The Game (38 page)

“Whom the gods would destroy, they first oversell.” The NHL’s American dream has come to an end, again. It will be back, years from now when old lessons grow hazy, when enough is different that everything before it seems hopelessly quaint and irrelevant, when optimism returns. For hockey is too appealing a game for the dream to die.

Whether it will ever fare any better is less certain. In America, it is a game most of whose fans were never players, and now that the latest minor-hockey boom has busted, it seems they never will be. It changes how a game is watched, and enjoyed, how it is sold to its audience. It becomes a promoter’s game, a hard sell of hype and hyperbole—the fastest, the toughest—always pandering to stereotype. It is a game rel-egated to the fringes, to the not quite respectable line between sport and attraction.

Hockey was not the sport of the 1970s as deadline writers wished it to be, nor was there ever really a chance it could be. An exciting mix of speed and violence, it was simply a game that made sense. And in the irrepressible logic of the time, that seemed enough. Whatever its problems, money and
exposure
would overcome them. But the econo-my turned down, too few sat by their TVs to be exposed, and it didn’t happen. There would be no quick fixes: no network TV contracts, no American superstar messiahs to start an unstoppable ball rolling. So at the end of its decade, hockey is where it was at the start—a minor American sport with major regional appeal. Except that the mood around it has changed. It is sour. The gods that oversold it are bitter.

They feel betrayed. It is not the game they said it would be; it’s the game’s fault, they decide.

The Challenge CLIP was the bottom, on the ice, and off Madison Square Garden, the Waldorf-Astoria,
the Russians;
a week in the
Big
Apple
, big corporate clients wined and entertained. It was to be like Super Bowl Week, its model. “…one of the world’s most dynamic sports events,” columnist Dave Anderson wrote in
The New York Times
, “but no impact…. It should be the talk of the town. Instead, it’s hardly mentioned except by the hockey community.” And finally what should have been clear was clear. It is easy to feel big when you’re not, if you surround yourself with others who are smaller. But if you pretend you are big, and surround yourself with others bigger, you feel crushingly small.

That is what happened in New York. There was
Ain’t Misbehavin’,
Sweeney Todd, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,
the New York Philharmonic, the New York City Ballet, the Metropolitan Opera’s
Don
Carlo
and
Madama Butterfly
, the Knicks and the Celtics, harness racing at Roosevelt Raceway and the Meadowlands, St. John’s at Fordham, Queens at Brooklyn College, and us. And if any doubts remained, they disappeared on Saturday. For though Sunday was the final game, Saturday was the bottom. It was the day of the great TV fiasco.

Unable to sell the series to an American network, the NHL put together an ad hoc group of stations for two games, selling the Saturday game to CBS for its afternoon sports program. Highlights would be aired on a delayed basis, sandwiched between coverage of the
Los Angeles Times
track meet, a WBA welterweight championship fight, and the International Pro Surfers Women’s Team Championship. The NHL also sold advertising space on the boards. When CBS found out, they asked the league to remove the advertising. The NHL refused.

CBS decided to go ahead with the game anyway, but shifted their camera angles so that the advertising wouldn’t show. It would be the only extended network coverage of the season. For the game’s allotted minutes, CBS cameras followed the puck, but as it approached the boards, everything taller than a puck got chopped. It was the final humiliation.

The league had tried too hard.

But now the trains have passed through the tunnel, and the light remains. What now? It will be a quieter decade for the NHL.

Expansion and the WHA behind it, it will be a time to turn inward, to put its unwieldy house in order. Like an aging adolescent having grown too fast, it will get reacquainted with its parts, get them in hand, and do something with them. It will be a time of realism, and stability, for chastened hopes and dreams deferred—except one. Off ice, the whispered word will be “cable.” But it will represent a more modest dream this time, and more realizable, if the promised bonanza is only for some. It is time for a deep breath, a pause, a time to return the game to the ice. For that is the real tragedy of the 1970s, and the real opportunity of the 1980s. It is on the ice that its next great challenge lies.

It was an easy win, 7-3, where wins are never easy, but the Flyers are not the team they were. Parent is injured, seriously again, perhaps for the last time. It’s his eye. A few years ago, it was his neck. A marvel-lous goalie at his best, Parent must play untroubled. His goaltending-guru, Jacques Plante, had seemed always able to unburden his mind, but now, in his thirties, Parent’s body overcomes him.

So too Jimmy Watson, a small, brave defenseman, who plays often when he shouldn’t. He played tonight, but didn’t play well.

Even Bobby Clarke has changed. The spirit of his team, Clarke could always find a level of commitment no one else was willing to find. But now there seems a different desperation in his game, as if he can’t quite feel that same commitment, and he’s scared. It’s as if he’s suddenly come face to face with human weakness—his own. It’s different when a body wears out, when legs get tired and slow. It seems an act of nature, unstoppable, beyond control. And it is forgivable. But not so a mind. Then it is weakness, unforgivable weakness. It is
you
. It happens often to those nearing thirty, when the best seems suddenly past, before age is accepted and new goals are found. Still Clarke, being Clarke, fights back, pushing himself to do what once was natural. But tonight he looked tired. He needs a new goal. The Flyers have always depended on him. Now it is his turn. He needs them to be real contenders again.

But they are not. Their points totals may improve, they may move up in the standings, but it’s all illusion. They have a fundamental flaw, and can’t win. Each year since 1976, since their two-year hold on the NHL was ended, they have been the “new” Flyers. They are faster, more talented, more versatile, less goon-like than their predecessors.

But each year, they show they are not. They are simply
the Flyers
. It is an attitude, and a tradition, that will not change. They have the same swagger. They play as if with the same impunity, as if penalties, fines, and suspensions are mere costs of doing business, to be served, paid off, killed without consequence. But things are different now. The costs are too high, the consequences too certain. The style that won them two consecutive Stanley Cups only guarantees that they will win no more. The irony is wonderful.

It changes the mood of our games. It makes each less threatening.

Knowing the ending, the rough parts are easier to take. So when Paul Holmgren beats up someone until my stomach turns, when the Spectrum crowd roars its approving roar, when Behn Wilson, Ken Linesman, and other “new” Flyers file by him in tribute, I smile. It is what we never got to feel as kids. What never happened to the bully on the block. For Holmgren, Linesman, Wilson, and the others, there is no more impunity.
They will get theirs.

The bar is Sunday-evening empty. Suddenly it’s full. One game is over; another begins.

“…Aries, right?”

“Huh? Oilers? No, no, no, Canadiens.”

“Canadiens?”

“You asked me if I played for the Oilers?”

“No, I asked you your sign.”

“Oh,
hah hah hah
, I’m a…”

“You play for the Houston Oilers?”

“No, no the Canadiens. The Montreal Canadiens. The hockey team.”

“You’re a professional athlete? Oh wow! I mean, I don’t know much about hockey, but…”

Games are played, so games are to be won. But they are easy games, soon forgotten. Until the next time. It’s a fact of every road trip. Some play, some don’t; no one keeps score. At home, wives and girl friends wonder.

It’s quiet. The music has stopped. For some, the weekend is over.

They gather up cigarettes and coats, say perfunctory goodbyes; at a table at the back, no one moves. It is our time. The luckless climb from their bar-stools; more tables are pieced together. Jackets get slung into chairs, ties loosen, talk comes dressing-room easy. It’s about goals and goals missed, money, women, cars, golf. Anything. Stories that we’ve heard before, and some we haven’t; and will again. It’s my favorite time, when something is done and over, and good, when there’s nothing more to do, and no place to go until morning.

Everything slows down. Words get softer. We speak of “the game”
this
, “the game”
that
. Sentences trail off, never finished. Things go unsaid. Yet we nod and understand. It is at moments like this that I remember why I play.

Last year, after we had won the Stanley Cup against the Bruins, several journalists asked what it had meant to me. I couldn’t really tell them. I heard myself speak of satisfaction and pride, yet I knew that wasn’t it, or all of it. I sat in my office a few days later, and tried again.

I wrote this to myself:

“I am good, and we are good, and when I do my best and we do our best, we win most of the time. When we win, we receive trophies and plaques, our names go in newspapers; they go on checks alongside numbers with lots of zeros. When people talk, they talk about us a
certain
way. And after a while, everything is inextricably linked—winning, playing our best, money, celebrity. If someone asks us why we play, we’re not sure any longer. We might speak ritually of ‘loving the game’; then, embarrassed, skip on to winning, money, and the rest.

And everyone understands.

“But ask us after a game. After we’ve played the Bruins or the Islanders; after a playoff game. If you don’t understand the excited tumble of words, look at our gray-white faces, at eyes that glitter and pop at you. Look at our sweaty smiles, at hands that won’t shut up. An hour later, a day’s tension sucked away, look at our bodies. All gangly and weak, so weak we laugh it feels so good. Look at our faces, at smiles distant and content.”

I have a picture. It shows nine or ten guys, arms hanging on each other’s shoulders, faces dripping with sweat.
Beaming
. Tremblay, Lafleur, Palchak, Nyrop, Jarvis, me. I don’t beam; Jarvis doesn’t beam.

A week before, we had won the Norris Division, Prince of Wales Conference, and $4,500; five weeks later, we would win $15,000 and our second straight Stanley Cup. Pete Mahovlich, our designated captain, held a tiny trophy we had given ourselves for winning a series of week-long intrasquad games. Later, we received $25 a man. It’s the happiest picture I have.

Coaches like Vince Lombardi and George Allen have told us we must play for certain reasons. As children, our parents and coaches told us something else. But after the Bruins series, Chartraw came much closer, “I don’t play for money,” he laughed, “I play for the party after.”

A few years ago, I called Dickie Moore to arrange an interview for a friend. Moore had been a fine player for the Canadiens in the 1950s, and after retiring with knee injuries (later, he returned briefly with the Leafs and the Blues), had built a successful equipment rental company in Montreal. It happened that I called on the first anniversary of his son’s death in a car accident. It had been a tough day was all Moore said. More for me than for him, he changed the subject. He asked me how I was, how the team was doing; then he turned reflective. He spoke of “the game.” Sometimes excitedly, sometimes with longing, but always it was “the game.” Not a game of his time, or mine, something he knew we shared. It sounded almost spell-like the way he put it. I had always thought of it as a phrase interchangeable with “hockey,” “baseball,” any sport. But when Moore said it, I knew it wasn’t.

“The game” was different, something that belongs only to those who play it, a code phrase that anyone who has played a sport, any sport, understands. It’s a common heritage of parents and backyards, teammates, friends, winning, losing, dressing rooms, road trips, coaches, press, fans, money, celebrity—a life, so long as you live it. Now as I sit here, slouched back, mellow, when I hear others talk of “the game,” I know what Moore meant. It is hockey that I’m leaving behind. It’s “the game” I’ll miss.

MONDAY

“It’s not just a job.”

—
A Chorus Line

On the Road

“Never again.”

No one laughs. Cowlicks, gray stubbled faces, auras of garlic and beer. Stars of the world’s fastest game, on a bus to New York.

Yesterday’s rain stopped moments ago. It’s dull and overcast.

“Jesus, it’s bright in here,” Chartraw bellows. “Ya got no curtains for this thing, bussy?”

“Hey Sharty, try these,” Lapointe says, holding out his sunglasses.

“Your eyes are makin’ me sick.” Chartraw reaches for them. Lapointe puts them back on. There are sunglasses everywhere. Behind them, some are reading, most are sleeping. Shutt is bored. He tells everyone near him his newest theory on drinking—“Don’t inhale.” He laughs; no one else does. He watches Napier beside him. Napier’s head lolls from side to side, bounces to his chest a few times, and finally settles there. He’s asleep.

“Hey Napes,” Shutt whispers, “you asleep?” Napier stirs. “Oh sorry, Napes. But Napes, I gotta tell ya somethin’. Napes, are ya listenin’?” Napier’s head lolls upright, one eye struggles open; he nods.

“
Sleep at night, Napes
!”

Behind Shutt, a little black book is being updated: “Ooh, she was a firecracker,” the diarist mumbles. “Gotta find her a permanent place.

Lemme see, Anne, Anne, what goes with Anne…Ooh, she’s a silky little thing.” At that, those asleep begin to laugh.

He doesn’t notice. “What goes with—Sullivan! That’s it, Sullivan.”

Eyes pop open. “Silky Sullivan?” A loud laugh this time. “That’s not bad,” he says, pleased with himself. “Now what’ll I call him?” Awake, now sitting up, others shout their suggestions, “Ed? Naw, too obvious.

Red? Hayward? Hey, c’mon. Barry? Yeah, Barry. That’s not bad.” A final laugh, then those around him go back to sleep. He leafs through his book to “S,” takes a pen from his pocket, and writes: SULLIVAN, Barry (wife, Anne)

Presbyterian Minister

Philadelphia

(215)…

The overcast has burned away. I try to sleep, then read. I look out the windows, at turnpike countryside, mile after mile. It’s a day to took out windows, to let energy run down, and feel it trickle back. Then feel it build again. It happens each year at this time. When I feel spring, or the playoffs, I never know which it is. It’s an instinct, as sure as the seasons. Something that happens, that cannot be rushed. When it’s time, I will know. I lean back in my seat, and close my eyes.

“Ya weren’t sleepin’, were ya?” It’s Shutt.

“Huh? Oh no, Shutty.”

“I was brilliant last night, eh?”

“Huh? Oh yeah, Shutty, yeah, you were brilliant.”

“I was, wasn’t I? Happens every time I drink. Can’t understand it.

Wish I could remember what I said. I oughta drink more often
hee hee
hee
. “ It comes in a dizzying burst. I can’t keep up. He sees a pad of paper on my lap. “Hey, whatcha doin’?”

“Huh? Oh, I was just writing down some things. May use ’em sometime.”

“Ya writin’ a book? Hey great. Need some help? Want some of my quips? Hey, we could do it together. We’d quip ’em to death. Give ’em quiplash
hee hee hee
.” And he’s gone.

I feel comfortable on this bus, with this team. I’m not sure anyone else knows that. I’m not sure even my teammates know it. I don’t say much. I often like to be alone. My background and interests are different enough to make me
seem
different (being a goalie forgives a lot; being a good goalie, a lot more). Still, by now I think most understand.

I have changed in eight years. Before my sabbatical season, 1973-74, 1(h)ad little time for the team. It was due in part to my dual life as a law student, but only in part. I was young, and, in pre-dynasty times, better than the team. I had standards no one could meet. Those who didn’t backcheck as often as I thought they should, those who drank too much, let
me
down. They had seemed more like opponents than teammates, lined up against me, keeping me from being what I wanted to be. And, silently, I raged at them. Early in the 1973 playoffs, Bowman took me aside. He wondered if I felt myself “too big” for the team. I don’t remember what had prompted it. It didn’t matter. I was hurt, and furious. For the rest of the playoffs, I sulked, desperately sure he was wrong, afraid he wasn’t. At the end, I got my revenge. It was Bowman’s first Stanley Cup. When the team celebrated on the ice, he hugged me as he did the others. I hung from him like a rag.

When I returned from my year in Toronto, things were different.

I was older. My contract squabble had made me seem disagreeably normal. I let in too many goals. I improved as the year went on, and since, yet it’s never been the same. I lost something those two years—(a)n illusion of my own perfectibility. I had done many things in a short time. The rest I
could
do, I
would
do. It would only take time. I would read the classics. I would learn more science and economics. I would learn to speak French. Then I had the time, and I didn’t. On the ice, I made the same bad passes, fell for the same inexplicable reasons, eased up on long shots and sharp-angled shots with the same results.

At the same time, the team was getting better. It became less clear to others, finally to me, who really needed whom.

In 1976, the team and I did something together. There was a great sense of quest that season. We had not won the Stanley Cup for two years. The Flyers were champions, so we chased them over the summer, in training camp, in every game we played. We left them behind in the standings; we chased what they had been, and still might be. We chased them until May, and caught them. No Stanley Cup had felt so good. I had learned the lesson Gainey had learned when he was twelve years younger.

Yesterday, I did an interview with a Philadelphia journalist. After some minutes, he shook his head and told me I was different from other athletes he had interviewed. His voice then got quiet, as if he thought someone might overhear him (though no one was around).

“How do you relate to these guys?” he whispered. I sat quiet and said nothing, and he went on to something else. I think it took me so long to want to be a part of the team because I was afraid of a team. Afraid of always having to do what a team does; afraid of losing my own right to be different. When I realized that I could be part of a team, and still be different, I could then be less different. Then I realized I wasn’t very different at all. The Philadelphia journalist didn’t understand. I may seem different, as others may seem different from me. But together we have one common passion. It has taken much of our time, and most of our energy. It has shaped us. All of that we share. The rest are details.

I look around the bus. What will happen to this team? There will be changes soon. Cournoyer, Lemaire, Savard, Lapointe, each is now past thirty. Not old, but old enough. Excepting Cournoyer, each may yet play several more years. But maybe they won’t. Maybe they can’t. Like a man of sixty, each is at an age where there can be no more surprise, no sense of tragedy, if something happens. Who will take their place?

Where will the next Cournoyer come from? The next Lemaire and Savard? The next Pollock and Bowman? There has always been someone. In twenty-three years, Plante, Charlie Hodge, Worsley, Vachon, Doug Harvey, Tom Johnson, Talbot, Ted Harris, J. C. Tremblay, Laperrière, Harper, the Rocket, Henri Richard, Bert Olmstead, Floyd Curry, Moore, Claude Provost, Ferguson, Bobby Rousseau, Backstrom, Gilles Tremblay, Donnie Marshall, Dick Duff, Roberts, Béliveau, Geoffrion, Pete and Frank Mahovlich have all been replaced. So have Selke, Blake, and Pollock. In twenty-three years, fourteen Stanley Cups have been won. The team goes on. But what now?

It will be harder. The historical advantages of thirty years are gone, or going. What you see on the ice is very nearly all there is. There is no farm team somewhere “better than most NHL teams.” Most importantly, the store of draft picks that nourished the success of the 1970s looks now like everyone else’s. But great teams need great players; and great French-Canadian teams need great French-Canadian players. Where will they come from? Who will carry the torch of Richard, Béliveau, and Lafleur? Not Mondou, or Tremblay, or Larouche; they are spear-carriers. No one now on the team; no one in Halifax with the Voyageurs. It will be someone somewhere in Quebec.

But who?—and when he grows up, will it be with the Canadiens?

Thirty years ago, the answer would have been yes. NHL teams could sponsor amateur teams; the Canadiens monopolized Quebec.

When sponsorship ended in favor of a universal draft in the 1960s, the Canadiens were given a concession. They were allowed two picks prior to the draft for players of French-Canadian parentage (in lieu of their first- and second-round picks). That concession expired for the 1970 draft (and Gilbert Perreault). Yet the answer remained a tentative yes. Pollock had used the fruits of Selke’s farm system to rebuild the Canadiens dynasty, its rejects to bargain for the future. Expansion teams, vulnerable at the box office and on the ice, needed players.

Pollock had them. In return, he got nameless draft picks, who would turn out to be Lafleur, Robinson, Shutt, Larocque, Nyrop, Connor, Risebrough, Tremblay, Mondou, Chartraw, Engblom, and Napier. A new dynasty was built; the torch was passed. Perreault, Dionne, Potvin, and Bossy got away, almost unnoticed; so did many others; Hangsleben, Micheletti, Hislop, Hunter, and about a score more, all drafted but signed by the WHA. None seemed a great loss. The WHA had become a kind of development league for the Canadiens. If any proved themselves, they could be signed later. Yet they were important. Descendants of Randy Rota, Ernie Hicke, and others, they were the barter that would become the draft picks, that would become the future Lafleurs, Robinsons, and Hangslebens, on which succeeding dynasties would be built. For much of the decade, the Canadiens have had to do without them. The stockpile of draft picks has diminished.

When the NHL-WHA merger takes place, most will be gone for good. For the Canadiens, this is a crossroads.

I’ve often wondered what makes this team so good. It’s a question we’ve all had frequent practice at answering, yet I’m not sure any of us has done very well. We each have our pet theories, the latest and most obscure, the most undeniably our own, the best. Yet, it seems there should be
one
reason, more central than others, on which the others rely.

Management perhaps. Certainly the Canadiens are a textbook study: stability (three managers, five coaches in forty years), competence (
professional
managers, whose qualifications aren’t goals and assists; who are secure enough to hire the best people; who win), dedication (Pollock, Bowman, Ruel, and others didn’t marry until well into their thirties), attitude. They feel it’s their “God-given duty to be the best every year,” (f)ormer coach Al MacNeil once said. It’s a message we all sense. The team is a business, yet its bottom line seems only to win.

Maybe it’s the Montreal environment, that conspiracy of expectations, of fans, press, management, coaches, players, that makes losing intolerable. Or it’s the team itself. Its mix of ages, sizes, and styles of play; personalities, attitudes; French and English. There is something distinctly different about Richard, Béliveau, Lafleur, Plante; and about Mahovlich, Moore, Gainey, Dryden—something incompatible, or richly varied and strong. Maybe it’s the presence of great players like Béliveau and Lafleur. The attitude of a team depends so much on its best player. A coach and a manager can be neutralized; a best player has followers, and must be a leader. He must have the character and personality to match his skills. It’s why the Flyers won and the Sabres didn’t; why the Kings and Blues never went far; why the Islanders needed the emergence of Trottier. Or maybe it’s talent—the first and easiest explanation; the first forgotten. We would prefer that it be hard work, for hard work seems less a gift, more a reflection on us. But without talent, “hard work doesn’t work,” as journeyman defenseman Bryan Watson once put it. With talent, bad games and a bad season can still be won.

Really, it is all those things, and more. When a team wins once, it can be for one central reason. When it wins for three consecutive years, nine times in fourteen years, it’s for a crush of reasons. Winning brings with it such an immense momentum. Everything fits, everything works. Every new thing is made to fit and work. Everything just is. Reasons blur and disappear. It becomes a state of mind, an obligation, an expectation; in the end, an attitude. Excellence. It is that rare chance to play with the best, to be the best. When you have it, you don’t give it up.

It’s not easy, and not always fun. “Satisfaction for me never came during a season,” Jimmy Roberts, a veteran Canadiens player, once told me. “There was always too much pressure…. It was so sudden and gone again because there was always another game. Then, when a season was over, I’d realize, ‘Jesus Christ, I can’t live off this. I gotta do it all again next year.’ Then I’d get all worried about next year.” But it gives you a range, and depth, of feeling no also-ran can have. “Now I look through the old scrapbook,” Roberts went on, “at my trophies on the mantel, and try to remember if they were good days or not.

Then I look at what I’ve got.” He smiled. “It was really nice.”

But it’s a state of mind that can get tired. When you win as often as we do, you earn a right to lose. It’s losing to remember what winning feels like. But it’s a game of
chicken
. If you let it go too far, you may never get it back. You may find its high-paid, pressureless comfort to your liking. I can feel it happening this year. If we win, next year will be worse. But who’s going to stop it? Where are the legendary figures that refuse to fall? Pollock is gone. Bowman may soon leave. Cournoyer, Lemaire, Savard, Lapointe. There had always been someone. It’s the Canadiens’ tradition. Who now?

Irving Grundman continues the line of professional managers. But he came late to hockey. Competent, decent, he learned its language quickly. Can he learn its idioms? Can he deliver the same palpable message? A year of losing and the spirit will rekindle. But more than spirit is needed. Great players, great coaches and managers, must be replaced in kind. In 1960, the Canadiens won their fifth successive Stanley Cup. Richard retired, Harvey and Plante were later traded, and Geoffrion retired. In due course Selke retired, replaced by Pollock. A new generation rose from the farm system, and, after winning in 1965, won three times in four years. There is no farm system now. Nor is there the stockpile of draft picks that built the next generation of success. With Pollock’s departure, management is thinner than it has ever been, and unhappy. It’s not 1960 again. It’s not the fal-low end of a cycle. Like snakes and ladders, when the slide comes this time there’s less to stop it, and there’s farther to fall.