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In Facebook, you see it all the time. People joining different groups about all kinds of different things. Thousands of people in each, attaching their name to various banners.

I have never been much on groups but I loved being part of a team. A lot of people will say that a team is also a group but there is a big difference between the two. Groups are intended to align people under a single banner and they spend a lot of time talking about the cause or goal. A team is similar but the difference is they work together to actually do something about it.

A group embodies the true meaning of one of my favourite sayings— “They are like old men and sex. They spend more time talking about it than doing it.”

A team adopts the genuine spirit of one of the best advertising slogans I can recall—Nike’s “Just Do It”

My personal memorable teams involved a few football teams that I played on and a group of young men in their first year of university living in a residence called Edwards Hall. Throughout the year, we banded together in numerous actions ranging from frosh week rebellion against our residence executive. We dropped them off in a farmer’s field (20 miles away or so) in the middle of the night to find their way back to the residence like they did to us.

We peppered a nearby men’s residence’s balcony with locally purchased eggs as retaliation for crimes against some of the hall members’ girlfriends. The opposition dumped garbage cans of water on innocent passers by from that same balcony. We had numerous house parties that made Animal House feel more like a home movie made about our time in Edwards Hall.

But a visit to one team in particular gave me another look at what makes a team as opposed to a group. It was in Montreal while visiting the Montreal Canadiens. I was based in Toronto and used to visit Maple Leaf Gardens 4 or 5 times a week to conduct the business of providing team sales support to the Maple Leafs, Toros and Marlboros on behalf of Cooper Sporting Goods.

The Leafs were more like a group. In fact, it was the only dressing room in North American hockey that I was not permitted to enter as per the owner’s instructions, Harold Ballard. The trainers were always very embarrassed by this, especially after knowing I had just left the numerous visitor’s dressing rooms throughout the building and also the Marlboros dressing room right across the hall.

The Canadiens dressing room in the old Forum was charged with energy. The time was somewhere in the middle of their 4 year run of winning the Stanley Cup. It may have been the first or second season but that isn’t important. You could sense the confidence and shared in all the good natured fun that took place. The status lines between so-called Superstar and front line players really didn’t exist. They were all quite talented, but it is how they worked and played together that made it obvious that they worked together mostly as one unit.

They had techniques that weren’t dissimilar to my university residence experience to deal with non team players. I watched two players drink from another players coke that was chilling in an ice bucket awaiting the return of the other player from his shower. Upon his return the bottle was magically full again and the smiles of getting even were on all the other players because they were all in on the prank.

It was hard to follow some of the conversations because they were switching back and forth between English and French as if they had developed some new language called Frenlish. Most often the sentence was punctuated with group laughter. I now understood the meaning of what a team does to stay loose. Team chemistry is very difficult to develop and is much easier to destroy. Harold Ballard was very good at the latter.

It struck me as quite strange that I had to leave the room to talk to their starting goalie and go into his small and private dressing room to talk to him about the new designs of equipment that his brother worked so closely with us to develop.

Yes it was the Dryden brothers, Ken and Dave. Ken was not much of a team player while Dave was almost the total opposite. I guess their future careers reflected that. Ken became a lawyer and Dave taught school and worked at different levels in the educational system. Ken was more comfortable behind the scenes while Dave was in the middle all the time.

Some years later, I was at a conference where Ken was the guest speaker. He talked about his book, The Game. It is a very good book about hockey. I don’t remember the finish of his speech. Someone nudged me when it was time to clap.

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