Ken Dryden, the late goalie extraordinaire, was a Buffalo Bills fan.
He had just turned 13, growing up in a Toronto suburb, when the Bills were born in 1960. He liked them right away and liked them even more when Cookie Gilchrist arrived, in 1962, fresh from six seasons in the Canadian Football League.
Dryden’s enthusiasm for the Bills came up when I interviewed him for a USA Today story that ran 20 years ago this week. At the time, he was in the cabinet of Prime Minister Paul Martin as minister of social development. I told Dryden this made him Canada’s Jack Kemp.
The former Bills quarterback had been U.S. secretary of housing and urban development in the George H.W. Bush administration. Dryden grinned at the mention of Kemp – and that’s when he told me he had been a Bills fan since their very beginning.
When word came two weeks ago that Dryden had died, at 78, our conversation sprang immediately to mind. The encounter remains among the most memorable of my 50 years in newspapers.
“Safety nets are important things,” the ex-netminder told me. “Freedom generators, really, is what they are.”
Dryden had spent his hockey life stopping goals – and now, in his political life, he wanted to achieve a huge goal: national child care in Canada. The complexity and cost made such a thing seem nigh impossible, but it was what he wanted to talk to me about most on that day.
At one point, Dryden explained that a goalie’s job is not only about stopping pucks.
“You know what else it is? You’re trying to deliver a message to your team that things are OK back here. This end of the ice is pretty well cared for. You take it now and go. Go! Feel the freedom you need in order to be that dynamic, creative, offensive player and go out and score.”
He was loudly animated as he said this. His metaphor cast Canada as a team, parents as goal scorers, and himself as a sort of national goaltender in chief.
Dryden earned a degree in history at Cornell before making history with six Stanley Cups for the Montreal Canadiens. Scotty Bowman was his coach for five of them.
“He was a guy you could count on,” Bowman said. “That’s a pretty good trait in politics, too.”
Roy MacGregor, a co-author of two of Dryden’s books, said Dryden had been unique as a locker-room intellectual: “Some players speak in grunts. Some players speak in clips. Rare players speak in paragraphs. And Ken was the only player any of us ever knew who spoke in chapters.”
Word of Ken Dryden’s passing brings to mind a memorable game in March 1971, when the Buffalo Sabres played the Montreal Canadiens in the first game in NHL history with brothers in goal.
He spoke fluent Bills, too. When saying Gilchrist had been his favorite player, Dryden called out, “Lookie, lookie, here comes Cookie!” (The fullback had played for the Tiger-Cats in Hamilton, where Dryden was born, and for the Argonauts in Toronto, where Dryden grew up.)
Dryden was an admirer of Kemp as well – not only as a quarterback, but as a public servant. Dryden was liberal, Kemp conservative, but they had much in common as former professional athletes who won championships and then political office. Such a dual feat is rare; that each rose to cabinet level is rarer still.
Kemp was elected to Congress from Western New York in 1970, served nine terms, then joined Bush’s cabinet. Dryden was elected a Member of Parliament (MP) from a Toronto riding in 2004 and soon joined Martin’s cabinet. (Cabinet members in Canada are almost all MPs; cabinet members in the U.S. cannot simultaneously serve in Congress.)
Two years into Dryden’s time as minister of social development, Canada had bilateral agreements with all 10 provinces to develop their own child care systems. But when Martin’s Liberal government fell, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives replaced what had amounted to national child care with a monthly check to parents instead.
A generation later, during the pandemic, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government introduced a $10-a-day nationwide child care program.
The Canadian quarterly Corporate Knights published a story in June titled Dryden’s Long Game. It quoted him saying that many people had been crushed when the national program was ended.
“But I knew it would come back,” Dryden told the magazine. “It was one of those lose-now, win-forever situations.”
Kick-save, and a beauty.