The Game: 30th Anniversary Edition

I am an amateur adult recreational ice hockey player, age 69, started skating and learned to play when I went to college at Cornell. Dryden started there the year after I graduated, so we played at the same rink, but of course different times. This book has been called the best ice hockey book ever written. I completely agree. It is well written, the accounts are vivid, his personal insights are very interesting, and are so much about life as about ice hockey specifically. I liked it so much I bought another four copies to share with some of my team mates. Well, it does provide a lot of insight specifically about the develoment of ice hockey too, in terms of style of play, the significance of certain rule changes, and I expect tomorrow night when I step out onto the ice, I will be thinking of Dryden and connecting it together.

What a wonderful book about life on one of the most dominant teams in the history of sports. Dryden did an amazing job with this book - it covers the big names on the Canadien teams of the 70s but it was so much more at the same time. He obviously is very intelligent and the writing reflects this - this isn’t your normal book written by a start athlete.Great insights into life and the history of hockey. Lots of history I had no idea about and Dryden does an outstanding job analyzing how new rules changed the games and how the game resisted the changes. The Soviets were obviously on his mind as Dryden spends time showing how the Soviets impacted the game.

A highly entertaining and informative book about old-timey hockey. He had great anecdotes about interactions between players, media, and management in the locker rooms and I LOVED the way he clearly conveyed what goes through a goalie's head during the game.One caveat: seeing as most of the events that this book described took place well before I was born, I had trouble telling a lot of the people apart. He assumes you know all of the Canadiens players from the 70s, their personalities, their playing styles. Maybe I'm just not the intended audience, but I kept having to Google people.But still, extremely well-written, funny, and heartwarming. Would recommend to any hockey fan.

This book by former Montréal Canadiens Goalie Ken Dryden is nothing short of brilliant. It is certainly the best sports related biography I have ever read to this point in my life. As much as I enjoy Baseball biographies of former players of years gone by; this book by far outdoes them all. As a young lad growing up in Ontario Canada and prior to moving as a kid to Southern California – Ken Dryden was for me at the time a person I liked to despise – this of course due to my allegiance to the Toronto Maple Leafs. I have of course grown softer with age and with life experiences that have brought a reality of “not so tough” mentality; I have over the recent decade and a half followed the Montréal Canadiens as I do occasionally the NY Yankees and Boston Red Sox (even though my MLB teams are the Anaheim Angels and Washington Nationals). A game of tradition, history, a rich past it is apparent the 1967 expansion changed the game forever. Bob Dylan once said “Reality Has Many Heads” – so no wonder I came to see in print within this book the same feelings I held but didn’t want to accept that the “Maple Leaf/Canadiens rivalry is dead….has been since the late 1960’s” There goes my childhood (LOL) even though I became a Los Angeles Kings fan and later Anaheim Ducks fan in Southern California. The Gretzky years in Los Angeles were both fun and invigorating – the loss of the 1993 Stanley Cup to Les Habitant de Montréal was the result of a game changer when Marty McSorley was tossed from a game by a referee for having too large a curve on his Hockey stick. I was at the Great Western Forum in Los Angeles the night Wayne Gretzky scored goal number “802”.Mr. Dryden is first and foremost not a boaster of his sports accomplishments; he prefers to draw attention in his book to those around him who played positively with a work ethic incumbent upon any profession. He isn’t a “snob” either in that he references periodically through his books other great sports stars in a personal occasional comparison of the NBA, MLB, NFL and there is quite an interesting passage as well that reflects the personality of a goalie. He uses this reference of reflection in the same manner that he considers a Soccer star from Europe – it is apparent that “good” goalies have rather introverted tendencies – the last line of defense in both Soccer and Hockey. I have a personal opinion that Hockey Goalies in North America are more acutely in tune with their MLB Catchers counterpart – the bending is more frequent in Hockey than soccer and the position requires a tighter space to operate within (about the same space a catcher deals with only a bit higher and wider than the strike box). Home plate or a Hockey net require control and precise ability. Jonathan Quick of the Los Angeles Kings was drafted by both the NHL and MLB for his abilities as a player on both the Hockey and Baseball Collegiate teams he played for while attending the University of Massachusetts. Mr. Dryden won 5 Stanley Cups, was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1983 and took a year off of his NHL career to finish his law degree at McGill University in Toronto; but, he earned a B.A. in History at Cornell University – he later became a Canadian Politician elected to office in the Liberal Party – the Party that currently holds the Prime Minister’s Office of Canada. He won 76 of 81 collegiate starts while playing goalie for Cornell Big Red; in 1967 he helped the team win what we call today the “Frozen Four” for a Collegiate Championship.Mr. Dryden doesn’t brag about any of these personal accomplishments – he is most humble and is careful as to how he approaches his personal awards – his interest lay within the confines of his home and his family. Was great to read a sports book where there was no wife beating, no alcohol or steroid abuse, no arrests, and no need for intervention of any form at any part of his life. A brilliant Sports Biography – plain and simple. This is the 30th anniversary edition of the first edition printed in 1983; reprinted with an added chapter in 2013.

When hockey was played as a game of skill and not what it has become, and the Montreal Canadiens were at the top of their game, Ken Dry den was a large part of that. It is unusual to have a top-ranked NHL goalie who is also a lawyer. He is eloquent in how wording, and put me right back into those glory years. I remember the game from when I played, as a goalie, but just in pick-up games. I remember the old Forum, and the old teams, and this author will put a hockey fan right into the middle of a team and give a different perspective. I can see why this book is often called the greatest sports book of all time, and, for a hockey fan, I believe that it is.

Ken Dryden esq. writes my favorite memoir of all time, sports or non sports. I’m a hockey lover, and a goalie, but I don’t think you need to be either to enjoy this book full of funny stories and eloquent insights. Not the navel gazing, fart joke, party all night type of pro athlete book (which I also enjoy). But more of an inside look at the day to day lives of these guys, in the locker room, on the bus, after a bad game, after a good game etc. Awesome all around book, very well written, holds up to multiple reads.

Good read and enlightening. Also could have been titled the World According to Ken. Appreciate the fact that he is not your run of the mill jock but he seems to analyze and overanalyze to point of not being able to enjoy what he was accomplishing, which was a lot. I was glad he was able to re-live and have a good time by having the reunion with his childhood friends and old hometown in one of the afterwards. His insights are interesting and in most cases still hold water. Worth the read.

He loved it!

Dryden gives a very open and insightful look into the inner mind of a professional athletes on the road and the mental toughness that is required in the pro sports. A great read.

Really good read to feel what ice hockey was like and what a team is like and how those that play professional sports are different to those who don't.

Great insight of hockey of this era

Good