Free The Game by Ken Dryden

Bowman resigned, Henri Richard called Al MacNeil “incompétent,” the province of Quebec heard him say something quite different, and the Canadiens needed a new coach. At thirty-seven, Scotty Bowman returned to Montreal to take the job he had trained for during most of his life.
    If you ask the players who have played for Bowman if they like him, most will stand shocked, as if the thought never occurred to them, as if the question is somehow inappropriate, as if the answer is entirely self-evident. No, they will say, Scotty Bowman may be a lot of things, but he is not someone you like. A few, usually those who played for him the longest but who now no longer do so, might brighten and answer quickly, as if they had thought about it, maybe a lot about it, in the years since.
    “Yeah sure, I, I really respect the guy. I really admire him. He sure did a lot for me.”
    Scotty Bowman is not someone who is easy to like. He has no coach’s con about him. He does not slap backs, punch arms, or grab elbows. He doesn’t search eyes, spew out ingratiating blarney, or dis-arm with faint, enervating praise. He is shy and not very friendly. If he speaks to reporters or to a team, he talks business, and his eyes sweep several inches above their heads. If he speaks to you alone, as a few times each year you force him to, explaining something that is annoyingly unclear, you share three or four intimate, surprising minutes that bring you closer to him than you ever thought possible. Then, as if he suddenly remembers where he is and what he is doing, he cuts it off—
    “Yeah, yeah, is that it? Good, good”—and before you can answer, it’s over. And if, by chance, your path crosses his away from the rink, at first there will be several awkward “caught in the act” moments.
    Recovering, he may ask how you are, but if he does, he’ll blurt something about Tremblay’s rash or Lemaire’s injury before you can answer. And all the time you talk, one foot on the brake, the other on the accelerator, he lurches away, inch by inch. In the intimacy of a team, Bowman calls Bunny “Michel,” Sharty “Rick,” and Pointu
    “Guy.” Bo and Bird and Co and Shutty are Bob and Larry and Jacques and Steve. He doesn’t call anyone by his nickname.
    Abrupt, straightforward, without flair or charm, he seems cold and abrasive, sometimes obnoxious, controversial, but never colorful. He is not Vince Lombardi, tough and gruff with a heart of gold. His players don’t sit around telling hateful—affectionate stories about him. Someone might say of him, as former Packers great Henry Jordan once said of Lombardi, “He treats us all the same—like dogs,” but he doesn’t. He plays favorites. His favorites, while rarely feeling favored, are those who work and produce for him. He is complex, confusing, misunderstood, unclear in every way but one. He is a brilliant coach, the best of his time.
    He starts each season with a goal—the Stanley Cup—and he has no other. It is part of the Canadiens’ heritage passed from Selke to Pollock, through Dick Irvin, Blake, and Bowman, to the Richards, Béliveau, Lafleur, and the rest. A good season is a Stanley Cup; anything else is not. So in September, in November, in December, and in March, he never loses sight of May. With schizophrenic desperation/perspective, he treats each game as an indicator, as a signpost, en route to May; yet he makes no compromise for any game. He sees an inextricable link between the months and games of a season—“You can’t turn it off and on,” he says, as other coaches say. But Bowman believes what he says, and practices it. Like his mentor, Sam Pollock, he lives with a conviction, what others, less strong, might call paranoia, that no matter how good the team is, it might never win another game. He can see in every game the beginning of a chain of events he cannot stop—a careless loss at home, a tougher game on the road, an injury, three games in four nights, Chartraw