Ken Dryden - The Game
Mike St. Jean
Layout & Design Editor
As a hockey fan, I have always enjoyed reading about the lives of the game’s greatest stars and the often overlooked challenge of trying to juggle living out of a suitcase on the road with being a member of an elite group of athletes. More times than not, however, sports books are disappointingly one dimensional, with very little insightful commentary included, leaving the reader feeling unfulfilled.
The Game by Ken Dryden is definitely the opposite of the run-of-the-mill biographical book about a sports superstar. Written almost in the form of a fictitious novel, the book follows one of the NHL’s all-time great goaltenders through the course of his final season with the legendary Montreal Canadiens of the 1970s.
The reader is left with affectionate and almost down-to-earth portraits of many of the star teammates Dryden played with, including Guy Lafleur, Larry Robinson, Guy Lapointe and Jacques Lemaire, as well as his record-breaking coach Scotty Bowman, who made the Canadiens of the 1970s one of the greatest dynasties in sports history.
The book is much more than a sports book, however, as Dryden uses mundane, everyday occurrences as a starting point to back-track through his past and provide the reader with insight into many of the important events that shaped his life, his career, and the teams for which he played. From living in the spotlight as a member of Canada’s most historic sports franchise to residing in Montreal during the height of English-French tensions in Canada, Dryden sheds light on many of the aspects that shaped not just the business life of an athlete, but more broadly, life in Canada in the 1970s.
Since its release in 1983, The Game has been praised as the greatest hockey book ever written, and also as one of the greatest sports books ever published. Throughout its easy to read format, which arranges events into chapters that represent days of the week, Dryden puts on display both his love of hockey and the high level of intelligence and insight that allowed him to pursue a law degree at McGill University while tending goal for Montreal.