Dispatches from the Sporting Life (29 page)

And later on, he would hint darkly that in making Grundman GM, Pollock had ensured his own continuing career with the Bronfman brothers’ investment company.

Along came the 1978–79 season. Bowman, a hot-tempered disciplinarian, seemed to let up some, and acute observers of the team noted that once-safe leads now tended to evaporate. Teams lacking the Canadiens’ talent made games much closer than they ought to have been. All too often games that should have produced a cozy two points became a tough one point, that is to say, ended in a tie.

Steve Shutt told me, “For the first couple of years here, Scotty was a yeller and a screamer. But it was his team, he built it. Besides, I think everybody needs a good kick in the ass once in a while. Last year, however, when it became obvious Scotty wasn’t going to get the GM’s job, he didn’t want to do anything. He was really, really upset.”

In the summer of 1979 the inevitable happened. Bowman, arguably the best coach in hockey, however personally unpopular—Scotty, ferocious leader of the team since 1971, a streetwise Montreal boy himself—walked out of the Forum to become general manager and director of hockey operations for the Buffalo Sabres.

Something else happened that summer. Ken Dryden, five-time winner of the Vezina Trophy, announced that he was retiring from the game to practice law. More bad news. Jacques Lemaire, just possibly the most complete centre in hockey, surprised even his best friends on the team by saying that he had had quite enough of Stanley Cup pressure, thank you very much, and that from now on he would be doing his skating in the more salubrious climate of the Swiss Alps.

Early in September, only days before training
camp was to open, Bernie Geoffrion, a fifty-goal scorer, a regular with the greatest Canadiens team ever, was named coach. “A dream come true,” he said, beaming, but on the night of December 13 he was to resign. “I’m sick and tired of them. Guys coming in at two or three in the morning, laughing and joking around. They’re not acting like professional athletes. I’m not going to stick around and let everyone in Montreal blame me for what’s happening….”

Geoffrion named names, too.

“Larouche walking through the airport, smoking a cigar, acting like we won the Stanley Cup when we’d lost a game. I thought Savard would help me. But he’s more interested in his horses. I feel sorry for Robinson. How do you think he feels?”

The players, of course, told a different tale. “He flunked out in New York,” Shutt said, “he flunked out in Atlanta. Why would he come here, a town like Montreal, where the fans are so demanding?” Where, as yet another veteran put it, “You’ve got seventeen thousand assistant coaches and the fans are right behind you, win or tie.”

Other players, among them honest Larry Robinson, readily admit they came to camp out of condition. With Scotty gone, they grasped that they would not be scorchingly reprimanded for it. Geoffrion, a new boy, was out to ingratiate himself.

“Geoffrion didn’t want to push us,” Gainey said, “but we needed it.”

So faithful Claude Ruel, a former coach and then assistant to Scotty Bowman, stepped loyally into the breach. But come the Christmas break, the team that had lost only seventeen games in 1978–79 and a
mere ten the year before stood at an embarrassing 17–13–6.

Something had happened. Something bad.

Where once the players on the other teams, knees wobbly, skated out on the Forum ice determined not to disgrace themselves, now they leaped brashly over the boards actually looking for two points.

“We are no longer intimidated by all those red sweaters,” New York Islander goalie Glenn Resch said.

Canadiens defensive forward Bob Gainey agreed. “When you start to slip, everybody else in the league sees it, the others catch on. Now even the fringe players on the other teams think they can score here.”

Since then, everybody’s been taking the pulse, few as knowledgeable as Henri Richard. Richard, who played with the team for a record-breaking twenty years and eleven Stanley Cups, feared the dynasty was coming to an end. “They miss the big guy,” he told me.

Sam Pollock.

“Nobody ever saw Sam,” the left-winger Steve Shutt said. “I noticed him in the dressing room maybe two or three times in five years. But you always knew he was out there somewhere. Watching.”

Watching, yes, but sometimes to inadvertent comic effect.

“Sam,” Doug Risebrough told me, “was very impressed with how scientific football coaching had become, and so for a while he tried to adapt their methods to our game. He would wander the highest reaches of the Forum, searching out patterns of play, and if he detected something he would quickly radio Busher Curry, who would be pacing the gangway, a
plug in his ear. No sooner would the Busher get Sam’s message than he would rush up to Bowman with the words of wisdom. Once, when we were leading the Bruins here, 3–2, with a couple of minutes to go, Sam, watching above, got on the radio to the Busher, who immediately rushed to the bench with the message for Scotty, which Scotty passed on to us. The message was ‘Sam says don’t let them score on you.’”

The rap against fifty-year-old Irving Grundman, Pollock’s successor, is that he is not a hockey man, he lacks fraternity credentials, but neither did he inherit the team with his daddy’s portfolio. The taciturn, driving Grundman is a butcher’s boy, and when he was a kid he was up at 5:00 a.m. to pluck chickens in his father’s shop on the Main. He became a city councillor and went on to build a bowling empire, hooking up with the Bronfman brothers, who shrewdly took him to the Forum with them. “When I came here eight years ago it wasn’t with the intention of having Sam’s job. But once I got here I took a crash course with him. Five hours a day every day. He recommended me for the job. Now I’m in a no-win situation. If things go well, I did it with Sam’s team. If not, it’s my fault. However, we’ve already won one Stanley Cup, so I’m ahead of the game.”

It was also Grundman, obviously a quick learner, who engineered the trade—or theft, some say—that did so much to enable the troubled Canadiens to hang in there in 1980. He sent Pat Hughes and Rob Holland to Pittsburgh for goalie Doug Herron. The season before, the fans, in their innocence, were demanding more ice time for backup goalie Michel
Larocque. In 1980 the same fans were grateful that Herron was number one.

Still, Dryden was missed. Bob Gainey felt that it was his retirement that had hurt the team most. “The other teams are overjoyed. They look down the ice and he isn’t standing there anymore.”

Red Fisher, sports editor of the
Gazette,
who travelled with the Canadiens for twenty-five years, allowed that Dryden used to let in soft goals if the team was ahead 5–1, “But if they were down 1–0 on the road, he was the big guy. He kept them in there until they found their legs.”

Others insisted that the most sorely missed player was Jacques Lemaire. Lemaire, hanging back there, brows knitted, scowling, as Lafleur and Shutt swirled around the nets. Certainly he would be missed in May. Lemaire, the leading scorer in the 1979 playoffs, accounted for eleven goals and twelve assists in sixteen games. But the biggest adjustment the team had to make in 1980, according to Larry Robinson, was the loss of Scotty Bowman. Bowman was feared, maybe even hated, by most of the players, but he got the best out of them. “With Scotty gone, the fear and motivation is gone. He’s a great hockey man. He made us work hard. You never knew what to expect.”

Something else. In 1980, as all the players were quick to point out, the team had endured an unseemly number of injuries, and for the first time in recent memory, there was nobody down there in Halifax threatening to crack the lineup. The bench was thin.

Another consideration was that the one superlative
defence hadn’t been playing up to par. “In the first half,” Shutt allowed ruefully, “Savard and Lapointe couldn’t have made Junior A.”

“We can’t do it all with one line,” Shutt said, and the other lines were simply not scoring.

But then, on New Year’s Eve, there was a miracle at the Forum. Playing fire-wagon hockey, buzzing around the nets like the Canadiens of cherished memory, a revived team put on a dazzling display, beating the Red Army 4–2 in a so-called exhibition game. Many a fan, his faith in mankind restored, was saying the Canadiens, awake at last, would not lose another game during the rest of the season. Look out, Flyers. Boston, beware.
Les Canadiens sont là.

On New Year’s Day, rotund Claude Ruel, mistaken for a buffoon by some, announced, “The past is dead. They are playing a little harder now, with more enthusiasm and pep.”

Alas, the past was prologue. The following night
les Glorieux
ventured into Pittsburgh and lost again. They continued to play erratically, but with rather more success than in the first half, before Lafleur sounded off early in February. Some players, he said, were less interested in playing hockey than in drawing their salary. “It’s reached a point where some of them don’t want to play because they have a little headache. What do you expect a guy like Ruel to do then?” Lafleur also felt that some of the bigger players, say six-foot-six Gilles Lupien, were not doing enough hitting. “I know a number of players who are satisfied with thirty goals, while they could easily score fifty. But they don’t because they say then the public and the boss would be more demanding.”

By this time I had caught up with the Canadiens myself, determined to stay with them for six games, come to scrutinize the troubled club firsthand; and what follows is in the nature of a concerned fan’s journal.

February 7, the Forum, Canadiens 4, Rockies 3.

Good news. Savard and Lapointe, coming off injuries, are back together in the lineup for the first time in a month. Bad news. Back and stumbling. Savard, racehorse owner and proprietor of a suburban newspaper, is wearing a helmet for the first time this season. And Lapointe, as everybody knows, is having marital problems. The first period is largely smash-and-grab, the sort of play that is giving hockey a bad name, but, at the period’s end, the Canadiens lead 3–2. A disgruntled journalist, rising from his seat in the press gallery, observes, “Will you look at that. I mean, they’re playing the Colorado Rockies. The most compelling man on the team is their coach.” Don Cherry.

In the second period, the Canadiens stumble badly. From Doug Harvey to Gilles Lupien, I note, is not so much a fall as a suicidal leap. Lupien treats the puck as somebody else might being caught with another man’s wife. No sooner does it connect with his stick than he shoots it blindly out of his zone, as often as not onto a waiting Colorado blade. Lafleur scores twice. Mario Tremblay once, his first goal in ten games.

February 9, the Forum, Canucks 4, Canadiens 3.

“Look at those menacing black uniforms!” somebody in the press box exclaims as Vancouver skates out on the ice.

“Yeah, but that’s all they’ve got.”

Tonight it’s enough to beat the disorganized Canadiens, their play distressingly tentative. Once more the team squanders a two-goal lead, characteristically provided by Lafleur and Shutt, and stumbles through a punk second period. Lapointe separates his shoulder once more and will be out again, possibly for another month. “He has to be thinking about something else out there,” a reporter observes sadly.

The unnecessary loss is a bummer flying into Boston for a Sunday-night game. On our chartered flight, the subdued players sip their beer morosely. I sit with Doug Risebrough, a scrapper on ice, who turns out to be most engaging. “That game was given to them,” he says. “A lot of nights what’s missing with us is the concentration. It’s just not there.”

As we check into the hotel in Boston, after 1:00 a.m., three garishly made up hookers, their smiles menacing, are fluttering around the registration desk, eager to begin negotiations.

“How would they know when we’re coming in?” I ask one of the writers.

“They’re always in touch with the sports desk. They ring me all the time in Montreal to find out when a team is flying in and where they will be staying.”

When Frank Mahovlich was still with the Canadiens, one of his teammates connected with a groupie in a hotel lobby, but unfortunately he was slated to share a room with still another player. Instead, he got Mahovlich, who had a room to himself, to switch with him. Settling in with his girl, the player dialled room service. “I want two rye and ginger ale. Room 408. Mr. Mav’lich.”

“How do you spell that, sir?”

“M, A—M, A, V—no, no—M, A, H—H, V—oh, fuck it. Never mind.”

In the morning, I meet Bob Gainey for breakfast.

“We don’t seem to want to do it this year,” he says, “or have the ability to do it all the time.” He invokes the Cincinnati Reds. “You can hold on to it for so long, then it slips away. But we still have the potential,” he concludes wistfully.

Toe Blake is in the lobby, mingling with the players. It’s been a long haul for Toe, working in the mines in summer in Falconbridge when he was playing with the Punch Line, and then coaching the greatest Canadiens team ever, its total payroll $300,000. A long way from there to here. Now travelling with today’s
Glorieux,
disco-smart in their Carin jackets, ostentatious fur coats, suede boots; a team representing a total payroll estimated at $3 million. “When I was playing in this league,” Toe says, “I worried about my job. Even the stars worried. If you went sour for five games, maybe even a couple, down you went, but now…” Today’s average player, he acknowledges, is a better skater, but he misses the passing and the play-making of the vintage NHL years. In that feathery voice of his, Toe laments that even on the power play, forwards tend to shoot the puck into the corners, rather than carrying it over the blue line. “If I were still coaching I’d bring back puck handling. I wouldn’t want them to throw the puck away. Look at the Russians. They’re skating all the time. That’s their secret.” Neither is Toe an admirer of the slap shot. “Dick Irvin used to say it doesn’t matter how hard you hit that glass or the boards, the light won’t go on.”

The team bus is due to leave for the Garden at five o’clock, but come four Lafleur is pacing the lobby, enclosed in a space all his own. Doug Herron, whose wife gave birth to a baby girl the day before, will be in the nets. “I know I’m ready,” he says. “But sometimes you’ve got it, sometimes not.”