The Game (36 page)

The effect has been profound. The game was pushed far more completely down the dump-and-chase road, its various alternatives plainly discouraged. The game was made more violent. The hockey stick had been allowed a new use. Not just as a tool of offense and defense, but as a weapon as well, a legal weapon to impede and punish. Those with memories of the 1920s or 1930s, or before, will insist there were more serious incidents of violence in other times. Perhaps so. But it was in the late 1940s that a
pattern
of violence entered the game. For the first time, it became part of the regular play. And when it wasn’t removed, it only meant it would get worse. The nature of violence, the emerging style of play, guaranteed it.

The 1950s and 1960s brought other changes, yet the direction of the game never varied. Recently, I watched some kinescopes of games of that time. It was hockey’s “golden age” as I remembered it: six teams, the Rocket, Howe, Hull, Béliveau, all seen through my childhood eyes. I had wanted to see how we compared, the Canadiens then and now, the best of this time and the best of that. I had grown suspicious of middle-aged recollections and highlight packages that showed Richard always scoring, Béliveau always elegant, Doug Harvey always in quarterback command. I wanted to watch complete games, games at random, season games, with good teams and bad, for it would tell me far better about the hockey of the time.

I was disappointed. To those used to the thirties and forties, the game may have seemed dizzyingly fast, but to eyes used to the present, it appeared slow. Shifts were two minutes or longer (down from five minutes in the 1930s), the leisurely pace of the game geared to it.

Players dumped the puck ahead often enough that Jacques Plante inno-vated out-of-crease play for goalies, but chased after it less rigorously than they would a decade later. It was a possession game, of sorts (like the Soviets, I had been told), but it involved little passing: the puck brought to center by a centerman or a defenseman, wingers spread suitably wide right and left (how often as a child I heard Foster Hewitt say, “The Leafs are at center, three abreast”), the defense stacked up, waiting, the patterns of the game still rigidly intact. To me, it looked like an ancient siege. An army on one side charging, an army on the other waiting; each taking turns.

By the early 1960s, shifts were shorter by thirty seconds or more, the game was faster, the level of skill consistently higher. The slap shot was new, and wonderfully exciting until everyone had one, then badly overused. Goalies rushed for their masks, moved out to cut angles, and gradually got bigger. Yet the slap shot marked no fundamental change to the game. It was in fact only a variation of the dump-and-chase style, born of the same root problem—the inability to penetrate a defense. A player could shoot for the corners of a rink, or take a distant shot on net. The traditional wrist shot, intended for in-close attempts, lost power from a distance, and was of little use. The slap shot took its place. It produced glamorous new stars, most especially Bobby Hull and Frank Mahovlich, and a glamorous new image. This was the league’s competitive and commercial zenith. And if the style of play remained basically unchanged, it was clearly well-played. Indeed, watching it, I felt I was seeing players who had taken it about as far as it could go.

The 1967 expansion changed everything. Shading and subtlety left the game; trends, unseen, ignored for many years, were suddenly unmistakable. The stereotypes had come true. There were one hundred and twenty new players, one hundred and twenty old. New teams, old teams, teams in the same league bore little resemblance one to another; and side by side, teammates and linemates the same. It was massive dilution, and produced massive disparity. The march towards the dump-and-chase style, towards stickwork and violence, slowed by the skills of the sixties, accelerated.

The game was caught in a familiar spiral. Shifts got shorter, the game speeded up; the faster it got, the more difficult to play, the fewer alternative styles of play, the more systematic the style, the more time without the puck, the shorter the shifts, the faster it got. And the faster it got, the more players on the puck, the more crashing and bumping, the more violent it got—like punting for field position, trying for a turnover. It was offense based on a defensive skill, forechecking: over center, into the corners, and chase, again, again, again. Goalies passed the puck; defenses banged it around the boards and out; defenses rushed up to keep it in. It was all a matter of who got there first, with how many, and how much punishment you could take.

The game became an immense physical struggle. In corners, along the boards, in front of nets, the puck would be the center of two or three or more players constantly fighting for it. It made for a new range of skills, for players who were bigger, stronger, tougher, by skill and power better able to maneuver in the clutter and emerge with the puck, by temperament loving to hit and be hit; it made for centers better trained for the more frequent faceoffs (in the 1950s, there was an average of about sixty faceoffs a game; today’s average is nearly eighty); it made for penalty-killers and power-play specialists, the quid pro quo.

The game had become rougher. If speed and confined space had guaranteed collisions in the first place, more speed, more congested space, and this style of play would guarantee more. If collisions were unavoidable, they would be made calculated: a hit now, a message for the next time, and there would be a next time. The style of play made it so. It was intimidation, an effective tactic in an over expanded league. Great disparity wouldn’t allow competition on the same level, yet teams had to compete. So, if it wasn’t with artistry or finesse, it would be with
character
—hard work, discipline, courage—and no little intimidation. Teams could find character even among the lesser players available to them; intimidation was to make a good player worse. And it worked. The league circled and jabbed at the worst abuses; the Flyers won two straight Stanley Cups. Violence had been allowed to make sense.

It had come down to this, one final development many years coming, the Flyers its visible iceberg tip. For what happens to a game when it picks up speed and never learns to use it, when its balance of speed and finesse is disturbed, when finesse turns to power? It becomes a game of energy—an
adrenaline game
. Listen to its language. Listen to a coach talk about a game. He talks of “emotion,” of being “up” or“(n)ot up”; of “pressure,” two men on the puck, defense “pinching” on the boards, “hits,” turnovers, shots, all in exquisite volumes; and especially of “momentum,” head-shaking, hand-shrugging “turning points” and the irreversible destinies that flow from them. Adrenaline is important to a game, but like the batter who chokes a bat too tight, not all the time. It is important to sharpen senses, not to overcome them; to enhance skills, to push them to their high-pitched best, but not to replace them. We have lost the
attitude
of finesse necessary to a game, and now we pay a double price. For adrenaline has its dark side. Fouled or resisted, it turns to anger, frustration, retaliation. And inside a pattern of violence allowed many years before, it sends violence spiralling higher.

It is a hundred years since the original Montreal rules, almost fifty years since the forward pass. For us, it has been like a journey through a maze, one path, then many, and finally coming to where we can go no further, and realizing that we missed a turn along the way. Yet had the Soviets not held up a mirror to our game, first in 1972, and again this year, much of what has happened might have gone unnoticed. We had been the best, we had always been the best. So, however we played, it was the best way. And there could be no other way to play.

That the Soviets played differently was well known to us by 1972.

That their style would work against the world’s best players was not.

Nor was it seriously considered. They had taken up hockey only twenty-six years before, in 1946. But playing more months of the year, more hours of the day, they had short-cut time: World Champions in eight years, Olympic champions in ten; their long domination of amateur hockey beginning less than a decade later.

Indeed, their tardy start for them would prove fortuitous. For 1946(w)as after hockey’s great upheavals, after the forward pass, after the center red line, leaving the Soviets no accumulation of obsolete thinking to burden their future. They had, as well, a long tradition in hockey—like games such as soccer and bandy. Soccer, played by most of the world’s countries, was much more advanced in strategies and techniques than hockey. To its off-season players, the first coaches and players of Soviet hockey, the common principles of the games were quickly evident. This was of no small importance. It would give the Soviets the necessary confidence and will to develop their own school of hockey, quite distinct from the Canadian game.

In the 1972 series, we dominated those parts of the game to which our style had moved—the corners, the boards, the fronts of both nets, body play, stick play, faceoffs, intimidation, distance shooting, emotion. In the end, it was enough. But disturbingly, the Soviets had been better in the traditional skills—passing, open ice play, team play, quickness, finishing around the net—skills we had developed, that seemed to us the essence of hockey, but that we had abandoned as incompatible with the modern game. The Soviets had showed us otherwise. It would be unfair, perhaps incorrect, to say that nothing has come of it. Yet little has. What we didn’t understand, what we don’t understand now, is that body play, stick play, faceoffs, intimidation, distance shooting, and the rest have become the fundamentals of our game; that the fundamentals of any game are the basic skills needed to play it, and our present game requires those. To a dump-and-chase game, passing and team play are not fundamental. We may practice them rigorously, we may intend to use them in a game. But unless they fit in a style of play, and are rewarded, it will come to nothing. To change the fundamentals of a game, a style of play must change; to change a style of play, the attitudes and patterns that underlie it must change first.

Yet still there was room for illusion. The pendulum that was swinging away from us seemed to stop for years. They won, we won; they changed a little, so did we. And the more we played, the more their bewildering patterns seemed not bewildering at all. What had seemed to us so unpredictable—the crisscrossing patterns, the breakaway pass through center, the goalmouth pass to an unseen defenseman—was really just surprising. And when it stopped being surprising, it began to seem predictable; and less successful.

The Soviets needed open ice for their open-ice patterns and skills.

They wanted a high-tempo game, 4-on-3, 3-on-2, 2-on-1, always out-numbering an opponent, fast-shrinking numbers on a fast-shrinking ice surface. It was this way that their skills worked best. It was up to us to see that it didn’t happen. We forechecked when we were sure of not being trapped; peeled back when we weren’t. We jammed the middle to interrupt their first pass, which set their game in motion, which created the tempo and the numerical advantage they needed. We checked hard in the center zone, and retreated when we couldn’t, always certain of at least three defenders to clutter the defensive zone. On power plays we waited more patiently, watching for the offside defenseman and the offside winger we had ignored before. And it worked, more often than it should have worked against a team of their calibre.

In their intricate, patterned game, there seemed a fatal flaw. A few years ago, a friend working at the Canadian Embassy in Moscow told me he had seen the Soviet soccer team play several times. What had amazed him, he said, were its obvious similarities to the Soviet hockey team, in style and patterns of play, in its very
look
. Yet, on a world scale, it was decidedly mediocre, and the hockey team was not. Why? (h)e wondered.

Later, I asked an international soccer coach the same question. He described the Soviet team much as we might the hockey team—well-conditioned, highly skilled, highly disciplined and organized, its style based on speed and passing. Yet in this patterned style was a basic weakness. For when a team knows what it will do next, soon an opponent knows too, and can defend against it. The Soviet style was
too
patterned,
too
predictable, he said, and in the large, cozy world of soccer, there could be no greater sin. Offense, by its nature, must be unpredictable. It may evolve out of earlier pattern and understanding, but its ultimate act is individual creation. No team can depend on weaving rink-long textbook patterns. They are too easily interrupted and broken. And, as with a memorized speech, when it happens you lose your place and must start again to find it. Except that then everyone is waiting.

It was what I was beginning to feel about the Soviet hockey team.

There was also something else. The Soviets were remarkably ineffective as one-on-one players. Since they were quick skaters and excellent puck-handlers, it was a game they should have excelled at, but they didn’t. They always needed the extra man. It was basic to their game.

Find the open man, and use him. But nearing a net, often there is no open man. A puck-carrier must do it himself. He must use his skills to create an advantage, his will to do the rest. But the Soviets seemed never to make that commitment—looking, always waiting for the open man until the chance was lost. It was a burden from
their
past, on
their
game, one they seemed no better at handling than we did ours.

Problems remained for us, of course (facing Goose Gossage, a batter may know what’s coming, but he still has to hit it). Still, it was something. And if instinctively I knew the Soviets had found the right direction, if not quite, I hoped, maybe believed, that our high-pressure, high-energy style could interrupt theirs, could break it down and simplify it, just as it had broken down our own; that in our game we possessed the permanent antidote to theirs.

Then came the Challenge Cup. I don’t know when it happened. I don’t know how. I don’t know even if I understand it the same way the Soviets understand it. I am convinced only that it happened—that the Soviets fundamentally changed their approach to the game, that they understand finally that hockey is not a
possession game
, nor can it ever be.