Wayne Gretzky's Ghost (32 page)

Dryden, in fact, was a trailblazer for those netminders who would later move on to broadcasting careers. The U.S. network ABC hired him to work the Olympics, and the fact that he fit in
quickly and easily is, he says, readily understandable: in a way, they've already done it.

“In the post-game,” Dryden says from his home in Toronto, “you go to the scorer and the scored-upon. You go to the scorer maybe every second night or so. But you go to the scored-upon every night. When you're a goalie, you get practised at being able to talk about it.” That goaltenders would end up as analysts and colour commentators seems, to Dryden, only a natural progression: “The broadcast booth in baseball is filled with pitchers and catchers. In football, it's the quarterback. These are the people who see the whole game.”

“Basically,” says Greg Millen, “there are three things that come into play. One, when you're a goaltender, you're a focal point, so you're used to dealing with the media on a daily basis. Second, your personality is such that you chose to be a goaltender because you wanted to be the centre of attention. And third, the game is always in front of you. A big part of being a goaltender is the ability to anticipate, to read how a play is going to happen. Fans can see how a play can happen. They want to know why it happens.”

“It's because of what you see,” says Jim Ralph. “You see the whole game. And you spend a lot of time sitting around watching the game.”

Ralph believes a number of factors come into play. Goaltenders shout at their defence to do certain things, meaning they have to anticipate flow and solutions. Goaltenders share “scouting reports” on shooters. Goaltenders spend enormous time “visualizing” how a game will be played. All that and this, he smiles: “We think we are smarter.”

Ralph, like the others, says the goaltender's personality cannot be underestimated. “It's what Dryden was getting at in his book: Does the personality get attracted to the position or does the position form the personality?”

“Goalies are different,” was what Dryden wrote.

Make no mistake: they are different. Goaltenders form almost a secret society within the hockey world, so caught up in their own world that they have virtually created a second one for themselves on the Internet, where sites for “hockey goaltenders” number close to nine thousand and where the discussions about personality and preparedness can sometimes reach into the mystical.

“Our position,” says goaltending instructor Paul Fricker, who calls himself “The Goalie Doctor” on the World Wide Web,

A hockey goaltender, Dryden wrote back in 1983,

Used to the pressure of their position, they find the pressure of the camera and deadlines relatively simple. “If you lose,” Frank (Ulcers) McCool, who played in the War years, once said, “the fans blame the goalie and the reporters take up the cry. After a while, the other players believe what they read and the goalie feels like it's one man against the world … Pretty soon, the goalie feels like an outcast.”

But no longer. Today they are the first ones the media goes to for an explanation of what happened, and perhaps because of this increasingly cozy relationship, the first ones the media managers go to when an opening arises in the hockey broadcast industry.

One almost certain to head there some day is Boston's Bill Ranford, who says, “I'd love to do that when I'm done playing.” His reasons are much the same as the others'—a chance to stay with the game, a second career, a natural outlet for his easygoing, articulate nature—but he inadvertently lets slip one of the best-kept goaltender-broadcaster secrets.

“Goalies figure they're always the scapegoat for all the times the team blew a game. This is their chance to get back.”

By 2011, the proliferation of goaltenders as analysts and panellists was even greater, though former enforcers and fourth-liners were giving goalies a good run for the money in the broadcast world. It continued to baffle as to why there were so few highly skilled former skaters in the booths—and no European-trained players whatsoever, despite the fact that many of the most interesting hockey thoughts expressed in the English language were coming from those speaking it as a second or third language
.

I
have been rendered unconscious. It has now been more than a month since the Stanley Cup playoffs began and we have yet to hear an original thought.

“Is the first goal important?” the media want to know. Presumably, in a game in which a 1–0 score is not at all unusual, it is.

“Your best players have to be your best players,” the coaches tell us and, presumably, if they weren't they wouldn't be.

“So long as we stick to our game plan we'll be all right,” the players say. I have long given up the obvious follow-up to that comment—“And what, pray, is that game plan?”—because, well, they don't know, but it sure sounds good.

Hockey is a terribly simple game complicated by error, and in this way it largely defies analysis beyond “stuff happens.” A “game plan,” fancy as it might sound, amounts to the team deciding to send one player or two players into forecheck. The rest is all speed and skill and pucks flipping like coins—luck, more than anything, determining the heads and tails of an outcome involving two largely equal opponents. But the games—and even more so, the days between games—demand words. The media insists; the water cooler demands.

“We just want to take it one game at a time,” the players say, although with June fast coming on we sure do wish there was an alternative.

“We don't want to get too high or too low,” players say after wins as well as losses, though the post-series dressing rooms suggest it is impossible to get any higher or lower.

“It is what it is,” someone will say and someone else will nod, though no one has a clue what this phrase means.

“Talk to us about …,” someone will say, inserting whatever fits at the end of the sentence—a particular player, the power play—and essentially conceding that there is, in fact, no question
to ask when there is really no answer to be given. The old clichés persist: we have to bring our “A” game … we had our chances … we out-chanced them … they'll have to regroup … we need to play desperate … we have to stay focused … obviously …

There are also new clichés being born before our very ears: Players checking successfully now have “quick sticks,” as if the sticks—not the players—have somehow taken over the task; fourth lines are now called “energy lines” so as not to hurt the feelings of those players who simply are not good enough; goaltenders now stay in “the paint” instead of in the crease; long breakout passes—hardly a new invention—are now called “stretch passes”; and digging in the corners now involves something called the “half-boards.”

All this, of course, is in the sportswriter's attempt—and I myself am guilty—to make more of an extremely simple game (“He shoots, he scores”) than should be necessary. Yet what makes it necessary is that sports channels now have as many panels as Ottawa and Washington politics and the demands of the media, particularly between games, are so immense that “filler” is required both in content and conversation.

It has reached the point this year where several times I have heard the word “plethora” applied to hockey—a word that had those of us covering the 1979 federal election rolling our eyes every time Joe Clark hauled it out. I still have no idea what it means.

Ken Dryden, who has experience in both hockey and politics, says it is perfectly understandable that clichés and catchwords and catchphrases should dominate in both cultures. There is great safety in saying nothing, great danger in actually saying something. “It's why athletes sound dumb and why politicians sound dumb,” Dryden said over lunch at last December's Liberal leadership convention. “There's not much upside, and a very big downside.”

Clichés, says Dryden, are controlled. “They're sort of acceptable—and they don't lead to something else that may get you into trouble.”

Trouble is when a coach might accidentally use the word “choke” even if casually discussing a lunch that didn't go down particularly well. Trouble is one player on one side daring to suggest the goaltender on the other can be had.

Trouble is a politician admitting a mistake rather than accusing the opposition of being on “a fishing expedition.” It's why politicians promise their campaigns will “focus on the issues” and then focus on nothing but personality. It's why they promise “change” but shy away from “reform.”

It's why they speak inanely of “going forward” without the foggiest notion in which direction forward lies. It's why “at the end of the day” the late-night news is almost invariably no news at all.

It's why, after years of covering both sports and politics, I've come to think the main difference between the two worlds is that politicians don't have numbers on their backs.

No question about it.

New phrases continue to take on new life until they have long since been beaten to death by tongues. The current fad in the hockey world is to say “moving forward” at least once a sentence. As if there were any other direction to go …

H
e probably has no idea what he is sitting on. But if Sidney Crosby were to stand up and raise the plywood seat in the locker stall he has been assigned in the Scotiabank Place visitors' dressing room, he would find something remarkable. At the very bottom, below all the extra pads and tape and assorted hockey detritus, he would see that someone has taken a Sharpie pen and
written: “Wayne Gretzky sat in this stall during his final game in Canada, April 15, 1999.”

And it is here that Sidney Crosby sat for his very first National Hockey League playoff game in Canada, April 11, 2007.

Some kid, likely here for a minor-hockey tournament, has scribbled his own name in red ink over the makeshift plaque. His first name is Michael. His last name is Crosby. Coincidence? A sign? Who would dare say on Friday the thirteenth, the day before Crosby's young Pittsburgh Penguins attempt to even their Eastern Conference playoff series against the more experienced Ottawa Senators.

One game into the series and already superstition is at play. The Senators have declared nearly half of their far-larger dressing room off-limits to all, whether media or players. No one, absolutely no one, is allowed to tread over the huge Senators logo on the carpet.

The Penguins have their own eccentricities. The team began its stay in Ottawa by posting all the news clippings of the day on the wall back of the workbench—stories of the miracle year this team has had, stories of the amazing young stars such as nineteen-year-old Crosby, eighteen-year-old Jordan Staal and twenty-year-old Evgeni Malkin.

The morning after the Penguins fell 6–3 to the Senators in a game that was nothing short of embarrassing for the young stars, the clippings wall had vanished. And already, only one game into the post-season, the playoff beards are sprouting. Crosby says he hopes his amounts at least to a moustache by the time the end comes, whenever it comes. Young Ottawa defenceman Anton Volchenkov rubs his face and shakes his head in disappointment: “I'm trying, but that's it.”

“You noticed!” twenty-four-year-old Colby Armstrong, Crosby's winger and close friend, shouts in triumph as a reporter remarks on the tiny stubble forming below the player's chin. “This is my first playoff beard. I've never had one before. I've
only got a few hairs coming up, but there's a couple there that I'm just going to let go.”

It is a time for insanity, but not time yet for the depths to which the madness of superstition can sometimes sink and will very likely sink somewhere, on some team, before the four long rounds of the Stanley Cup playoffs are through.

The first time the Senators reached post-season play back in 1997, they threw their faith not in their coaches, not in the crowd, not in their goaltender—but in a tiny wooden Buddha that forward Tom Chorske had picked up in a San Francisco souvenir shot. “Buddha Power” became the clarion call of those young Senators, the equipment manager charged with making sure Chorske carried the tiny statue around in his shaving kit as the inexperienced team took the Buffalo Sabres to seven games before losing the final match in overtime.