Book a game changer
Ken Dryden urges decisions to make game of hockey safer in his new book Game Change BOOK REVIEW
Steve Montador’s eyes stared into mine with the excitement of a child at Christmas when he learns you are not only surprised that he just got back from Tanzania volunteering with Right To Play, but you are genuinely interested.
There are a dozen people around us throwing back beers and wines, but he has been sober for a few years, his high is helping other people and when he finds an ear that is interested he talks about the experience like a fan returning from his first NHL live game. You envy his journey and sense of helping others.
The last time I had any lengthy talk with Steve Montador was that night in a Peterborough home. It was about helping children who don’t get help.
It was years later I read of his tragic death at the age of 35, but only this week, after reading Ken Dryden’s latest book, that I learned this young man had also needed help.
Montador’s story is one that anyone who cares about hockey, but more importantly anyone who cares about people, should read.
Dryden, a former all star NHL goalie, politician, cabinet minister, and lawyer knows of what he writes. It is as a caring human being that he writes about it.
Dryden’s latest of five books takes us through the history of hockey and its changes. He shifts gears into Montador’s life, his minor hockey, upbringing, junior hockey, many Peterborough and hockey connections, pro hockey career, life, death and ... his brain.
He takes us through hockey’s shifts in speeds, size, development, passing, fighting, team play, salary cap, players and Montador’s tumultuous life, team play, no quit attitude, addictions, cities, changes ... and concussions.
My favourite hockey book is Dryden’s which took us on a ride through a season of the Montreal Canadians. It was a wonderful, magical journey.
Today my favourite sports book is Dryden’s
He takes us on a much different ride. It is not a hockey book, although certainly the game is the focus, but a book that unlike
can give players, parents, coaches, managers, owners, commissioners, league presidents at all levels, something to change and give meaning to Steve Montador’s life and death.
Steve Montador’s brain was badly broken by the time he died, damaged by numerous concussions, stained with CTE discovered after his death.
This book can make a difference in the game unlike any book before it. It can make a change for present and future players if anyone wants to make a difference.
But, as he points out, it all depends on the decision makers. He outlines easily doable changes to the game that can drastically reduce concussions in hockey.
One would think that is what everyone would want, but he points out how tobacco and asbestos health issues should have been no brainers, but we tend to turn blind eyes to the obvious.
His book is complicated. Montador was complicated. Hockey is complicated. Science is complicated. The brain is complicated. His solutions are not. Fans of the movie or the preachings of TV commentator Don Cherry might park their biases while reading this book. Pull them inside out and you’ll get the journey Ken Dryden takes us on. It is the opposite, not entertainment and crazy talk of taking one for the team and tough guys finishing first, but the reality of the damage being allowed to continue on our beloved hockey’s ice.
It is a sober look at what parents allow their children to get into at an early age. It is a document that they can now use to better decide if they should continue if decision makers don’t change the rules so that not only NHLers are playing in a safe environment but so are
The Life And Death Of Steve Montador And The Future Of Hockey
By Ken Dryden • Signal, McClelland and Stewart • 357 pages • $32 our children.
Through Montador’s daily journal along with doctors, experts and the eyes of friends, family and teammates Dryden takes us on the NHL player’s horrific journey climbing up to the joyous, curious, adventurous person he became and taking us on the slide down into the dark hole of concussion’s consequences and conditions, as he writes, “depression, the anxiety, the loss of control, the inability to sleep, the memory loss, the inability to focus, to think rationally, to work things through, the residual of pain in his neck, his shoulders, his back and knees, from thousands of little abuses.”
Dryden pleads for sanity from the NHL, asking for the elimination of the hits to the head simply by eliminating the interpretation of rules that allow the hits and by getting rid of finishing the checks.
He pleads that the NHL implement a brain injury research program which would be so helpful and to initiate public debate on how changes to the game could help. Most of all he wants decisions. “But the answer for brain injuries is not awareness. It is not our scientists, researchers, equipment manufacturers, writers, or film makers. It is in our decision-makers. Decision makers decide.”
He urges that hockey cannot wait for science “it takes time, and games are played tomorrow. And people, and players, have to live with the consequences of tomorrow.”
He says hockey cannot continue to create doubt about the cause of brain injuries.
“After ignorance, after denial, after counter argument and strategic reaction that’s what tobacco companies did. That’s what lead and asbestos companies did. That’s what climate change-deniers do.”
He asks us to look back fifty years at tobacco, lead and asbestos and remind ourselves how we now wonder, “How could we be so stupid?”
“Fifty years from now, people will look back at us with the same incredulous eye about something ... in sports it will be brain injuries. How could they - how would we be so stupid?”
For anyone who reads Steve Montador’s life and Ken Dryden’s incredible story it shouldn’t take 50 years, only the time it takes you to read 357 pages.
“All of us need to be saved from ourselves at times,” writes Dryden. “Steve did. It’s why we have traffic lights. The league needs the players to go full out when it’s time to go full out. The players need the league - it’s doctors, rule-makers, and decision-makers-to say stop when it’s time to stop.”
This book should capture the eyes of our nation and beyond, let’s hope it captures the eyes and action of the people, such as hockey’s most powerful person NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, a decision maker who can decide on hockey’s tomorrow today.
“This book,” writes Dryden “above all, is about outrage and hope. Outrage for what is wrong; hope for what can be made right and how.”
Let’s hope the right people hear the outrage and do what has to be done so we may continue to see and hear the excitement of people when they are telling us their stories and we can follow their journeys into happy and healthy lives.
p.m., OCAA Women's Soccer, Durham Lords vs. Fleming Knights, Fleming Sports Field Complex
p.m., OCAA Men's Soccer, Durham Lords vs. Fleming Knights, Fleming Sports Field Complex
p.m., CUFLA Men's Lacrosse, Queen's Gaels vs. Trent Excalibur, Justin Chiu Stadium
p.m., Hockey, Boston Pizza Icefest AAA Tournament for minor bantam, bantam and peewee divisions, Evinrude Centre, Kinsmen Civic Centre
p.m., Book Signing, Toronto Maple Leafs great Doug Gilmour is signing his book Killer: My Life In Hockey at Chapters