Ken Dryden

I don't like how this  is going. I'm reading about contemporaries who have passed away. There's nothing I can do about it, but be assured that if I'm reading about them, no one has written about me yet. As if they would.

Ken Dryden, All-Star goalie for the Montreal Canadians and Cornell University has passed away at 78. It's funny, as much as I was a hockey fan and a suffering New Yorker Ranger fan during Dryden's career, I would have said he was one of the few American players in the league.

That's because I first became aware of Dryden when he was playing for Cornell, Big Red, a powerhouse college team that seldom lost. In 1966 I was a freshman at Clarkson College (now University) in Potsdam, New York, near the Canadian border. Clarkson was a top-rated college team then, but Cornell was better—they had Dryden.

I didn't stay a student long enough into the schedule to try and attend a Clarkson/Cornell game at Clarkson's ice arena. Cornell was a top draw then, lead by their coach Ned Harkness. Even before Dryden, a Cornell/Clarkson game was another chapter in their rivalry. 

Clarkson's team was coached by Lennie Ceglarski, who went onto become the winningest coach in college hockey, finishing his coaching career at his alma mater, Boston College. In 1966, I saw him as a young man holding a baby while wearing a leather sleeve varsity jacket. 

Both Clarkson and Cornell heavily recruited Canadian student-players. I was friends with one of the Clarkson players at the time, and I don't think the roster had a single American born player. I knew of  American born guys who tried out for the team, but never made it onto the team.

Dryden was tall. 6' 4", of course even taller wearing skates, even if all the players wear skates. In net, he looked like there would be no way you were going to score against him. And scoring against him didn't happen often. He won five Vezina Trophies, a league trophy awarded annually to the goalie with the best record. He won that trophy in four consecutive years.

I was holding my breath reading the obit to see if the story about Phil Esposito's frustration with trying to score against him would make it into the obit. It did. An understandably sanitized version.

Phil Esposito was a center for the Boston Bruins, later the New York Rangers. He scored goals by the bushel with his favorite tactic of keeping himself in front of the net, hopefully blocking the goaltender's view, and then tipping a shot from another Bruin shooting from the point, or at the top of the face-off circle. into the net.

As a kid growing up, he practiced this way of scoring with his brother Tony who played the part of being the goalie, and who later grew up to be an All-Star goalie for the Chicago Black Hawks.

Phil was a big center, and he was tough to push out of the way without drawing an interference penalty. The obit writer, Richard Sandomir, writes about the event between Dryden and Esposito thus:

"...Dryden, an imposing presence round the net—at 6 feet 4 inches—stopped a shot at point-blank range by Phil Esposito, who would score a record 76 goals that season, Esposito shouted at Dryden, 'you thieving giraffe!' and smashed his stick against the arena glass."

Wherever I read about that thwarted goal-scoring chance, it was that Esposito said, "you fucking giraffe." A much more likely choice of words.

NYT journalistic standards keep Sandomir from of course spelling out "fucking," even implying it with "f---ing." No matter. Dryden was an annoying, acrobatic giraffe in net. It's funny, because in a recent blog I wrote again about Phil's competitive temperament frustration when he started jawboning with the New York Ranger organist for playing "Talk to the Animals" as the Bruins came out for a pre-game skate at Madison Square Garden. Poor Phil.

I wasn't really aware of Dryden's post-Canadians career. It was surely multi-faceted enough that the obit headline tells us: Ken Dryden, Star Goalie With Cups and Careers Galore..." Galore indeed. TV analyst, writer, lawyer, president of the Toronto Maple Leafs, Member of Canadian Parliament.

It was nice to see Dryden's photo with the Vezina trophy with Gump Worsley in the background. The "Gumper" played for the Canadians, the Rangers, and eventually the Minnesota North Stars. I remember him as a Ranger goalie on some bad teams. He was a plumb, little guy, who didn't wear a mask, like most goalies of his era. He had a bit of a bulbous nose with broken blood vessels, which made you think he wasn't kidding when he would tell you he trained on Canadian Club whiskey.

I don't pay much attention to hockey these days. I haven't been to a Ranger game in quite some time. I was a two-seat season holder for 11 years I think, thin years with only one appearance in a Stanley Cup final, despite some really solid winning seasons and advancements in the playoffs.

I had bever heard about Dryden's 1983 book, The Game, despite it being updated in 2013 on the 30th anniversary of publication. It's said to be a great book on hockey. 

These days I start to pay real attention to the New York Rangers around February, keeping track of the standings and watching parts of televised games

NHL hockey has the longest season in all of professional sports, and the 4-round playoffs are a second season in themselves. It's very hard for a team to be a dynasty these days. Even the Florida Panthers, with wins in the last two finals for the cup, have a ways to go to becoming a dynasty like the Montreal Canadians.

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