Class act

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This article was published 23/10/2023 (1000 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ken Dryden has an uncanny ability to rise to the occasion.

In 1971, he was the rawest of rookies when he led the Montreal Canadiens to victory in the Stanley Cup final. A year later, he won Game 8 of the Summit Series, helping Team Canada subdue the vaunted Soviet hockey machine.

He went on to win a total of six Stanley Cups in his eight-year NHL career, squeezing in the final years of law school (while he was playing) before going on to a rich and varied career as a lawyer, member of Parliament and federal cabinet minister, TV commentator and author.

His latest book, The Class, explores the lives of the 35 high-achievers — Dryden included — who were enrolled in Grade 9 at Etobicoke Collegiate Institute — the so-called ‘Brain Class’ in the fall of 1960.

This isn’t a hockey book, yet Dryden successfully balances the need of his fans’ to read about their hero with those of his classmates, most of whom he did not reconnect with until the COVID-19 shutdown. He spent hundreds of hours on the telephone and the results of these conversations are compelling.

“That part of the trickiness of writing the book is that I was not only writing it but I was also a character in it,” Dryden said in a recent interview with the Free Press. “I am a member of this class and I’m not a more important or less important member of this class, but I’m not a non-existent member of the class.

Dryden, who was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1983, brought his promotional book tour to McNally Robinson Booksellers in Winnipeg on Monday night.

“A central part of the story is about a class as it was in high school, but really it’s a group of people that existed before these five years and whose families existed before and then all of the years that we have lived since… a hard part in it was what’s the right balance of writing about myself and writing about others.”

Dryden weaves historical context of growing up in Canada during that era with the personal stories of his classmates. Some lives might have been perceived as ordinary or something more. With the benefit of Dryden’s keen insight, none is mundane.

“I have done this enough that I knew that people are interested and we do live different lives and unexpected and surprising lives,” said Dryden. “Whereas most nonfiction or at least biographical or autobiographical nonfiction is of well-known people that you kind of assume have done interesting things and that’s why the books are written about them. But almost all fiction isn’t. Fiction is about an average person. Almost all great fiction is that.”

Dryden is unflinching about some of the difficult times in his personal and professional life, admitting, for instance, that he was a bedwetter for most of his childhood.

He also recounts the time in 1997, prior to being installed as president of the Toronto Maple Leafs, when Martin Kruze revealed he had been sexually abused as a child by a team employees in the 1970s and ’80s. Three months later, Kruze died by suicide and Dryden made the agonizing choice to represent the club at Kruze’s funeral.

“The whole thing to me was dealing in unknowns and unknowables, where something really bad had happened and where people were really sad and really angry,” said Dryden. “I just had no idea what to do. I think now there are people who… set up companies specializing in how to manage moments like that. But that wasn’t the case then and the only thing that I was pretty sure of was that I needed to be at that funeral and anything else, I didn’t know.

“As I’m hearing people who are speaking at the funeral and others who are around me who are speaking, it just was so entirely clear that what everybody wanted more than anything — because that moment, of course, you can’t reverse time – is you want something a little bit good to come out of something really bad and you’re desperate for it.”

Again, Dryden was able to rise to the occasion. He organized an open house at Maple Leaf Gardens, inviting psychologists, therapists and survivors of abuse to the event.

“They just wanted so much for Maple Leaf Gardens and the Toronto Maple Leafs to acknowledge the fact that this had happened,” he said. “to be deeply sorry that it happened, to understand why it happened and how wrong it was that it happened and to do things differently, so that it wouldn’t happen (again).”

mike.sawatzky@freepress.mb.ca