The stuff of legends

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/09/2022 (1460 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Most fans just date their team. This one we married.

It is 1972 and, for the very first time, it’s face-to-face for Canada’s very best hockey players versus Soviet Union’’s. They will play eight games, four in each country. Canadians will exhaust their ache to win by booing, worrying, cheering, cursing, blaming, rejoicing… and end up in love.

After games here of varying merit, and the odd TV smashed in frustration, our team of selected NHL players end up in Moscow across from Red Square in one of Russia’s newest hotels.

Veteran author and Team Canada goalie Ken Dryden describes how the phones in their rooms ring in the middle of the night, the beautiful pre-game steaks the team brought from home have disappeared and been replaced with Russian gobs of meat about as tender as hardtack, the hand-held showerheads in their rooms are feral and spew water everywhere. Their bathtubs have no curtains, their beds are too small and before they even get the keys to their rooms, he writes, “we had to get past a grim, implacable, unimpressible floor lady who was the real reason Hitler never made it to Moscow.”

In The Series the legendary goaltender goes inside his memory of 50 years ago and picks out, with sheer veracity, how he felt when he and his team won the world’s most memorable hockey series in the history of the game we invented, a series sometimes not of hockey but hostility. It was the Summit Series, and people with high blood pressure should not have watched.

This is Dryden’s eighth book. He won six Stanley Cups with the Montreal Canadiens in the 1970s, is an officer of the Order of Canada, is in the Hockey Hall of Fame, is a former federal cabinet minister and a lawyer. He lives in Toronto. He is 75.

One of the most memorable bits in Dryden’s game-by-game account is a letter that discloses how much these ordinarily high-paid NHL players will earn for participating in the series. “You will be paid a salary of $200 per week for each week in training plus the sum of $100 for each game in which you play.” Their pension fund did well from the series, all their expenses were paid and it was 50 years ago, but it’s still a shock to read.

Dryden played four games, including the first and the last. Tony Esposito backstopped the team in the other four.

Canada almost lost the series, and at times in the eight games the Soviets looked sure to win. After the stunning goal by Paul Henderson in Game 8 that won it all with just seconds left, Dryden looks around the dressing room. “It was almost quiet. It was still celebration, deep, deep celebration. But, more than that, like the feeling of being shot at and missed, it was deep, deep relief.” Surely nobody in or around hockey could have put it better, and nobody will. It was a perfect description of solace — like astronauts must feel when they’ve just made it to outer space.

Canadians watching that determining game back in Canada — more than 72 per cent of our entire population — went wacky when Canada won with seconds to go. If the game had stayed a tie, the Soviets could have claimed victory for having scored more goals.

Schools had brought in televisions for the kids, while workers had crowded into department and electronics stores to watch. And it was a workday and a school day, and nobody gave a darn because, in the end, they were smitten.

Says Dryden: “No other moment in Canadian history has been so shared — not Vimy Ridge, not D-Day. But more than shared, Canadians were a part of it.”

The Series is not so much a chronicle of the games as an assembly line of word pictures spilling from the memory of what it felt like to a thoughtful, observant and articulate man who not only was there, but out there on the ice both in Canada and Moscow. Helping paint the vivid picture in this glossy-paged book is a number of photos, among the most striking a two-page spread of downtown Toronto suits, sitting and standing wall-to-wall in the electronics department of the upper-crust Simpsons department store, watching Game 8. It captures the hypnotic allure, the trance-like power the series had on Canadians.

Dryden explains himself with no more than the necessary words. The economy is a delight.

They are in their dressing room the day before Game 3, to be played in Winnipeg. Before practice Dryden can’t find one of his skates. It is being used as a doorstop. He picks it up as forward Red Berenson carps in a loud voice the entire dressing room can hear: “It’s the only thing it’s stopped all week.” Dryden had last played in Game 1 in Montreal. The Soviets won 7-3.

Before the series, reporters confirmed what Canada’s team already knew: they’d likely win the series in a walk — eight straight. At first, in Game 1 in Montreal, it looked that way, recalls Dryden.

“Less than a minute into the (first) game, we scored. This is the way it was supposed to be,” he writes. “Five minutes later we scored again.” But when the Soviets tied it, Dryden says “now we were beginning to wonder, and now they were beginning to believe.” He says his team couldn’t score the big goal and he couldn’t make the big save. The game started to slip away. Dryden describes what they lacked as “the nagging fear of losing that you need if you want to win.”

It was nighttime in Moscow but morning in Winnipeg when Game 8 began. Dryden remembers a man he knows who worked for a big moving company. “His managers handled hundreds of calls an hour,” he writes. The man told him they all watched the game. The phones never rang, not once.

“Why did we win? Why is the series felt so deeply by players, by fans, by Canadians?” Dryden asks.

His answer: “Because it was personal.”

Barry Craig was at a political cartoonist’s house in Edmonton and putting on his coat to leave when Henderson scored. He also was at the game in Vancouver.