The Game

"The Game may be the best sports book ever written by a participant. It’s by Ken Dryden, who was perhaps the best goalie of his era. He played for the Montreal Canadiens in the 1970s, at the time when they might have been the best hockey team ever. He tells his story in a journal format, tracing not only what was happening on the team but what was happening in the world around him – the sociopolitical atmosphere in the province of Quebec when nationalism was rearing its head. Ken Dryden is a graduate of Cornell, an educated and erudite observer. But he was also a great athlete. With these books, the person is either a great writer but not really a participant of any value, or else they’re an athletic star but they haven’t got the means to tell the story in a way that resonates. Dryden is an excellent writer and he was an excellent athlete so he was able to write an unsurpassed insider account of the game and point out its place in our culture. I don’t think you can find a better book by a participant in any other sport. The statistic you just gave speaks to how indelibly hockey is ingrained into the Canadian culture. Baseball is very popular in the United States but there are other sports Americans love. With the exception of maybe soccer in Argentina and rugby in New Zealand, no other country so identifies with a single sport as Canada does with ice hockey. It speaks to our national character. It’s what we send forward into the world. I tried to unlock the mystery of why Canada and hockey are so inextricably linked. I took the reader back to the 19th century to understand why we became so enamoured of this game and why we’ve adopted it as our own. I looked back at moments in hockey history, like the 1972 eight-game summit showdown between Canada and the USSR. It was Canada’s first chance to beat the Soviets. They beat us in the Olympics, where you were only allowed to use amateurs. In the summit series we used our best players. The entire country was absolutely wrapped up in these eight games against the Soviets. It was a cultural political sport. I try to identify in the book why it is we have that link to hockey, and in particular why a country that is so well known for being pacifist is so attached to what might be the most violent team sport in the world – the only sport that I know of which allows you to fight and still stay in the game. It has to do with our pacifist character. Human nature isn’t all docile. There are primal urges. Hockey is a chance for us to express or experience vicariously the very opposite of pacifism within a sport. And for a country that had two very strong forming influences, the English and the French, hockey is a way to basically work out that relationship, work out the tensions between the two sides without it erupting into civil war or something worse. Often the conflict in hockey represents and is a way of working out other tensions in our country. If conflict is played out in hockey, then we don’t necessarily have to play it out in other parts of our lives."