Former Montreal Canadiens goalie Ken Dryden fields questions at a news conference, in Montreal on Sept. 20, 2006.Ian Barrett/CP
Every sport needs its athlete-poet. Now that Ken Dryden is gone, where is hockey’s?
Dryden was a great player on what was probably the greatest team of all time, and that was the least of it. Via his landmark autobiography and many subsequent writings, he was the game’s conscience, its sharpest interrogator and its interior monologue.
It’s difficult for someone who is very good at something to explain to someone who isn’t how they do the thing they do. Dryden spent decades trying.
Here he is, in a frequently quoted passage from ‘The Game’, on how he does his job:
“My conscious mind goes blank. I feel nothing, I hear nothing, my eyes watch the puck, my body moves–like a goalie moves, like I move; I don’t tell it to move or how to move or where, I don’t know it’s moving, I don’t feel it move–yet it moves. And when my eyes watch the puck, I see things I don’t know I’m seeing.”
By current NHL scrum standards, that’s about a decade’s worth of philosophy.
Other great players made hockey exciting. Dryden’s job was to make it less so. Usually, he could dampen the opposition’s spirit. Often, he would crush it. Few have ever done it better.
Dryden’s other, possibly greater skill was making hockey important. He gave the rest of us permission to believe that it mattered.
Canada only does one thing better than everyone else in the world, and for a lot of its history, we didn’t take it very seriously. Hockey wasn’t something you did. It was something you played.
It didn’t deserve the same consideration as arts, sciences or literature – things that other, bigger countries were better than us at. Culturally, we were the western world’s kid brother.
Ken Dryden is recognized during a pregame ceremony in Toronto to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Team Canada’s victory in the 1972 Summit Series, on Sept. 28, 2022.Nick Iwanyshyn/The Associated Press
Then the defining national incident of the second half of the 20th century – the Summit Series.
Dryden appeared in it – not at his best, he was the first to admit. Once that was done, he spent the next fifty years turning it over in his mind.
This was a remarkable act – a hockey player thinking deeply about hockey, and not just in terms of old war stories, though he was good at those, too. About hockey’s meaning, its real-world relevance, and what it says about us as a people.
‘The Game’, published just four years after Dryden retired for real from the Montreal Canadiens, is as close as we get to a national document. You want to know how a Canadian thinker of the time talked and thought? It’s in there.
That the subject was hockey wasn’t revolutionary, but Dryden made it seem that way. Former Globe and Mail sports columnist Scott Young captured its essence: “A hockey book so rare that there is actually nothing to compare it to.”
From that point on, hockey was worthy of study, though nobody’s ever really attempted to out-Game ‘The Game’. What would be the point?
As more and more people piled into the field of hockey studies, usually around an Olympics or during some sporting crisis, Dryden maintained his intellectual lead. He always had the final word in print, often in the pages of this newspaper.
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It was a measure how far he’d risen in the national mind that when he made the big leagues of politics, his reputation in government was as the smart one.
In eulogizing him on Saturday morning, Prime Minister Mark Carney said, “Ken Dryden was Big Canada.” It bothers me that an economist gets the last word on this, but that’s pretty hard to beat.
Deeply saddened to learn of the passing of the Hon. Ken Dryden, a Canadian hockey legend and hall of famer, public servant and inspiration. He was a 6-time Stanley Cup Champion, 5-time Vezina trophy winner, Minister of Social Development, and dedicated Parliamentarian.
Ken…
— Mark Carney (@MarkJCarney) September 6, 2025
When we eventually write the history of these times, sports will figure as large in the shaping of them as painting did in renaissance Florence. It is our cultural lingua franca. People still read books and go to museums, but not in numbers anywhere close to all those who will sit down on a random Saturday night to watch the Leafs play the Canadiens.
Former Montreal Canadiens goaltender Ken Dryden rests on his stick during a 1979 game.STF/The Canadian Press
We know a lot – too much, really – about the 20-somethings playing right now. They don’t have a whole lot to say about what the game means or why it’s important. If it comes to them at all, that wisdom will arrive much later. It doesn’t stop people from asking.
That’s why there’s more and more pressure to avoid saying anything interesting. Interesting things cause trouble. Safer to stick to the clichés.
Eventually, the clichés become the wisdom. This is the species of hockey conversation a friend in the business calls, “Pucks in deep.” What’s the answer to any hockey question? Pucks in deep.
Standing almost alone and up to his waist, Dryden pushed back against that tide for decades. He wanted us to do what good students do – watch what’s happening, and then try to figure out why it’s happening. Most hockey people never get past the first part.
Now that he’s gone, he has no replacement. There is no one speaking with his authority as a Hall of Famer and national hero who’s willing to call hockey out on its nonsense, but not in a scream-y sort of way. There’s nobody with that sort of CV who wants to have a deep chat about the difference between patriotism at the rink and jingoism.
In February, Dryden wrote another of his signature hockey meditations in ‘The Atlantic’, just after Canada had beaten the U.S. in the 4 Nations Face-Off. Everybody had a Big Idea about that tournament, all of which were the children of Dryden’s 50-year-old Big Idea. That this game expresses something about this country that must be disassembled and catalogued to be understood.
As senior man, Dryden got the last word. There was something charming about the fact that his work on hockey was now being published in this handbook of American intellectualism. I wonder how many of the people who read it had ever sat through an entire hockey game?
Knowing his audience, Dryden began with a small primer on the Summit Series. He brought them back to the first game. Canada had figured they’d win easy, though Dryden had his doubts. They were wiped out instead.
“Instantly, the stakes changed,” wrote Dryden. “Something deeper than hockey pride was on the line. We were the best in the world when it came to hockey; the rest of the world didn’t think about Canada that way when it came to many other things. Now we had lost. What did that say about us? About Canada? About Canadians?”
Ken Dryden spent his whole life thinking about that fundamental. When you think about what makes us us, you’re walking a path he broke.