Ken Dryden, "The Class: A Memoir Of A Place, A Time, And Us" (SportsLit fan notes)
In what might be his most ambitious work, the goaltending great turned man of letters shares the life arcs more than 30 of his peers from the "Brain Class" at Etobicoke C.I. in the early 1960s.
Ken Dryden drops the gold right at the end of a conversation with SportsLit about his latest book.
That means you should listen to the whole thing, which is available wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Ostensibly, the author and Hockey Hall of Fame goalie’s tome The Class: A Memoir Of A Place, A Time, And Us (McClelland and Stewart, October 2023) reads a bit like social history and/or sociology. In great detail, Dryden chronicles the life arcs of over 30 Canadians who were his schoolmates in the “Brain Class” at Etobicoke Collegiate Institute west of Toronto during the early 1960s.1 It is also a forward-thinking work, and that is refreshing at a time when the dank is such a convenient hidey-hole.
“This book to me, as anything I have done, is not about the past — it’s about the extent to which it draws on the past,” Dryden says in an interviewed recorded with Neil Acharya and me on April 3. “It’s to try to help understand where the present is; how we got where we are; where it seems we’re going, and whether there is a better way of getting there.
Dryden referred to a class in futurism he taught at McGill University in Montréal for a spell. It helped put an upbeat bow on the hour.
“Don’t assume you’re a passenger, imagine you might be a driver,” he says. “Where do you want to go? What kind of Canada do you want to live in? What kind of world do you want to live in? I hope they have some thought that, today is only going to matter if I make something about tomorrow. Today doesn’t matter if tomorrow doesn’t work. The past certainly doesn’t matter if the future doesn’t work. Make something of today, but have an eye on tomorrow.”
I was ready to run through the figurative brick wall after hearing that.
The Class checks in at around 480 pages. It might be the most ambitious work from Dryden, who has written nine books during a life that includes winning the Stanley Cup six times with Montréal in the 1970s, serving as the top hockey exec of the Toronto NHL team, and being a federal cabinet minister.
Here are some ‘fan notes’ as a companion to this episode.
Intro
1:00 Since it has been 45 years since Ken Dryden tended the twine for the Canadiens, we need a picture of him leaning on his goal stick.
2:15 The first part of turning despair into a verb is tracking down Dryden’s In School: Our Kids, Our Teachers, Our Classrooms (McClelland and Stewart, 1995). It advocated for public education that would reflect a diversifying Canada. Then in Ontario got a string of neoliberal governments that gutted public schools. The second part? Ask an Ontario public school teacher about the current state of classrooms and their pupils. Bring alcohol and edibles, though.
5:15 Parks and Recreation’s Leslie Knope is a glaring omission from those sitcom character references. But those who know, know that the truest Type-A blonde overachiever in a major network sitcom is Eliza Coupe’s Jane Kerkovich-Williams in Happy Endings, end of discussion, unless you happen to be Amy Poehler.
6:20 Dryden, recall, served as a cabinet minister in the Paul Martin Liberal government in the early Oh-Ohs. History tends to rhyme, and things go in cycles, so it felt important to read this observation into the record right here, right now, when the regressive and retrograde appears to be gaining sway:
“The mainstream outlasts every decision-maker, Losing the present isn’t fun. Winning the future is. And the future lasts a whole lot longer.”2
I caint possibly think of any politicians in Canada, federal or provincial, who should have this stamped to their abdomen, forcibly.
7:00 Neil Acharya nails it here; I will seek a Bill Bryson book this summer. Or fall.
Interview
9:30 Dryden alludes to his path to the Canadiens, and it is striking his path there was odd for the time, but might be typical today. Well, except for the part where he was a law student at McGill by weekday and an American League (AHL) goalie by weekends.
Other than that, goalies début in the NHL at age 24. Taller goalies need more seasoning, and the 6-foot-4 Dryden took the path from lower-level junior hockey in his hometown, a full (for the time) college hockey run at Cornell, and then gained some exposure to the minors before becoming a 23-year-old rookie in 1971.
13:00 There was only one “Brain Class” student whom Dryden failed to track down. All told, he spent upwards of a dozen hours apiece with the others, going into topics that one might not have anticipated discussing with someone they had not seen in over 50 years. Or as he puts it:
“It’s going to require all of us to think about things that we have not thought about before,” is how he describes his pitch. “All I need to hear now is you are somewhat interested. It’s not going to work if I can only find 8 or 9 people; that’s cherry-picked. Once you get to 35, and the lives that led into them and the lives that came out of them, it becomes random and covers a lot of ground.
20:00 Dryden puts the life challenges of his parents’ North American generation into terms that should hit home with Millennials and Gen-Z folx. Two world wars and the 1930s Great Depression meant they started forming their own lives much later than they might have liked.
24:00 Over this section, Dryden builds a great point about why he does not read what is written and said about him: “I have to get on with my life; I can’t live with their take.”
This is just me, but one intergenerational beef people with Gen-Z is that they are fussy about giving their time and trust to legacy media, i.e., when a reporter looks to get a comment at (random example!) a protest. These Youngs look up the person’s byline and outlet before deciding.
However, I believe that is a good tack for a private individual, especially when there is a surfeit of bad-faith actors and opportunists. It tells the media, Be Better and Don’t Be Evil. However, that changes when someone represents a public institution or quasi-public institution such as a National Hockey League team. They should be accountable and available.
That’s right, Morgan Rielly and Mitch Marner!
37:00 If the name was too quick to catch, Neil Acharya brings up Dryden’s ‘Brain Class’-mate, actor Steve Whistance-Smith. In February 1971, Whistance-Smith starred in Creeps, the first production staged at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto. It opened 37 days before Dryden played his first NHL game.
38:15 Time for a reading.
41:00 Some refresher for my reference to the World Hockey Association. In The Class, Dryden mentions he considered a jump to the WHA Toronto Toros during the year he spent out of hockey to article at a law firm in Toronto. Articling is a requirement for new law school grads in Canada before they become a full-time lawyer. What tipped him, Dryden writes, is that he had experienced a first-class operation whilst winning the Stanley Cup twice in three seasons with the Canadiens. Taking a flyer on the Toros was not gonna happen. Or as he wrote:
Once you’ve been surrounded by people who know what they’re doing, you don’t want anything less. I knew I’d hate being with the Toros. And because I didn’t love it, I knew I’d hate practising law.3
42:30 “Every season was a mission … I knew something about the prize and the noise.” Dryden refers to the work to create a national child-care program in the mid-’00s. He was minister of social development under then-prime minister Paul Martin in a Liberal-led minority Parliament from mid-2004 until early 2006. Of course, the Liberals lost government. The child-care subsidy did not come into being until early this decade, with plenty of slow-playing by Conservative provincial governments.
Just an observation!
46:00 Dryden has my gratitude, as a peon rural public-board school graduate of a public-board high school teacher, for this observation about what was once called “the disappearance of public education investment in Canada.”
That quote is from a 15-year-old article in The Walrus.4 The way that right-wing provincial governments blew up public education real good because they could has almost become a fourth wall. Nobody in Ontario, or at least no one younger than my 47-year-old ginger arse, talks about how it is an easy go-to to go after a majority-female profession such as teaching or nursing.
They do it since most people disliked school, nobody likes being sick, and it’s easy to raise barely-below-the-surface sexism that coarsely courses through the Canadian establishment, even in 2024. Meantime, taxpayers end up paying for it when Ontario’s criming syndicate of a government takes an L for their wage theft.
That’s not to say one should expect politicians to change. It’s just not OK that we play along with it. It is shameful how we were co-opted into making teaching a job that no one wants to do.
52:45 We would all be better off recognizing commonalities instead of differences.
57:00 Dryden refers to Life On The Run by Bill Bradley, the Basketball Hall of Fame player who became a United States Senator. And he cites Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch. Branch and NBA legend Bill Russell released Second Wind in 1979, the same year Dryden hung up his goalie gear.
Branch has, branched into sports. His work The Cartel: Inside the Rise and Imminent Fall of the NCAA (Byliner, 2011) was prescient.
1:02:30. Dryden was a Toronto Maple Leafs executive for about seven years (1997-2004). I still remember hearing of his hiring while working at my summer job in golf course construction; the supervisor had a radio in his tractor. It was exciting that a team was going outside of the box, at least by NHL standards.
No Canadian NHL team ever went as deep into academia for its top hockey execs. Dryden has his law degree. The associate general manager who did the GM-ing, Mike Smith, has a doctorate in sociology from Syracuse. And the late great Pat Quinn, the eventual coach-GM, also had a law degree. I also got off a little that so much of the denizenry of Leaf Nation were cool to Mats Sundin since he was a Swede instead of being from Moose Jaw, Flin Flon, or some other place in a province people in Southern Ontario had never actually visited.
There was, by expansion-era Leafs standards, relative success with two incursions into the league semifinals (1999 and 2002).
A lot went down with the Leafs in that period. Dryden came aboard three months after Martin Kruze (1962-1997) heroically came forward to detail how he was abused by pedophiles employed at Maple Leaf Gardens in the 1970s. Kruze died by suicide during the first month of the first season Dryden was at the helm.
There was also a governance transition with the team, the forming of a partnership with basketball’s Raptors, and a move from grand old Gardens to (Insert Corporate Name) Arena, and the catastrophic eye injury defenceman Bryan Berard suffered in a game in 2000.
Dryden’s position was binned after the 2002-03 season, and he left to run for Parliament. My Leafs fandom was also binned during that period. I had my reasons, and have never looked back.
1:08:00. During prep, I found a long CBC-TV feature about Dryden from the 1972-73 season. Filmed across several months, it includes footage of Ken playing tennis with his elder brother and goaltender’s-union confrère Dave Dryden (1941-2022). I’m a very caszh tennis watcher, but I got a real Milos Raonic vibe from both of their games.
That about wraps it up.
One thing I did not get to was asking Dryden about his days on the bump in the middle of a ball diamond. Toronto hosted the MLB All-Star Game in 1991, and Dryden wrote an article for the official program about his love of baseball. He mentioned once attending a major league team’s open tryout camp in Michigan as a teenager and how “a 16-year-old Ted Simmons hit my not-very-good overhand curve to deep centre.”
One future hall of famer pitching to another. Imagine! Simmons, a switch-hitting catcher who played in 21 MLB seasons, was inducted into Cooperstown in 2020.
Previously on SportsLit
Hockey Hall of Famers, we have interviewed a few. Prior to Dryden, the most recent HHOF player to indulge us was Bryan Trottier (All Roads Home, McClelland and Stewart, 2022). Both Dryden and Trottier’s books are coming out in paperback in October 2024.
Serge Savard was part of the 1970s Canadiens’ Big Three, alongside Larry Robinson and Guy Lapointe, who kept the crease and the sightlines clear for Dryden and goalie partner Michel (Bunny) Larocque. Savard discussed his biography, Forever Canadien, with us in 2020.
That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind — especially to yourself.
Feb. 12-May 6, 2024
Hamilton, Ont.
Dryden attended Etobicoke C.I. from 1960 to ’65. Ontario, alone among all principalities in Canada and the United States, required the university-bound to take a fifth year of high school until 2003.
The Class, pg. 432.
Ibid., pg. 249.
Roger Martin, “Who killed Canada’s education advantage?” The Walrus, Nov. 12, 2009.