The Game (6 page)

A year later, we played against the Islanders again. We had lost the fifth game in Montreal in overtime, and we played the sixth game in New York, ahead 3-2 in the series. Lapointe had missed nearly half the season with injuries and illness, and had struggled in the playoffs, playing poorly in the overtime game. In the sixth game, however, he was brilliant. While it is usual, indeed expected, that a defenseman will block shots at least occasionally, Lapointe prefers not to. He did it at times earlier in his career, but less often in recent years and with more injuries that year, less often still. And whenever he
did
block a shot, whether from accident or mindless desperation, he would always follow it with the same routine slowly getting to his skates, wincing painfully, limping in a way that said he was finished for the game, moving imperceptibly towards the bench, looking at Bowman, wanting to go off; seeing Bowman turn and look away. But Bowman knew that when the puck was dropped, Lapointe would play as if nothing had happened. That night he blocked several crucial shots—intentionally—and we won 2-1.

Then last year, in a game against Detroit in the Forum, it finally happened. After practice the day before, Lapointe had gone to a dentist to get some new teeth. These teeth were bigger than his old ones, longer, in fact too long, especially the front two. They might have gone entirely unnoticed except for another change. His hair. Tired of it falling on his forehead like a bowl, he had had it permed into a round, black aura. The next night he wandered into the dressing room before the game and sat down as if nothing had happened. One by one our sightless glances turned to double and triple takes, open mouths, and finally fits of laughter:

“Je-sus Christ, will ya look at that head!” someone said at last.

“Hey Pointu, the beaver put up much of a fight?”

Laughing at first, then embarrassed, then making it worse by trying to explain—“Yeah, the dentist said he might have to file ’em down a bit”—Lapointe removed his teeth and slipped out to the bathroom for water and petroleum jelly to stick down his hair. When he came back, he looked almost like Pointu, but the memory wouldn’t go away.

Every few minutes there was a snigger or a snort, then we’d laugh until we were all aching and teary-eyed again.

When the game began, it got worse. The water evaporated, and the petroleum jelly washed away with his perspiration. I didn’t notice anything for a while; even after the first period nothing seemed unusual. But suddenly, early in the second, when he skated back for the puck, he looked different. He had grown. His aura was much bigger than before. With the heat and the bright lights, his hair had straightened, stiffened, and shot up like an umbrella in a wind storm. At the end of the period, we were beside ourselves.

“For crissake, Pointu, put a helmet on. I got a game to play.”

“Hey Pointu, I got the electrician. Which socket was it?”

Finally, the right guy.

If the bus were to continue past our destination a few blocks, we would come to an area called “the Avenues,” the six numbered avenues that run north-south between Verdun Avenue and Bannantyne. It was on“(t)he Avenues” that Scotty Bowman grew up.

In 1930, John Bowman, a blacksmith, left the small market town of Forfar on the east coast of Scotland and arrived in Canada. He was twenty-eight. A year later, his wife Jean joined him. They were Depression immigrants, and like many of their ancestors who began settling in Canada in large numbers more than a century before, they came first to Point St. Charles, a low-income working-class area east of Verdun, less than a mile south of the Forum. There, surrounded by countrymen, they learned to adapt quickly to life in their new country.

In time, as the men found jobs, and as families settled in, most left “the Point,” many moving west a few blocks into slightly newer and larger accommodations in Verdun.

In 1935, with two young children, the Bowmans moved to 2nd Avenue in Verdun. Two years later, they moved again, west onto 5th Avenue, where they remained for the next twelve years.

More than one hundred and fifty families lived on 5th Avenue in the city block between Bannantyne and Verdun. It was a street of sixplexes, one beside the other, thirteen on each side of the street, each with two doors on the ground floor, a flight of outside stairs to a balcony and four more doors, two of which led to second-floor flats, the other two to inside stairs that connected to flats on the third floor. Inside, the flats were identical—a narrow hallway running from the front door to the back, and extending off it, a small sitting room, two small bedrooms, a kitchen and bathroom on the other side near the back. For $22 a month, the Bowmans lived in one of the bottom flats; the landlord, as was the custom, lived in the other. Years later, Bowman and his friends would joke about living in Harlem, but the flats, while small, were well-built and well-maintained. Size, in fact, was little problem, for the children of Verdun spent most of their time outdoors.

They spent it on the streets—in the 1930s and 1940s, streets largely empty of cars—or at Willibrord Park, where each winter the city of Verdun put up five outdoor rinks. On these rinks or in back alleys, from late November to late March, at noon, from school-end until dinner time, Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays from morning to night, Bowman and his friends played hockey. In summer, they played baseball. It was a simple, invigorating life, the cliché childhood of Canadians of their generation. Years later, asked to remember his childhood, Bowman said simply that “everything was sports.”

After playing his minor hockey in Verdun, at sixteen Bowman joined the Montreal Junior Canadiens. A left-winger, he was a good skater with a fine instinctive sense of the game, though surprisingly weak defensively, and in his first season scored the promising total of twenty goals. That year in the playoffs, the Juniors played Trois-Rivières. It was March 1951 and Bowman was seventeen. Ahead 5-1 in a game that would eliminate Trois Rivières, with thirty seconds remaining Bowman got a breakaway. Chasing him a few strides behind was Jean-Guy Talbot, a talented defenseman who would later play sixteen seasons in the NHL, three in St. Louis with Bowman as his coach. Talbot had played poorly, taking several costly penalties, and with his season about to end, he was frustrated and angry.

He reached out and came down hard with his stick on Bowman’s shoulder. Bowman kept going. Talbot brought his stick down again, harder, this time on Bowman’s head. Bowman went down, his skull fractured, his career over.

Talbot was suspended for a year, though his suspension was lifted the following November. Bowman, after a few anxious days in the hospital, slowly recovered. He tried playing again the following year, this time with a helmet, but found that he couldn’t play as he had before. Late in the fall, Frank Selke, then general manager of the Canadiens, sponsors of the Juniors, called him to his office and told him it wasn’t worth the risk to him or to the team for him to continue. Having just turned eighteen, Bowman decided to quit, accepting Selke’s offer to coach a midget-age team in Verdun. Years later, he held no bitterness. Uncertain of a professional career in the tightly competitive six-team NHL, he saw his injury as an opportunity to get a head start in a new life.

For sixteen years, almost a coaching lifetime, he apprenticed coaching and supervising minor hockey teams in Verdun and recruit-ing players for Jr. A teams, coaching a Jr. B team, for two years assisting Sam Pollock with the Hull-Ottawa Juniors, moving to Peterborough to coach for three seasons, scouting eastern Canada for the Canadiens for two, coaching Omaha, his first professional team, for a few unhappy weeks, then returning to Montreal for two more years with the Juniors. At first, it was a rapid rise. Then, too young to advance beyond junior hockey, Bowman began a long and at times frustrating wait, moving sideways several times until much of his early promise seemed to have deserted him. But during this time, working with Selke and Pollock, he got immensely varied and valuable experience. So, early in 1966, a year before the NHL expanded from six teams to twelve, when Lynn Patrick, coach and general manager of the expansion St. Louis Blues, called and asked him to be his assistant, at thirty-three, Bowman was ready.

Before twenty games had been played in the Blues’ first season, Patrick had stepped down as coach and Bowman had replaced him. In his first three years, the Blues finished first twice and third once in the expansion Western Division of the NHL, going to the Stanley Cup finals each time. In his fourth season, the team slipped to second and lost to expansion rival Minnesota in the quarter-finals of the playoffs.

After an uncomfortable plane ride home from Minnesota, the next day Bowman met with Sid Salomon III, son of the principal owner of the team. In a stormy meeting, Salomon made it clear that he didn’t want Al Arbour as his coach the following year, Cliff Fletcher as Bowman’s assistant, or Tommy Woodcock as the team’s trainer. Bowman decided to resign. Little more than a year later, only Woodcock was still with the Blues, his job saved by a players’ protest.

A few days after Bowman resigned, Henri Richard called Al MacNeil “incompétent,” the province of Quebec heard him say something quite different, and the Canadiens needed a new coach. At thirty-seven, Scotty Bowman returned to Montreal to take the job he had trained for during most of his life.

If you ask the players who have played for Bowman if they like him, most will stand shocked, as if the thought never occurred to them, as if the question is somehow inappropriate, as if the answer is entirely self-evident. No, they will say, Scotty Bowman may be a lot of things, but he is not someone you like. A few, usually those who played for him the longest but who now no longer do so, might brighten and answer quickly, as if they
had
thought about it, maybe a lot about it, in the years since.

“Yeah sure, I, I really
respect
the guy. I really
admire
him. He sure did a lot for me.”

Scotty Bowman is not someone who is easy to like. He has no coach’s con about him. He does not slap backs, punch arms, or grab elbows. He doesn’t search eyes, spew out ingratiating blarney, or dis-arm with faint, enervating praise. He is shy and not very friendly. If he speaks to reporters or to a team, he talks business, and his eyes sweep several inches above their heads. If he speaks to you alone, as a few times each year you force him to, explaining something that is annoyingly unclear, you share three or four intimate, surprising minutes that bring you closer to him than you ever thought possible. Then, as if he suddenly remembers where he is and what he is doing, he cuts it off—

“Yeah, yeah, is that it? Good, good”—and before you can answer, it’s over. And if, by chance, your path crosses his away from the rink, at first there will be several awkward “caught in the act” moments.

Recovering, he may ask how you are, but if he does, he’ll blurt something about Tremblay’s rash or Lemaire’s injury before you can answer. And all the time you talk, one foot on the brake, the other on the accelerator, he lurches away, inch by inch. In the intimacy of a team, Bowman calls Bunny “Michel,” Sharty “Rick,” and Pointu

“Guy.” Bo and Bird and Co and Shutty are Bob and Larry and Jacques and Steve. He doesn’t call anyone by his nickname.

Abrupt, straightforward, without flair or charm, he seems cold and abrasive, sometimes obnoxious, controversial, but never colorful. He is not Vince Lombardi, tough and gruff with a heart of gold. His players don’t sit around telling hateful—affectionate stories about him. Someone might say of him, as former Packers great Henry Jordan once said of Lombardi, “He treats us all the same—like dogs,” but he doesn’t. He plays favorites. His favorites, while rarely feeling favored, are those who work and produce for him. He is complex, confusing, misunderstood, unclear in every way but one. He is a brilliant coach, the best of his time.

He starts each season with a goal—the Stanley Cup—and he has no other. It is part of the Canadiens’ heritage passed from Selke to Pollock, through Dick Irvin, Blake, and Bowman, to the Richards, Béliveau, Lafleur, and the rest. A good season is a Stanley Cup; anything else is not. So in September, in November, in December, and in March, he never loses sight of May. With schizophrenic desperation/perspective, he treats each game as an indicator, as a signpost, en route to May; yet he makes no compromise for any game. He sees an inextricable link between the months and games of a season—“You can’t turn it off and on,” he says, as other coaches say. But Bowman believes what he says, and practices it. Like his mentor, Sam Pollock, he lives with a conviction, what others, less strong, might call paranoia, that no matter how good the team is, it might never win another game. He can see in every game the beginning of a chain of events he cannot stop—a careless loss at home, a tougher game on the road, an injury, three games in four nights, Chartraw missing a plane, a sweep of winter sickness, an opponent on a hot streak, building pressure at home, a media scandal, a team that shows you less respect, then another, and another, and quickly several more.

For someone of his obvious ability, Bowman seems a remarkable contradiction of strength and weakness, realism and insecurity; but he is not. As others have discovered, at the top, where Bowman is, strength, weakness, realism, and insecurity are really just symptoms of each other. So while he surely knows that we are better than any other team, if he has ever thought about it, he has done so only fleetingly and not without wincing at his own dangerous thought. For he knows that May is always ahead, and when May is over, September is never far away. With each Stanley Cup, we look for, and sometimes find, signs he is loosening up. But he has never really changed. We know that when two or three days of uncharacteristic pleasantness leave us talking to ourselves, as winger Jimmy Roberts once said, “It’s nothing that a loss won’t cure.”

Not long ago, I asked him his most important job as coach. He sat quiet for a moment, his face unfurrowed and blank, thinking, then said simply, “To get the right players on the ice.” In an age of “systems” (a)nd “concepts” and fervid self-promotion, his answer may seem a little unsatisfying; but though misleadingly simple, it is how he coaches.