The Game by Ken Dryden (Winter 2011)
A few years ago on Grantland, the now-defunct site run by columnist and current head of The Ringer's Bill Simmons, I read a piece by Ken Dryden responding to the ongoing debate about physicality in the NHL. This column remains to this day one of my favorite-ever pieces.
The reason Simmons asked Dryden to write for his site, I'm sure, was because of The Game, a book Dryden wrote during the final season of his legendary career as goalie for the Montreal Canadiens. Originally published in 1983, The Game is commonly cited as the best hockey book ever written. Simmons himself referenced it a number of times in his pre-Grantland columns and later editions of The Game included a foreword the current Ringer boss.
Dryden's description of his coach, Scotty Bowman, forever altered the way I looked at leadership. Although the two shared many successful seasons together in Montreal, Dryden admits they do not have a very deep or personal relationship. But as a professional, he fully understands Bowman (1).
As Dryden describes it, the decorated coach is disinterested in a host of factors lesser managers often obsess about: coming to practice early, not staying out too late at night, being a friendly person, attending optional workouts, and so on. The only thing Bowman considered, Dryden notes, is whether a player is capable of helping the team. Once it became clear a player was no longer useful, Bowman moved on to someone else (2).
Not all of these details were immediately relevant for me, of course. But understanding the thought process helped clarify my own understanding of a manager's role. If someone in my team regularly arrived last to the office every morning, was this a problem for me to worry about? Or was it an opportunity to adjust my own expectations and get more out of the team?
For us, staggering arrivals and departures over a 730am - 630pm block turned out to work far better than having everyone work strictly between 845am - 515pm. It was, in an almost completely invisible way, innovative. I bet a lot of what Bowman did to improve his teams was just as invisible to outsiders yet indispensable to his team's success.
Footnotes / imagined complaints
1. It could have just been an age difference, quite frankly...
Perhaps Bowman, seeing a difficult day in the future when he would need to demote or release Dryden, chose to keep the relationship at arm's length in order to ease the goalie transition. It is perhaps equally likely that Dryden, fully understanding the coach's methods, did the same to protect himself from being hurt or betrayed by the decision. I suppose there does not need to be an answer at all; sometimes, friendships do not develop, just because.
2. But everyone is like this, right?
Careful and knowledgeable sports fans, I think, will find this profile of the coach hugely informative. In some ways, he was the first of his kind, a type of coach currently best embodied by Bill Belichick: interested only in the success of the team.
And yet, despite the success these types tend to have, their existence is a rarity among the coaching ranks. I'm sure there are many reasons to explain this. But when coaches fail, they seem to do so after making decisions (or non-decisions) to keep players no longer able to help the team for just a little too long.
It reminds me of a remark from Alfred P. Sloan in his My Years with General Motors, a memoir about his time at the head of the massive automobile corporation. He cites one of the major problems in large corporations as a reluctance to act on poor personnel.
