Quotes from Ken Dryden

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.

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.

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,

850 square feet. It's what forced the Bowmans and everyone else on the Avenues outside. And it was these outdoor spaces—not the closed-in world of flats and row houses of Verdun—that defined them.

But while Kravitz has a need to perform, with Sam you saw nothing. Things just got done. And when he wasn't doing, he was thinking—he was doing things inside his head. In the rinks and parks of Snowdon, he learned that if you know everything about everything, people listen. And if you're willing to do everything, people let you.

In the off-season, it wasn't games that the players missed—it was their teammates. It was the team.

In the Canadiens' dressing room, on a wall above the players' lockers, is a line from John McCrae's poem, "In Flanders Fields." It reads: To you from failing hands we throw the torch, be yours to hold it high.

It didn't matter if someone else scored more goals or had more points or was the league's MVP; there might be many leaders on the team, but the Rocket was its spirit.

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.

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

I know that pucks are now shot faster by more fast shooters. I know that players train harder and longer, and receive better coaching. I know that in any way an athlete can be measured--in strength, in speed, in height or distance jumped--he is immensely superior to the one who performed twenty years ago. But measured against a memory, he has no chance. I know what I feel.

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?

It is easy to say that a fan can stay at home, or at home he can change a channel and watch something else. But it isn't as simple as that. A sports fan loves his sport. A fan in Toronto loves hockey, and if the Leafs are bad, he loses something he loves and has no way to replace the loss.

Nothing is as good as it used to be, and it never was. The 'golden age of sports,' the golden age of anything, is the age of everyone's childhood.