The Game (37 page)

Possession was what they were supposed to be about: passing, team play, always searching for the open man, regrouping to start again if their possession seemed threatened. But a puck cannot be physically carried up the ice like a football; and a hockey player is not protected from physical battering as a basketball player is. He can be overpowered, the puck can be wrested from his stick by one or two or more opponents, with little recourse except to pass it on to someone else soon harassed the same way. A possession game is hyperbole. The puck changes teams more than six times a minute, more than one hundred and twenty times a period, more than four hundred times a game, and little can be done to prevent it. And when it is not changing possession, the puck is often out of possession, fought after, in no one’s control. It is the nature of the game, North American or European. There is sustained possession only on power plays. There is possession involving several seconds at other times only when a team regroups to its own zone to set up a play. If possession is team style, it will be frustrated. Worse, if it is attempted, it will make a game cautious and predictable.

Instead, hockey is a
transition game
: offense to defense, defense to offense, one team to another. Hundreds of tiny fragments of action, some leading somewhere, most going nowhere. Only one thing is clear. A fragmented game must be played in fragments. Grand designs do not work. Offenses regrouping, setting up, meet defenses which have done the same, and lose. But before offense turns to defense, or defense to offense, there is a moment of disequilibrium when a defense is vulnerable, when a game’s sudden, unexpected swings can be turned to advantage. It is what you do at this moment, when possession changes, that makes the difference. How fast you can set up. How fast you strike. What instant patterns you can create. How you turn simple advantage into something permanent. It is this the Soviets have learned to do, and the balance has been swung.

In the Challenge Cup, for the first time the Soviets joined in the game. They had always stayed a little separate from it, not adjusting and readjusting opponent by opponent, moment by moment. It was as if they feared that the compromises of a particular game and a particular opponent would distract them from a course they believed in; certain that eventually they would raise the level of their game to whatever was needed so that it wouldn’t matter anyway. Then, two weeks ago, they entered our game, found its weaknesses, and exploit-ed them. They chased the puck in the offensive zone and the neutral zone, turning the tables and using the smaller ice surface to
their
advantage. They got the puck, with forty feet of ice, or fifty, or eighty, with two teammates or three, and created something with it; no regrouping, no setting up, a teammate in motion, the defense off-balance, a pass, a 3-on-2, a 2-on-1—instantly. It was all-ice commitment, but always under control. It was
our
game played
their
way, a game exactly suited to their skills. Their smaller bodies were strong enough, tough enough, to stand up to the game, to wrestle for the puck, to get it and move it, if rarely to punish. Their short, choppy, wide-gaited stride was quicker to start up, quicker to change direction, quicker to gain advantage and keep it. And finally they had an opportunist’s touch, a model transition game.

It worked spectacularly. It offered no patterns to interrupt, no time for us to organize and prepare. It made the unpredictability of the game seem theirs. We had the puck, then they did, and it was too late.

By pressuring us, they took pressure off themselves. And without pressure, our offense couldn’t work. So we turned up the adrenaline game higher. Only this time it couldn’t go high enough. We couldn’t move our bodies fast enough, long enough. The Soviets were too quick. We exhorted and yelled; the robot-like Soviets, annoyingly dispassionate to our eyes, played with no less commitment, but with control. Too often the puck moved past us just as we arrived. Usually it was late in periods, or late in games, when we tired slightly. Then, when we were committed and out of position, the trouble got worse. It was like throwing haymakers at a counterpuncher: the harder we threw, the worse it got. In 1972, the Soviets had seemed intimidated by our frightening will; now they turned it against us. Yet the essence of their style of game did not change. It was the final irony. In countering our game, they discovered they could play theirs more effectively.

So where do we stand? There can be no more illusion now. We have followed the path of our game to its end. We have discovered its limits. They are undeniable. More and better of the same will not work. The Soviets have found the answer to our game and taken it apart. We are left only with wishful thinking. We must go back and find another way.

We have paid an enormous price as originators and developers, as custodians and keepers, as unchallenged champions of the sport. That others coming later, unbound, would take greater, more creative steps is understandable. That we should fail to fight back is not. Yet there is a fatalism about Canadians that extends beyond hockey. To a child of celebrated parents (England and France’s progeny), raised in the shadow of a southern colossus (America’s neighbor), others have always seemed to do things bigger and better; others always would. So, never precocious, never rebellious, reasonably content, we ride their coattails and do
pretty
well. In hockey, now that we’ve been caught from behind, we wonder why it took so long.

Except that in sports, it doesn’t have to happen that way. The biggest, or richest, or most scientific does not always win.

The Yugoslavs beat the Soviets in basketball; the Argentines, the Dutch, and others do the same in soccer. For us, the first and biggest problem is not the Soviets, it is ourselves. If we can do little about our national state of mind, we can do a lot about rethinking our national game. Most of our traditions date back fifty years. Since then, there have been two major rule changes, a revolution in all things
speed
, and the emergence of a new hockey model. But the league never carried through the logical consequences of its own changes, and others got their chance. Now we forget what those consequences were. We must go back and find them, ask ourselves if traditions and myths that once made sense make sense any longer.

Mostly, the answer is no. But the value in tracing a game to its roots is to find out why it is no; to realize that once there were reasons, often good reasons, for why things were as they were; to realize that in time good reasons can become obsolete; to watch those same reasons take on a life of their own; to see what happens when they are enshrined as treasured myths; to see that a game can be changed, and to see what change can do. Then to take a game forward in time, to use those lessons, and look again. Our message is clear: ice surfaces may be enlarged, painted lines removed, nets moved forward, old fundamentals practiced and perfected, but until the patterns of the game change, nothing else will. Simply, speed must be harnessed and directed, the forward pace must be made to work.

The Soviets pass better than we do because their crisscross diagonal patterns allow it, and demand it; because passing is a fundamental of their game, fostered and encouraged by their leadership; because the instincts and skills necessary to it develop naturally from practice and use. We need no less. We must abandon our tethered, straight-ahead style, up and down like tablehockey players. Offensively, it has made no sense for fifty years. Defensively (“picking up our wings”), it makes sense only because the offense is so strangled. We must find open ice, moving on diagonals to present a better target, a target that skates in front of us, not away from us, using the width of the ice for more space, more time, to pick up more speed, to make those unburdened by the puck the creative figures. We must take the focus off the puckcarrier, to turn ours into a team game. We should remove the individualist’s instinct to skate several strides with the puck; we must force a pass—one touch—to pick up speed, to create an advantage and press it. We should use more of the ice, make the game less congested. Like big fullbacks running into a line, we skate always anticipating contact, straining against it even when it isn’t there. Breaking into the open, we feel naked and clumsy, as if robbed of our skills. We must become more comfortable with open ice, make quickness and creativity seem like more than just flash. And the league must deliver a message, clear and uncompromising: hooking, holding, and high-sticking will be penalized, so that the quick and skilled are not, so that open ice created will not be taken away.

We must develop new fundamental skills, create new positional stereotypes. We must make size less crucial, we must exchange speed for quickness, power for skill, bigness for muscular strength. We should adapt long, graceful quarter-miler strides to a sprinter’s game.

Defensemen should become both the stopping point
and
the starting point of the action, developing transition game skills. For in a transition game, it is out of defense, resilient and forceful, that offense emerges. Body-checking should remain an inevitable and attractive part of their game, but with a new function: not accident, strategy, or a means of intimidation, but as part of that transition; used as a way to get the puck, to set a game in motion, not to stop it dead in its tracks, to allow a game to hit and run.

We must free the game from the dump and chase, break the congestion of hits, shots, screens, deflections, rebounds, and scrambles.

We should make it seem like more than just patternless chance, more than just fury, mayhem, and the law of averages. Let fans follow it. Let them see goals, and goals in the making. In open ice, a puck
can
be seen, it isn’t hard to follow. And if collisions cause angry, violent feelings, fewer collisions will cause fewer of them. To break the pattern of violence, we should get the game out of the corners, away from the boards. Get it into open ice.

The violence of our game is not so much the innate violence in us as the absence of intervention in our lives. We let a game follow its intuitive path, pretending to be powerless, then simply live with its results. The game now has more Americans and Europeans who play it, it is trained and developed more often in schools and universities, yet its conservative culture remains.

And if we were to do something, who would decide what is right and wrong for a game? Who decides what is in a
game’s
best interests?

Who is the keeper of the game? John Ziegler? The NHL owners?

They are surely the only ones who can do something. But what are their interests? Why should they want the game to change? They are businessmen. They may love hockey profoundly, but they have an investment to protect. Their arenas are already more than eighty percent full, more than seven hundred times a season. What have they got to gain? And how would fans accept the change? In the United States, it is axiomatic that speed and violence are what sells. It was what new teams sold in the 1920s, it is what new teams sell today. A few years ago, the Tidewater Red Wings of the AHL told fans in southern Virginia that hockey was coming. Billboards went up—one read,

“Brutal, fast, brutal, exciting, and brutal”; the other, “If they didn’t have rules, they’d call it war.”

But if the pattern of gratuitous violence were eliminated, what then? Who would watch? Maybe the axiom is wrong. Maybe it has always been wrong. Maybe its formula only limits the appeal of the game, committing the already hardcore fan, turning away millions of others. Maybe fans really do want change. Maybe it would bring them into arenas in even greater numbers, in front of TV sets in greater numbers still. And maybe not. And who wants to take that risk? Years ago, it was simple. We didn’t have to worry about the best way to play because we were the best, and how we played was the best way to play. Then the Soviets came along, and things got complicated.

But what can we do now? This is no public enterprise. Why should we think of hockey as a national possession? Why should we think of the Montreal Canadiens as
ours
? If we buy a car, we don’t think of General Motors as ours. So why is hockey any different? But it does seem different. The Canadiens do seem ours. We cheer them as if they are ours, and boo them the same way.

Before every game—“
Accueillons
. Let’s welcome. Nos Canadiens!

Our Canadiens!” And we want to believe it. And we do believe it until something happens that reminds us that they aren’t, that they really belong to Molson’s.

It is our fundamental dilemma. A game we treat as ours isn’t ours.

It is part of our national heritage, and pride, part of us; but we can’t control it. Baseball has no similar problem, nor basketball or football, for there is no external challenge to bind a public together, to turn a league and a sport into a national cause. And there is no sport in the United States that means the same as hockey means to Canada. So what is our future? How can we meet the Soviet challenge, and our challenge? It is to find a coincidence of interests. That point where the interests of the game and of those who own it are the same.

For it is only there that our game can change enough to make a difference. And it can only happen if the NHL makes international hockey the climax to its season, in World Championships, or, more likely, in a year-end series between the Stanley Cup winners and the Soviet league champions. It would give a season a new, never-forgotten goal, because teams gear to win championships. They draft players and plan their teams with that in mind. They focus on last year’s winner. How can we beat them? Where must we improve? When the Flyers were champions, teams got bigger and tougher, just for the Flyers. When we took over, teams changed. With the Soviets as each season’s ultimate opponent, they would change again. Or should.

Players’ skills and sizes would change, styles of play, the league’s enforcing of its rules; never to become some European facsimile, but something new, ours. It may never happen, but it could. For such an annual series will come about. The exponential revenues soon available by cable and pay-TV make it certain. Also certain is that the more competitive and attractive the series is, the higher those revenues will be. There is the coincidence of interests. There is the incentive to compete, and change. It is the chance we need.