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mrissa"It is in free time that the special player develops, not in the competitive expedience of games, in hour-long practices once a week, in mechanical devotion to packaged, processed, coaching-manual, hockey-school skills. For while skills are necessary, setting out as they do the limits of anything, more is needed to transform those skills into something special. Mostly it is time unencumbered, unhurried, time of a different quality, more time, time to find wrong answers to find a few that are right; time to find your own right answers; time for skills to be practiced to set higher limits, to settle and assimilate and become fully and completely yours, to organize and combine with other skills comfortably and easily in some uniquely personal way, then to be set loose, trusted, to find new instinctive directions to take, to create.
"But without such time a player is like a student cramming for exams. His skills are like answers memorized by his body, specific, limited to what is expected, random and separate, with no overviews to organize and bring them together. And for those times when more is demanded, when new unexpected circumstances come up, when answers are asked for things you've never learned, when you must intuit and piece together what you already know to find new answers, memorizing isn't enough. It's the difference between knowledge and understanding, between a super-achiever and a wise old man. And it's the difference between a modern suburban player and a player like Lafleur.
"For a special player has spent time with his game. On backyard rinks, in local arenas, in time alone and with others, time without short-cuts, he has seen many things, he has done many things, he has experienced the game. He understands it. There is scope and culture in his game. He is not a born player. What he has is not a gift, random and otherworldly, and unearned. There is surely something in his genetic make-up that allows him to be great, but just as surely there are others like him who fall short. He is, instead, a natural."
--Ken Dryden, The Game
I tell you, when I started reading this book, all the quotations on the jacket about how it was the best hockey book ever were a bit off-putting, and I started making snide remarks about it curing scrofula. But I am won over. If you have the king's evil, it might be worth a try to order this book, at least if you have the king's evil and like hockey.
"But without such time a player is like a student cramming for exams. His skills are like answers memorized by his body, specific, limited to what is expected, random and separate, with no overviews to organize and bring them together. And for those times when more is demanded, when new unexpected circumstances come up, when answers are asked for things you've never learned, when you must intuit and piece together what you already know to find new answers, memorizing isn't enough. It's the difference between knowledge and understanding, between a super-achiever and a wise old man. And it's the difference between a modern suburban player and a player like Lafleur.
"For a special player has spent time with his game. On backyard rinks, in local arenas, in time alone and with others, time without short-cuts, he has seen many things, he has done many things, he has experienced the game. He understands it. There is scope and culture in his game. He is not a born player. What he has is not a gift, random and otherworldly, and unearned. There is surely something in his genetic make-up that allows him to be great, but just as surely there are others like him who fall short. He is, instead, a natural."
--Ken Dryden, The Game
I tell you, when I started reading this book, all the quotations on the jacket about how it was the best hockey book ever were a bit off-putting, and I started making snide remarks about it curing scrofula. But I am won over. If you have the king's evil, it might be worth a try to order this book, at least if you have the king's evil and like hockey.
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Date: 2009-01-21 04:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-21 04:23 pm (UTC)He's using his own experience with the 1970s Habs in some ways as a microcosm, so you and Puppy should be aware that it's not a history of hockey, it's a memoir of hockey.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-21 04:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-22 04:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-21 04:59 pm (UTC)[Feeling sub-articulate; will write back/more later.]
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Date: 2009-01-21 10:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-21 05:51 pm (UTC)I got stuck on the first sentence for a while, because I was looking for a later clause explaining what the player develops and I wasn't finding anything. Then I skipped to the bottom, saw that you were praising this and not making fun of it, thought there must be something there and tried again, and understood it properly this time and was able to keep going and enjoy the rest.
And yes. One must have play, not just practice.
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Date: 2009-02-01 03:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-21 07:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-21 07:49 pm (UTC)While I do not have the king's evil, I think I would like to read this.
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Date: 2009-01-21 10:45 pm (UTC)