A GOALIE, A GENTLEMAN, A GIANT: Remembering Ken Dryden
- Anthony Pellegrino
- Sep 6
- 3 min read
Six Stanley Cups, a book that redefined how hockey could be written, and a life lived with dignity and thought beyond the crease.
By Anthony Pellegrino @Pellegrinoap50 TheFrozenFocus.com NHL Correspondent
A remembrance.
The hockey world lost one of its finest yesterday. Ken Dryden was more than a goaltender. He was calm when the rink roared, steady when the Canadiens soared, and reflective when the game was over.
Dryden passed away on Friday after a battle with cancer. He was 78.
Playing just eight full seasons in the NHL, all with the Montreal Canadiens, the Hall of Fame Goaltender became the backbone of one of hockey’s great dynasties, in a short time.
Between 1970 and 1979, the luminary ambassador of hockey backstopped Montreal to six Stanley Cups, and collected nearly every honor a goaltender could: the Calder, the Conn Smythe and five Vezina Trophies.
At 6-foot-4, Dryden was dubbed the ‘four-storey goalie,’ towering in an age of smaller nets and shorter men.
He rarely scrambled. He played as if he had more time than anyone else on the ice.
During stoppages, he leaned on his stick, mask off, studying the play with a patience that became his signature. The image most commonly associated with Dryden today.
For all his presence in the league, his career was startlingly brief. Dryden played fewer than 400 games, retiring at 31, still at the height of his powers.
He indeed left by choice, before time or decline could take him.
It was no secret in the Montreal room that Dryden’s world was larger than hockey.
“We didn’t see hockey players coming into the dressing room with books under their arms. After practice, he was going to McGill University.” - Serge Savard
Why McGill? Dryden was simultaneously studying to earn his law degree even as he backstopped the Canadiens.
Even in the middle of a dynasty, he was splitting his days between the Forum and the law library.
That was Dryden. One foot in the crease, the other already beyond it.
When the Forum lights dimmed, he carried the same patience into another world: The House of Commons.
Dryden traded the crease for Parliament Hill, his voice transforming from shaping policy instead of steadying a defense corps.
After McGill came speeches in Ottawa, where the same calm that marked his game marked his politics.
"Few Canadians have given more, or stood taller, for our country. Ken Dryden was Big Canada. And he was Best Canada. Rest in peace." - Canadian PM Mark Carney
Dryden would return to hockey with a headset in 1980. During the Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, he served as a CBC analyst.
On the night the United States stunned the Soviet Union, his voice carried Canadian viewers through one of the game’s most unforgettable upsets: Miracle on Ice.
Three years later, his voice reached even further in the hockey world.
In 1983, he published The Game, a book that was more than a memoir. Dubbed as "the greatest hockey book of all time," it was part diary, part meditation, and it gave hockey a seriousness it had rarely been afforded in print.
The book captured not only what it meant to play goal in Montreal in the 1970s, but what it felt like to live inside the sport. Through its routines, its anxieties, and its moments of grace.
Dryden wrote with the same patience that had marked his play, sentences unhurried, deliberate, observant.
Four decades later, it remains the book against which all hockey writing is measured, still regarded as the finest account of the game from the inside.
Dryden was a Hall of Fame goaltender, inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1983. He earned just about every accolade a goalie could earn.
Yet at the core, what set him apart, was not the trophies or the titles, but the humility he carried off the ice. He had a quiet greatness that felt as rare as it was genuine.
Ken Dryden gave back more than he ever took, and leaves behind a steadiness that the sport, and the country, will search for, and ache for, for time to come.
Hockey’s calm in the storm, and Canada’s quiet giant.
The game, and the country, will never feel as steady without him.
Comments