As published in the Hamilton Spectator
April 11, 2009
Photo: Scott Gardner, the Hamilton Spectator
Meet the man behind the mask, the one who stopped Bobby Hull, lost to Gretzky and mentored the iconic Ken
STEVE BUIST
Dave Dryden walked into the old Chicago Stadium, looked around and tried not to be intimidated, either by the enormity of the building or the situation he now found himself facing. Back in the days of the NHL's original six teams, the stadium was easily the league's largest rink, and this was about to become Dryden's new home as a goalie for the Chicago Blackhawks.
Somehow, in a matter of months, he had gone from teaching school and playing goal on the side for the Galt Hornets of the Ontario senior A league, to the Buffalo Bisons of the American Hockey League, to the biggest stage in hockey's big league.
It was September 1965, and training camp for the Blackhawks was going to start the following day.
"Back then, the guys never worked out in the summer," said Dryden. "You'd show up, get your skates sharpened, skate around, and the next day, you'd start your practices."
Dryden had been told to be at the rink by 10 a.m. to make sure his equipment fitted but, excited and eager, he was far too early. There was no one else in the dressing room.
He suited up in his new goalie gear and wandered out alone onto the Chicago Stadium ice, taking lap after lap on his own.
"The dressing rooms at the Chicago Stadium were downstairs, so you had to walk upstairs to go on the ice," Dryden recalled. "I could hear footsteps on the stairs."
It was Bobby Hull.
"So here I am on the ice, skating around all by myself with Bobby Hull," said Dryden. "We skated around and chatted, I don't know what about, and he said 'How about I take some shots on you?' I thought 'Hoo boy.'
Dryden said Hull "did 10 breakaways on me, and I beat him every time."
They headed back down to the dressing room and, by this time, about 15 more players had arrived.
"Bobby just said 'Guys, this is Dave Dryden, he just stoned me 10 out of 10 times and this guy is good,'" Dryden said.
"You never forget that. Bobby, he probably wouldn't remember that, but for me, that's something I'll always remember.
"It gave me every sense of confidence. I mean, there's no bloody way I should have made the team."
A door closes, a window opens. Right place at the right time. Call it what you want, it always seemed to work out that way for Dave Dryden throughout his hockey career.
You'd be excused for not knowing there were two Dryden brothers who played goaltender in the NHL.
Any Canadian hockey fan is familiar with younger brother Ken, the hall-of-famer for the Montreal Canadiens, member of Team Canada, which beat the Soviets in the 1972 Summit Series, and now a Liberal MP.
Fewer are familiar with his elder brother Dave, who knocked around the NHL and WHA from 1965 to 1979 with Chicago, Buffalo and Edmonton -- a career that started as an emergency replacement for Gump Worsley and ended with Wayne Gretzky as a teammate.
Fewer still would know that Dave Dryden is credited with changing the way the game is played.
"Dave completely revolutionized how a goaltender plays," Ken said from his office on Parliament Hill.
"That is something that should not be underestimated at all," he added. "People think of goaltending being transformed by Jacques Plante and Glenn Hall with the butterfly, but the third transformational figure in goaltending is my brother."
One was the teacher, literally, and one was the student.
One was the innovator, always tinkering, always asking why. The other would become an iconic figure, the calm, cerebral backstop of a hockey dynasty during the '70s, then a celebrated author and politician.
"I mean, who knows, way back when you're a kid, what motivates you, but I'm almost sure the reason I wanted to be a goalie and only be a goalie was because of Dave," said Ken. "Here's a kid who's six years older, doing all the things I wanted to do. He was a pitcher and a shortstop; I was a pitcher and a shortstop. He was a goalie; I was a goalie.
"It was hero worship," Ken added. "It wasn't rivalry.
"He didn't treat me as an annoyance. He never made me feel that way."
The Dryden brothers were born in Hamilton -- Dave in 1941 and Ken in 1947 -- and they lived on Haddon Avenue North, near McMaster University.
"A two-storey house with a coal bin in the basement," Dave recalled. "I remember the cupboards in the kitchen were big enough that if I took the pots and pans out, I could crawl in there and hide. It's funny the things you remember."
Goaltender was the only position that ever interested either of the Drydens. Dave's only game as a forward was a charity match after he retired. Ken played parts of three games out of the net until the end of his NHL career.
"For some reason, I loved to catch and loved to react to things," said Dave, who now lives in Oakville and is and chair of the Sleeping Children Around The World charity, an organization started by his parents, Murray, and Margaret.
"It was more fun to be on the defensive and stop somebody than to be out there on the offence all the time," Dave added.
A fluke injury pushed Dave Dryden into his first NHL game in 1962 while he was still a junior with the Toronto Marlboros.
It was one of those right place at the right time moments.
Back in those days, NHL teams carried only one goalie, so the Maple Leafs would pay one of their junior goalies from the Marlies $10 to sit in the stands in case either team needed a fill-in.
The New York Rangers had come to Maple Leaf Gardens, and just as the second period started, Ranger goalie Gump Worsley threw out his back. "They had to drag him off the ice, literally," Dave said.
Dryden was summoned from the stands, threw on Marlie equipment and Gump's sweater, and played the final two periods against his parent club. His first save was a breakaway by the Leafs' Dave Keon.
He let in three goals, including one with less than a minute to go, as the Rangers lost 4-1, but by all accounts, Dryden performed admirably.
"There are very few games I can remember, but I can remember almost everything of that game," Dryden said. "There was one shot that absolutely convinced me that there are instances when you know ahead of time what's going to happen."
With about three seconds to go in the second period, there was a faceoff to Dryden's left.
"As we started lining up, I knew that they were going to win the draw, that Bobby Nevin was going to get the puck and that Bobby was going to shoot low on my stick side," said Dryden. "I just knew it."
Years later, when Ken was president of the Maple Leafs, he went into the club's archives, found the footage from his brother's first game, had it transferred to a DVD and gave it to Dave as a Christmas present.
Watching it confirmed Dave's own memory of the game, and his premonition about that one play.
"They won the draw, it went back to Nevin, he took a shot that was going right in the very bottom right-hand corner, and I got my toe on it," said Dryden. "I remember going off the ice thinking 'I knew that was going to happen.'
"I don't know why, but I knew it before it happened."
Dave Dryden never set out to be an NHL goalie.
"Honestly, I didn't think I was cut out for it," he said. "I knew I was a pretty good goaltender, and I knew on the good nights, I could be a really good goaltender, but I just didn't have an image of myself as a professional goalie."
He was a teacher by age 20, playing goal for the Galt Hornets on the side and taking courses at the University of Waterloo.
In February 1965, Dryden's season with Galt came to a premature end when he developed pneumonia. Weeks later, however, he got an unexpected call from the Buffalo Bisons, Chicago's farm team in the AHL.
Bison goalie Eddie Chadwick was injured, and one of the Bison players, former Hamilton Red Wing Larry Ziliotto, had played with Dryden in Galt and recommended him as a replacement.
Dryden was called up for two weekend games, won both and recorded a shutout.
The Bisons' coach believed Dryden was the team's new good luck charm, so he'd call him up for weekend games -- the only time Dryden could play because of his teaching duties -- even after Buffalo's regular goalie returned from injury.
A door closes, a window opens.
"At the end of it, Chicago asked 'Do you want to come to training camp next year?'" Dryden recalled. "I said 'Well, I won't go unless I have a contract.'
"It had to be three times what I made as a teacher," Dryden said. "Which meant $10,000."
By the 1969-70 season, Dryden could see that his days were numbered in Chicago.
The Blackhawks had picked up Tony Esposito, and he was tearing the league apart in his first full year, recording an incredible 15 shutouts on his way to Rookie of the Year honours.
Dryden played a few games in the minors then decided to go back to Toronto to teach school.
But the NHL had expanded again and Dryden was picked up by the new Buffalo Sabres.
"I was totally rejuvenated," said Dryden. "Buffalo was my best place."
During the first season, the Sabres carried three goalies, and Dryden wasn't seeing much action so he asked coach Punch Imlach to send him to Buffalo's farm team in Salt Lake City to get some playing time.
While he was in the minors, he hurt his shoulder just before being called back to the NHL to join the Sabres for a road game in Minnesota in March 1971.
Sabres' coach Punch Imlach used to designate which goalie would be playing by walking around the dressing room before a game and kicking the leg pads of the starter.
Dryden wasn't expecting to play, then watched in horror as Imlach walked past veteran Roger Crozier and kicked Dryden's pads. He raced to the trainer and had him quickly apply some ointment to his ailing shoulder.
Dryden then went out and led the Sabres to a 5-0 win.
"I think I've still got the puck," Dryden said. "Forty-eight shots, and I get a shutout."
"I was right out of my mind. That changed my career, that one bloody game."
Shortly after, the Sabres traded away their third goalie.
Right place at the right time.
Dryden spent four seasons with the Sabres, with his workload increasing each year.
During the 1973-74 season, he appeared in 53 of Buffalo's 78 games and played in the NHL all-star game.
"Much to my embarrassment," Dryden cringed. "I was awful.
"There's a guy who owes me a truck, and that's Garry Unger," he added.
Unger scored three goals on Dryden during the game, and was rewarded with a new truck when he was named MVP of the all-star game.
"I always told him that truck was half mine," Dryden joked.
After the 1973-74 season ended, Imlach told Dryden he was probably going to be traded. Dryden decided to jump to the Chicago Cougars of the rival World Hockey Association, a team coached by Pat Stapleton, an old friend from their days together on the Blackhawks.
"I was actually looking forward to it," Dryden said. "The NHL, at the time I left, was the Broad Street Bullies.
"There was such a sense of gang intimidation on the ice all the time," he added. "That was the winning style, and you couldn't knock it, but a lot of guys really weren't comfortable with that.
"And you could certainly get more money going to the WHA."
One small problem, though. The Kaiser brothers, who owned the Cougars, were going bankrupt.
Early in the season, Dryden, Stapleton, teammate Ralph Backstrom and Stapleton's lawyer, ended up as co-owners of the Chicago franchise, backed financially by the league.
"We said 'Yeah, what the heck,'" Dryden recalled. "What was obvious right off the bat was that we were losing a lot of money. I think they lost over a million dollars while we were running the team.
"My credit card was maxed out," he said. "Some of the cheques that we were giving to the guys had bounced.
"You go to the airport and you've got 25 guys with you and they say 'Well, who's paying for the tickets?' and it's 'Oh God, here's the credit card, put it on my card.'"
The Cougars disbanded after the 1974-75 season, and Dryden ended up with the Edmonton Oilers.
Another door closes, another window opens.
"People said, 'You don't want to go to Edmonton-- that's the end of the world,'" Dryden said. "Well, it wasn't. It was a great place to go."
By the 1978-79 season, Dryden was making $125,000 a year. "That was good money," he added. "I was very happy."
In October 1978, Dryden became the answer to a trivia question -- he was the goalie who allowed Wayne Gretzky's first goal as a pro hockey player.
Gretzky was a skinny 17-year-old playing for the Indianapolis Racers when Dryden and the Oilers arrived in town early in the season.
Stapleton was now coaching the Racers, so Dryden called him up the night before the game and asked how things were going.
"He said, 'I've got this kid, Gretzky, on the team. He's a wonderful kid, but he hasn't scored a goal, and I don't know what to do with him,'" Dryden recalled.
The next night, Gretzky scored his first, a low backhander from far out that beat Dryden on the stick side. You can even watch it on YouTube, Dryden's told.
"I don't want to watch that friggin' thing," Dryden laughed.
Eight seconds after the first Gretzky goal, Dryden was also the goalie who allowed the Great One's second professional goal.
"I think the second one was through my legs," he admitted, sheepishly. "It was a dink-ass goal. I was so ticked afterwards."
A week later, Gretzky became Dryden's teammate when financial pressures forced Racers' flamboyant owner Nelson Skalbania to dump his teenaged phenom.
"When Wayne came to Edmonton, the first thing I said to him was, 'Hey kid, you're in this league because of me,'" Dryden joked.
Playing against him in practice, however, taught Dryden what made Gretzky special.
"If you had him just take shots on you, his shot wasn't great," said Dryden. "It was very average. But he had the ability to outwait just about anybody.
"As a goalie, I found the way to play against Wayne was to do nothing. So when he came in on you, you just waited and waited ...
"As soon as you made an anticipatory move, he'd go the other way. He had such a great ability to react to a situation.
"But the other thing was he just had so much confidence," Dryden explained. "Not boastful or arrogant, though. He'd come down the ice on the wing, shoot from 30 feet, and I'd stop it, and he'd say, 'Gee Dave, you're lucky. I should have scored on that.'
"And it was like, 'Wayne, give it a break, you shouldn't score one out of a 100 from there.' But he was so used to being successful that he just expected to be successful. The only other guy I've ever played against who was like that was Bobby Orr."
One of Dryden's other teammates in Edmonton was Steve Carlson, better known as one of the Hanson brothers in the movie Slap Shot.
"We went into Quebec City for one game, and at the end of the game, this guy comes in the dressing room door and it's Paul Newman," Dryden recalled. "Stevie took him around and introduced him to everybody."
Dryden was named the WHA's Most Valuable Player for the 1978-79 season, winning 41 of the 63 games he played in and allowing an impressive 2.89 goals per game. That made him the answer to another trivia question -- the last player to be named MVP of the WHA.
That summer, the Oilers and three other WHA teams were absorbed by the NHL when the league folded.
When the 1979-80 season started, Dryden was 38, and he knew his time was almost up. He wasn't playing well, and he was beginning to worry that he was hurting, not helping, the team.
In December, during a pregame skate in Denver, he went up to coach Glen Sather and simply told him he was retiring after that game.
"I just knew," Dryden said. "I always wanted to retire when I knew it was the time. I never regretted it."
Throughout his career, Dryden was constantly tinkering with his goaltender equipment. The great irony was that goalie gear weighed about 40 pounds in those days, and yet despite that bulky weight, it did a horrible job of protecting a goalie.
"Especially arm pads -- traditionally they were awful, like quilted nothing," said brother Ken. "And they just about did nothing.
"He decided to question everything about the nature of equipment," Ken added.
Why leather? Why deer hair in the pads? Why not nylon and foam and plastic?
"He would break down equipment, weigh each individual component and then ask himself if there was another material that could be used that was lighter that would be just as effective," Ken said.
"Goalie equipment is so much bigger than it was before," added Ken. "If there wasn't the change in materials, that 40 pounds of equipment would be 70 pounds of equipment now, and it would be unwearable.
"Now this equipment that is so much larger than before actually is also so much lighter."
But Dave Dryden's greater contribution was reinventing the goalie mask. The combination fibreglass shell and wire cage model he developed remains the standard for goaltenders today.
"The first masks that we wore didn't stop us from getting hurt -- they stopped us from getting cut," said Dave.
He used to make his own masks, so he took one of his old ones, cut a hole in the front, then began using solder wire to create different grid patterns that would maximize both visibility and protection. Once he found the right pattern, he had someone make the wire cage and attach it to the outer shell.
"You almost never see a goalie injured from being hit in the mask now," said Ken. "They'll do a little shake of the head, and then they're back into it."
The standup style of goaltending that was popular through the 1970s had almost nothing to do with playing the position effectively, Ken noted.
"It was a compromise for safety," he said. "It was a way of keeping your head above the bar, out of the way of just about every shot that would come in.
"It's allowed every goalie to change their style from standup to butterfly to deep butterfly to even the Dominik Hasek dimension because their face is no longer vulnerable," Ken said. "That has completely changed how people play goal.
"By far, the best style is to bring all of your body under the bar because with all of your body under the bar, you've got that much more of the net protected."
Better protection of the head and body, combined with lighter equipment, has revolutionized the way goaltenders play.
"We became like an octopus because what was important was the flexibility to get any part of your body in front of the puck," Dave said, "because no matter where you got hit, it wasn't going to hurt.
"As soon as a high level of fear was taken out of the game for the goalies, it just absolutely liberated them to do whatever they wanted."
"And that's all because of what Dave introduced," Ken added proudly.
sbuist@thespec.com
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