Quotes from The Game

Ken Dryden ·  320 pages

Rating: (4.6K votes)


“Ya writin’ a book? Hey great. Need some help? Want some of my quips? Hey, we could do it together. We’d quip ’em to death. Give ’em quiplash hee hee hee.”
― Ken Dryden, quote from The Game


“I feel nothing, I hear nothing, my eyes watch the puck, my body moves—like a goalie moves, like I move; I don’t tell it to move or how to move or where, I don’t know it’s moving, I don’t feel it move—yet it moves. And when my eyes watch the puck, I see things I don’t know I’m seeing. I see Larson and Nedomansky as they come on the ice, I see them away from the puck unthreatening and uninvolved. I see something in the way a shooter holds his stick, in the way his body angles and turns, in the way he’s being checked, in what he’s done before that tells me what he’ll do—and my body moves. I let it move. I trust it and the unconscious mind that moves it.”
― Ken Dryden, quote from The Game


“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,”
― Ken Dryden, quote from The Game


“When you are a presence, there are many things you need not do, for it is simply understood you can do them. So you don’t do them. You don’t risk what you need not risk, you let others’ imaginations do them for you, for they do them better than you can. Like the man who opens his mouth to prove he’s a fool, often the more you do, the more you look like everyone else.”
― Ken Dryden, quote from The Game


“Yet, in fact, both were deeply sensitive and very much alike, Frank keeping everything inside, Pete letting it out, and steamrollering it before it could bother him.”
― Ken Dryden, quote from The Game



“But life on the road comes at a price. The energy it gives, the freedom you feel, it takes away, and more—twenty-six weeks a season, eighty games, from bus to plane to bus to hotel to bus to arena to bus to plane, to a leagueful of cities three times a week. A rhythm like any other rhythm, it is one you get used to; except this one is always changing and you never do. Like a skillful runner in a distance race, it sets the pace and plays with you; going slower than you want it to, speeding up before you are ready, gradually wearing you down, until after four games in five nights in four different cities, you are weak and vulnerable, and it sprints away from you.”
― Ken Dryden, quote from The Game


“Once I didn’t. Once, as I was told I should, I kept a “book” on all the players I knew, with notes about wrist shots, slap shots, backhands, quick releases or slow, glove side or stick side, high or low; about forehand dekes or backhand dekes, and before a game, I would memorize and rehearse all that was there. But when my body prepared for Thompson’s backhand before I knew it was Thompson, I realized that what was in my book, and more, was stored away in my mind and muscles as nerve impulses, ready, able to move my body before I could.”
― Ken Dryden, quote from The Game


“For there is a life there, and in destiny and romance there is no room for life. Painted as they are with broad brush strokes, vivid and lush, they find shape and pattern only with distance. The person who lives them is too close. He feels sweat as well as triumph. He understands what others see, but feels none of it himself”
― Ken Dryden, quote from The Game


“As for the Wings, I wanted to tighten some already painfully tight screws, to force on them the kind of cruel question no one should have to answer: am I willing to go through what surely I must, for something I will surely never get?”
― Ken Dryden, quote from The Game


About the author

Ken Dryden
Born place: in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Born date August 8, 1947
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