The Game (5 page)

Peter, a tiny round elf-faced boy of about fourteen, a Canadiens sweater visible beneath his parka, runs from in front of the players’(e)ntrance and meets me at the corner. Six or seven others, boys and girls, bigger than Peter but about his age, follow behind. Many of them are also wearing Canadiens sweaters under their parkas. I recognize most of them; a few ask for autographs. They walk thirty quick feet with me as they do with each player, we ask them how they are, they answer with “Great game” or “Too bad about last night,” then, out of time and at the door, we say “Thanks.” They leave their class-es at nearby schools an hour before practice, stay most of that hour, returning two hours later as we leave. For games, they wish us luck as we go in; five hours later, after 11 p.m., they’re there again, some having gotten in to watch the game, most having not. Peter has been coming for nearly two years; a year or two from now he will have new interests and commitments—girl friends, school, a job—and gradually he will stop; and there will be others. During that time, the boys never change; the girls, once thirteen, suddenly seventeen, do. In a life where games and seasons blend together, it is one of the few ways to know that time has passed.

I’m late again. I come in another door, hang up my coat before anyone sees me, and walk in the room as if I’ve only been unnoticed, not absent, all these minutes. My laces are cut again. Risebrough says,

“I tried to stop him.” Lapointe says, “Hey, get the right guy,” and everyone laughs. Larocque arrives after me and gets the same reaction, then Savard. Pierre Meilleur, the pudgy assistant trainer, who likes to introduce himself as “Pierre ‘Boom Boom’ Meilleur, personal trainer Serge Savard, team trainer Montreal Canadiens,” sits down next to Savard and begins to replace his shredded laces. We shout at Meilleur, gibing him for his self inflicted status, but he just laughs and continues. There is something he doesn’t hear though, something he should hear; it is anger. For while Bowman lets us get away with his “thirty minutes in the room before practice” rule, except when we’re losing, the team, in its own way, does not. We all like to test his rules, getting away with as much as we can, but by cutting laces, we remind each other that there is
some
price for being late, that it
has
been noticed. By fixing Savard’s skates, Meilleur has gotten in the way of a team as it disciplines itself, and the anger is real.

The room is alive and bursting with energy. It is what happens when a team gets together—in a bar, on a plane, anywhere, every time.

Everything louder and faster. Half-naked players move hurriedly about, laughing, shouting for tape (black or white, thick or thin), cotton, skate laces, gum, ammonia “sniffers,” Q-Tips, toilet paper, and for trainers to get them faster than they can. It is the kind of unremitting noise that no one hears and everyone feels. But there is another level of dialogue we all can hear. It is loud, invigorating, paced to the mood of the room, the product of wound-up bodies with wound-up minds. It’s one line, a laugh, and get out of the way of the next guy— “jock humor.” It is like a “roast,” the kind of intimate, indiscriminate carving that friends do to keep egos under control. Set in motion, it rebounds by word association, thought association, by “off the wall” anything association, just verbal reflex, whatever comes off your tongue, the more outrageous the better. Elections, murders, girl friends, body shapes, body parts—in the great
Tonight Show
/
Saturday Night Live
tradition, verbal slapstick dressed as worldly comment, mother-in-law jokes for the media-conscious, it is anything for a laugh.

Amid the business of getting ready for practice, there is talk of beer.

“
Câlisse
, you see the paper?” Houle moans. “Beer’s goin’ up sixty-five cents a case. Sixty-five cents!”

His words bring a grumble of memory.

“Shit, yeah,” says a mocking voice, “the only thing should go up is what they pay fifteen-goal scorers, eh Reggie?

There is laughter this time. Across the room, Guy Lapointe stares at the ceiling, lost in thought. Suddenly he blurts, “That’s it, that’s it.

No more drinkin’.”

There is loud laughter.

“Hey, Pointu,” Steve Shutt says, “ya just gotta learn to beat the system—drink on the road.” His quick, chilled, high-pitched laugh follows.

Steve Shutt is a curious-looking hockey player. Short, with a wide round face, a permanently quizzical grin, and a body shape he feels is deceptive— “Hey, that’s not fat,” he insists, referring to a small puddle of fat around his middle; “I’m swaybacked”—he is often disparaged as a “garbage man.” But he is not. Rather, he is what laughingly he says he is—a “specialist.” He lurks about “in the weeds,” as he would put it, away from the play, unnoticed in a game that centers around his linemate Lafleur. Then, as the puck enters an opponent’s zone, he accelerates to the net like a dragster, with quick, chopping strides, to sweep in a goalmouth pass, to deflect a shot in some improbable way, to snap a rebound to a top corner. It is a style he learned as a boy on a small backyard rink his father built. Crowded with neighborhood kids, there was little room to skate and only time for short, quick shots that gave no second chance.

Off the ice, he is the same. Lurking about in a corner of the room, he takes in everything, his head bobbing about like a bird, ninety degrees at a time, ready, waiting for an opening, Then, at the moment we’re most vulnerable, he springs into action, throwing out a stream of “quips,” as he calls them, in quick staccato bursts, always with the same shivery giggle—hee hee hee—like Ernie on
Sesame Street
. He is our foil, a perfect Shakespearian fool; his greatest delight comes in interrupting life’s careful, ordered rhythms to catch people with their pants down. Some of his quips are good, some are not so good, some are genuinely bad. But it doesn’t matter. Irrepressible, irresistible, funnier than anything he says, after a while he just opens his mouth and we laugh.

The talk rebounds from Margaret Trudeau to the price of gas to

“Sheik Khomeini” to harems to “real service stations” (“no selfserve”).

Houle, who as a boy was poor enough that now he worries about losing what he has, puts on his sweater, grateful that the subject he started has now been forgotten. Savard adjusts his shoulder pads and looks across the room at him.

“Hey, Reggie, relax,” he yells, and Houle, no longer relaxed, jerks up his head. “What’re you worryin’ about,” Savard continues. “All those annuities you got. Hell, they’ll pay ya six per cent the rest of your life. In ten years they’ll be worth five, ten thousand bucks a year,” (h)e says soothingly, then pauses for his own punch line, “just because they’re worth fifty [thousand] now.”

There is loud laughter. Suddenly, we’re back to the price of beer.

“It’s that fuckin’ government,” someone says. “Why the hell don’t they do something about that instead of the goddamn referendum?”

There are loud murmurs of agreement.

“Shit, they don’t care,” another voice says, “they got all the wine drinkers on their side. The beer drinkers gonna vote ‘no’ anyway.”

“The government,” someone else growls, “who gives a shit about the government. We win [Stanley] Cups with the Liberals, we win 'em with the PQ What the fuck’s the difference?”

Stunned, we go silent for a moment, then Lapointe looks over at Mondou. “What d’you think, Mousse?”

Pierre Mondou, a funny, likeable second-year player, with a mind too fast for his tongue and a tongue too fast for any ear to compre-hend, in English
and
French, looks up like he hasn’t done the reading.

“Huh, oh, um,
câlisse
goddamn, heh heh heh.”

We all stop what we’re doing and look at each other.

“What the hell was that?” more than one of us asks.

“
Câlisse
, I thought it was English,” says Lapointe, looking puzzled.

“Hey Mousse, easy for you to say,” and there is more loud laughter.

Today, we practice at Verdun Auditorium, a short bus ride from the Forum. With the work involved in packing the equipment needed for practice and taking it to another rink, all but Larocque and I dress into full equipment at the Forum. Because of the awkward bulk of our leg pads, we put our pads, skates, gloves, and masks into an equipment bag to change at Verdun. It will be one of the few times this season we have not practiced at the Forum.

As soon as the NHL schedule is released in late summer, Bowman and Grundman meet with a Forum executive and Bowman tells him the days he wants the building reserved for practice. The day after a long road trip, the day before an important game if any of the dates then or later conflict with a possible Forum event, there may be, negotiation, but final discretion always remains with Bowman. It is a power almost anachronistic in a time when a building’s high operating costs demand as close to nightly use as possible. But though busy more than two hundred nights a year with rock shows, ice shows, circuses, and other events, the Forum remains first and foremost a hockey arena.

Tonight, the Harlem Globetrotters are in town and the ice has been covered with a gray bounceless floor.

Carrying sticks and helmets, with skate guards protecting their skate blades, players walk from the building to a chartered city bus waiting at a bus stop on Atwater Street. Across the road, shoppers at Alexis Nihon Plaza go about their business. A few stop suddenly, do a quick double-take, but distrusting their instincts, certain it must be someone else, they continue on. We spread around the bus, sitting singly or in twos, reading the newspapers that are passed around, some of us with legs crossed, others stretched into aisles—looking much like any bus passengers. The door of the bus remains open while we wait for the trainers. A plump middle-aged woman, laden down with parcels and bags, runs across the street against the light, dodging traffic, looking anxiously toward the bus. Lapointe yells something to the driver. The woman reaches the bus badly out of breath, but at least a little triumphant. The driver says nothing. She climbs the steps, reaches into her purse for the fare, glances quickly down the bus at the smiling helmeted heads, screams, and runs off.

It’s a sense of fun more than a sense of humor. It’s pie in the face, seltzer in the pants, duck and get the other guy—slapstick, up front, but rarely the way it seems. So free of malice—the mangled pies and ruined ties exist only in fun. So well done that the fiftieth pie is as funny as the first. And Lapointe is a natural. With the team as his audience and his more than happy victim, he lets us share hundreds of pranks in the making—on the other guy. When it’s on you, you never see it happen.

It was at lunch before my first game with the Canadiens, an exhibition game in Halifax against Chicago:

“Ah, I’m full,” Lapointe announces, wiping his face with his nap-kin. “Anybody want my ice cream?”

Shaking their heads, murmuring, everyone says no. Finally, after looking around, certain that no one else wants it, “Um, yeah sure,” I say tentatively, “ya sure ya don’t want it?”

Lapointe shakes his head, and hands it to me. I take a bite. Before I can taste what I have eaten, the room explodes in laughter—sour cream with chocolate sauce.

“Pointu!”

In Colorado, Lapointe in a garbled French accent addresses a young stick-boy anxious to please:

“Oh garçon, uh, uh bud-dy, les boys uh, zey ont bes-uh zey, zey need un, un bucketa steam.”

“Excuse me?” the boy says.

“Les boys zey, zey un bucketa steam. Vas-y, vas-y, go, go, go.”

The stick-boy, still anxious to please but a little puzzled, leaves to find a bucket of steam.

A serious Lapointe:

“
Câlisse
, now I done it,” he groans. “Kenny, who’s a good lawyer?

I need some help.”

He looks genuinely worried this time. “Call a guy named Ackerman,” I tell him earnestly.

“What?” he says.

“
Ackerman
,” I repeat louder, and suddenly I know what’s coming next.

“I’m not deaf,” he says indignantly, and walks away laughing.

“Pointu!”

Sugar in salt shakers, ketchup on shoes, shaving cream on sleeping heads, petroleum jelly on the ear-piece of a phone, and never once do we wonder—why does a thirty-one-year-old man do these things?

To others, it might seem just adolescent humor, adults playing a little boys’ game playing at being little boys. But up close, we don’t worry about that. To us, it is simply fun. Seven days on the road, walking through an early-morning airport, tired, laden with carry-on bags, starting up a long escalator, and suddenly it stops—without looking up, with no one else in sight, six or seven voices chorus into the wind, “Pointu!”

We learn to count ketchup bottles, check ear-pieces, salt shakers, and ice cream, but it doesn’t matter; and we don’t care.

In the early and mid 1970s, except for Bobby Orr, Guy Lapointe was the best defenseman in the NHL. He was strong and powerful, an explosive skater with a hard, low shot, but what made him unique was the emotion he could bring to a game. During flat, lifeless stretches, uncalculated, he would suddenly erupt with enormous impatient fury, racing around the ice, daring and inspired on offense and defense, giving the game a new mood; turning it our way. It is a rare ability, and even as Potvin and Robinson matured in mid-decade to push him onto second all-star teams and beyond, it was a skill that even they couldn’t match. Only recently, with accumulating age and injury, has some of that fire gone out.

When I think of Lapointe, I think of three games. The first, in 1976, was the fifth game of the Stanley Cup semi-finals against the Islanders. We were ahead three games to one, having won the decisive fourth game in New York, and were back in Montreal to finish the series. The game began slowly, both teams playing as if it were only a formality. The Islanders, then a young, emerging team, seemed intimidated by the task before them, and waited for the game to take shape—as we did, apparently believing that our accumulated reputation, home ice advantage, and series lead would give us the win. Early in the second period, drifting in a tie, the game was there equally for either team to take. The Islanders continued to wait; it was Lapointe, not Potvin, angry and impatient, who finally took hold of the puck and with it the game. We scored two quick goals, and by the end of the second period, the game and the series were suddenly over.