For over 28 years, I have been married to an Orr, Heather Lynn Orr to be specific. Now being from Canada, a hockey-crazed nation, you would naturally ask if my Orr family connection was the BIG ONE… the Bobby Orr family connection. Robert Gordon Orr, the best offensive defenseman ever to play hockey, carried the Bruins from Boston to two NHL Stanley Cups (1970, 1972) and won the most awards of any defenseman in the history of the league. But, as luck would have, the Port Greville, Nova Scotia Orrs that I married into and Bobby’s Parry Sound, Ontario Orrs are not related. My Orr relatives are great people, so I just had to get over that minor genealogical disappointment.

 

But being from Montreal, where Heather was born, I was brought up in the hometown of the greatest hockey dynasty, and perhaps the greatest sports dynasty, ever assembled, The Montreal Canadiens. Known to Montrealers as The Habs, short for Les Habitants, the team epitomized the city’s hopes for greatness and Quebec’s struggles for biculturalism. And in the 1970s, when the separatist violence escalated in the streets of Montreal, The Habs played their heart out and won six Stanley Cups, often at the expense of Bobby Orr’s Bruins. The Canadiens won the Stanley Cup the year that Quebec Minister of Justice Pierre Laporte was killed by extremists, triggering the 1970 October Crisis. Laporte, my future wife’s neighbor, was kidnapped from his home just one suburban block from where she lived!

 

As a McGill medical student in the mid-1970s, I saw more of Heather than hockey until graduating in 1978, the year we were married. As a medical resident at McGill’s Montreal General Hospital, I saw even less of both. This was before the era of the 80- hour resident work week. Then, we were called “residents” because we literally lived in our hospital, in a dormitory just east of the Montreal General Hospital on the volcanic slopes of Mont Royal. This was a time where formative career decisions were made, usually for you, on the basis of personal performance: stand and deliver or leave. This was the place I met great mentors, including one Dr. Douglas Kinnear, a self-confessed “hockey nut” who grew up in Quebec City playing hockey, but who was “too small and not good enough” to keep it up after high school.

 

One thing that distinguished Dr. Kinnear, a gastroenterologist, from the other doctors on the faculty at McGill was that he was also the Canadiens’ team doctor, a post he held for nearly 40 years since 1962 when he subbed for another team physician who came down with acute viral hepatitis.

 

Like other institutions who revel in tradition, colleges and sports teams look back on their histories to form their futures. One tradition set into place by Dr. Kinnear was the yearly selection of three medical residents to carry out the pre-season physicals for the returning Habs hockey heroes. And as luck would have it, I was chosen with two others to accompany Doug Kinnear to The Montreal Forum, hallowed ground for hockey fans, to carry out these exams on the returning players.

 

The players we examined had just won the 1978-79 season Stanley Cup over the New York Rangers, and included nine future NHL Hall of Famers: Yvan Cournoyer, Ken Dryden, Guy Lapointe, Guy LaFleur, Serge Savard, Larry Robinson, Steve Shutt, Bob Gainey and Jacques Lemaire. We entered the sanctum sanctorum, the Habs locker room, through a door above which hung a sign with the Canadiens’ motto: “To yours from failing hands we throw the torch. Be it yours to hold high”. These words from the poem “In Flanders Fields” were written in the trenches of the First World War by Lt. Colonel John McCrae. He died shortly afterward. The power of history is tremendous, its effect undeniable. The players felt it move them and so did we.  

 

Dr. Kinnear, the same physician who pumped Habs goalie Patrick Roy full of antibiotics to keep his acute appendix from bursting so he could compete in the playoffs against the hated Bruins, advised us to concentrate on the “big stuff” in our pre-season exams (presumably any missing limbs), and we followed his advice. The players were as nervous as we were about the whole exercise. When we later marched upstairs to the Canadiens executive office to report our findings to the brain trust of the franchise, legendary Coach Toe Blake and General Manager Sammy Pollock, we meekly noted the pertinent positives and ignored the white coat hypertension and the smell of cigarette smoke we had encountered in the Forum’s catacombs. Athletes were different then and so were residents.

 

And the most different athlete of them all was Ken Dryden. A graduate of Cornell, where he led his team to the 1967 NCAA title, he was drafted in 1964 by the very same Bruins he went on to torment between the pipes for a decade. Ken Dryden took a season off at the peak of his career in 1973-74 to complete his law degree at McGill. He was the NHL’s top goalie for five years, and was inducted into the NHL Hall of Fame in 1983. He now has the distinction of being the only ex-NHLer to run for the office of Prime Minster of Canada!  I might just vote absentee.

 

But all this brings me back to hockey and to some advice that I gave to the Class of 2010 on the first day of medical school at MCG, when I quoted hockey icon and forward Wayne Gretzky: “Skate to where the puck is going, not to where it is....”

 But a goalie, especially a 6’4” goalie like Ken Dryden, plays the game largely trapped in the crease, defending his ground. Even the busier Canadiens goalies like Rogatien Vachon in the 1960s, or Jacques Plante in the 1950s, were more comfortable between the goal posts. But then along comes big Kenny Dryden… talk about career risks and reinventions!!

 

So life’s lesson is that your career is a reality built on the commitments to others that you keep, the lucky breaks you are given, the opportunities you chase down while staying mostly in position and the few calculated risks you take along the way.

 

So to the students of the MCG School of Medicine I say, begin now to own your careers.

 

And to its alums, be prepared to pass the torch.

 

Sincerely,
D. Douglas Miller, M.D., C.M.
Dean, MCG School of Medicine