Former Montreal Canadien Ken Dryden takes part in the team’s centennial celebrations in 2009.Richard Wolowicz/Getty Images
Imagine Neil Armstrong had been a poet, and came back from the Apollo 11 mission with just the right words to capture our place in the cosmos.
That’s what it meant, for Canada, to have Ken Dryden on the 1970s Montreal Canadiens. Under normal circumstances we would never know what it was like to play for the greatest hockey team of all time; that particular experience of touching the heavens would remain locked away in the relatively unpoetic minds of Steve Shutt and Jacques Lemaire.
Instead, we had Dryden in the space capsule of that locker room, and The Game as the immortal testament of what it was like. By common consensus one of the finest sports books of all time – Sports Illustrated once placed it at No. 9 – The Game recounts Dryden’s final season playing for the Montreal dynasty that won six Stanley Cups in the seventies, featuring legends such as Guy Lafleur and head coach Scotty Bowman.
The book expresses what it feels like to play sports at the highest level with a richness that will probably never be matched. The presence of a mind like Dryden’s on a team like that is hardly less improbable and wondrous than if Robert Frost had played alongside Babe Ruth on the 1920s Yankees.
Dryden, who died last week at 78, was famously the thinking man’s hockey player, and his smartest-guy-in-the-NHL credentials are well known – college career at Cornell, on-ice sabbatical to finish his legal training, early retirement to become a lawyer, then later an MP and cabinet minister.
Ken Dryden had a hockey career like few others, winning six Stanley Cups and taking part in the victorious Summit Series.Nick Iwanyshyn/The Canadian Press
But even that résumé undersells how unusual he was, and how remarkable it is that a book like The Game exists. The qualities that make a good writer – sensitivity, reflectiveness, introspection – are largely antithetical to athletic success, which depends on wiping your mind clean, thinking with your body, inhabiting the moment.
So it comes as a shock at first, on picking up the book, to find that Dryden was capable of beautifully turned prose. “Like a starlet in the morning mirror,” he writes about the Canadiens as they wobbled on their perch, “everything we see is a haunting omen of breakdown.”
The book is written in the present tense and pulses with immediacy. Dryden had a reporter’s eye for detail and telling anecdote. He unforgettably describes the night at the Montreal Forum in 1976 when the sovereigntist Parti Québécois was elected for the first time, the results trickling in on the jumbotron until a new government was announced; half the stadium rose to cheer wildly while the other half sat in resentful silence.
But the book’s most precious material is the stuff no journalist could capture, no matter their access – material only accessible to a participant. It’s the character sketches of mostly forgotten role players like the ingenuous Réjean Houle, playing at being a millionaire before he had the money, with his pinstriped suits and fat cigars, his face “lumped and scarred by a decade of pucks and high-sticks,” his winsome eyes “that tighten and twinkle.”
The hall-of-famers come alive in Dryden’s pages, too: Lafleur the obsessed prodigy, still playing alone on a river in Thurso; Larry Robinson the reluctant bruiser, almost embarrassed by his size and strength and the need to use them. The inscrutable Bowman so fascinated Dryden he later wrote his biography.
Ken Dryden and his former Montreal teammate Serge Savard laugh at a photo of the pair ahead of their number retirement ceremony.Ian Barrett/The Canadian Press
More than any individual, though, the team as a living, breathing, organic thing emerges as the most interesting character in the book. Its unspoken masculine codes have rarely been so attentively laid down in words.
Dryden was an outsider on the beer-drinking, card-playing Canadiens, a bit of a loner on road trips, the middle-class egghead with his law textbooks on a bus full of working-class lads. But that seems to have allowed him to feel the tug of team dynamics more sharply, as he was pulled by their undertow into an unlikely collective.
He is great on the giddiness after a win, the single experience about being a professional athlete he seems to have enjoyed most; the way “voices blurt on top of each other, and everything is funny – things not funny when they happened, everything that earlier was too personal, too embarrassing, too important to be funny, today is torn laughingly apart.”
Dryden is also clear-eyed about the precarity of a team’s bond, the way losing can break it remorselessly down, how “winning is the central card in a house of cards, and that without it, or with less of it, motivations that seemed pure and clear go cloudy, and personal qualities once noble and abundant turn on end.”
Those Habs teams of the late seventies didn’t lose much. Despite some worthy rivals in the Bobby Orr Bruins and the Bobby Clarke Flyers – the Broad Street Bullies made him clutch the hotel curtains “like a cloak” every morning in Philadelphia, dreading the day – The Game ends with Dryden hoisting his sixth Stanley Cup at the end of the 1978-79 season, going out on top.
Montreal Canadiens pair Ken Dryden and Larry Robinson, centre, battle the Philadelphia Flyers and their tenacious captain Bobby Clarke in the 1976 Stanley Cup final.The Associated Press
His decision to retire at the end of the season had been made months earlier, his reasoning laid out with lawyerly rigour in the book. He didn’t want to keep playing without his love of the game, and he could feel that coming.
Still, he worried about losing hockey as a steadying force by his side to “smooth away the changes.” He worried that being a brainy jock was a shtick, that his smarts wouldn’t seem so impressive any more without the qualifier of “articulate athlete.”
The Game was proof that his fears were misplaced. Published in 1983, it was nominated for a Governor-General’s award and quickly recognized as a classic. It’s not just a good book for an athlete to have written, it’s one of the essential works of Canadian non-fiction. It established Dryden as the Canadian superego, the identity we want for ourselves: brawny and unyielding on the ice, thoughtful and soulful off of it.
The truth is, if Dryden hadn’t existed, Canadians would have had to make him up. But no one else could, or probably ever will, come up with a book quite like The Game.