Dispatches From the Sporting Life

by Mordecai Richler

  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.”

  February 10, Boston Garden, Canadiens 3, Bruins 2.

  In the first period, the surging Bruins outshoot the Canadiens 8–4, and the difference is Herron, who makes some spiffy stops. Fifteen long minutes pass before Montreal has its first shot on the Boston nets. A goal. Engblom. Trooping out of the press gallery, everybody agrees that if not for Herron we could easily be down three goals. Like Dryden, he is keeping them in there.

  In the second period, Boston outshoots Montreal again, 12–8, scoring twice. Both goals come on two-on-ones. Savard is caught up the ice on one, Robinson on another. An overworked Robinson is not making many end-to-end rushes this season. He can’t. Poor Robinson is playing forty minutes a game, maybe more, and seems to be out on the ice every time I look down. “Last season,” Toe says, “Larry wouldn’t be out there for more than a minute, maybe a minute and a half, and then in would come Savard and Lapointe, but now…”

  Finally, the Canadiens surface with what was once their traditionally big third period. Napier, who some observers thought would help us forget Cournoyer, ties the game with his first goal since December 23. Then Lafleur sets up Larouche for the winning goal with a pass from the corner that I can only call magical.

  On the chartered jet back to Montreal, the players are in high spirits, a smiling Lafleur drifting down the aisle, serving beer. These are a classy bunch of athletes, not the sort to goose stewardesses or embarrass other guests in hotels. The French-and English-speaking players mingle easily; they don’t drift off into separate groups.

  February 14, the Forum, Canadiens 5, Nordiques 1.

  Suddenly, the others are scoring. Mondou, Jarvis, even Chartraw. And of course Lafleur is there, with a goal and two assists.

  “What you are really seeing,” a bemused French-Canadian sportswriter tells me, “is a battle between two breweries.” Molson’s owns the Canadiens; Labatt’s, the Quebec City Nordiques. “Loyalties are split in the province for the first time,” he adds, “and we will have to wait and see which brewery improves their beer sales most.”

  A couple of days after the game, Ruel announces he will wait until the season is over before deciding whether to continue coaching. “The decision is mine,” he says.

  The players are fond of Ruel but not intimidated by him. This is now a matriarchal society, Ruel fussing fondly over his charges rather than threatening them. But he remains a joke to some of the writers. At a practice, coaching the team on two-on-ones, he bellows at the lone defenceman, “Each guy take a man.”

  During his previous short-lived stint as coach, Ruel was standing behind the Canadiens’ bench in the Boston Garden when a brawl broke out among the fans. Clearing the aisle behind the bench, enthusiastic cops shifted Ruel out with all the troublemakers. “I de coach!” he shouted back at them unavailingly. “I de coach!”

  Now that so many Europeans were playing in the NHL, a writer asked Ruel why he didn’t scout the Swedes and the Czechs during the off season. “Nutting,” he shot back, “would make me cross the Athletic Ocean.”

  February 16,
the Forum, Canadiens 8, Penguins 1.

  One of the season’s rare laughers. Mondou scores twice and so does Lafleur, now only a point behind Marcel Dionne in the race for the scoring championship. It is Lafleur’s 399th goal.

  It is announced in the dressing room that our charter will not be taking off tonight as expected. Instead, we will be leaving for Buffalo at ten-thirty tomorrow morning.

  At the airport, Sunday morning, everybody is reading Dimanche-Matin, wherein Maurice Richard, who ought to know about such things, observes in his column, “A lui seul, Guy Lafleur vaut le prix d’entrée.”

  Ten forty-five. Still no plane. “Hey,” one of the players asks, “do you think Scotty’s behind this?”

  “Damn right.”

  This will be the team’s first trip to Buffalo. In two earlier games against the Sabres, both in Montreal, Scotty has failed to appear behind the bench. Montreal won the first meeting 6–3, but was routed the second time out, 7–2. “Is there anything personal against Scotty in this game?” I ask.

  “Aw, he won’t be wearing blades,” Robinson replies.

  I catch up with Scotty in the somewhat frenetic Buffalo dressing room just before the game, and we retreat to his adjoining office.

  “I have no axe to grind with anybody, except Sam,” he says. “Sam duped me. Sure, I was offered what they called the GM’s job for the year following this one, but I would have had to serve on a five-man committee. I wouldn’t have had the right to make trades. Would Sam have taken the job under those terms? I have nothing against Grundman, but Sam looked after himself. Well, that’s the name of the game.” He sneaks a glance at his wristwatch. “Last summer, at the individual awards dinner, not one Montreal player mentioned me. They miss Dryden, you know. He was a great goalie. He very rarely had two bad games in a row. Well, we’re second overall, you know.”

  February 17, Buffalo Memorial Auditorium, Canadiens 2, Sabres 2.

  Bowman is not behind the bench, but he was carrying a walkie-talkie in the dressing room, so I suspect he is in direct touch with Roger Neilson. Surprisingly, Larocque is in the Montreal nets. It turns out to be a boring, defensive game, possibly a dress rehearsal for the playoffs, scoreless going into the third period. In the third, both teams collect a couple of goals, but Lafleur fails to earn a point and now trails Dionne by three.

  In Landover, Maryland, a couple of nights later, the Canadiens were defeated 3–1 by the Washington Caps, the latter’s first victory over Montreal in thirty-four games. Once more Lafleur, still looking for his four hundredth goal, failed to earn a point. The next morning it was reported that he had bruised his knee, and would be out for another game. But a few days later, after Lafleur had missed his third game in a row, the club allowed that he was suffering from a contusion of the knee, along with stretched ligaments. He wouldn’t be in the lineup for at least another week, but there would definitely be no surgery, trainer Yvon Belanger said.

  “I hate to think where we’d be without Lafleur,” Toe Blake had conceded earlier. “Maybe even worse off than the Leafs. He’s one of the all-time greats. Bobby Orr was the best for ten years, the best I’ve ever seen, in fact, but after Guy has played for ten years, I might just change my mind.”

  Lafleur, who was then earning a rumoured $350,000 a year with the Canadiens, told me that he could easily get $1 million elsewhere. Possibly in New York. “Why don’t you leave, then?” I asked.

  “A friend once told me, better to be a king in your own country than a valet somewhere else.”

  The next season was the shortest ever for a suddenly vulnerable, clearly perplexed Lafleur, who missed twenty-eight games and, for the first time in seven years, failed to challenge for the scoring championship or to net the magical fifty goals. Poor Guy. Essentially a private man, in 1981 he also became the stuff of gossip columnists and public scolds. Beset by marital conundrums, as well as highly publicized income tax troubles, the once seemingly indestructible player was out of action nine times, either ill or injured. Coming off his last injury—a minor one, a charley horse—he was, according to reports, exhilarated by his best practice of the season, and then he was obliged to endure yet another round of bargaining with obdurate income tax officials. Depressed, he met new teammate Robert Picard for dinner at Thursday’s, a singles bar on Montreal’s modish Crescent Street. They had a few drinks and wine with dinner, which Guy followed with a couple of Amarettos. Afterwards, they repaired to Le Saga, a disco bar, to meet another friend for a nightcap. Lafleur left at 2:00 a.m., alone, in his Cadillac.

  “Don’t drive,” Picard pleaded, reaching for his car keys. But Lafleur insisted, with some heat, that he was just fine.

  Maybe fifteen minutes later, out on the highway, Lafleur fell asleep at the wheel. His car plowed through sixty feet of fence and a light standard. A metal plate shattered the car’s window, trapping him between the door and the steering wheel. The light standard, a veritable spear now, sliced his ear. An inch or two more to the right, and he would have been impaled.

  An off-duty Mountie, who just happened to be driving past, promptly removed Lafleur from the wrecked Cadillac and rushed him to the hospital, where he underwent surgery to his ear but was otherwise pronounced healthy. On balance, he was lucky to escape with his life. Very lucky. But he was never the same player again, losing speed and showing his vintage form only in increasingly rare bursts.

  The same was true of the Montreal Canadiens.

  In 1980, they were eliminated by the Minnesota

  North Stars in the second round of the playoffs.

  In 1981, they went down to the Edmonton Oilers, losing three games in a row.

  In 1982, they were humiliated in the first playoff round by the Québec Nordiques, and in 1983, they were knocked out in the first round, yet again.

  General manager Irving Grundman was fired.

  Coach Bob Berry was also fired and then rehired by Serge Savard, the newly appointed general manager.

  Morenz. Richard. Beliveau. Lafleur.

  The Montreal Canadiens, a proud dynasty now in sharp decline, are not, as tradition surely demanded, counting on a magical Québécois skater to renew their dominance of the league. Somebody now playing out there in Thurso or Trois-Rivières or Chicoutimi. No, sir. Today le Club de Hockey Canadiens is looking to an aging commie—Vladislav Tretiak, goalie for the Red Army—whom they devoutly hope to sign following the 1984 Olympic Games in Sarajevo.

  Ça, alors.

  20

  Playing Ball on Hampstead Heath

  An Excerpt from St. Urbain’s Horseman

  Summer.

  Drifting through Soho in the early evening, Jake stopped at the Nosh Bar for a sustaining salt beef sandwich. He had only managed one squirting mouthful and a glance at the unit trust quotations in the Standard (S&P Capital was steady, but Pan Australian had dipped again) when he was distracted by a bulging-bellied American in a Dacron suit. The American’s wife, unsuccessfully shoe-horned into a mini-skirt, clutched a London A to Z to her bosom. The American opened a fat credit-card-filled wallet, briefly exposing an international medical passport which listed his blood type; he extracted a pound note and slapped it into the waiter’s hand. “I suppose,” he said, winking, “I get twenty-four shillings change for this?”

  The waiter shot him a sour look.

  “Tell your boss,” the American continued, unperturbed, “that I’m a Galicianer, just like him.”

  “Oh, Morty,” his wife said, bubbling.

  And the juicy salt beef sandwich turned to leather in Jake’s mouth. It’s here again, he realized, heart sinking, the season.

  Come summer, American and Canadian show business plenipotentiaries domiciled in London had more than the usual hardships to contend with. The usual hardships being the income tax tangle, scheming and incompetent natives, uppity au pairs or nannies, wives overspending at the bazaar (Harrod’s, Fortnum’s, Asprey’s), choosing suitable prep schools for the kids, doing without real pastrami and pickled tomatoes, fi
ghting decorators and smog, and of course keeping warm. But come summer, tourist liners and jets began to disgorge demanding hordes of relatives and friends of friends, long (and best) forgotten schoolmates and army buddies, on London, thereby transmogrifying the telephone, charmingly inefficient all winter, into an instrument of terror. For there was not a stranger who phoned and did not exude warmth and expect help in procuring theatre tickets and a night on the town (“What we’re really dying for is a pub crawl. The swinging pubs. Waddiya say, old chap?”) or an invitation to dinner at home. (“Well, Yankel, did you tell the Queen your Uncle Labish was coming? Did she bake a cake?”)

  The tourist season’s dialogue, the observations, the complaints, was a recurring hazard to be endured. You agreed, oh how many times you agreed, the taxis were cute, the bobbies polite, and the pace slower than New York or, in Jake’s case, Montreal. “People still know how to enjoy life here. I can see that.” Yes. On the other hand, you’ve got to admit…the bowler hats are a scream, hotel service is lousy, there’s nowhere you can get a suit pressed in a hurry, the British have snobby British accents and hate all Americans. Jealousy. “Look at it this way, it isn’t home.” Yes, a thousand times yes. All the same, everybody was glad to have made the trip, it was expensive but broadening, the world was getting smaller all the time, a global village, only next time they wouldn’t try to squeeze so many countries into twenty-one days. “Mind you, the American Express was very, very nice everywhere. No complaints in that department.”