The Game (24 page)

After a trade, an old slate impossibly cluttered and complicated gets wiped clean, and a traded player, with the help of the management who made the trade, of new coaches, teammates, press, and fans who know no better, is able to pretend that old problems, the ones that brought on the trade, were not of his own making. That in fact they were the result of a former coach who didn’t understand him, a former city that didn’t appreciate him, a former team with the wrong style of play. Sometimes it happens to be true; most of the time it isn’t. Shortly after Larouche’s trade, the old patterns of his game reappeared and finally were noticed. In Montreal, in wide-open games where defense meant little to winning, Larouche scored impressively, then rode his statistics through uneventful, do-nothing road games until he was back in Montreal again. Later, when it became clear that his pattern wouldn’t change, a conscious decision was made
not
to play him in Montreal, to force him instead to earn his self-sustaining points on the road, in order to
earn
games in Montreal. But late in his first season and now into his second, Bowman has begun using him as one of his discretionary players, inserted into a game when additional offense is needed, taken out when it isn’t.

Yet every so often, waiting for the breakthrough we all know is coming, we see it happen: a practice when he skates with surprising energy, anxiously involved all over the ice; a game, like one a few months ago, when he rushed back into our zone to cover up for a defenseman who was trapped up ice. They are just moments, random and isolated, but indicators that he can do what he needs to do, that prove to him, and to us, that he can do it. He is so close. He needs nothing extraordinary, for the extraordinary is already there. And a step away from being a regular, in Larouche’s case, means a step away from being a star.

But nothing changes, except gradually everything becomes harder and harder for him. For he is a star. He has been a star all his life, and everything about him is based on being a star. Cocky like a star, extravagant like a star, he talks with a swagger that comes from goals, that needs goals to work. Now every so often, as if to remind himself and others of something, he demands to be traded, and gets a star’s attention.

It seems remarkable, even to us, but on a team of specialists that succeeds and prospers with Gainey’s fifteen goals and Jarvis’s eleven, Larouche, a fifty-goal scorer, is too much of a specialist. Giving up a goal in one game to get one or two in another, less important game, is not a Stanley Cup-winning rate of exchange. There are still some games when he does something so extraordinary that you change your mind and decide never to change it again, that anyone so offensively talented simply
must
play, that any defensive problems
must
be accepted, but then something happens and you change your mind again, not for the last time. For always he tempts you, tantalizing you with his skills, fooling you because you want to be fooled, because you want those fifty goals. So always you wait a little longer. And though he demands to be traded, he won’t be traded, at least for a while. Bowman and Ruel know that when one goal is needed there are few players better able to score than Larouche. On a team as strong as we are, a team so strong he cannot be a regular, Larouche is a luxury we can afford, and need, if only a few times a year.

I have never been traded, nor do I think I’ve ever been in much danger of being traded, though of course I can’t be sure. A few years ago, while negotiating my return to Montreal after a one-year absence, I asked Sam Pollock for a no-trade clause in my contract.

Pollock, a short, roundish man, who always seemed in great physical agony when non-physical things bothered him, contorted his face and began breathing audibly, gradually talking on about something else.

He believed strongly that championship teams couldn’t be built on trades and consequently rarely made them, but he always insisted on retaining the right to trade as a means to improve his team should it be necessary. I quickly realized that to win such a clause,
if
I could win it, would take a long and destructive fight, something I wasn’t prepared for at the time, and I decided not to pursue it. And so, like every other Canadiens player, at any time, any season, I might be traded.

It has never seemed right to me that someone should have that power over me, or over anyone. That someone can simply call me up and tell me that if I wish to continue in my profession, I will have to pack up my family and move to Detroit or St. Louis or wherever the voice on the phone tells me to go. I don’t like the idea of being“(s)wapped” or “exchanged,” though the words hold no exaggerated meaning for me. I simply find it demeaning. And whenever I’ve lingered with the thought long enough to confront myself, I’ve always come to the same conclusion—that if I were ever traded, no matter where, I couldn’t accept the helpless, shabby sense of manipulation I would feel, and would retire.

Yet, in every player, myself included, there resides a closet general manager willing to wheel and deal in teammates and opponents, a lifelong fan who, when notified of his own trade, will ask, “Who for?” As a player, I know that I’m unwilling to play out a season as a competitive lame duck, patient, hoping that next year’s draft picks will make things better. In my whole career, I will have fewer than ten chances to win a championship, and I want a real chance every year. So at least a few times each season, I persuade myself that a “superstar” is overrated, “old reliable” simply old, the “young phenom” simply young, and that each must be traded. Yet I’ve learned, and continue to learn, that trading is never as simple as it seems.

You should always know what you’re giving up; you can never be sure what you’re getting—it is the general manager’s dictum. But a trade involves change, and the effect of change can never be easily predicted. Each team, each player on a team, is a web of dependencies, personal and professional, positive and negative, many of which can only be guessed at beforehand: the small player who needs the protective confidence he gets from a big player, the big player who needs a small player’s quickness to open up the ice; the younger player who needs an older player as a model, the older player who needs a young player to excite him and motivate him through his late-career ennui; the teammate who translates a difficult player to the rest of the team, the secondary star who leads only where there’s a pre-eminent star to follow, the older player who blocks the development of a younger player, the player who makes a team enjoy being a team. A trade disturbs these relationships, many of which the team intends to disturb by making the trade, and in doing so, the personality, character, and chemistry of a team will be affected, both on and off the ice. Just how a trade changes things often takes some time to emerge—Phil Esposito in Chicago, Boston, and New York was three different players—but two things are certain: If a team doesn’t agree with a trade, it will feel let down, using the trade as a crutch whenever it needs it, often before; and even when anticipated, a trade is a wrenching personal experience for a team.

When I was a teenager playing for Humber Valley, Pete Mahovlich was a teenager across the city playing for St. Mike’s. The younger brother of one of hockey’s great players, Frank Mahovlich, then a star with the Leafs, Pete was a big, gangly kid who tried to play the way his brother did—taking the puck at center, circling back into his own zone, “winding up” as Foster Hewitt would say, then leaving everyone to watch as he powered his way up ice for a shot on goal. But in his adolescent awkwardness, Pete couldn’t play that way, and when he tried, we would chase after him with two and three players, stopping him more often than not before he reached center ice. And each time we did, it seemed a moment separate from the game. For, because of who he was and who he pretended to be, when we stopped him we had stopped
Mahovlich
.

After a disappointing junior and minor pro career, when he was traded from Detroit to the Canadiens, things began to change. He came under the influence of John Ferguson, a tough, fiery “enforcer” then late in his turbulent career. “Get mad, Pete. Get mad,” Ferguson would exhort constantly, and Mahovlich would get mad, if never for long. But gradually, he put an edge on his flouncing, puppy-dog style and became a star, if not a superstar, though he might have. Tall, strong, a wonderfully adept puckhandler, at times he could take the puck from end to end and score. In his first full season with the Canadiens he scored thirty-five goals; in his next five seasons, as his point totals soared, he scored thirty-five (again), twenty-one (in sixty-three games), thirty-six, thirty-five, and thirty-four goals. Curiously, he seemed content there, just underrated enough to encourage others to overrate him, not entirely happy in the shadow of his linemate Lafleur, yet unwilling to emerge on his own. It was as if he understood the torment his brother had once felt, scoring forty-eight goals one season early in his career with the Leafs, then unable to surpass himself, treated as a nagging disappointment for much of the rest of his career. Later, not quite joking, he said to his linemate Shutt, “struggling” through a forty-nine-goal season, having scored sixty goals the year before, “I told ya, Shutty. Ya get sixty [goals](o)ne year, they want sixty-five the next.”

More than a superstar, Mahovlich wanted to be a character. I played with him for nearly six years and saw him score many memorable goals, including a short-handed, end-to-end goal against the Soviets in 1972 which few who saw it will ever forget. But if I have one lasting image of him, it is from off the ice—wearing a patchwork sports jacket, the kind Heywood Hale Broun might wear, a rough, tweed fedora on his head, pushed up and punched around to look a certain way, a cigar in his teeth, a day’s growth of beard, a big picket-fence grin, and saying in a too-loud voice with a too-loud laugh, “Hey, who has more fun than people?” (In all the years I heard him say it, I never had an answer.)

He was a big, handsome, talented man who wouldn’t play it straight—the guy who wears lampshades at parties, the perennial conventioneer in desperate search of a good time. Off the ice, he was the original Mahovlich, competing against no one except, as he would later discover, himself.

Holding court in the dressing room, on a plane, in a bar, he was a little louder, a little funnier, a little more uninhibited than the rest, always the first to buy a round—throwing out crumpled bills, stuffing smaller ones back into whichever pocket was closest—always quick to buy another to keep the feeling going. He said that he always knew if he had had a good time the night before when he checked his pockets the next morning. If he found crumpled bills in his shirt pocket, in all five of his jacket pockets, in all of his pants pockets, he knew he must have had “a helluva time.” His brother was often distant and moody; Pete was the gregarious one, the life of every party. Yet, in fact, both were deeply sensitive and very much alike, Frank keeping everything inside, Pete letting it out, and steamrollering it before it could bother him. More than any of his teammates, he was affected profoundly by the mood and spirit of the team. He needed to like, and be liked, intensely in order to play well. He needed a coach he could “play for,” (a) coach for whom he would do what was asked not because of personal pride or threat, but because he liked him. He had liked At MacNeil, but he didn’t like Bowman, and gradually it became a problem for him.

And he needed the same kind of mutual feeling within the team.

On the road, Pete was our social director, ambassador, and guide, his role to make sure that everyone was happy, and he always did his best. Whenever we were looking for something to do, we always looked for him—“Hey Pete, what’re ya doin’ tonight?”—then followed along. If he said he was tired, which he rarely did, and was going to bed early, we would react as if he was letting
us
down, spoiling
our
fun. But we knew that he didn’t like to say no, and could never say it for long, so we kept asking until we knew with a laugh he’d relent. But it was a life-style that couldn’t last. Competing with himself, always needing to be funnier and more outrageous to seem as funny and outrageous as he had been the day before, he finally burned out. His skating grew labored, he complained to Bowman that he needed more ice time to “get [himself] going.” Instead he got less. The worse things got, the more he tried to right them with one dramatic play, usually an end-to-end rush that would leave his linemates Lafleur and Shutt as spectators. When it didn’t work, when he’d be stopped at center or lose the puck at an opponent’s blueline, it became more and more annoying. Then one morning, after sitting two seats away from him for more than six years, I found that he was gone. That night, he showed up at the Forum in a Penguins sweater.

While he had talked of being traded off and on for some time, it seemed it would never happen. When it finally did, when he left, the dressing room changed. Everything we had come to expect of him—the hats, the jackets, the laughs, the outrageous stories—we couldn’t count on any more. Even the few things we told ourselves we wouldn’t miss, we did. Each had become something we could depend on, something we could fit in with and organize around, something that was part of him, that had become part of us. For while sameness can be deadening, it is also comforting. Like George Burns’s awful songs or Johnny Carson’s double-takes, when you like someone there is something quite nice in knowing what’s coming next, in knowing that nothing has changed; that when laces are cut, when petroleum jelly is smeared on the earpiece of a phone, we will all look at Lapointe, and he’ll say, “Hey, get the right guy”; that when interest rates go up and the Dow Jones goes down, Houle will complain of inflation and taxes, and if he forgets, someone will remind him; that when Lemaire giggles and squeals and collapses to the floor, someone will say, “There goes Co again”; that when Savard has a “hot tip,” Houle and Shutt will be interested, and if it pays off, Ruel will have backed away at the last minute; that before a game Lafleur will take out his teeth and grease back his hair, oil the blades on his skates, set off an alarm clock, smash the table in the center of the room with his stick, then laugh and say, “Wake up,
câlisse
”; and that when the room goes suddenly quiet, someone will bring up Larouche’s checking, Risebrough’s shot, Chartraw’s spinouts, Houle’s breakaways, something,
anything
, to keep the feeling going. In a life that changes with the score, this is our continuity, our security. When Mahovlich was traded, the room felt lousy for a while.