The complete package

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/11/2020 (1975 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In Canada, books about our hockey greats — about players and coaches, and about the history of the game itself — occupy a special place in our imagination. They are cultural histories: we read our stars’ personalities as transparencies laid over their times.

No Montreal Canadiens fan remembers the Richard riots of the 1950s without thinking, immediately, of Clarence Campbell, of les maudits Anglais, of the old Montreal Forum on Atwater and its sacred chiens chauds.

Similarly, no Habs fan can conjure the great years of Les Glorieux in the 1970s and their six Stanley Cups — the teams of Ken Dryden, Guy Lapointe, Jacques Laperierre, Larry Robinson, Henri Richard, Yvan Cournoyer, Jacques Lemaire, Guy Lafleur, Bob Gainey, Pete and Frank Mahovlich, et al — without hearing Danny Gallivan’s inimitable voice arise, invoking “Savaaard,” with Savard’s patented spinorama move, and seeing in the mind’s eye that tall, imposing figure, the statesman of Montreal’s defence, striding up ice and negotiating a pass, as Gallivan had it.

In Philippe Cantin’s welcome biography, ably translated by Christopher Korchin, we now have the first full account of Savard’s life, a rounded insider’s account: Cantin spent countless hours interviewing Savard, and brings his 30-plus years’ experience as a journalist with La Presse to this work, to rich effect.

Cantin gives us a detailed portrait of Savard’s early years in Landrienne, in the Abitibi region of Western Quebec, where he grew up in a loving family that he has remained close to for life, and where his lifelong commitment to the French Canadian community was first nurtured by his father. At 15, the talented young teenager moved to Montreal to play hockey, and Cantin shows us the struggles of those early years in the big city.

Canton skillfully documents how Savard’s commitment to French Canada imbued his later desire to fashion the Canadiens, not only as Quebec’s team — and the impassioned rival of the Nordiques during their time in Quebec City — but as the team that would, under his tutelage, become an embodiment of French Canada. Savard himself became the first French Canadian general manager of the Habs and a symbol, on and off the ice, of the resurgent French fact, in the businesses he successfully acquired and managed over the years, in his political affiliations, as an entrepreneur.

Affable and articulate, always known as a general manager who knew the players and who managed as a former player himself, Savard became the consummate insider. But that didn’t mean he didn’t have his battles: Cantin relates Savard’s tensions with figures such as the brilliant but irascible coach of the Habs, Scotty Bowman, or with the premier hockey mind of his time, his boss Sam Pollock — or, surprisingly, with Dryden (still the author of Canada’s best book about hockey to date, The Game, and of last year’s biography of Scotty Bowman.)

Cantin also gives us an insider’s view of Savard’s inevitable fall from grace when he was fired by Ron Corey, president of the club during the Molson family’s reign, and provides us with a clear window into Savard’s disappointment over his treatment, a feeling Savard harbours to this day.

Most revealing, finally, are the stories of the innumerable personal connections Savard has nurtured over a lifetime in hockey — with teammates, coaches, general managers, with agents and owners — and beyond hockey, in the business community, at the race track, and of course during his storied sojourn in Winnipeg, where he played his final two seasons in the NHL with the Jets before his retirement as a player in 1983.

No one who saw Savard on the ice can forget his passion for the game. Thanks to Cantin, we now know more fully just what an outsized presence, on and off the ice, inhabited that big sweater, number 18.

Neil Besner, former vice president, academic at the University of Winnipeg, treasures having watched Savard wheeling down the ice.