Ken Dryden — a man of many talents

Opinion

Canada has suffered a great loss with the death of Ken Dryden, a man best known as the anchor of a Montreal Canadiens hockey dynasty, but a man who was far more.

His pedigree in sport was unquestionable: a Hockey Hall of Fame member as a goaltender, he was named the top goalie in the NHL five times, named the most valuable player in the 1971 playoffs as a rookie when he won his first of six Stanley Cups. He’s rightly recognized as the absolute gold standard of NHL goalies.

But he had a bigger view of hockey that his own unquestionable athletic prowess — there was also his fight to raise awareness and to try to reduce the risk of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in hockey.

In 2017, he talked to the CBC about the need to stop hits to the head: “Whether they are intentional or accidental, whether they are incidental or significant, whether they are from an elbow or a fist or something else, it doesn’t matter,” Dryden said. “The brain doesn’t distinguish. … It’s about the injury. It’s about the brain. It’s about the player being hit. It’s about the effect of it — not the cause.” It was a fight he took to the top of the NHL, hand-delivering the first copy of his book Game Change: The Life and Death of Steve Montador, and the Future of Hockey to NHL commissioner Gary Bettman.

And that wasn’t his only bigger view — he had a bigger view for Canada, too, one much larger than the world of his own personal needs.

He left hockey at 31, when he could have stayed and continued playing. He became a lawyer, an author, a sports executive, a member of Parliament, and a cabinet minister. In Paul Martin’s government, he advocated for a national daycare program — something that the Liberals would eventually advance under Justin Trudeau.

He plainly wanted things not for himself and his family, but for the country as a whole.

As Prime Minister Mark Carney put it, “Few Canadians have given more, or stood taller, for our country. Ken Dryden was Big Canada. And he was Best Canada.”

The goal of big Canada and best Canada is so much better, so much more aspirational, than endlessly rolling around in the claim that we live in broken Canada.

When so much of our national politics seems now seems based on grievance and personal greed, Dryden was a standout as a public persona and a public servant.

Personally, he was renowned for taking the time to stop and speak to people who wanted to meet him and answer questions — and he kept up relationships with some of those contacts, sometimes for years. He stopped to talk every bit as much — actually, far more — than he stopped pucks in net.

It’s no wonder that as stories have been printed about him since his death, almost all have interviews with Canadians who have been personally affected by his words and actions.

Dryden was a person who did the right thing for the right reasons. Not the ones that benefited him, but that benefited Canadians.

We should, perhaps, all take some time to consider if we had experienced his early success at hockey, whether we would have done as much for others, let alone whether we would have had the energy to work to make this country a better place.

It’s pretty clear that his actions did.

Would that more Canadians, especially in the top ranks of provincial and federal politics, aspired to be like him.