The Game by Ken Dryden Page B

Wednesday, blanking my mind, building up energy, comfortable, confident, getting ready for Saturday. After a good start, we were outplayed in the last two periods and lost 5-4. I spent Saturday night with teammates talking about the Sunday game. We talked about what we hadn’t done, and what we needed to do to win. I felt confident, comfortable, almost relaxed.
    Sunday morning, Bowman told me he was making a change. Bruins’(g)oalie Gerry Cheevers would play the deciding game.
    If the New Year’s Eve game was my most disappointing moment, this was the most crushing. (After moping in a catatonic sulk for several days, back in Montreal I sat in the dressing room slouched against the wall, jot-ting something on a piece of paper. Looking over at me, Risebrough asked Shutt beside him, “What’s he writing?” Shutt: “A suicide note.”) Friends and others found relief and vindication for me in the 6-0(l)oss and were surprised when I didn’t feel the same way. They didn’t understand. The third game was a game we had to win. Against a tough opponent, after a loss, it was my game, the kind Bowman always put me in, the one he knew I would deliver. A few days later, unable to keep to myself any longer, I went to Bowman and asked him why.
    He said that he and Ruel and the team’s general managers, Harry Sinden (Bruins), Bill Torrey (Islanders), and Cliff Fletcher (Flames), had talked at length about it and had made the decision jointly, hoping to give the team a spark that the second game had showed we needed. But Bowman, not hiding in that, said further that as coach, if he had insisted, he could probably have had his way. He didn’t insist, he said, because looking at all the circumstances, he didn’t feel certain enough. It was then that I understood for the first time.
    Each year when the season ends, Bowman invites me to spend a day or a weekend at his farm south of Montreal. And each year, I intend to go, but I never have. It is because other things come up and gradually I forget about it until the summer runs out, but in part, perhaps in larger part than I’m willing to admit, I don’t go because I’m afraid that knowing him better, and having him know me better, things might change. And I don’t want them to change. We are a good combination. Together we have shared four Stanley Cups and many other satisfying moments. I know that nothing would change, yet I don’t want to take that risk.
    As a goalie, I am in Bowman’s hands. I play when he says I play; I don’t play when he says I don’t. Much of my happiness, much of the mood I carry with me away from the rink, come from when and how often and against whom I play, and that depends on Bowman. It can be a helpless feeling for a player but with Bowman I am comfortable.
    We are in someone else’s hands in everything we do, but how often are any of us in hands that know us so well? Hands that insist we be as good as we can be, that tolerate nothing else, hands we trust.
    There are many successful ways to coach. There are autocrats and technocrats, mean SOBs and just plain folks. What makes Bowman’s style work is an understanding, the understanding that must exist between a coach and his team: he knows the most important thing to a team is to win; we know he does what he does to make us win.
    I like him.
    The forwards and defensemen take off their skate guards and go directly onto the ice. Larocque and I remain behind in a small dressing room to put on our skates and pads. By the time we get to the ice, the others are warmed up and anxious for practice to begin. The rink is cold, and I move stiffly through the skating drills, unable to get loose. Then, as I skate around one net and start up ice, out of nowhere, with only his usual warning, Chartraw wipes me out.
    It is not the first time. Rick Chartraw, a big slab-thick forward/defenseman, man-about-town, and designated team eccentric—“(a) classic,” in the language of the team—has the annoying habit of