The Stanley Cup finals are here and I find myself re-reading “The Game,” Ken Dryden’s classic meditation on his life in hockey, as he recounts one week in his final year (1979) as goaltender for the legendary “Flying Frenchmen,” the Montreal Canadiens.
On page 135 in the “Friday” chapter, as Dryden muses on players’ creativity on ice, I began to see similarities - and differences - to The Paul Franklin Method of learning the pedal steel. So I’ve excerpted a passage below to show the connection. If you choose to read it, try substituting “Paul Franklin” for “Guy Lafleur” and “Buddy Emmons” for “Bobby Orr” and see how it plays. Dryden’s analogy is not a perfect fit: for example, no one could ever call Paul or Buddy “inarticulate” - far from it!
It is in free time the special the player develops, not in the competitive expedience of games, in hour-long practices once a week, in mechanical devotion to packaged, processed, coaching–manual, hockey-school skills. For while skills are necessary, setting out as they do the limits of anything, more is needed to transform those skills into something special. Mostly it is time – unencumbered, unhurried, time of a different quality, more time, time to find wrong answers to find a few that are right; time to find your own right answers; time for skills to be practiced to set higher limits, to settle and assimilate and become fully and completely yours, to organize and combine with other skills comfortably and easily in some uniquely personal way, then to be set loose, trusted, to find new instinctive directions to take, to create.
But without such time a player is like a student cramming for exams. His skills are like answers memorized by his body, specific, limited to what is expected, random and separate, with no overviews to organize and bring them together. And for those times when more is demanded, when new unexpected circumstances come up, when answers are asked for things you’ve never learned, when you must intuit and piece together what you already know to find new answers, memorizing isn’t enough. It’s the difference between knowledge and understanding, between a super-achiever and a wise old man. It is the difference between a modern suburban player and a player like Guy Lafleur.
For a special player has spent time with his game. On backyard rinks, in local arenas, in time alone and with others, time without short-cuts, he has seen many things, he has done many things, he has experienced the game. He understands it. There is scope and culture in his game. He is not a born player. What he has is not a gift, random and otherworldly, and unearned. There is surely something in his genetic makeup that allows him to be great, but just as surely there are others like him who fall short. He is, instead, a natural.
’Muscle memory’ is a phrase physiologists sometimes use. It means that for many movements we make, our muscles move with no message from the brain telling them to move a certain way, and, given stimulus from the spinal cord, they move that way. We see a note on sheet of music, our fingers move; no thought, no direction, and because one step of the transaction is eliminated – the information-message loop through the brain – we move faster as well.
When first learning a game, the player thinks through every step of what he’s doing, needing to direct his body the way he wants it to go. With practice, with repetition, movements get memorized, speeding up, growing surer, gradually becoming part of the muscle’s memory. The great player, having seen and done more things, more different and more personal things, has in his muscles the memory of more notes, more combinations and pattern of notes, played in different ways. Faced with a situation, his body responds. Faced with something more, something new, it finds an answer he didn’t know was there. He invents the game.
Listen to a great player describe what he does. Ask Guy Lafleur or Bobby Orr, ask Reggie Jackson or Julius Erving what makes them special, and you will get back something frustratingly unrewarding. They are inarticulate jocks, we decide, but in fact they can know no better than we do. For ask yourself how you walk, how your fingers move on a piano keyboard, how you do any number of things you have made a routine, and you will know why.
Stepping outside yourself you can think about it and decide what must happen, but you possess no inside story, no great insight unavailable to those who watch. Such movement literally comes from your body, bypassing the brain, leaving a few subjective hints behind. Your legs, your fingers move, that’s all you know. So if you want to know what makes Orr or Lafleur special, watch their physical movements, fluent and articulate, let them explain. They know.
Hockey has left the river and will never return. But like the “street,” like an “ivory tower,” the river is less a physical place than an attitude, a metaphor for unstructured, unorganized time alone. And if the game no longer needs the place, it needs the attitude. It is the rare player like Lafleur who reminds us. Go Cats!
