{"id":124605,"date":"2025-09-06T16:14:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-06T16:14:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/124605\/"},"modified":"2025-09-06T16:14:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-06T16:14:11","slug":"ken-dryden-was-a-national-hero-now-that-hes-gone-he-has-no-replacement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/124605\/","title":{"rendered":"Ken Dryden was a national hero. Now that he\u2019s gone, he has no replacement"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Former Montreal Canadiens goalie Ken Dryden fields questions at a news conference, in Montreal on Sept. 20, 2006.Ian Barrett\/CP<\/p>\n

Every sport needs its athlete-poet. Now that Ken Dryden is gone, where is hockey\u2019s?<\/p>\n

Dryden<\/a> 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\u2019s conscience, its sharpest interrogator and its interior monologue. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s difficult for someone who is very good at something to explain to someone who isn\u2019t how they do the thing they do. Dryden spent decades trying. <\/p>\n

Here he is, in a frequently quoted passage from \u2018The Game\u2019, on how he does his job:<\/p>\n

\u201cMy conscious mind goes blank. I feel nothing, I hear nothing, my eyes watch the puck, my body moves\u2013like a goalie moves, like I move; I don\u2019t tell it to move or how to move or where, I don\u2019t know it\u2019s moving, I don\u2019t feel it move\u2013yet it moves. And when my eyes watch the puck, I see things I don\u2019t know I\u2019m seeing.\u201d<\/p>\n

By current NHL scrum standards, that\u2019s about a decade\u2019s worth of philosophy. <\/p>\n

Other great players made hockey exciting. Dryden\u2019s job was to make it less so. Usually, he could dampen the opposition\u2019s spirit. Often, he would crush it. Few have ever done it better. <\/p>\n

Dryden\u2019s other, possibly greater skill was making hockey important. He gave the rest of us permission to believe that it mattered. <\/p>\n

Canada only does one thing better than everyone else in the world, and for a lot of its history, we didn\u2019t take it very seriously. Hockey wasn\u2019t something you did. It was something you played. <\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t deserve the same consideration as arts, sciences or literature \u2013 things that other, bigger countries were better than us at. Culturally, we were the western world\u2019s kid brother. <\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

Then the defining national incident of the second half of the 20th century \u2013 the Summit Series<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Dryden appeared in it \u2013 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. <\/p>\n

This was a remarkable act \u2013 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\u2019s meaning, its real-world relevance, and what it says about us as a people. <\/p>\n

\u2018The Game\u2019, 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\u2019s in there. <\/p>\n

That the subject was hockey wasn\u2019t revolutionary, but Dryden made it seem that way. Former Globe and Mail sports columnist Scott Young captured its essence: \u201cA hockey book so rare that there is actually nothing to compare it to.\u201d<\/p>\n

From that point on, hockey was worthy of study, though nobody\u2019s ever really attempted to out-Game \u2018The Game\u2019. What would be the point?<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Opinion: Ken Dryden on the biggest question young Canadians face: Climate change<\/a><\/p>\n

It was a measure how far he\u2019d risen in the national mind that when he made the big leagues of politics, his reputation in government was as the smart one.<\/p>\n

In eulogizing him on Saturday morning, Prime Minister Mark Carney said, \u201cKen Dryden was Big Canada.\u201d It bothers me that an economist gets the last word on this, but that\u2019s pretty hard to beat.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Ken\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2014 Mark Carney (@MarkJCarney) September 6, 2025<\/a> <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Former Montreal Canadiens goaltender Ken Dryden rests on his stick during a 1979 game.STF\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n

We know a lot \u2013 too much, really \u2013 about the 20-somethings playing right now. They don\u2019t have a whole lot to say about what the game means or why it\u2019s important. If it comes to them at all, that wisdom will arrive much later. It doesn\u2019t stop people from asking. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s why there\u2019s more and more pressure to avoid saying anything interesting. Interesting things cause trouble. Safer to stick to the clich\u00e9s. <\/p>\n

Eventually, the clich\u00e9s become the wisdom. This is the species of hockey conversation a friend in the business calls, \u201cPucks in deep.\u201d What\u2019s the answer to any hockey question? Pucks in deep. <\/p>\n

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 \u2013 watch what\u2019s happening, and then try to figure out why it\u2019s happening. Most hockey people never get past the first part. <\/p>\n

Now that he\u2019s gone, he has no replacement. There is no one speaking with his authority as a Hall of Famer and national hero who\u2019s willing to call hockey out on its nonsense, but not in a scream-y sort of way. There\u2019s nobody with that sort of CV who wants to have a deep chat about the difference between patriotism at the rink and jingoism. <\/p>\n

In February, Dryden wrote another of his signature hockey meditations in \u2018The Atlantic\u2019, just after Canada had beaten the U.S. in the 4 Nations Face-Off<\/a>. Everybody had a Big Idea about that tournament, all of which were the children of Dryden\u2019s 50-year-old Big Idea. That this game expresses something about this country that must be disassembled and catalogued to be understood. <\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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\u2019d win easy, though Dryden had his doubts. They were wiped out instead. <\/p>\n

\u201cInstantly, the stakes changed,\u201d wrote Dryden. \u201cSomething 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\u2019t 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?\u201d<\/p>\n

Ken Dryden spent his whole life thinking about that fundamental. When you think about what makes us us, you\u2019re walking a path he broke.<\/p>\n