The Game by Ken Dryden

quality and readiness of the rest that make the crushing difference. In the third game of the 1976 finals against the Flyers, Chartraw made that difference; two years later, Tremblay scored two goals and Larouche one in a 4-1 Stanley Cup winning game against the Bruins. It is all part of getting “the right players on the ice.” Bowman knows the enormous strength he has, and squanders none of it.
    On a team of talented, tough-minded, egotistical players, Bowman is the boss. His captains—earlier Henri Richard, now Cournoyer—(h)ave no special role. A few years ago, he formed a committee of the senior players on the team—Lemaire, Savard, Lapointe, Cournoyer, Roberts, Pete Mahovlich, and me (“the Magnificent 7” the others called us) to meet with him periodically to discuss the team. We held one meeting. (That we had only one meeting didn’t surprise us; that he formed the committee did.)
    Unmistakably, and to an extent that may surprise even him, Bowman is in charge. Not Grundman, not Pollock before him—in distant upstairs offices, with technical authority, we feel little contact with them. It is Bowman who sets the tone and mood for the team. He may say less than he seems to say (when asked, most players admit to their own surprise they “never really had any problem with him”), but his presence, belligerent, nagging, and demanding, like a conscience that never shuts up, is constant. And every so often, when some internal threshold is passed, he will blurt out something in his acerbic, biting way, to others usually, but really to all of us. Just words we’ve all heard before from others, but coming as they do without malice, with nothing in them that can be for his benefit, we hear them as words that might be right, and probably are. It is what he says and what he might say that make us fear him. It is his hair-trigger sense of outrage at those who don’t measure up; and the feeling, the fear we all share, that at any moment that outrage will be directed at us.
    He knows each of us too well; he leaves us no place to hide. He knows that we are strong, and are weak; that we can be selfish and lazy, that we can eat too much and drink too much, that we will always look for the easy way out, and when we find it, that we will use it. He knows that each of us comes with a stable of excuses, “crutches” he calls them, ready to use whenever we need them. The team with the fewest crutches will win, Bowman believes. So he inserts himself into our minds, and anticipates these crutches—practice times, travel schedule, hotel, the menu for our team meal—then systematically kicks them away, leaving us with no way out if we lose. And when we don’t lose, we get our revenge, we pretend that we did it ourselves. We want him to have no part of it; and he lets us. He never challenges the integrity of the team. Just as he will allow no player to stand above the team, he will not stand above it either. The team must believe in itself.
    More than any coach I have had, Bowman has a complete and undistractible team focus. He has one loyalty—to the team; not to individual players on the team, though most coaches prefer to ignore the distinction (as most players do until they are traded or become free agents); not to fans or to anyone else. Most of us like to pretend the primacy of personal relationships in our work (then are unforgiving of those who let us down); Bowman doesn’t pretend. To him, loyalty is doing what you can and doing it well. If you don’t, and play less often or are traded away, it is not he who is being disloyal.
    He is uncompromising, unmellowing, unable to be finessed; he is beyond our control. Being a nice guy doesn’t count; going to optional practices, coming early, staying late, doesn’t count. As Pete Mahovlich, Cournoyer, and Henri Richard have discovered, what you have done before counts only until you can’t do it again. No politics, no favors, it is how you measure up to what you can do, how