Late Hall of Fame goalie also left mark as author, laywer, Parliament member, Maple Leafs president
© Frank Prazak/Hockey Hall of Fame
MONTREAL — The loss of goaltending legend Ken Dryden will be felt a great distance beyond hockey.
Not only was Dryden arguably the game’s sharpest, most scholarly observer, a keen student of the sport and a champion of players past and present, he was a worldly man who viewed and experienced life far beyond the arenas that set the stage for his remarkable life.
The Toronto native, whose death to cancer at age 78 was announced by the Montreal Canadiens on Saturday, will certainly be celebrated for his six Stanley Cup championships won with the powerhouse Canadiens of the 1970s, for the five times he won the Vezina Trophy voted for his goaltending excellence, and for his 1970-71 Conn Smythe Trophy voted as the most valuable player of the postseason.
© City of Montreal archives
Ken Dryden during the Canadiens’ 1971 Stanley Cup parade, holding the Conn Smythe Trophy he won as most valuable player of the postseason.
Dryden will be discussed for the 1971-72 Calder Trophy, voted as NHL rookie of the year after his first championship; one of the great facts of his career is that he won the Stanley Cup and the Conn Smythe Trophy not just before he won the Calder — the last Montreal player to win it before defenseman Lane Hutson last season — but before he had lost a single regular-season NHL game.
Dryden was well outside the mold of the swashbuckling, brash Canadiens of the 1970s, a studious man who chose to sit out the 1973-74 season over a contract dispute, earning a relative pittance that year working for a Toronto law firm. He would return to anchor Montreal’s run of four consecutive championships from 1976 through his final game in 1979.
His illustrious career merely set the table for his full, rewarding post-hockey life as a lawyer and much more.
© Steve Babineau/NHLI
Canadiens’ Ken Dryden and Boston Bruins’ Johnny Bucyk, between captains Brad Marchand and Nick Suzuki and two young players for a ceremonial face-off preceding the Bruins’ centennial game at TD Garden on Dec. 1, 2024.
Dryden would become a three-time Olympic hockey analyst — including calling the “Miracle On Ice” game with Al Michaels in 1980 — author or co-author of an impressive library of books, a newspaper and magazine columnist and essayist, elected member of Canada’s Parliament, the Youth Commissioner for his native province of Ontario and president of the Toronto Maple Leafs from 1997 to 2004.
His most recent hockey book, “The Series: What I Remember, What It Felt Like, What It Feels Like Now,” was published in 2022, a deeply personal 50th anniversary celebration of the historic 1972 Summit Series, the eight-game tournament between an NHL all-star team and a select squad of Soviets that fully redefined professional hockey while giving Canada a month-long nervous breakdown from coast to coast to coast.
In 2019, he wrote “Scotty: A Hockey Life Like No Other,” a folksy, affectionate study of his dear friend and former Canadiens coach, Scotty Bowman.
© Canada Post Corporation
Ken Dryden as featured in a 2015 Canada Post stamp series.
Dryden’s reflective “The Game,” first published in 1983, is widely viewed as not just the finest, most insightful hockey book ever written, but among the best sports books of all time.
Upon the 2003 publication of its 20th anniversary edition, the publisher, John Wiley & Sons, offered a few statistics Dryden loved — if he hadn’t calculated them himself:
There were 124,716 words in “The Game,” a total of 710,787 characters in 7,024 sentences. It offered 5,774 words per ounce and 7,934 words per dollar of its weight and suggested retail price.
© Hockey Hall of Fame
Ken Dryden in goal with the 1955 Islington Hornets of Toronto’s Humber Valley Hockey Association.
Dryden’s broad scope and interests took him post-retirement to Montreal’s McGill University, where he had earned his law degree, as a lecturing professor. He embraced his work as a television producer, having co-created and co-produced the six-part CBC-TV series “We Are Canada,” showcasing young, innovative Canadians to help celebrate the nation’s 150th birthday in 2017.
Dryden was both a dream and nightmare interview for many hockey writers. His multilayered analyses of the game were enriching studies and viewpoints on one hand. On the other, they were deadline-crushing streams of consciousness that sent many scrambling for their dictionaries or decoder rings, a writer begging his editor for more space “because I just got Ken!”
On many occasions, I used to kid Dryden, “If I asked you for the time of day, you’d tell me how to make a watch,” and more than once our conversation would instantly turn to our favorite timepieces.
© Graphic Artists/Hockey Hall of Fame; Dave Stubbs/NHL.com
Ken Dryden in a 1971-72 rookie season portrait taken at the Montreal Forum — he had no recollection of these factory-fresh pads — and at Amalie Arena during the 2018 NHL All-Star Game, stepping off an elevator with Stinger, the Columbus Blue Jackets mascot.
His usually serious demeanor disguised a delicious sense of humor, a light moment or a joke sending him into a fit of giggles.
During a wide-ranging 2003 talk, we detoured into comic strips and his love of the brilliantly skewed “The Far Side.”
“I enjoy his slightly off-center take on the world, seeing it straight on — with a little twist,” Dryden said of cartoonist Gary Larson, his voice brightening with laughter. “I remember a Far Side strip with one deer talking to another. One has a bull’s-eye on his chest and the other is saying, ‘Bummer of a birthmark, Hal.'”
© Michel Lapensee/Montreal Canadiens; Graphic Artists/Hockey Hall of Fame
Ken Dryden as featured in a Montreal Canadiens painting by Michel Lapensee, and in a 1971-72 rookie season portrait taken at the Montreal Forum.
Dryden’s favorite scene in the cult classic “Slap Shot” wasn’t goalie Denis Lemieux flailing around his crease or in the dressing room, victim of a Federal League shooting gallery, but the Hanson Brothers playing with slot cars in their hotel room.
His favorite Beatle was “probably Ringo Starr, for his name and his odd eyes,” and he believed that every putt he made broke from right to left.
“I feel I can read a green when I stand back from the ball,” he told me, “but when I stand over it and look toward the hole, my world tilts.”
Dryden adored Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Dairy Queen milkshakes and, in 2006 at least, the $9.95 cheeseburger at the Toronto diner, The Senator.
© Graphic Artists/Hockey Hall of Fame
Ken Dryden in early 1970s action against Toronto during a game at Maple Leaf Gardens.
I went back many decades with this legend, first as a teenage fan in Montreal thrilling to his exploits with the 1970s Canadiens, then having written many features in newspaper journalism and for the NHL about one of the most interesting men I’ve met in any walk of life.
We spoke most recently in late July about the death of former goalie Wayne Thomas, an early 1970s teammate in the Montreal organization.
Not long before that, we connected about the 2025 Calder Trophy win of Hutson and at much greater length this past February during the 4 Nations Face-Off in Montreal.
As always, Dryden’s view was different than any other, his expansive take narrowing to a razor-sharp focus, if not in the same sentence, then in a second breath. When he paused in thought, you knew something profound was on the way.
© Vitor Munhoz/NHLI
Ken Dryden speaks during the NHL Alumni Association’s “Man of the Year” ceremony in Montreal on Feb. 14, 2025, the ceremony paying tribute to Canada’s 1972 Summit Series team.
I reached out to him in August 2017, his milestone 70th birthday a few days away, for a look back at where he had been and his busy path of the day. He politely declined.
“It is very nice of you to think about me and to do a story,” he replied. “But I really don’t want to talk about matters of the past — they are already there and in the record — and there’s too much interesting in the present to focus on. I hope you understand.”
And then we almost immediately slipped into conversation about something other than himself — our attempt to identify a mystery goaltender in a 1970 Canadiens training-camp photo.
A few days later, in my email, was a photo of Dryden’s two feet, a baseball diamond stretching out beyond them. He celebrated his 70th birthday in a minor-league ballpark, wonderfully off the beaten path.
© Melchior DiGiacomo/Getty Images
Ken Dryden in action in Moscow during the 1972 Summit Series.
He let on only that he and his wife, Lynda, “would be somewhere in Tennessee, driving around,” as he turned 70.
Dryden was still wet behind the ears when he famously led Montreal to an upset championship against the Chicago Black Hawks (then two words), a late-season call-up from the American Hockey League’s Montreal Voyageurs. He went into the postseason with a 6-0 NHL record.
“I never saw a goaltender before who, when the play became ultra-confusing in front of him, stretched out across the goal like a lady on a chaise lounge,” Toronto Telegram columnist Scott Young wrote of Dryden’s 1971 playoff debut.
© Phillip MacCallum/Getty Images
A view of the Montreal Canadiens pregame ceremony to retire Ken Dryden’s No. 29 at Bell Centre on Jan. 29, 2007.
“Low shots plunked into his pads and the high ones he caught. Resting all the time. That is a very engaging habit he has, too, no matter how hot the action has been, of greeting each stoppage of play by folding his arms over the top of his stick and leaning there like a streetcleaner resting on his broom.”
“The Pose” of Dryden leaning on his stick is recreated in a massive statue at the entrance of the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. It was the go-to pose of countless road-hockey kids and beer-league goalies for years.
Indeed, Dryden was never a conventional goaltender. Not with his lanky, even gangly body type, accentuated even more by his stand-up style of play, and certainly not with how he viewed or analyzed the game, as he often proved in postgame comments offered in meandering paragraphs rather than tidy, cliched sound bites.
He confounded his teammates as much as the media, and his button-down personality made him a natural target for practical jokes.
Legendary prankster Guy Lapointe, with Serge Savard and Larry Robinson a member of the 1970s Canadiens’ “Big Three” on defense, once nailed Dryden’s new cowboy boots to a dressing room bench.
© Minas Panagiotakis/Getty Images
Ken Dryden speaks to Bell Centre fans during his No. 29 jersey retirement ceremony Jan. 29, 2007.
Either not wanting to give Lapointe the satisfaction or because he was famously careful with a dollar, Dryden didn’t have the boots resoled. He stuffed them with paper towels and wore them that way through the slushy Montreal winter.
Of the Canadiens’ 1976-77 season, during which the Canadiens won an NHL-record 60 games, tied 12 and lost just eight, Dryden (41-6-8 that year) was quoted as saying, “There were an inordinate number of games we won without a reasonable amount of difficulty.”
I had asked him during one talk about the collections of his youth, hockey cards in particular.
In fact, he was collector of baseball cards as a schoolboy growing up in Toronto, his treasures including a Mickey Mantle in his shoebox. But typically, Dryden was more dearly attached to a couple of cards that wouldn’t be confused with the New York Yankees slugger.
© Vitor Munhoz/4NFO/World Cup of Hockey via Getty Image
From left, Team Canada 1972 Summit Series players Paul Henderson, Ken Dryden, Serge Savard and Yvan Cournoyer acknowledge the arena fans during a break in the second period of the 4 Nations Face-Off game between the United States and Canada at Bell Centre on Feb. 15, 2025.
“I had a Virgil Trucks card. He had two no-hitters for the Detroit Tigers, but his name was so interesting for a 7-year-old,” he said.
“And there was Sibby Sisti,” he added of the 1940s and ’50s utility infielder. “I thought that was a fantastic name, too.”
Dryden didn’t know until we later spoke that Sisti had a small role as the Pittsburgh Pirates manager in the 1984 Robert Redford baseball movie “The Natural.” It was no surprise when he replied with some wonderful trivia about a minor-league ballpark in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
A photo surfaced of Dryden at a Montreal Expos game in the mid-1970s, someone resembling him behind the home team’s Jarry Park dugout. I asked him to confirm his presence that day and was met with a 200-word summary of what he wore at that time, how the shirt was vaguely familiar, how the glasses looked a little like his and how he sometimes sat behind the dugout … but usually farther along the row of seats. Finally, he arrived at, “No, my wife says that’s not me.”
Very rarely, if ever, was Dryden a simple yes or no.
The last meaningful hockey one of the game’s greatest goalies watched was this past spring.
© Minas Panagiotakis/Getty Images
Ken Dryden walks onto Bell Centre ice for a pregame ceremony Oct. 22, 2024.
“It’s magic,” he said of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. “You’re going back-to-back with games every night. It’s amazing. It’s almost as if, while there are all these games, there’s one long continuous game.
“Each exciting moment of one comes to feel as if it’s part of an exciting moment of the next and the next and the next … you end up reacting as if it’s one game, all of these things that are happening in one game that’s going on night after night.”
Though the Canadiens had a special place in his heart, he didn’t expect to be pulling for any team in particular.
“There are certain teams that I have a certain affection for and in some cases a big affection, but I end up really kind of hoping for the team that deserves to win,” he said.
“It becomes clear with each game in a series who is really earning it. There are very few teams that I really don’t like, there are very few that I really, really like a lot. I can come to like, a lot, a team that’s really earning it, even a team that I have no history with at all.
“Whoever will win the Stanley Cup will have earned it,” Dryden said, the Florida Panthers ultimately bound for their second consecutive championship. “That’s why you play the game. The players are going to determine it. I’m not going to determine it with whatever I think or do with any fantasy league.
“It’s in their hands and those hands are terrific and exciting and competitive. Whoever makes it to the end is going to have completely earned and deserved it.”
It was classic Ken Dryden, not a simple opinion casually shared. He watched his final Stanley Cup Playoffs as he played the game and had lived his full, remarkable 78 years — with insight and depth and a unique point of view, life qualities for which he’ll always be remembered.
Top photo: Ken Dryden early in his Canadiens career, watching a puck fly to the corner during a Montreal Forum game.
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