{"id":190899,"date":"2025-09-12T23:36:12","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T23:36:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/190899\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T23:36:12","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T23:36:12","slug":"an-all-time-classic-the-game-continues-to-stand-apart-just-like-its-author","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/190899\/","title":{"rendered":"An all-time classic, The Game continues to stand apart, just like its author"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Former Montreal Canadien Ken Dryden takes part in the team’s centennial celebrations in 2009.Richard Wolowicz\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 Sports Illustrated once placed it at No. 9 \u2013 The Game recounts Dryden\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s on a team like that is hardly less improbable and wondrous than if Robert Frost had played alongside Babe Ruth on the 1920s Yankees. <\/p>\n

Dryden, who died last week at 78, was famously the thinking man\u2019s hockey player, and his smartest-guy-in-the-NHL credentials are well known \u2013 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. <\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

But even that r\u00e9sum\u00e9 undersells how unusual he was, and how remarkable it is that a book like The Game exists. The qualities that make a good writer \u2013 sensitivity, reflectiveness, introspection \u2013 are largely antithetical to athletic success, which depends on wiping your mind clean, thinking with your body, inhabiting the moment. <\/p>\n

So it comes as a shock at first, on picking up the book, to find that Dryden was capable of beautifully turned prose. \u201cLike a starlet in the morning mirror,\u201d he writes about the Canadiens as they wobbled on their perch, \u201ceverything we see is a haunting omen of breakdown.\u201d<\/p>\n

The book is written in the present tense and pulses with immediacy. Dryden had a reporter\u2019s eye for detail and telling anecdote. He unforgettably describes the night at the Montreal Forum in 1976 when the sovereigntist Parti Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois 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. <\/p>\n

But the book\u2019s most precious material is the stuff no journalist could capture, no matter their access \u2013 material only accessible to a participant. It\u2019s the character sketches of mostly forgotten role players like the ingenuous R\u00e9jean Houle, playing at being a millionaire before he had the money, with his pinstriped suits and fat cigars, his face \u201clumped and scarred by a decade of pucks and high-sticks,\u201d his winsome eyes \u201cthat tighten and twinkle.\u201d<\/p>\n

The hall-of-famers come alive in Dryden\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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 \u201cvoices blurt on top of each other, and everything is funny \u2013 things not funny when they happened, everything that earlier was too personal, too embarrassing, too important to be funny, today is torn laughingly apart.\u201d <\/p>\n

Dryden is also clear-eyed about the precarity of a team\u2019s bond, the way losing can break it remorselessly down, how \u201cwinning 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those Habs teams of the late seventies didn\u2019t lose much. Despite some worthy rivals in the Bobby Orr Bruins and the Bobby Clarke Flyers \u2013 the Broad Street Bullies made him clutch the hotel curtains \u201clike a cloak\u201d every morning in Philadelphia, dreading the day \u2013 The Game ends with Dryden hoisting his sixth Stanley Cup at the end of the 1978-79 season, going out on top. <\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

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\u2019t want to keep playing without his love of the game, and he could feel that coming. <\/p>\n

Still, he worried about losing hockey as a steadying force by his side to \u201csmooth away the changes.\u201d He worried that being a brainy jock was a shtick, that his smarts wouldn\u2019t seem so impressive any more without the qualifier of \u201carticulate athlete.\u201d <\/p>\n

The Game was proof that his fears were misplaced. Published in 1983, it was nominated for a Governor-General\u2019s award and quickly recognized as a classic. It\u2019s not just a good book for an athlete to have written, it\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

The truth is, if Dryden hadn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Former Montreal Canadien Ken Dryden takes part in the team’s centennial celebrations in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":182940,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5103],"tags":[1018,1001,1019,967,991,1020,19,990,1008,1009,1004,992,989,265,1014,1016,1013,1007,1000,1030,993,994,1006,5,1002,1003,997,1021,264,21,5147,998,1025,1026,4,1028,1023,1027,786,1024,995,1011,1012,333,1010,1022,86,1015,1017,1005,999,996,1029],"class_list":{"0":"post-190899","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-montreal-canadiens","8":"tag-alberta","9":"tag-arts-news","10":"tag-bc","11":"tag-breaking-news","12":"tag-breaking-news-video","13":"tag-british-columbia","14":"tag-canada","15":"tag-canada-news","16":"tag-canada-sports","17":"tag-canada-sports-news","18":"tag-canada-trafficcanada-weather","19":"tag-canadian-breaking-news","20":"tag-canadian-news","21":"tag-canadiens","22":"tag-economy","23":"tag-education","24":"tag-environment","25":"tag-federal-government","26":"tag-foreign-news","27":"tag-globe-and-mail","28":"tag-globe-and-mail-breaking-news","29":"tag-globe-and-mail-canada-news","30":"tag-government","31":"tag-hockey","32":"tag-life-news","33":"tag-lifestyle","34":"tag-local-news","35":"tag-manitoba","36":"tag-montreal","37":"tag-montreal-canadiens","38":"tag-montrealcanadiens","39":"tag-national-news","40":"tag-new-brunswick","41":"tag-newfoundland-and-labrador","42":"tag-nhl","43":"tag-northwest-territories","44":"tag-nova-scotia","45":"tag-nunavut","46":"tag-ontario","47":"tag-pei","48":"tag-photos","49":"tag-political-news","50":"tag-political-opinion","51":"tag-politics","52":"tag-politics-news","53":"tag-quebec","54":"tag-sports-news","55":"tag-technology","56":"tag-travel","57":"tag-trudeau","58":"tag-us-news","59":"tag-world-news","60":"tag-yukon"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190899\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/182940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}