(i) Imlach’s gamble
55 seconds on the clock and holding. Toe
smells hope. A goal behind, the game would be decided
down in Sawchuk’s end, the crucial faceoff to his left—that would
take his trapper out of play. The situation shortens up the ice, Toe
pulls Worsley for the extra man. Garbage is the one hope now,
something off the blocker or the far side pad.
Terry knows what’s on the way.
He knows exactly what Blake’s looking for.
The mask had taken in the gathering at the bench, Toe
leaning close to give his last commands. The mask had taken in
the glance from Ferguson, the look of murder on his face.
Then watched as Blake removed his hat and smoothed
his hair, wanting every detail in its place.
Still, finesse would take a back seat now—Ferguson
would try to ram the puck and Terry through the post. Imlach,
street wise, has a counter plan. He understands the shifting
scale as well as anyone. Name the referee who’d call him
now and here, at home. Who had the balls? And stalls
to rest a tired ageing team. On the goal that closed the gap,
how bad had Duff made Horton look, Stanley too, and here was
goddamn Blake back in the game again. Imlach argues, curses, climbing
up his players’ backs, “Hey faceoff in the neutral zone, hey wake up ref,
the puck went off their guy, hold it, look, for Godsake, Sawchuk’s got
a problem with his gear.” And when he feels they’re ready, slowly,
climbs back down and out they come, Horton, Stanley, Kelly,
Armstrong, Pulford. (Three defencemen?) “Stanley takes
the faceoff.” (Stanley? What was Imlach smoking? No one
tries that bulldog tactic any more, he’ll never get away with it.)
Stanley backs out. Starts to think. He hasn’t taken one
in how long? Years. And he knows who’s there in the circle,
calmly waiting, Béliveau, with Backstrom on the point,
and Ferguson, the talker, out in front.
His mind goes blank. He glides back in.
What’s this about? The crowd goes strangely quiet,
staring at the empty net. Unthinkable somehow.
Worsley. What a card. Out for a leisurely skate like that
towards their bench. Then they heard the gate crunch shut
and he was gone. They had to look again. In even the fiercest
Toronto fan, there was a grudging recognition of hockey’s royalty.
Who could believe an unattended net in the Montreal end?
Who’d have thought Toe, with his dark inventiveness,
his intuition with his bench, with Béliveau, Richard and
Backstrom up the middle, a Trinity, no less, and others spoken of
with reverence in Quebec, Cournoyer, Rousseau, J. C. Tremblay,
Jacques Laperrière, the scary Ferguson, not to underestimate
the lingering heat of the Rocket, of Harvey and Lach
and Morenz—that was the nightmare, how do you grapple
with ghosts?—who’d believe that Blake would be
the one to weave the desperate plan?
The building holds its breath.
Huddled at the bench, his players ponder Toe’s
tumultuous temper. They gaze at the puck-flecked boards,
listening to his plan. How the devil had they let it come to this?
Spring of 1967, something brilliant on its way, and what a thing
he fashions now in their heads, to dodge another bullet here
and get that seventh game at home against an ageing
English team, a goalie who’d owned them, past his prime—
a dream, what better way to end the age and get a leg up
on the next. And Montreal that summer with its international fair,
its brand new subway and its big league baseball team.
Then that Gallic fist of freedom in the air.
Bugger all that, said Imlach. What he dreamt about
was beating Toe. De Gaulle was just the icing on the cake.
But any thought of heading back to Montreal, of facing
Toe Blake in a seventh and deciding game at home,
had him dashing for the nearest cubicle.
He knew this game was the one they had to win.
They had to grab that faceoff in their end.
(Two days later, who did I see staring bleakly
into the empty Forum but the future Prime Minister
of Dominica. His mood was grim. He’d had his fill of
sleet and cold. Losing to the Leafs was hard to take.
We crossed St. Catherine Street and headed east
toward the Toe Blake Tavern where we honed our plans
to meet in paradise and talked away a nasty afternoon.
He felt something ending too, and more than school. He hadn’t
met Gaddafi yet or Castro. His hero then was Béliveau. We had no
sense of what was on its way. No thought that it would fall to me
to count off troops in combat gear, the dread Van Doos,
and send them over the river into the city.
We kept a careful watch that day, but only in the hope
of seeing Worsley coming through the door.
That was the day, if things had fallen into place,
they would have played the seventh game.)
(iii) the Béliveau stare
He glides back in. Then glances to see how Montreal
lines up. The ice feels cluttered, disordered, things heat up
whenever someone has the extra man. He feels the old familiar
belly-rolling fear. You take the faceoff. He’d felt the weight
of Imlach’s hand on his shoulder. He knows what he brings
to this one is a whole career. And Béliveau, the captain,
calmly waits. Le Gros Bill, who’d brought a new dimension
to the game, whose size and scoring touch were such, not even
the brashest prairie boy would dare to mock his elegance and grace.
As well, he had that levelling stare, the eyes that cut you down
without a word. He wasn’t beaten often when the game
was on the line—that’s why they don’t forget
the few defeats. Unfair of course.
Inching forward, hardly more than leaning
as the linesman sets to drop the puck, Stanley checks,
his forward motion transferred to the rising stick which jumps
and nicks the puck before it hits the ice. Somehow it lands
between his skates, he lets it go and takes a chance,
stepping into a stretching Béliveau. The puck
slides to a tantalizing stop. Sawchuk’s welded to the post.
Ferguson jumps but Kelly’s quicker. Fixed on running over
Kelly to the net, he lunges with an awkward check, if anything
propelling Kelly faster to the puck, who tips it neatly
through the tied-up captain’s legs, where driving
Pulford picks it up. A game of speed and fortitude, for sure,
but inches too. And luck. Toe can hardly bring himself to look
as Pulford banks and, deftly off an outside edge, slides a backhand
pass, just beyond the reach of Backstrom’s frantic dive,
to Armstrong flying up the ice. Coolly now, Toronto’s captain
takes a look and lets it go. Five degrees his margin of error.
The puck skips into the undefended net.
What just happened here?
Had Punch and Stanley read the moment well
and stretched the rules? Had something distracted Béliveau,
putting him back on his heels a hair? Before the puck was dropped
he’d turned to take a long and searching look at Ferguson in front,
perhaps to set the plan to crash the net. Or maybe he found
it faintly distasteful, resorting to Ferguson’s style
in a crisis. Perhaps in itself that seemed a kind
of defeat. Something out of the bumptious west.
Or perhaps he was only tired—he wasn’t that wild
about Toronto’s tactics either. The way they clipped
your wings and wore you down. Try to get loose for a pass,
you always had somebody grabbing your stick or holding your arm
in front of the net. Whatever it was, he’d lost a big one. A miracle
of timing, that’s what it took—even so, he knew
that he’d been beaten to the puck.
(iv) any sensible goalie
“Toughest series I ever lost,” says Toe. And hard
as it was, he heads out onto the ice in search of Punch,
thinking how Stanley had made him look like a genius.
Though Terry was the one who’d forced Blake’s hand,
he hadn’t even had to touch the puck.
Anticlimactic, perhaps, but just how any sensible goalie
would have it. Besides, he’d done his share with 47 saves.
And 55,000 minutes of life under fire—and feeling them
all in that moment—was surely more than his share
if he never touched a puck again. “Here he is,
you fucking negative Nellies, here’s our Horatio,”
the happy foul-mouthed Imlach hugs his battered goalie
and brays at the press, “you know, that guy
who guards the fucking bridge.”
Echoing Billy after the semifinals with Chicago,
Toe tells his guys how proud he was of how they played,
“But Sawchuk was too much tonight.”
Terry takes a pounding from his own guys now
that carries him back to those heady days in Detroit.
And here’s Marcel and Kelly with him still.
How strange life is. How drained they seem.
They’d borrowed what they needed, like him, from God
knows where. A fleeting thought of his wife and seven kids
comes unaccountably into his head. But here in the wild abandon
of a winning dressing room, he knows that this is where he
lives. He savours the perfect moment with a cigarette,
speaking to no one in particular, “I wonder what that
fellow thinks about it now.” The telegram
had driven him back to draw on what he’d been.
What he’s going on about, nobody has a clue, and none
thinks to ask. Goalies, they mouth to one another cheerfully.
Everybody knows they have their dark and bloody
ways of dealing with the world.
And popped the corks and let the celebrations
loose. What a feeling, oh my Jesus. Something about
surviving the heat of war, something about the plunder
yet to come. If this was the last, if this meant
the long lull was about to descend,
what a hell of a way to go.