Hockey occupies a precarious position in the hierarchy of my sports fandom. I watch a fair amount of my local team’s games (Go Devils!) but I don’t really know anything about the sport itself, outside a few big names from its history and a general comprehension of the rules. (I know what icing is, but I doubt I could explain it effectively, for instance.)
I have recently been getting more into soccer, and a big part of that has been reading some really great books about the sport. So I thought I would try to replicate that formula for hockey. It turns out that the question “what’s the best hockey book ever written?” yields a pretty strong consensus answer. Ken Dryden was the goaltender for the Montreal Canadiens for most of the 1970s, at a time when the team was a dynasty. He won six Stanley Cup titles in a relatively brief career before retiring at the age of 32.
The Game is set over the course of about nine days near the end of Dryden’s final regular season with the Canadiens. Having already decided to retire, Dryden is introspective about this career and the game itself. In a loose, largely unstructured manner, he takes the reader into the locker room, onto the team plane, and into the mind of a hockey player.
Dryden was most unusual for a professional athlete. He took a whole year off during his playing career so he could article at a Toronto law firm, having earned a law degree from McGill. His early retirement was partially motivated by his desire to do other things with his life besides hockey. His writing, and it is worth noting that there is no ghostwriter here, is erudite by any standard, let anyone what one might expect from a jock.
In a way, though, that erudition became something of a problem, at least for this reader. The Game runs over 400 pages when it’s updated prologues are included, and that is quite frankly a lot for what this book is. At a certain point, it felt a little like Dryden just liked hearing Dryden talk, you know? I also couldn’t help but wonder how some of his teammates appreciated being talked about so candidly. Dryden practically psychoanalyzes many of them, including the weaknesses in their playing style and the juvenile behavior they exhibit in the locker room.
For an established fan of the sport, however, I’m sure Dryden’s insider’s eye offers a lot. As for me, I think it was maybe just not what I was looking for at the moment.
