My friend Ken Dryden died on Friday. His is not a name I drop lightly. Calling our friendship a close one would be misleading, but it was a good one for a long time, 50 years. For me, it was never about name dropping.
We’d hoped to meet, for the first time in eight years, in late May. In what would be his last email, Ken wrote:
“We are trying to be in Boston [to be close to children and grandchildren] as much as possible. It’s doctors’ appointments and other things that bring us back [to Toronto], and all that can be a little unpredictable. A few days ahead of when you’re nearby let me know so we can meet up.”
We missed each other in May. We never connected again. In hindsight, that email could have prepared me for last Friday, but it didn’t. We knew each other well enough for there to be tears in our home when we heard the news.
As relationships between sportswriters and athletes go, ours was unique. He was playing goal for the Montreal Canadiens when we met, yet I knew him longer and better when he was a former player. I often told him he was my educator because every time we talked, or he wrote a book, I learned something new. That was true when he played, as I waited by his locker until all reporters had left before launching into what for him must have been my painfully long interview.
He never said no. We often blamed each other for such lengthy conversations, and he once explained the relationship this way: “They never felt to me like interviews. They just felt like friends talking. As you know, this becomes the awkward thing about a player and a writer. Friends don’t tell the world you played lousy last night. That’s tough to take and why almost always that relationship breaks down. But ours didn’t.”
It could have, the 1973 afternoon I spent in his suburban apartment asking Ken, as he prepared to desert the Canadiens for law school. More than once, I quizzed him about having at least a moral obligation to honour the year left on his contract. He wasn’t offended enough to put me in his past… not then, not ever.
Years after we’d both left Montreal, I was able to commission him to write for the Calgary Olympics Official Souvenir Program. Then I wrote a TV Guide feature about the six-part television series based on his book “Home Game.” Then we just had discussions — in person, on the phone, by email — about many topics, some unrelated to sports.
I will miss Ken Dryden. We all will. As a society, as a humanity, we need people of his intelligence, his eloquence, his integrity, his caring — more now than ever.
To his dying day, he battled NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman about concussions and CTE, the subject of one of his books. The last time we discussed it, he sounded frustrated.
“All this time,” he told me, “I assumed Bettman would do what needed to be done. But then, of course, the longer you don’t do something the more you feel yourself trapped in the corner you created for yourself and then the harder it is actually to do something. Every article, speech, book I do I send to him, and I make sure he’s the first to see them.”
In the email I received on Friday night, Ken’s family echoed his unending commitment “to make hockey just as exciting to play and watch, but less dangerous, for everybody’s kids and grandkids.”
Ken Dryden knew many people, and many people considered him a friend. I was one of the lucky ones.
