The late Montreal Canadiens great Ken Dryden had two links to Trail: he visited the city in 2006 and he was immortalized in a novel set in the area.
In Pete McCormack’s critically-acclaimed Understanding Ken, published in 1998, Dryden is the scapegoat (scapegoaltender?) for a young boy who projects the trauma of his parents’ divorce onto Dryden for sitting out the 1973-74 NHL season to work at a law firm.
McCormack grew up in the West Kootenay, but the book is not strictly autobiographical and his feelings about Dryden’s decision weren’t as intense as his protagonist’s.
“I think all Montreal fans were heartbroken when he wasn’t playing that year,” McCormack said in a phone interview today from his home in Vancouver.
“I mean, we read in the newspaper that he’s playing defense on a rec team in Toronto. Like, what the hell is going on? But no, I didn’t feel that kind of animosity, nor did I project my own journey in my life at that time on Ken that way.”
In the novel’s opening pages, McCormack’s narrator describes Game 7 of the 1971 Stanley Cup final, when Dryden robbed Chicago’s Jim Pappin of an open-net chance to tie the game: “Pappin puts his arms in the air to celebrate the goal. That’s when the goalie pad came out of nowhere. That pad swallowed up the puck like water down the bathtub drain. That pad broke Jim Pappin’s heart and all the Black Hawks’ hearts and my brother’s heart. That was the pad of Ken Dryden. The greatest goalie in the history of the world.”
When he learns Dryden has quit hockey, he is mortified: “Who will play goal? Bunny Larocque? You can’t win with a goalie named Bunny. I feel like I’ve been butt-ended in the gut a million times.”
McCormack did share his young narrator’s reverence for Dryden, both on and off the ice: “The intelligence he brought to the game and the way he thought about it afterwards is just extraordinary,” he said. “He was a really interesting, quirky, and fascinating guy. So it’s a huge loss to the hockey world and to Canada. He represents so many good things about Canada in my eyes.”
McCormack ultimately got a firsthand view of Dryden’s perceptiveness.
“When I wrote Understanding Ken, I wrote him a letter saying, ‘You’re such an important part of my childhood, and this book is sort of an ode to you.’ Even though he comes off as a villain in a certain way in the book, that wasn’t true at all for me as a kid.”
Dryden didn’t respond. But 16 years later, McCormack interviewed Dryden in Toronto for the Sports on Fire documentary series that aired on HBO Canada. The first episode was devoted to the 1972 Summit Series between Canada and the Soviet Union.
“He walks in and says ‘Oh, by the way, my wife read your book. She really liked it.'”
Dryden’s lone visit to Trail came on Sept. 14, 2006, while he was campaigning for the leadership of the federal Liberal party.
On that stop, he was presented with a replica sweater of the Trail Smoke Eaters 1961 World Championship team by team members Norm Lenardon and Dave Rusnell.
Dryden said while he had never been to Trail before, he knew the city’s name well thanks to the Smoke Eaters. “In 1961, at a time when there were only two NHL teams in Canada, for a time the third most-famous hockey team in the country was the Trail Smoke Eaters,” he told the Trail Daily Times.
“Everybody followed the Smoke Eaters, and when they won the World Championship, we knew all the names. We knew Harry Smith and Seth Martin, and Norm and Dave. They were household names to us.”
Reporter Raymond Masleck wrote that Dryden looked “somewhat tired” after months of campaigning and also “rumpled” after Air Canada lost his luggage on a flight to Calgary. Dryden drove to Trail from Cranbrook and declared the leadership race “endless, but terrifically interesting.”
At the time, polls reported Dryden was in third place. He was ultimately eliminated on the second ballot. Stephane Dion ended up winning, but only remained leader for two years.
Dryden died Friday of cancer at age 78.
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