Ken Dryden transcended the game of hockey

National Post, 16 September 2025

He was too big for hockey alone, big enough to be the best of Canada

Every five years, as the anniversary of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team’s victory over the Soviet Union in Lake Placid, N.Y., rolls around, Al Michaels is on the circuit reminiscing about his play-by-play call that christened the “Miracle on Ice”: “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!”

In his retelling, Michaels includes this remarkable anecdote about his colour-man partner on that broadcast, Ken Dryden, who died on Sept. 5 at age 78.

Dryden had retired from hockey the previous year, after winning his sixth Stanley Cup with the Montreal Canadiens. He had previously taken a season (1973-74) off from being the NHL’s best goaltender (five Vezina trophies in the 1970s) to article at a Toronto law firm. He would — even after winning his first Stanley Cup in 1971 and Conn Smythe trophy as playoff MVP, and the Calder trophy the next year as NHL rookie of the year — list his profession on U.S. customs documents as “law student.”

In February 1980, the former-superstar-turned-fledgling-lawyer needed to write the bar exam, which fell during the Olympics. So he did a broadcast with Michaels, drove three hours from Lake Placid to Ottawa, wrote (and passed) the exam the next day, then drove back to be on air for the most important Olympic hockey game of all time (even if Canadians prefer to remember the 2010 gold medal game in Vancouver against the Americans).

Dryden — a true renaissance man, as Michaels called him — had a life simply bigger than usually considered possible. It could fit the Olympics and the bar exam into the same week. And he made bigger whatever he turned his attention to.

“Ken Dryden was big Canada,” said Prime Minister Mark Carney upon his death, noting that Dryden inspired him to become a goalie, though he could not even master Dryden’s famous resting pose, blocker leaning on his stick, which has been immortalized in statues. What other sports figure is sculpted at rest rather than in action? It’s the sports version of Auguste Rodin’s “The Thinker” because Dryden was the great sportsman-thinker of his time, perhaps any time.

A few years after retirement, at age 36, Dryden published “The Game,” which is universally acknowledged as one of the best sports books ever written, though it was really a cultural book, as the best sportswriting really is. Fans packed the Montreal Forum to watch Dryden and les Glorieux in the 1970s. Dryden, the observer, the chronicler, the thinker, was watching them.

For boys who grew up reading Frank Deford, George Plimpton and Rick Reilly in Sports Illustrated, it was not remarkable in the ’80s, as it is today, to read superlative writing about sports and culture. The surprise was that a superstar athlete could do it. It was as if the patient had become a pioneering surgeon.

In team sports, no one ever packed so much achievement into as few years (only eight seasons) as did Dryden — six Stanley Cups plus the 1972 Soviet series. Only Michael Jordan was comparable, but the 1992 U.S. basketball “dream team” was not nearly as important as the 1972 series. And Jordan was truly great only on the court; much of the rest of his life and character was lacking.

Dryden, astonishingly, was better, bigger, off the ice than on it. There are many great hockey players. None were also as incisive analysts of the public sphere and, eventually, served the public in the federal cabinet.

He spent a year sitting in classrooms as Ontario’s youth commissioner to more fully understand the challenges of education. He moved into a middle-class home for a week to observe what life was like for a typical Toronto family in the early ’90s. His novel of that experience, “The Moved and the Shaken,” had a large impact on me when I read it as a young man — a reminder in public policy, in journalism, in culture, to pay attention not only to the movers and the shakers, but those whom they move and shake.

Continue reading at the National Post.