"Yeah," said another voice, "we call him Shane. Hey! How about that, Shane? Pretty good, huh?"

The man they had nicknamed Shane said nothing. He smiled faintly and kept on munching. A figure appeared at the door and the general laughter subsided. James Dickinson Irvin, coach of the Chicago Black Hawks, and at 63, the senior coach of the National Hockey League, moved toward the window seat and sat down. He looked around and smiled. In 30 years of playing and coaching, Dick Irvin had seen many a happy washroom crowd--and many a gloomy one. "See them," he said with slow deliberation. "In hockey the goal is the thing. Look at a team that has won and see how they act. A hockey player who has scored a goal is the happiest man alive. If we hadn't beaten the Rangers tonight the boys would have been in bed by now. But, no, tonight they win, so what do they do? They sit up too late pulling on their cigars and trying to get a rise out of Shane."

Everyone looked at the sandwich eater and Irvin went on speaking. "Oh, his name isn't really Shane, you know. It's actually Frank Martin, and he can play a pretty good game on defense when he wants to. But, here, let me introduce some of the others."

The coach stood up, then propped himself against a washbasin. He is not a big man; with his silver hair and thinning face he seems almost frail, but he has a distinguished look about him. He stands 5 feet, 10½ inches and weighs 165 pounds. His voice is quiet and his penetrating eyes are gray. There is an inch-long scar on his right cheek. When he talks, he conveys authority and automatically commands respect.

He began pointing a long arm around the crowded room.

"There," he said, "on the end there is Nick Mickoski. You saw him turn in a good game tonight. Next to him, over there is Al Dewsbury, then Tony Leswick. There's our captain, Gus Mortson, then comes Lee Fogolin. This tall fella here, next to Shane, is Eddie Litzenberger and the last two are Glen Skov and Benny Woit."

The members of the hockey team acknowledged the introductions. Soon after, by the time the train had reached New Haven, the happy cigar smokers had drifted off to their berths, leaving Dick Irvin slumped pensively against the window staring with noticeable disgust at the last heavy clouds of smoke as they curled slowly out into the corridor. He stood up, finally, and unlimbered himself in a long stretch. "I suppose all of us are tired after a game. But me, I never get to sleep early on a train. I sit up talking or just thinking--talking about what happened in the last game or thinking about what we can do in the next one.

"The coach in the National Hockey League is different from a coach in any other sport. Now, take your baseball manager. It is taken for granted that under certain conditions he will play the percentages. Whether his move works for him or fails for him, it is accepted as a perfectly legitimate method of eliminating himself from personal blame. Look at your football coach. He has maybe 10 games a season. All right, but he has a week between games--a whole week to get his injured players back in shape, a whole week to think up new plays, devise new strategy, rebuild morale and confidence within his club. A whole week, mind you, seven days and seven nights. Then, what happens in the game? The football coach, when he sees things going against him, has a time-out to reorganize his team."

A vague smile spread across the coach's face. "Ah, and wouldn't I just love to yell for a time-out once in a while when I see a Rocket Richard or a Gordie Howe coming down on my nets! Sure I would. So would every other hockey coach. But hockey isn't like that. It's the roughest game in the world--on the players, yes, but on the coach too. In the National Hockey League we play 70 games--half of them on the road. It means about three games a week, sometimes as many as four games in five nights. The coach has the job of devising different patterns of play to use against each of his five league opponents. He's got to see that his players can make this switch quickly--from night to night. To succeed he's got to know how to handle men, know when to give them the bull whip or feed them sugar."

Irvin put his hands into the pockets of his coat and leaned back. "For all of this, I'm not complaining, because I love the game. It is my life. It is also, I think, the greatest of all games, for it is fast, there is continual action, bodily contact, cleverness and finesse. As a player, I admired these qualities. As a coach I find them no less admirable.

"The coach is an important man on a hockey club. But never for a minute forget that no matter who the coach is, he can't put the puck in the net from the bench. This is my 27th season in the league as coach and I think I've been the luckiest there ever was because I've always had good hockey players.

"People point to my record of missing the Stanley Cup playoffs only once in 26 years. All right, part of the explanation may lie with coaching experience, but most of the credit must go to the players themselves. If you haven't got the players you do not get very far. I will say this, though, a poor coach can spoil a good team just as easily as a good coach can make a poor team play well. Continuing along this line of reasoning, I quite positively believe that a good coach, through his knowledge and experience in the game and through the proper application of team strategy at the right time, should in a season win as many as seven games that his players, thinking for themselves, would probably lose.

There's no telling how many games are won or lost through sheer luck and the breaks of the game. Tonight we beat the Rangers and, frankly, we deserved just about a tie. But the puck was working for us and against them. Tomorrow we play Boston. I think we're a better club than Boston, but they're on a losing streak and one of these nights the puck is going to work for them and they'll beat any club in the league. But it won't mean they are a better hockey club." Dick Irvin stood up and yawned. "Might as well turn in," he said.

Late in the afternoon of the next day Irvin was sitting in his room in Boston's Sheraton Plaza Hotel. It was nearly time to pack again and move on to the Garden. Irvin was beginning to think about the upcoming game, and as he did he reflected for a moment on a hockey player's training. "When I go to training camp at the start of a new season I put three big letters on the blackboard. The first letter is 'C'. It stands for condition, and I don't give a damn what sport you're talking about, condition is the key to success. Another letter is 'D'. It stands for discipline and desire. The boy who is going to make the National Hockey League has got to have three essential qualities: desire, or the will to win; ability; and finally, courage. But first comes the desire. Three or four fellows on a team with it aren't enough; the whole team must have it. I tell my players over and over again that a team that can skate and has the desire to win can do a lot to make up for lack of ability.

"Fifteen years I coached the Montreal Canadiens. Some of those teams had pretty good records. Some of them had some pretty good hockey players, fellows like Richard, Lach, Durnan, Blake and now Beliveau. Hell, do you think it was my coaching that made Rocket Richard the greatest scorer in the game? I didn't coach Rocket to greatness--no coach could because Richard has the natural ability and the desire to win. He fought his way up all alone, not because I was his coach." Dick Irvin arose and began pacing the floor. He was now talking excitedly about something he loved very much, and for a moment he allowed himself to stray from the pattern of training-camp routine.

"I know about desire after what I've seen the Rocket go through. For 13 years that man has been the target for everyone in the National Hockey League who is not in a Montreal uniform. And after 13 years he's come out on top. Why? The answer is desire. I can remember a night in Boston some years ago. Every Boston player went after the Rocket, but he kept driving. I was getting pretty mad because the other team was getting away with murder and Referee Bill Chadwick was doing nothing about it. After that game was over, Chadwick came to me and said `Dick, I know what you're thinking, and I'll admit to your face that for a while out on that ice tonight I froze. I froze and found I couldn't blow the whistle, and the reason was that I was so horrified to see a man stand up under such punishment.'"

Irvin stopped, and almost with an effort brought his mind back to his training-camp routine. "The 'D' for discipline," he said. "That is elementary. If an efficient army runs on strict discipline, so must a winning hockey team. I've never stood for slave-driving tactics, nor have I ever checked on my players to see what they do after games. Most hockey players want a few beers after a game and I expect them to have a few beers--as much for pleasure as for plain relaxation. But at the arena discipline has got to be maintained.

"The third letter on the blackboard is 'W'. It stands for work and weight. A good hockey player will want to work as hard in practice as in the real games. Sure, he may have the natural talent, but without the work he won't be worth a damn. And if he can't keep his weight down he's worth nothing.

"I think I can tie together a few of these points with a couple of illustrations. First, more about desire and work at training camp. To get the best team together you have to be tough from the beginning. I had a system when I was with Montreal and I think it paid off pretty well. At the end of the training-camp period, just before I had to make the last cut and decide on the final club, I used to hold a regular full-length squad game. Only this one was a little different from most: it was veterans against rookies. I'd put the veterans in one dressing room and the rookies in another. To the older players I'd say, `Look, there's a bunch of rookies in the next room gunning for your jobs. Now you're not going to let them get away with anything, are you?' Then I'd walk across the hall and tell the kids, `Look, I've got room on my club for some of you fellas but today's the day you earn your ticket. Now I want to see which of you is going to be the first to go out there and put Richard or Bouchard on his arse.'

"Well, sir, I'm telling you, some of those squad games were as rough and tough as any league game I've ever seen. The system may sound brutal, but it worked, for hockey is a game of meanness and bitterness where there is no such thing as a friendly relationship."

The taxi threaded its way through the Boston streets to the Garden. Dick Irvin slouched down in the back seat. For a moment he looked suspiciously out into the darkness, then turned and gazed at the floor. "I think at last," he said, picking up the thread of his earlier thoughts, "that I must know something about conditioning of athletes. It follows that part of my responsibility is to try and prove to my players that I know what is best for them. Let me tell you about one way I proved my point last season.

"We'd gone three or four games without a win and I was getting pretty worried. I checked the weight list and noticed the players--as a group--were 37 pounds overweight. I got them all into the dressing room and told them I thought there weren't more than three men on the club who were in condition. They looked at me as though they though I was crazy, and you nobody said a word. Then I said to them, `And now I'm going to prove to you just how right I am.'

"Well, for two days, two practice sessions a day, I worked them. I skated them, I skated them again--and I skated them some more. The first day we had no contact work. Instead, I had the forward lines just going up and down the ice passing the puck back and forth. Mind you, no checking from the opposition, just passing. Pretty soon, as they became more tired, the passes were looking more awful. It came to a point where I was watching grown men, professionals in the National Hockey League, who were absolutely incapable of putting that puck on a linemate's stick. When I called them in there was no need for me to explain the point they had just proved to their own satisfaction: a hockey player cannot expect to be alert mentally if he is not in condition physically."

At rinkside in the Boston Garden that evening the visiting team was lonely and without friends. There was a group of girls in the first row behind the Black Hawks. Carefully they scrutinized the faces of the warriors before them and then quickly checked the number on the back of each jersey with the numbers on the program. Boston fans burst into an abrupt cheer for a goal just scored by the Bruins. Two young boys skipped down the passageway yelling--partly at the Chicago bench and partly at Irvin--"You guys really stink, ya hear? Ya really stink."

As the game in Boston grew progressively worse from the Black Hawks' point of view, Irvin restrained himself with marvelous control. A man who has almost never been known to berate a hockey player in public, the coach made an honest effort to take some pressure off his boys, all of whom had only to turn their heads slightly for one glance at the man to know what degree of humor they could expect to find him in later that night on the train to Montreal. Irvin looked over the tops of their heads and said simply, "The puck hasn't worked for us once tonight."

Before the train moved out there was time for a snack in the coffee shop. "You lose hockey games in two ways," Irvin said. "One, by having the breaks go against you. Two, by playing badly. Nobody--coaches or players--can do anything to alter the breaks of the game. But a coach is getting paid to see that his team doesn't play badly.

"All right, let's see what it is that makes a team play badly." Dick Irvin held out his a hand and prepared to thrust out one finger at a time. "A team plays badly for four reasons: one, it is stale; two, it is lazy; three, it cannot, or is by nature not capable of doing what is asked of it; four, it will not do what is asked of it.

"The coach's problem is to see which of these four factors is causing his team to lose--and then to remedy the fault. I'll now take them in turn. If the team is stale, that's easy. You give them a rest. If the team is lazy, that's easy too. You give them more work. If the team simply cannot do what is asked of it, the answer is to try and get new players who are more capable. Ah, and here's the toughie--if the team will not do what is asked of it, then the man who is in trouble is the coach. Management isn't in the habit of firing the whole team when it is relatively simple to let the coach go." Irvin popped the last piece of muffin into his mouth and smiled for the first time in several hours. "So you see," he said, while slipping into his overcoat, "the coach must be much more than a coach in a technical sense. he must be a psychologist too."

The lights in the private car BH1 were extinguished early. Only in the drawing room was there a sign of life. Dick Irvin sat huddled in one corner, allowing himself to be rocked gently by the motion of the car as it sped northward toward Canada. The door stood ajar, and from his position the coach could look the length of the car where, on either side of the dark corridor, drawn curtains indicated that every member of Chicago's losing hockey club had chosen quick retirement in favor of a probable midnight lecture. After gazing down the curtained berths for a few silent moments, Irvin reached a hand inside his breast pocket and withdrew a fat sheath of carefully folded papers. He took a pencil and began writing.

"I'm a great one for figures and statistics," he explained with a small smile. "I grade every player after every game with my own point system: three points for a star night, two points for good, one point for fair and minus one point for poor. Dressing 17 men for a game, if all 17 play a top game, it should give you a total of 51 points. Now let's see what sort of score we can give them tonight."

Irvin scribbled each name down in a long list, and after each name went a figure. His face was expressionless until he reached the end of the page, drew a last heavy line and began his addition. "There," he concluded a few seconds later, "just about what I thought--one of the worst games we've played all season: a total of six points out of a possible 51."

He lapsed into silence and twiddled with the pencil as he stared at the paper in front of him. After a while he pulled another sheet of figures from the bundles and made some minor adjustments on it. "It's strange how statistics have a fascination for some people. I keep a record of all sorts of things and never get tired of it. For instance, I've kept a record of every game and goal I've seen since I began coaching during the 1929-30 season. Including the playoffs, I've coached 1,634 games. My teams have won 801, lost 601 and tied 232. During all that time I've seen 8,705 goals--4,721 for me and 3,984 against me."

The train suddenly came to a jerking halt at a small New England station and Irvin chuckled quietly. "People wonder that I don't get tired of spending half my life on the railroad sleeper. Well, it's just a matter of getting used to it. By the end of this season I figure that I will have traveled roughly 1,050,000 miles during 30 years in the National Hockey League. A long way, sure, but I asked for it and who's to say I wouldn't do the same thing if I had to start all over again?"

As the train gathered speed once more, Irvin shuffled the papers around in his hands and found himself suddenly back to his personal record of the Black Hawks' game against Boston. A furious scowl covered his entire face and he exclaimed, "God damn it, only six points out of a possible 51. I just can't figure it, but when a team goes that bad the coach must take the blame if he expects to take credit when the team wins. I wonder, though, what the players think of themselves right now. Do you really think each man realizes what sort of a show he put on in Boston?" Dick Irvin stood up excitedly. Taking a blank piece of paper, he tore it quickly into little strips. Next he reached up to take his hat off the overhead rack. With the hat in one hand and the ballots in the other he moved quickly out into the corridor and began prodding the occupant of the first berth within reach. "Every one of you," he began, "will fill out a piece of paper I'm about to distribute. On it you will sign your name and indicate whether, in your own opinion, you deserve a rating for star, good, fair or poor after tonight's game. Drop your answers into this hat, and we'll take the matter up again tomorrow." The train to Montreal drove on through the night as Dick Irvin conducted his poll and tabulated the ballots. It was a cold night and, for some, a long one.

The oldest coach in the National Hockey League was born on July 19, 1892 at Limestone Ridge, Ontario. "My father," he said, as he sat in a well-stuffed chair in the lobby of Montreal's Mount Royal Hotel watching the passing parade of transient hockey players and other less distinguishable guests, "was a butcher by trade. I was the fourth of 10 children. There were six of us boys and four girls. In 1899 we moved to Winnipeg where I saw a pair of skates and the game of hockey for the first time. I think it must have fascinated me because I can remember staying out in the backyard practicing shooting a puck at a spot on the wall until my mother would have to come and drag me indoors for dinner.

There were commercial leagues in Winnipeg and naturally I wanted to get on the team sponsored by the butchers. I was 15 before I got my chance. One of the regular forwards was taken sick and a friend of my father's suggested that I be given a chance to play. The man came to me before the game and said he's give me a dollar for every goal I scored. Under the circumstances I suppose I was as excited and nervous as any boy of 15 can be. But I was confident too. I had developed a good wrist shot and somehow I always knew how to score. In that game I got five goals--and five dollars--and I know I've had few thrills like it since."

Irvin's eyes looked in the wide range of the hotel lobby and focused on a rookie who was just about to step up to the cigarette counter. The boy had a confident look about him. His coach grinned. "You know, when I finally turned professional with Portland of the Pacific Coast Hockey League, my salary was $700. It was in 1913, and the top pay in the league was $1,250." An old acquaintance hove, and Irvin's eyes lit up. "There's an old National Leaguer. He knew what it was like in the old days. I was 34 when the Portland club was sold to Chicago in 1926 and my team became the Chicago Black Hawks. The first year up in the National Hockey League I finished second in scoring to Bill Cook of the New York Rangers. The next season I fractured my skull and I was never any good again."

Irvin settled back slowly into his seat. "I can reminisce about the old days," he said, "and maybe I'll surprise you because I won't tell you how much better we played the game than they play it today. Hockey, in my day as a player, may have been dirtier--but it was not tougher to play. By dirtier I mean plain brutal. The butt end of a stick could break off in a man's ribs and the referee would never call it. Today the refereeing is better and the hockey is better too. A man does more skating in one period now that he used to in a whole game. It was the total legalizing of the forward pass in 1929 that opened up hockey. In my day we had stickwork, sure, and rough board-checking, but the game was so slow that if you tried it today, you'd put 15,000 people to sleep--or else they'd walk out on you.

"In their day there were great hockey players like Howie Morenz and George Hainsworth. They called Hainsworth one of the greatest goalies of all time. Well, I suppose he was. In one 44-game season Hainsworth had 22 shutouts and his team won exactly 22 games. Fine, but nobody's going to tell me that today's goalies aren't better. Fellows like Bill Durnan, Turk Broda, Harry Lumley and Terry Sawchuk were better than Hainsworth or Georges Vezina simply because the speeded-up game forced them to react faster. Still, you've got to go by the old theory that a goalie can be no better than the team in front of him. Where do you draw the line between individual and team ability? Sawchuk was terrific with Detroit. Now he's with Boston and having a bad year. Who is to blame, Sawchuk or his team?"

Another game--another loss for Chicago. The Montreal Canadiens, a team which Irvin, after 15 years as their coach, still affectionately refers to as "my old team," walloped the Black Hawks and now both clubs were on the same train heading west across the dominion for still further combat the following night. In the sleeper next to Irvin's were some of his star pupils: Maurice Richard, Jean Beliveau, Boom Boom Geoffrion, Doug Harvey, Bert Olmstead and Jacques Plante.

"As a rival coach," he said in reference to his former players, "you look at them differently. You face the challenge of trying to devise tactics to stop them when you know perfectly well what they can do. It should be easier for a coach to defeat a good offensive club than it is to beat a good defensive club. Why? Hell, you can take an ordinary ham-and-egg hockey player and tell him to stick right on a big star, say a fellow like Rocket Richard. But tell that same ham-and-egger to skate through a tough defense and put that puck in the net, and you've got a different story. Why, I read just the other day that this rookie Dickie Duff, a Kid with Toronto, stuck to Gordie Howe of Detroit so close in one game that Howe never got off one shot all night long. Everywhere he went, here was this Duff skating along with him--just annoying him and skating around getting in his way, zigging and zagging and never letting Howe get away from him.

"Despite the challenge you may feel about beating a team of stars, you don't let yourself forget a cardinal theory about hockey players. It's what makes the coach's challenge all the more challenging: when a super star has a bad night he is still pretty good. When an average player has a bad night he is fair. But when a poor hockey player has a bad night he's nothing. The hockey coach is forever hoping the other team's stars will have a bad night and his poor players a star night."

Irvin lay back in his berth, scanning the headlines of a paper. In a minute he had covered the important news and put the paper aside. "I never thought much about coaching until my skull injury finished my playing career after the 1928-29 season," he went on. "I got my first chance to coach at Chicago in 1929. For two seasons I put the Black Hawks into the Stanley Cup playoffs, and in my second season as a coach we lost the Cup only after going into overtime in the last game of the final series against Montreal. I was pretty pleased, but they dropped me as coach the next season and I went west to take a long vacation. The new season wasn't very old when I got a phone call from Conn Smythe in Toronto. The Maple Leafs had gotten off to a bad start and Conn wanted a quick coaching change.

"I took the job and that first Toronto team of mine went on to win the Stanley Cup. I stayed with the Leafs for nine seasons before moving on to Montreal. Now--although I still make my home in Montreal for my wife and two children--I'm technically back where I started coaching: in Chicago. I live alone in a hotel and think of ways to make my hockey players play better hockey. When they lose, sure, I brood and often feel that it's my fault and not their's. And when I get back to Montreal to see my family (Dick Jr., 23, and Fay, 19) a lot of my old friends look at my club and then at Les Canadiens and want to know if I don't feel silly accepting a job with a club that's going nowhere.

"To that I say: it's just another challenge. Conn Smythe tossed a challenge to me when he first asked me to come to Toronto. I accepted it and won that round. Last year it was Smythe again who let me know that the Chicago coaching job was mine if I wanted it. I thought it over pretty carefully. I thought too of how I'd been in five Stanley Cup final rounds with Montreal in the last few years and how we'd only managed to win the Cup in one of those five cracks at it. That could have been my fault too, not my players. So, instead of retiring to a farm and raising my pigeons and chickens (racing homers, bantams and white Wyandottes), I took Smythe up again and accepted the job Chicago offered me. The Black Hawks may be going nowhere this season. It looks doubtful as to whether we'll make the playoffs. But we're building up a farm system and I still happen to think I can help in the building. It's the same old thing: just another challenge. Maybe I'm too old. Maybe I'm wrong. But I don't think so.