Put in uniform at six or seven, by the time a boy reaches the NHL, he is a veteran of close to 1,000 games-30-minute games, later 32-, then 45, finally 60-minute games, played more than : twice a week, more than seventy times a year between late September and late March. It is more games from a younger age, over a longer season than ever before. But it is less hockey than ever before. For, every time a twelve-year-old boy plays a 30-minute game, sharing the ice with teammates, he plays only about ten minutes. And ten minutes a game, anticipated and prepared for all day, traveled to and from, dressed and undressed for, means ten minutes of hockey a day, more than two days a week, more than seventy days a hockey season. And every day that a twelve-year-old plays only ten minutes, he doesn’t play two hours on a backyard rink, or longer on school or playground rinks during weekends and holidays.
It all has to do with the way we look at free time. Constantly preoccupied with time and keeping ourselves busy (we have come to answer the ritual question “How are you?” with what we apparently equate with good health, “Busy”), we treat non-school, non-sleeping or non-eating time, unbudgeted free time, with suspicion and no little fear. For, while it may offer opportunity to learn and do new things, we worry that the time we once spent reading, kicking a ball, or mindlessly coddling a puck might be used destructively, in front of TV, or “getting into trouble” in endless ways. So we organize free time, scheduling it into lessons – ballet, piano, French – into organizations, teams, and clubs, fragmenting it into impossible-to-be-boring segments, creating in ourselves a mental metabolism geared to moving on, making free time distinctly unfree.
It is in free time that the special player develops, not in the competitive expedience of games, in hour-long practices once a week, in mechanical devotion to packaged, processed, coaching manual, hockey-school skills. For while skills are necessary, setting out as they do the limits of anything, more is needed to transform those skills into something special. Mostly it is time unencumbered, unhurried, time of a different quality, more time, time to find wrong answers to find a few that are right; time to find your own right answers; time for skills to be practiced to set higher limits, to settle and assimilate and become fully and completely yours, to organize and combine with other skills comfortably and easily in some uniquely personal way, then to be set loose, trusted, to find new instinctive directions to take, to create.
But without such time a player is like a student cramming for exams. His skills are like answers memorized by his body, specific, limited to what is expected, random and separate, with no overviews to organize and bring them together. And for those times when more is demanded, when new unexpected circumstances come up, when answers are asked for things you’ve never learned, when you must intuit and piece together what you already know to find new answers, memorizing isn’t enough. It’s the difference between knowledge and understanding, between a super-achiever and a wise old man. And it’s the difference between a modern suburban player and a player like Lafleur.
For a special player has spent time with his game. On backyard rinks, in local arenas, in time alone and with others, time without short-cuts, he has seen many things, he has done many things, he has experienced the game. He understands it. There is scope and culture in his game. He is not a born player. What he has is not a gift, random and otherworldly, and unearned. There is surely something in his genetic make-up that allows him to be great, but just as surely there are others like him who fall short. He is, instead, a natural.
“Muscle memory” is a phrase physiologists sometimes use. It means that for many movements we make, our muscles move with no message from the brain telling them to move, that stored in the muscles is a learned capacity to move a certain way, and, given stimulus from the spinal cord, they move that way. We see a note on a sheet of music, our fingers move; no thought, no direction, and because one step of the transaction is eliminated – the information-message loop through the brain – we move faster as well.
When first learning a game, a player thinks through every step of what he’s doing, needing to direct his body the way he wants it to go. With practice, with repetition, movements get memorized, speeding up, growing surer, gradually becoming part of the muscle’s memory. The great player, having seen and done more things, more different and personal things, has in his muscles the memory of more notes, more combinations and patterns of notes, played in more different ways. Faced with a situation, his body responds. Faced with something more, something new, it finds an answer he didn’t know was there. He invents the game.
– Ken Dryden, The Game
North American athletes play far too often, which is the reason why other countries have closed the gap in international competition, whether on the ice or the hardwood. European basketball clubs practice twice daily, improving individual moves and shooting skills. Hockey clubs emphasize quickness and passing in extensive development programmes. Plus fitness.
United States and Canadian sports organizations devote excessive time to playing and traveling. As Dryden alluded, muscle memory falls by the wayside when seated in a car or on the bench. Why should a high school player go from league game to club tournament – barely playing – when he could practice on his own and receive one-on-one attention? Skilled coaches do their best work in small groups.
La joie de vivre, ou la joie de jouer, est trés importante. Ken Dryden mentioned this in 1980 and it has proven itself to be true repeatedly: in the 1988, 1998, 2004, and 2006 Olympics for starters, as Europeans and South Americans have entered the Association, as skilled post play is replaced by mere size and athleticism.
Fundamentals remain paramount. An athlete cannot succeed without outstanding performance factors and exceptional skills. A student-athlete cannot land a scholarship without grades. A country may have won in the past but they must continually improve the entire sport system to win in the future. After all, John Wooden was correct when he said that “it’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”