The Game (39 page)

If dynasties come for a crush of reasons, dynasties die one reason at a time. It starts like a slump. The immense momentum of winning slows; the slump doesn’t end. The momentum turns. Everything that fits doesn’t fit. Obligation turns cranky; expectation and attitude disappear. It’s what each of us has felt at times this year. Slowly the team is joining the pack. It must learn to live, and compete, like everyone else.

Except, unlike everyone else it must win; and the French-Canadian character of the team must not be disturbed. The team created the expectations; now it must live with them. Fewer than fifteen percent of the league’s players are French-Canadian. Since Lafleur, Perreault, and Dionne in the early 1970s, few of them have been superstars. Now there are more teams, more reluctant to trade draft picks, in the market to compete for them. Lafleur must have his heir; the team must win. Ahead may be a tragic irony. Without the strength of the past, the team may face a choice—to win, or to be French-Canadian?

“Hey bussy! Turn up that radio.”

As we near New York, the singing begins. Then it stops. From an introductory few bars, we know what’s coming. “Hey, Reggie!” we shout. Houle’s ready, his voice a pristine monotone.

“You took a fine time to leave me, Lucille…” he wails; we cheer, then go quiet. “Four hungry children…” (dramatic pause, catch in his voice), “…a crop in the field.…” We cheer again. His accent strains at the words, turning the song into a touching/hilarious lament. “I’ve had some bad times, been through some sad times…” Here and there, others join him. But it’s Reggie’s song, and always will be.

Practice is optional; all but Savard and Lemaire go. It feels good to put on equipment, to sweat, to stop shots when no one tells me to, to feel washed-out, tired-out good at the end. It’s a practice that has only to do with us. No one mentions the Islanders. The Islanders don’t matter. It’s up to us. It’s time to feel good about ourselves. Later, Bowman has arranged a team dinner. Afterwards, some are going to the race-track, others to a movie. Other years, I’d take a train to Manhattan, to the theater. Tonight, I’m going to the movies too.

TUESDAY

“Like an army on ice, we march south every winter,
We return in the spring the conquerors!”

—Sebastien Dhavernas, translated by Rick Salutin,
Les Canadiens
New York

We don’t lose when we need to win. We win, we always win. We lose when it doesn’t matter, when nothing’s on the line, when illness, injury, fatigue, boredom, laziness, personal problems, travel—when the law of averages beats us. There’s no law of averages in big games.

Big games we gear to win. And win. We don’t lose when it’s
us
on the line, when something must be proved, when we can’t lose.
We don’t lose
showdowns
.
I
don’t lose showdowns.

But we lost tonight. To the Islanders.

I don’t know what to feel. I’ve thought about this moment, what it would be like. But it’s different. I’m not angry, or even disappointed. I feel a strange peace. Reporters come by, my voice comes out softer and slower, the questions I hear sound the same. Maybe I’m numb. Maybe I’m afraid to feel what I really feel. Maybe I’ve had enough. Maybe I don’t want to fight and struggle and pretend any more. Maybe I want to lose. I feel such a wash of sympathy. So wonderful, cozy and warm. No more nagging voices, no more self-hating words. It’s over. There are new targets now. The king is dead; maybe he’s not such a bad guy after all.

I pack up my things and go. At the door, I see Bowman. I see Gainey and Lemaire. We look at each other. They look almost serene.

But in their eyes, just beginning, is a glint. I can feel it too. This is what Bowman’s been waiting for. This is what we’ve all been waiting for. I walk out the door. Inside, I feel a smile.

EPILOGUE

“It was a dream, and everything I dreamed came true.

Now my dream is finished. That’s a new life for me.

Because what I do now, what I keep on doing is
something I never dreamed of.”

—Henri Richard

Nothing happened the way it was supposed to. The Islanders caught us, then we caught them. In the season’s final game, we needed a tie against Detroit for first place, and we lost. The Islanders, waiting to be crowned, lost to the Rangers in the playoffs. And we won again. It was no triumph; we only survived. After the season we had had, we could hardly hope for more.

It was my last playoffs, something that never quite left my mind. I felt no real nostalgia, no sudden paralysis at the brink. Yet I kept looking back, for I needed a guide. Nothing in the present was making sense. I felt like a chess player at a scrambled board. I was playing poorly, and couldn’t stop. I searched for answers, and found none; for patterns and precedents that would tell me how it would all end. I discovered the symmetries in my career: the Bruins, Boston Garden; coming in a winner, going out a winner. When nothing else gave comfort, they did. There seemed a kind of perfect destiny.

Then we lost three times in Boston Garden. The Bruins took us to seven games. There were no tidy circles, no symmetries—a cruel punch line at the end. Irony was my pattern.
My
town,
my
team,
my
rink,
my
solid ground,
my
first and lasting reputation with less than four minutes left in the seventh game, Rick Middleton scored from behind the net. The Bruins were ahead. Savard was closest to the play.

He let out a groan of curdling sadness, as if it was over. The Bruins got a bench penalty. Lafleur scored. Lambert won it in overtime. I felt nothing, as if my strings were being pulled, as if everything was beyond my control. Irony was not my pattern either.

The finals were no different. I was taken out after the second period of the first game, replaced by Larocque. I had played every minute of every playoff game until then (except for the year I was in Toronto), more than one hundred consecutive games. Larocque shut out the Rangers the final period. The Rangers won. Larocque would take over, just as I had taken over from Vachon for the playoffs, eight years before. Irony
was
my pattern. Then, in the warm-up for the second game, Larocque was struck in the mask by Risebrough’s shot, and couldn’t play. I felt like an observer to my own fate. Yet I knew with blissful certainty what would happen next. It was what always happened at times like that. I laughed and joked before the game because I knew that’s what I should do. I put everyone at ease. For me it would be vindication and triumph. The Rangers scored in the first minute, again a few minutes later. I had no more patterns left. The rest was nerve-endings. We won that game, and the next two. In my final game, I had a chance for a shutout, but a long, looping, screened shot beat me. It was just. When it was over, Bowman went to Buffalo, Lemaire to Switzerland; the team retired unbeaten.

A year later, my family and I moved to England. We lived in Cambridge, where there was a soccer team, Cambridge United, in the English league, Second Division. I had watched soccer a few times on TV, excited and intrigued by its spectacle of flags, scarves, and game-long singing, but knew little about the game itself. I asked an English friend to go to a game with me. He explained the rules to me, going over the offside rule more than once, and gradually what I didn’t understand seemed less important than what I did. I began to see patterns to the game, to recognize rhythms and moods, to anticipate what might happen next. I found that often I was right. In understanding one game, I discovered that I understood another.

But there was one player I couldn’t help watching—number 7 for Cambridge, a short, chunky, hard-trying winger who seemed a great crowd favorite. All through the game, he raced ahead onto long passes (“Good ball, good ball,” my friend would mutter), only to shoot wide, or be stopped by the goalie. He seemed undiscouraged by it, as the fans did (“Bad luck,” they yelled), cheering his every attempt. Yet there was something very familiar about him. Then it occurred to me: I had seen him before, hundreds of times. He was a player on every team I played on, on every team I played against—the same size, the same style, the same results. It hadn’t been “bad luck” at all.

Late in the game, Cambridge was a goal down. Another long pass put number 7 into the clear. The crowd roared. For forty yards it roared. My friend began bouncing up and down. “Here it comes. Here it comes,” he shouted. I smiled.

Number 7 missed the net.

OVERTIME

Sarah is now twenty-eight years old and Michael is twenty-five, neither of them much younger than I was in 1979 when I retired. Lynda and I live in Toronto, not Montreal. I haven’t played goal since that Stanley Cup-winning night at the Forum against the Rangers. In old-timers games, I became a defenceman instead of a goalie, sort of. If Chartraw and Lupien could play on defence, I thought, surely I could.

I also wanted to play a position where, year after year I could feel myself get better, not year after year feel myself get worse. It might have worked that way; it should have, but it didn’t. Exchanging a goalie stick for a defenceman’s hasn’t brought with it the poise to do the right thing with the puck when I have it on my stick. Always able to spot my intended receiver, I am always blind to the defender in between. I have also learned to blame the goalie. Still, in old-timers hockey just as in “Dryden’s Backyard,” without referees, coaches, scoreboards, fans or media, announcing what I want to announce in my own head, I am still able to be the hero of all my own games.

It has been twenty-five seasons since the Canadiens were the best team in hockey. Twice in that time they won the Stanley Cup, in 1986(a)nd 1993, but that is not the same thing. They were underdogs both times, and both times they found victory with smart, opportunistic play, good fortune, strong goaltending, and that catch-all which everyone understands and no one can explain: the “Canadiens mystique.” Their good fortune came as the team, seventh overall during the 1986 regular season, had only to beat Boston (ninth overall), Hartford (twelfth) and Calgary (sixth) to win the Cup. In 1993, the best teams again beat each other and the Canadiens (seventh) defeated only Quebec (fourth), Buffalo (fifteenth) and L.A. (eleventh) to win again. In each case, Patrick Roy supplied the strong goaltending. In each case, as the team advanced through the playoffs, visible first to the media, then to the fans, finally to the players on both teams, the Canadiens “ghosts” reappeared.

Ghosts of Richard and Beliveau, of Morenz and Vezina. Ghosts of all those Stanley Cups won. The improbable suddenly felt like destiny, and the Flames and Kings were done.

In 1986, only Bob Gainey, Larry Robinson, and Mario Tremblay remained as players from the 1979 team. Eddy Palchak was still the team trainer. By 1993, only Eddy was left. Serge Savard had become the team’s general manager. Jacques Lemaire had been head coach for a year. Jacques Laperriere had been an assistant coach, as had Steve Shutt, news that surely made every one of his (deceased) former coaches turn over in their graves and Scotty Bowman to swallow his ice.

“Hey, Shutty, you in charge of backchecking?”

Later, Rejean Houle replaced Savard as general manager and Mario became his head coach. Now, after thirty-one years and ten Stanley Cups, even Eddy is gone from the team. Pierre Mondou and Claude Ruel remain as scouts; Jean Beliveau, Henri Richard, Guy Lafleur, Yvan Cournoyer, and Rejean have become team ambassadors. Joyce, the usherette, whom I nodded to at the start of every warm-up to give myself a chance at a good game, now brings her luck somewhere else.

Peter, the tiny, round, elfin-faced kid, who waited outside the Forum at every practice and every game, who I was sure a year or two later would be gone, is still there. Nearly forty, still tiny and elfin-faced, still at every game and every practice, Peter now has with him photos, jerseys, sticks, and pucks for players to sign; then he sells them.

Yet if few of the players of those teams of the late 1970s remain in Montreal, their impact on the rest of the NHL has been profound.

Gainey and Savard have each won the Stanley Cup as a general manager; Lemaire and Robinson as a head coach; Laperriere, Robinson, and Jarvis as an assistant. Pete Mahovlich is now a scout. Jimmy Roberts retired recently after a long career also as an assistant coach.

And Doug Risebrough, as general manager of the Wild, has created in Minnesota a Montreal
mid-ouest
, with Lemaire as his head coach, Mario an assistant coach, and “get the right guy” Guy Lapointe, who now has to “get the right guy” himself as a scout.

In the 2003 playoffs, there was a remarkable scene. The expansion Wild, in only their third year, had never made it to the postseason.

They were up against the former champion and one of the Stanley Cup favorites, the Colorado Avalanche. It was the seventh game. The game went into overtime. It was on the road in Denver, against Peter Forsberg, Joe Sakic, and Patrick Roy, and the Wild scored. Their players leaped over the boards in celebration; one camera stayed back on Lemaire and Tremblay behind the bench. The former teammates turned to each other. Mario, his middle-aged body now thicker, his hair turning grey, had on his face his same little boy’s look of glistening, beaming, eye-popping wonder. Jacques, with his round, crinkly, Pillsbury Dough Boy face that would always fool you, that made you believe he wasn’t to be taken seriously, especially at serious moments like the playoffs, especially for serious tasks like scoring big goals, killing penalties and winning. Especially, years later, for serious jobs like coaching. As a coach, he had always hidden that face behind a stern, serious, implacable one. Until now. When that goal went in, his mouth flew open, his Pillsbury Dough Boy look was back.

At every other coach’s moment of celebration I had seen, there had been hugging and jumping up and down. But Jacques and Mario left that for their team. They knew that this moment belonged to the players. For Jacques and Mario, it was something quieter, more private.

They were like parents, bursting with pride, trying to keep it all inside.

And failing. The look they shared said it all: Can you believe this?!

Can you believe we just beat Colorado?!

I wonder what Dougie was doing at that moment. I wonder what Pointu was up to.

Only Savard and Laperriere have won their non-playing Cups in Montreal. Some had their chance, including Lemaire and Tremblay, but in Montreal, becoming head coaches as they did with little experience, they had to be great before they had learned to be good. They and the others, particularly Gainey and Robinson, had to leave the glare of Montreal to learn their trade in Dallas and New Jersey. That conspiracy of expectations, of fans, press, management, coaches, and players that makes losing intolerable, when you’re not quite good enough will work against you.

Even Scotty Bowman had left Montreal to win again. He had gone to Buffalo as coach and general manager in 1979, taking over a team that had almost won, but not quite, to get them to the top. But he couldn’t make them better. Maybe for the first time in his NHL(c)areer, he was a disappointment, and without likeability to forgive his failure, he was soon fired. He moved into TV and, at age fifty-three, appeared at the end of the head-coaching line. He returned to the NHL with Pittsburgh as an assistant coach, but when Bob Johnson died of cancer, he took over the team and led it to its second consecutive Stanley Cup. In Detroit, things only got better for him. At his age, with all his accomplishments, with the rebirth of the Red Wings, Scotty became a legend, finally and forever above the fray of opinion.

Even his former players who had never ever wanted to say anything nice about him, have been unable to resist. That may be the real measure of his achievement. He retired after the Red Wings’ victory in 2002 having won nine Stanley Cups as a head coach, more championships than Vince Lombardi, Red Auerbach, Toe Blake, Joe McCarthy, or Casey Stengel. When that final game ended, Scotty disappeared from sight for a moment, then returned with his skates on to take one final turn. It was a little over-orchestrated, a little unsmooth—it was Scotty to the end. But now everyone loved it. At age sixty-eight, having won Stanley Cups over a span of four different decades, through a time of NHL expansion, the introduction of the European player, free agency, big money, and all the rest, having had to learn and adapt and seek out new answers and keep on learning all of that time, Scotty Bowman left the NHL as undeniably, indisputably the best coach of all time.

This isn’t the “Original Six” NHL anymore. It’s not the fourteen-team League I entered in 1971 or the seventeen-team League I left in 1979. With thirty teams, it is harder to win the Stanley Cup. With free agency, it is harder to win again and again. And with the legacy of Frank Selke and Sam Pollock as manager, Toe Blake and Scotty Bowman as coach, with all the Stanley Cups won, for any coach, any manager, any player, now the “ghosts” can do you in. It is the challenge Bob Gainey faces as the team’s new general manager. In Colorado or Detroit or New Jersey, win one Stanley Cup and you are a success. In Montreal, win one and you’re a failure.

Most of what has happened these past twenty-five seasons I couldn’t have guessed. I knew that the dominance of the Canadiens would diminish. Nobody could sustain the pace of fifteen Stanley Cups in twenty-four years. Pollock and Bowman were gone. The farm system had been built during a sponsorship time when teams could sign up kids almost at birth, and when every Canadian kid wanted to play for the Canadiens or Leafs, and when every non-Canadian kid, every American or European, didn’t matter. When sponsorship ended in 1969 and a universal draft of players forced kids to play with whichever team chose them, the Canadiens had enough players already in their system to trade their surplus for future draft picks to teams desperate to compete and survive. But by 1979 all that was coming to an end. The next generation of great players was getting spread around.

Denis Potvin, Brian Trottier, and Mike Bossy had all gone to the Islanders. Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier were in the WHA. The Canadiens had been reduced finally to equal ground, and while equal ground, with proper care, might produce good teams, it won’t generate domination.

I might have guessed the rise of the European player in the NHL, but not his stunning impact. Borje Salming had become an all-star by the late 1970s. Anders Hedberg and Ulf Nilsson had joined the Rangers; Vaclav Nedomansky the Red Wings. Hammarstrom, Gradin, Lindgren, Brasar, Labraatan, and Svensson filled out other NHL team rosters. It would have been easy to imagine more Swedes and Finns by the early 1980s, even some additional Czechoslovak defectors. Maybe, in time, a Soviet or two. But not more. The Soviets believed too strongly in everything they were doing, hockey included, or they seemed to. Besides, the barriers to their escape were too high, the penalties for those left behind too steep. The Soviets would continue to be that other stylistic, developmental, and competitive model, existing separate and apart except for the occasional showdown series. It took the fall of the Soviet Empire to change that, and that was foreseeable to no one.

Yet the effect of the Soviets was beginning to be felt even by 1979.

They had made constraint their virtue. With little money to make good equipment, their sticks were fragile; their skates offered little support. So they passed the puck, focusing their style on players moving without it, instead of risking stick-breaking slap shots; they skated with a maneuverable, hard-to-knock down, wide-gaited stride.

Because they had few indoor arenas, they trained off the ice as well.

Having started hockey in 1946, seventy years behind everyone else, they played more hours of the day, more months of the year to catch up. With fewer resources to support fewer players, and with fewer players to play against, they practiced. Off-ice and off-season training would have come to North American hockey in time. Both were becoming features of other North American sports. Canadian hockey players were almost ready to believe that training off the ice might make them better on the ice, that the summer months actually offered them the opportunity to arrive at training camp in September three months better than they had been in May. But it took a winning Soviet team to provide the hockey model.

On the ice, the Soviets’ impact would have come more slowly but for Wayne Gretzky. There would always be the next superstar. Howie Morenz had given way to Rocket Richard and Gordie Howe, and they in turn to Bobby Hull, Bobby Orr, Phil Esposito and Guy Lafleur.

One could have predicted Mario Lemieux, not the scale of his talent, nor his unsurpassed ability to render an opponent embarrassingly inept. But in his style of play Lemieux was much more in the tradition of the Canadian player. Not Gretzky. He wasn’t big or strong. His game was giving, not receiving. He kept the puck and rewarded teammates who would skate, maneuver, create, and find open ice without it. The focus of the Canadian game had always been on the player with the puck. The Soviets’ style was centered on all the others. Gretzky, the kid from Brantford with the Belarussian name, was the acceptable face of Soviet hockey. No Canadian kid wanted to play like Makarov or Larionov. They all wanted to play like Gretzky.

Nobody has been more affected by the Soviet impact than the U.S. (p)layer. In hockey, the U.S. in the twentieth century had existed in relation to other countries the way in geopolitics other countries in the twentieth century had existed in relation to the U.S., as a minor player on the world stage. This was particularly true of Canada. In 1979, of the NHL’s five hundred and three players, forty-three or eight and a half percent were Americans, the best of whom were Paul Holmgren, Reed Larsen, and Dean Talafous. Yet even this modest level of achievement was markedly better than in 1967, the year before the NHL expanded from six to twelve teams. Then there was only one American, Tom Williams, from Duluth, Minnesota. Most of the NHL’s teams may have been American, but the NHL was a Canadian league. Almost all of its players, and all of its best players, were Canadian. Its head office was in Montreal. Its best teams were Canadian. Of the ten Stanley Cups won during the 1940s, despite being only two of the League’s six teams, Canadian teams won seven times. In the 1950s, the Canadiens and Leafs won six Cups. In the 1960s, expansion to the U.S. late in the decade meant there were only two Canadian teams out of twelve, yet those two teams won an astonishing nine times. In the 1970s, with further expansion and Vancouver now in the League, the three Canadian teams won six times, all of them by Montreal.