The Game (25 page)
The room empties slowly at first, then with its usual urgent rush.
Chartraw, Lapointe, and I are left. Chartraw doesn’t make it. At 12:01
(a minute late), he slips onto the ice into the invisible shelter of twenty others. Except when we see him, we laugh and slap our sticks to the ice, exposing him. But Bowman isn’t out yet. Curiously late, a moment later he emerges from the dressing room, apparently unaware of what has happened.
I’m in a contrary mood; I don’t feel like practicing today. I skate around faster than I want to, slowing down here and there until the fun goes out of it, my arms and shoulders drooping theatrically. As I look around, at Lapointe and Robinson, Shutt, Lambert, and Houle, their arms and shoulders drooping the same, I recognize what I feel.
This will not be a good practice.
Behind me, I hear a shout.
“Jee-sus Christ,
the pylons
!”
I look up and see Bowman with an armful of orange plastic pylons, planting them at various spots on the ice. Instinctively, I look into the seats and find what I’m looking for—a group of about thirty or forty men scattered over several rows in one corner. While it doesn’t always happen this way, it happens often enough that we think we’ve found a pattern—(w)henever our otherwise closed practices open up for even a small group to watch, the pylons come out and it becomes “Scotty’s Show.”
Bowman blows his whistle and brings us down to one end of the ice. We form into a shapeless huddle, some kneeling, others propping themselves on sticks or on top of the net, and Bowman talks to us about last night’s game. Within seconds, as the group in the stands watches intently, we stop listening: Shutt fingers the tape on his stick, Tremblay stares into the empty seats; I tighten a strap already tight.
Then suddenly, in a loud, earnest baritone, Bowman explains something about the pylon drill, and gets us back. Not certain that we understand what he’s said, he decides to demonstrate. Pretending to be the centerman, he breaks around the first pylon diagonally over the blueline for a pass, shouting back to us and gesturing as he goes. The seriousness of his tone, however, is not helped by his quirky skating stride, or by the pass he calls for from Lemaire that goes behind him and down the ice. A little flustered, with the group in the stands now back in their seats, Bowman blows his whistle for us to begin.
The drill doesn’t go well. Not used to its patterns, not very good at being mechanical, quickly we turn it into a shambles. And though Bowman, now speaking in a Tiny Tim falsetto, apparently believes that we should have had our heads up to see the pylons, we didn’t, and we don’t. After the second or third one has bobbled across the ice, and after a pregnant “I’m in charge here” pause, he collects the pylons and we begin our regular drills.
Unable to sustain our funk, gradually we compete against ourselves, and the practice picks up. A short hour later, Bowman blows his whistle, “Okay, that’s it,” and we let out a satisfied roar, then stay on the ice. With his irrepressible “Who’s got a good shot?” Ruel coaxes most of the players to his end of the ice for shots on Larocque.
I go to the other end with Lapointe, Lambert, and Risebrough.
Larocque and I are competing again. Though we’ve won our last three games, with games against the Flyers and Islanders coming soon—(g)ames I will almost certainly play—a good, enthusiastic, hard-working practice might get him the Detroit game, and he knows it. So today he is among the first on the ice, and will certainly be the last one off. It is bound to be noticed. I don’t really want to play against the Wings, an inept, uninteresting team, especially in the Forum—but I don’t want not to play either. So I compete back, staying out for shots I don’t want and today maybe don’t need, staying out just long enough that not staying long enough cannot be a factor.
Lapointe lines up fifteen or twenty pucks near the blueline and slaps them at me one by one; then Lambert and Risebrough do the same, but from closer. Unsure what to do next, with boasts and bets and great enthusiasm we decide on a penalty-shot contest, which Risebrough inexplicably wins. Running out of ideas, Lambert and Lapointe leave the ice, and Risebrough joins Ruel. Larocque is still in goal. I skate around, turning backwards and forwards, dropping to my knees for stretches, skating from board to board several times. Still Larocque hasn’t moved. I skate down the ice and stand next to him, waiting a turn. When I get it, he stands next to me, waiting his turn.
Crack-crack
,
crack-crack
, like a snare drum in a roll, the pucks jump from Ruel’s stick to a line of sticks across the blueline. “C’mon my Ricky,” Ruel shouts to Chartraw, “Shoot the puck! Shoot the puck!” (a)nd Chartraw, then Tremblay (“my Mario”), and Napier (“my Mark”) take two or three strides from the blueline, wind up for a slapshot, and crack-crack, the next puck shoots from the corner to the next stick in line, again and again until gradually the numbers dwindle. Finally, with only Ruel and Lupien left, there seems no great need for two goalies, yet neither of us will leave. Ruel puts us through a short skating drill, then we go back for more shots. The net is empty. Larocque and I skate towards it, easily at first, then like two kids reaching for the last piece of cake, with disinterested single-mindedness. When I realize that only an embarrassing sprint will get me there first, I angle away and skate to the dressing room. Larocque has won. But by leaving the ice first, I have reminded him that I am still the number one goalie.
Palchak distributes the checks. Houle looks at his and shakes his head. “How come my contract says I’m so rich and this check says I’m not?” he wonders, knowing the answer.
“
Câlisse de tabernac
, taxes!” Tremblay growls and storms to the shower. Shutt watches him go.
“That goddamn Lévesque,” someone snarls, not for the first time.
“Why the hell doesn’t he do something about that instead of the fuckin’ referendum?”
There are loud murmurs of agreement.
Suddenly Shutt goes to the skate room, picks up a plastic cup, fills it with ice, and returns to the room. Then, as we watch with squeam-ish, open-mouthed glee, he urinates in the cup until it’s almost full, tops it with Coke for color, puts it down beside him, and walks to the shower. Undressed and ready for our showers, we decide to stay put.
Moments later, water dripping from his body, Tremblay reappears and sits down. We watch him from the corners of our eyes. He dries himself slowly, then turns his head to one side and sees Shutt’s Coke. He looks around for Shutt, then, sharing smiles with those around him, grabs the Coke and sips from it—no laugh, no wink, no devil-may-care leap this time.
The laughter dies down, and one by one we become aware of some short, quick screams, like those of a passing racing car—it’s Palchak sharpening skates. Robinson stands up, puffs out his cheeks, sticks out his belly, wrinkles up his nose like an accordion, punches imaginary glasses back into place with his middle finger, and, stooped over like an old-world shoemaker, his hands in front of him as if holding a skate, he waits for the sound to begin again. Then, pursing his lips, he moves his hands back and forth as if across a sharpening stone, while others make the quick guttural scream of a passing racing car. When the sound stops, wrinkling up their noses like accordions, punching imaginary glasses back into place with their middle fingers, in heavy nasal voices several chorus, “Hey Eddy, leave some for us,” and there’s more laughter.
Lafleur has left, Risebrough and Lemaire disappear back into the trainers’ room, and Larouche heads out the door in the direction of Bowman’s office. The room gets quiet. Suddenly Lambert disappears around a corner and returns with the hard, heavy beat of rock music blaring from our stereo. “Aw-right Lambert,” we scream, “play that funn-ky music!” and the mood that seemed tired finds life again. His hair pushed up and back in a pompadour like a dry-look Little Richard, Lambert dances, his body jerking to the rhythm, his mouth sneering with feeling. “Ooh Lambert,” we shout, “make me
feeeel
it,” (a)nd, eyes closed, he hovers across the floor, loose and fluid. A few moments later, the stereo turned lower, then off, no one protests.
The room quickly empties. We are on the road from Sunday until the middle of next week, and with banking to do, and tax decisions by the end of the month, mid-afternoon downtown meetings with lawyers and accountants await. Going out the door, Houle yells back that he’ll be across the street at the pub. Dressing quickly in more three-piece suits, more suits and sport coats than usual, few seem to hear him.
Last year, many years after being traded by the Canadiens to Los Angeles, Bob Murdoch took me for a long, undistracting drive along freeways and beaches, and as we drove, we talked of our future plans and of contracts we had both just signed. Several years before in Winnipeg, we had been roommates together while playing for Canada’s National Team, both of us just out of college and playing one step higher than we ever thought we could play, both of us planning non-hockey careers, yet wondering if there was one step higher we could go. But in the middle of that year, Canada withdrew from the World Championships it was scheduled to host, and the team was dis-banded. Adrift, our plans of playing until the 1972 Olympics gone, we talked of quitting; and we talked of continuing on. A few months later, we both began negotiating with the Canadiens, the team holding our NHL rights. With matter-of-fact excitement, we would dream out loud of contract and bonus figures we had heard for others, wondering if Sam Pollock would go as high as “10 and 10” ($10,000 signing bonus, $10,000 a year in salary), “10 and 12,” or maybe “10 and 15.”
In May 1970, we both signed contracts and the following September began together with the Voyageurs.
Eight years later, as we drove around Los Angeles that day, the tone of our conversation had changed. No longer wide-eyed, we talked of our contracts and big jaded numbers spilled easily from us—”a hundred thou,” “two hundred thou,” individual bonuses, team bonuses, signing bonuses. Then, after continuing this way for several minutes, we suddenly stopped, looked at each other, and started laughing.
Remarkable though it might seem, as recently as ten years ago, it was possible to watch a hockey game and never once think how much its players were paid. For while salaries had moved up till they were nearly compatible with those in other sports, they were not so high as to seem relevant to what was happening on the ice. So good players were “all-stars” or “trophy winners,” and good players in bad seasons were “overrated,” not “overpaid.” It began to change late in the 1960s.
As sports and entertainment moved closer together, as sports turned from pastime to business, partnered and propelled by TV, leagues expanded, new money appeared with new expectations and styles, lawyers and agents emerging in its wake. Salaries went up; hold-outs increased. Comfortable with their historic upper hand, many general managers fought back, refusing even to negotiate with agents, turning negotiations and their resulting settlements into newsworthy events, turning money from an occasional issue to an incessant one.
But though that was a dramatic development at the time, the real change came a few years later when the courts struck down the“(r)eserve clause,” opening up free-agentry, giving a new competitor—(t)he World Hockey Association—its chance. Between May and September 1972, as WHA teams signed players for their initial season, the “going rate” on a new contract more than doubled. Bobby Hull received a million-dollar bonus for signing with the Winnipeg Jets; Brad Park, Rod Gilbert, Vic Hadfield, Walter Tkaczuk, and many of their teammates signed WHA-size contracts with the Rangers.
Gradually, as old contracts became due, other teams fell into line.
From a private, almost inconsequential matter, money moved front and center, where mostly it has remained. New teams in new hockey cities, hard pressed to sell goals and assists to fans used to ERAs and yards per carry, sold price tags as performance, and sold both as celebrity, overnight turning twenty-five-goal scorers like the Bruins’ Derek Sanderson into “million dollar” superstars. Agents, happy to use old clients to publicly solicit new ones, came up with creatively inflated figures and sold them to the media as news. The story became money, lots of it, all the time: ticket prices, TV contracts, free agents; day after day rumors, denials, speculations about who is going where, when, and mostly for how much.
“Sports” had become “Sports Inc.” With big money now to be made in sports, big money
would
be made, and the attitude changed.
“Cities” became “markets,” “games” became “products,” “sports” part of the “entertainment business,” fighting for “entertainment dollars.”
Owners sold civic pride, appealed to civic vanity, got civic concessions, moved into civic monuments; blamed civic pride, left. Players adopt-ed pin-stripe suits and permanented hair. Money, once only a practical imperative, a vehicle to let them as adults play what as little boys they could play for nothing, was now a reason itself to play. Sports became a means to something else, a player’s commitment distracted and suspect; money
a
motivation, so
the
motivation.
It is something far different from what I expected nearly nine years ago. Coming to Montreal as a part-time goalie with the Voyageurs while completing law school, I thought the Canadiens would simply take over from my parents for a time, paying my tuition and books, my room and board and little else until I graduated. Then, after giving them one more year as I was obliged to do, I would merely stop playing and they would stop paying. But I was better than we both thought, and with the team winning most of the time, and the WHA to compete implicitly or explicitly for my services, my salary has increased many times. In most ways, nothing has really changed. The cars I rode in as a child are the cars I drive now, the house I live in is the same, the food I eat, the clothes I wear the same; my bank account is larger, but quantitatively life seems little different.
Still, there have been changes. An agent, an accountant, a tax lawyer, and an investment counselor now ease and complicate my life.
