The Game (42 page)

The successful balance between corporate discipline and personal passion has become harder to maintain. Minor hockey parents, seeing gold at the end of a rainbow seemingly only a breath away, have injected ambi-tion into play and changed the spirit of kids’ hockey. Eighteen-year-old boys who once bought an exuberant Corvette when they signed their first big pro contract, now trained in money, buy a BMW.

Money has affected who wins the Stanley Cup and who doesn’t. It has especially affected the fortunes of Canadian teams. In the fifty years from 1943 to 1993, Canadian teams won thirty-five times. In the last ten years, since money has become a competitive tool, they’ve not won once. Canadian teams take in almost all their money in Canadian dollars and spend most of their money in U.S. dollars. With the Canadian dollar having dropped in value, it’s a big problem for them.

City size has become more significant as TV ratings, sale of merchan-dise, and season ticket splitting to support higher ticket prices have come to matter more. Many Canadian cities have suddenly become“(s)mall markets.” The “Canadian advantage” of history, climate, and passion for the game, where players live in an environment that offers them every reward of victory and every penalty of defeat, has been neutralized. For Montreal, more accustomed than any other team to winning, it has made winning even harder to achieve.

Money became an issue in sports the day someone came upon a game in an open field and noticed people watching it, enjoying it, having a good time. “If these people stop and watch,” that person realized, “(m)aybe if I put up walls around that game they would pay to get in.”

From sandlots and outdoor rinks to modern sports palaces, the rest has followed naturally: owners charging as much as they can; players demanding as much as they can, the only question being who gets what piece of what size of pie. Money is part of sports life. You can debate it, get angry about it, fear it, yet in many ways it just is. In another way, however, it represents the biggest threat to the future of professional sport. Money is a threat, not in the stresses it puts on sports’ structures (though that is significant) but in what it can do to those who have it. We see that outside sports with corporate executives in the immense sums they receive and the perks they negotiate for themselves that cut them off from the very world they had to understand so well to get to where they are. A fan is distracted by the money players make, but will accept that, I believe, so long as that player, who might have grown up next door to him, but didn’t, and who seems as if he might live next door to him now, but doesn’t, doesn’t act like he inhabits another world. In other words, the fan is saying to the player, “Act like a good guy and score fifty goals, and I’ll cheer you on. Act like you’re better than I am, and you’re toast.”

I left hockey in 1979 because it felt like time to go. I didn’t take any other job in hockey because, as I told people, I’d already had the best job—goalie for the Montreal Canadiens. Eighteen years later, I came back as President of the Toronto Maple Leafs. I returned to a very different NHL, to a vastly different sports world. Earlier, I related the story of a phone conversation with Dickie Moore, a Canadiens star of the 1950s and 1960s. I told of how, in a vulnerable moment, he had talked about “the game,” in a tone and in a way that made me realize for the first time that “the game” was not the same thing as hockey or baseball or any sport. It was something bigger, something that had to do with an intense shared experience of parents and backyards, teammates and friends, winning and losing, dressing rooms, road trips, fans, dreams, money, and celebrity. “The game,” Moore knew, was a life so long as you live it.

The experience in hockey that I came back to 1997 was different, often dramatically. When we are older, we see similar things through different eyes and don’t realize that it is we who have changed. The“(g)olden age of sports,” the golden age of anything, is still the age of everyone’s childhood. My time in the NHL in the 1970s, with its over-expansion, rival WHA, dump-and-chase and Flyers-level violence seemed a mess to commentators at the time. To today’s adult, frustrated by obstruction and money, it seems wondrous. “Hockey’s just not the same,” those people say to me. I wait for them to laugh, and they don’t. The 1972 Series, so rancorous and disappointing at the time, is now a glorious national memory. The longer we don’t play, it seems, the better we get. Twenty-five seasons from now, what will this time in hockey feel like to today’s ten-year-olds? What will they remember?

How will they remember it? And what about today’s players, ten or fifteen years after they have retired? How will they look back on their hockey life? Will they feel about it the way Dickie Moore does about his? And when you ask them that question, listen to their liquid voices as they answer, see the glistening pride in their eyes, and you will know. Hockey has changed, but the game has not.

A year ago, I was asked by LeafsTV to give the commentary on a past Leafs-Canadiens game. Tapes, sometimes films, of old games are shown in their entirety on a weekly show, and cut in to them are contemporary comments by a player who played in that game. The game chosen for me was from the 1978 Stanley Cup semi-finals. We had won the Cup the previous two years and had dominated the 1977-78(r)egular season as well. The Leafs had their best team of the decade, with Borje Salming, Darryl Sittler, Lanny McDonald, Tiger Williams, Ian Turnbull, and Mike Palmateer—they had just upset the Islanders in seven agonizing games. This was the second game of the series, in Montreal; we had won the first game.

Before doing the commentary, I brought the game tapes home to watch. I had no memory of the game at all, and if I had realized what I had agreed to, I wouldn’t have agreed to it. The game had been a long time ago and that time was over and done. All the votes were in and tallied. The results were on the scoreboard and could not be changed. All my feelings were in too; they had been tallied, and they had added up to something great. It had been a wonderful time. To live in Montreal in the 1970s, to live in Quebec, to play for the Montreal Canadiens at the Montreal Forum; to be surrounded by people who were the best; from the Molsons and Bronfmans to Sam Pollock and Scotty Bowman; from the players to the fans; to win six Stanley Cups in eight years—what could be better?

I don’t go back to things I have done. They are done, and there is nothing I can do about them. And there’s nothing I would want to do about this part of my life. But in going back with these tapes, I realized there’s something that might be done to that period of my life. I might see things now that I don’t want to see, that I didn’t see then, that can make me feel different now, that can muddy and confuse something that has been perfectly clear. And what is real is what was then, when it happened, and how I reacted to it, how I felt about it, and how others did the same—not what I see and feel now.

When I turned on that tape machine, I realized what was at stake.

I also realized that while I had seen highlight clips, I had never seen us play a full game before. And there we were. Roger Doucet singing the anthem; the players without their helmets; Claude Mouton with the PA announcements; the ice that looked slightly blue. The voice of Danny Gallivan, smart, clear, still able to tingle my spine. Larry Robinson, much taller than I remember, and such a good skater.

Jacques Lemaire, so smart, efficient, effective, always knowing where he should be. And Bob Gainey, his stride no longer or quicker than the players who were chasing him, surging past them with embarrassing ease. Bill Nyrop, too. Mostly unremembered from those teams, he moved so well. If he hadn’t left hockey the following year, I thought again to myself, he might have made “the Big Three” defencemen of Robinson, Lapointe, and Savard “the Big Four.” And Guy Lafleur, quick, decisive, confident, ever threatening, his jersey rippling, his hair streaming back the way no one else’s hair did. Shutt, Jarvis, even me.

I could have played the two goals differently, but I was OK. I was fine.

We went ahead 2-0. We had the game entirely under control; the Leafs scored two quick goals in the second period. We might have been shaken. The Leafs might have won a game they shouldn’t have won. Instead, unshaken, we scored late in the second period and shut the game down completely in the third. The Leafs didn’t come close. The Leafs had some good players, but we were just better.

However much they would pick up their game, we would pick up ours more. It was there, perfectly clear, on that TV screen.

When I sat down to watch, I wasn’t sure what I would see. I was less sure how I would react to what I saw. As I watched, I started to enjoy. We were good. We were really good.

When I was done writing this chapter for the last time, I came across something I had written to myself a few months before, that I had left unfinished, and I finished it:

* * *

I am a player

I love to play

I want to win

It matters to me if I win or lose

It matters to me how I play the game I want to win without injustice or bad luck or regret I want to own every pleasure and disappointment I want to get lost in play

I want time not to matter

I want to do something more important than me I cannot win alone

I need my teammates and my opponents to make me better I trust, because I have to trust

I forgive, because I need to be forgiven I play a game, not
only
a game I try because that matters to me

I try because it’s more fun that way I don’t quit because it doesn’t feel good when I do I play with others, but I play against me I learn when I play

I play when I learn

I practice because I like to be good I try what I’ve never tried before

I fail, to fail smarter

I want to be better than I was yesterday I dream

I imagine

I feel hard and deep

I hope, because there’s always a way.

—July 21, 2003