Awareness is important — people need to know, acknowledge and understand — but at a certain point, it’s time to act.
That’s what Ken Dryden decided two years ago when he started writing the book “Game Change: The Life and Death of Steve Montador, and the Future of Hockey,” which was published in the fall.
A Hall of Famer and a six-time Stanley Cup champion with the Montreal Canadiens, Dryden, 70, was one of 15 goaltenders to be named in 2017 to a list of the “100 Greatest N.H.L. Players.” In the years since he retired from the Canadiens, he has served as the president of the Toronto Maple Leafs and as a cabinet minister in Canada’s government. He has never stopped thinking and writing about hockey. The book he wrote soon after he retired from the N.H.L., “The Game,” from 1983, may be the most insightful reflection on the sport ever published.
Dryden’s focus is locked on hockey’s response to concussions and their devastating effects on the lives of its players. For too long, he believes, the N.H.L. has failed to act decisively.
Continue reading the main storyIn “Game Change,” Dryden explores the career of Montador, a journeyman defenseman who played for six N.H.L. teams. He saw his career ended by concussions — at least seven of them. After struggles with addictions, Montador died in 2015 at 35. Post-mortem studies of his brain revealed that Montador had been suffering from the effects of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease commonly known as C.T.E.
The book also skates deep into hockey history: Underlying Montador’s story is Dryden’s comprehensive view of how the game has failed to adapt to its own evolution in pace, equipment and tactics. For Dryden, it all comes down to this: Now is the time for hockey to eliminate hits to the head, and the N.H.L.’s commissioner, Gary Bettman, is the only person who can make that happen. Dryden has called it a test — for himself, for Bettman, for hockey. And so, in September, Dryden traveled from his home in Toronto to New York to carry that message, along with his book, to Bettman. They met for lunch.
Dryden sat down in Toronto in December to talk about “Game Change” and his vision for hockey. The interview has been edited and condensed.
How did that meeting with Bettman go?
It was a good lunch. We’ve known each other for a long time. We’ve worked together. We each know how the other thinks, and does things. I introduced it as a serious book about a serious subject, and the next few months will be a challenge for both of us. But a worthwhile challenge. I just told him about what was in the book. I told him that he was the first person to receive a final copy of the book. He said he would read it.
I came away feeling that he would. And that he would think about it very hard.
Why was Steve Montador’s story the right one to build your book around?
I wanted to write about somebody who was an Everyman player. I didn’t want somebody who was a superstar, who was unique and not relatable. And I didn’t want somebody who was a fighter and a goon, for the same reason. I wanted somebody who, when people read about Steve, they would see themselves, see their kids. Coaches would see their players. He was somebody a lot like them. And whose experience was a lot like theirs. He was somebody who was not dismissible.
You’ve talked about what you’re trying to say in your title: not just that the game needs to change, but how it has been changing, always, and keeps changing. Is that why you think this is all so eminently doable?
It’s one change that’s needed: No hits to the head. No excuses.
At the core of the problem of brain injuries is hits to the head. So you focus your attention there. The increased speed of the game generates more collisions and more forceful collisions. It’s not hard to see how this happens.
You can think about dealing with it as a revolutionary change, or you can think about it as an incremental and really evolutionary change. Right from the beginning of hockey, we’ve recognized the danger of hits to the head. We created high-sticking penalties. We created the elbowing penalty.
What we’ve come to understand better, with the force and the frequency of the collisions now, is that the dangerous instrument is not the stick or the elbow, it’s the body as a whole. So you don’t call a penalty for a stick or an elbow and not call one for a shoulder or a fist. It’s not the cause, it’s the effect. It’s not whether it’s intentional or accidental. The brain doesn’t distinguish. The brain is affected similarly. So you think of it in those terms, and you approach it in those terms. You connect it to the very set of understandings that is already in place, and to the penalties that are already in place. You just extend them to the changed circumstances of the game.
As you point out, Bettman never played the game. But he is surrounded in the N.H.L. head office by plenty of smart, committed people who did play. Why haven’t they recognized the problems you’re identifying. What’s kept them from urging the changes you’re advocating?
They haven’t played this game. We know what we’ve learned, we know what we’ve heard, and we tend to then apply both, as if everything else were constant. The myth and lore of a game like hockey are very difficult to undo and rewrite. And whether it’s in hockey, sports or climate change — anything — we all have a certain set of understandings. We’re comfortable with them. We always believed in them, and believed deeply.
But it’s a question of going beyond what you know to what there is to see. We’ve stopped seeing what is there. We notice the speed of the game, we notice the frequency and the severity of the head injuries, but we haven’t quite made the connection that then generates the response that’s needed. There’s this gap that is almost always present in terms of decision-making.
To get somewhere and change circumstances, you have to undo a set of understandings that are already in place. All we need to do is just see, see the game that’s there on the ice. And it’s a game that’s played with far greater skill than was the case in the past. Players are faster. They’re using lighter sticks, which become precision instruments in their hands, so they’re developing a dexterity that in turn pushes their creative minds.
And in the game now, the idea is not to go in straight lines: You go to open ice, wherever open ice is, and so the pass is more important than the rush. All of a sudden, you’ve got this incredible freedom, this possibility. The excitement with which people talk about Connor McDavid and Auston Matthews — that’s how they play. That is the game that has emerged, and it’s the game that’s being developed and understood by 10-year-olds and 12-year-olds everywhere in the world.
You’ve been traveling with the book, talking about it across Canada. Do you get the sense that parents and coaches and the people who run minor hockey have an appetite for change? Is it coming from the bottom up, too?
Yes. But a bottom-up movement is not going to change things as much or as quickly as needs to happen. But what it means to that decision-maker at the top is important: He can feel a kind of confidence that, in fact, a decision that he would make about hits to the head would be understood and accepted. The conditions are present.
You haven’t heard back from the commissioner yet. Not to doubt or prejudge him, but what if he doesn’t see what you’re seeing as quickly as you would hope? Does the challenge — and your campaign for change — simply continue?
Something that’s been so powerful for me on my book tour has been talking to the hockey guys, the sports guys on the all-sports radio stations: A lot of them are thinking in these directions. This is not a matter of starting at zero and trying to argue or persuade your way to 100; they’re already at 60 or 70. They see the problem. And so do people in the game I’ve been hearing from.
So all of this just kind of builds. That’s not unimportant. It will be moving forward, a little faster or a little slower. Five years from now, the game will be extremely different. How much in advance of that the change happens is really up to Gary Bettman.
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