The goaltender in hockey is like the drummer in a small band. Forwards are the lead guitarists and vocalists out front, the ones everyone watches most of the time. They flash around with the puck; they carry the melody of the piece. Then there are the defencemen who control the larger arrangement. Some of them are rhythm guitarists who pump the puck up and back, back and forth, and occasionally carry it themselves for a few licks and overlap their play with the forwards'. Others are stay-at-home bass players who patrol the perimeter, stretching it out or moving it in. Whether it's lead or harmony or bass, the forwards and defencemen are all actors in the musical narrative and its subplots. The goalie is alone in the back, percussive rather than melodic or harmonic, unique in the band.
The others do have defensive responsibilities - they skate back, they pick up their man, they block shots, they clear the puck away from the front of the net - but the goalie's defensive role is the whole of his obligation. Yes, he corrals the puck behind the net and makes it convenient for his defencemen to take it away, and when he clears the puck he often has the side effect of starting an offensive rush. From time to time he makes a long pass or shoots at an empty net. But those are extras. The goalie's main offensive move is to leave the ice so that someone with real offensive capability can come out in place of him. He doesn't start the puck, he stops it. He's the main reason hockey games end up 3-2 instead of 116-114. Think about it. A basketball has a ten-inch spherical diameter, travels at a comparatively low speed to and from players who are walking or briefly running, and has to fit through a linear circle scarcely larger than itself. There are a hundred goals a game. A puck is three inches across and an inch thick, it gets shot around at more than a hundred miles an hour by players skating most of the time at thirty miles an hour, and the net is six feet across by four feet high. There's room for one thousand, one hundred and fifty-two pucks to fit through the opening of the net at the same time. Why isn't there more scoring in hockey? The goalie doesn't allow it.
This makes the goalie very important, and the game provides protections. If an opposing forward loiters around the net without the puck (known as "camping on the doorstep"), the goalie can whack his legs or give him a good dig in the back, even though strictly speaking those procedures aren't legal. If the goalie travels out of his crease, it's understood that he enjoys a sort of diplomatic immunity; the very name "crease" suggests a personal textile like clothing or bedding. If an opposing forward intrudes too closely, one of the goalie's teammates knocks him down. Provided the violence is appropriate to the offence, normal rules about its content are relaxed, so that some slashing, roughing, hooking, charging, tripping, cross-checking, elbowing and so on are considered within bounds. On the other hand it is also accepted that the attacking team ought to intrude and intimidate its opposition's goalie ("run the goalie" is one expression) - spray snow in his face, poke sticks under him, detain him when he's out of his net, and so forth. Thus some of the play around the net has a stylized and even ceremonial aspect. I position myself where the goalie doesn't want me. He takes his stick to my calves. When the puck arrives and he covers it up, I slash his catching glove. His defenceman cross-checks me, and my team-mate has no choice but to pull that defenceman down from behind. Soon everyone takes his part in the scene (known by this point as "a gathering of the clan"), and the referees and linesmen arrive. They, in turn, have clear obligations about whom to pull and what orders to issue. The players, again, are obliged to resist the authorities within certain well-established norms; and so the band plays on.
The goalie's importance is also emphasized by his appearance, privileges and property rights. He dresses differently from everyone else, and he is the first player onto the ice at the start of a game. He is the only participant who maintains a permanent establishment on the ice surface, and he is entitled not only to landscape it with shavings but even to stock it with provisions for himself. Should the net be moved ("come off its moorings"), play is stopped at once and domicile is restored. If a goalie is assigned a penalty, someone else must serve it; eviction of a goalie from his house is unknown to hockey. Nowadays the goalie sometimes fights, but this is a recent innovation and shouldn't be considered established or authentic. The old practice was better - when everyone else was fighting, the two goalies used to shoot the puck back and forth the length of the ice. In fact, before the days when teams dressed a second goalie for every game, when the visiting team's goalie was hurt the home team was obliged to supply a substitute, and these substitutes sometimes shut out their own teams; it was a question of integrity. I have heard tell that in the 1972 series between Canada and the Soviet Union, Jacques Plante visited with Vladislav Tretiak and counseled him about the Canadian shooters; that was part of his duty as a goalie.
Other players go to the bench to rest; a goalie instead waits until play moves to the other end of the ice. Then he thwacks his stick against his pads, sweeps his porch, stretches, takes off one of his gloves and has a drink, leans back on his elbows, and looks around to see what's happening in the stands. The others have gone up-ice and there's nothing he can do now to support them, so he relaxes until they come back. Occasionally he'll go for a little skate to inspect nearby sites of interest. In the old days he might strike up a conversation with someone at the boards, perhaps even have a smoke, keeping half an eye on the other end in case something broke out, maybe daring the opposition to take a long shot. But when the game is played for a lot of money, playful elements of that sort get squeezed out.
Then - no matter how much the goalie has actually done - when the game is won, the goalie is said to have won it. Everyone on the winning team immediately gathers around and congratulates him. But I think in this he is more like a sort of slightly moveable Maypole, a location for the celebration. Season and career "victories" are counted and compared only by commentators; fans accept only the convention of gathering around the goalie. We do think about shutouts - those demonstrate sustained concentration - but mostly we think of characteristic moves and postures, or of heroic saves ("robberies" is often the term). Above all we think of a goalie's demeanour, of the way he conducts himself, of his moral bearing on the ice. It was clearer in the days before the mask. Not that anyone would wish masks away in the current state of the game, but the dignity of goalies was more prominent and gave the game a dimension that it doesn't have today. You can still see it in pictures. One classic shows Jean Beliveau trying to poke the puck through Johnny Bower while Bower stands upright and implacable, holding his stick authoritatively in the way; you can almost hear him saying simply, "No." Or there's Henri Richard, flying past the net chasing the puck that Glenn Hall has just steered away; Richard looks keen and excited, while Hall looks relaxed, even pacific. We don't get to see the facial expressions any more, and we have to read the poise from grosser gestures, but fearlessness and resolve are still how we judge a goalie's moral stature. Ah, there should be an epic...
Sing, Muse, the standup strength of John Bower,
Who steered countless pucks into the corners
And left their shooters tired and unfulfilled,
Prey for defencemen clad in white and blue,
The Leaf hosts, who journeyed from Toronto
On the train. Sing, the well-scarred big brown pads,
The wrinkled chest protector that covered
Chest and belly together, the blocker
Paler than the catching glove, the stick taped
Black along the blade and around the heel.
The mask does usefully emphasize the goalie's remoteness, and when he takes it off at the end of a game it is with the air of a deep-sea diver taking off his diving helmet. He clomps around with the rest of his diving suit still on, only just returning from a hidden world where his operations have been as obscure as his identity. He and the others have played in the same game but seen completely different features of it. For his part, he has only distant notions of what really happened at the other end, of who really scored, of whether a given penalty was a good one or not. And while it's true that the others have sometimes been nearby in their own end, they haven't seen quite what their goalie saw. It is as if he has been working inside a special control room, staying more or less in place and pulling various levers to move highly specialized equipment in response to events that he sees only through his windows. Those responses can be classified in certain ways - the poke-check, the butterfly, hugging the post, going behind the net to stop the puck on the periphery, and so on. But they never fall into the repetitious patterns the other players use so often - cycling the puck in the corner and moving it back and forth from one defenceman to the other, for instance. The goaltender is like a main actor in a Greek drama, and is entitled to a mask that distinguishes him from the chorus. Still, all in all I think it was better before the masks.
In those days there were even fewer goalies than there are today. There was room for six regular goalies in the National Hockey League, which made goalies at the top of their profession about as common as leaders of major world powers. Seeing Terry Sawchuk talking to Jacques Plante was a bit like seeing Winston Churchill talking to Charles De Gaulle. It is pleasant to reflect on a time when there were fewer heroes and they really counted - those were indeed the men of old and the men of renown. They were exclusive and iconic. It is no surprise to learn that the goalies of today - more numerous than their predecessors, but still a small club - commemorate their ancestors. When a young goalie today is first hit on the mask with a puck, for instance, he is presented with a St. Jacques medal by the fraternity. Goalies who get a certain number of shutouts - the exact number is a close secret - are entitled to wear a St. Terry. Good goalies on weak teams can qualify for the St. Gump. Older goalies will wear a St. Johnny, though they normally follow a special tradition of concealing it. It isn't much known outside hockey circles, but a goaltender is the only player entitled to keep his age a secret; it is even provided for under Canada Pension Plan regulations.
The goalie did look better without the gaudy mask and the massive padding, but he's still a throwback. The other players have learned new tricks, rules have come and gone, but the goalie hasn't really changed. He stays in the back and when someone shoots at his net, he steps in the way like a dragon guarding a golden fleece.
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