Month: December 2015

are you afraid of anything?

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richard scores 3

“Are you afraid of anything?”

Richard was quiet a long time. “Yes,
I am afraid of the future.
I am afraid to grow older.
I never used to think of it,
now it’s on my mind every day.
I will be so lonely
when hockey is over for me.”

“Can you coach, maybe?”

“No,
I can’t change
the way a man plays hockey.
Either he can play it
or he can’t.
I can’t help him.”

He looked at the ice,
his eyes moving up and down its length.

“I give myself another day,
that’s all.
I just count one day ahead to be able to play.
For the last four or five years,
I’ve been the oldest in the league.
That’s terrible
for a man to think about.”

• June Callwood talks to Maurice Richard for Maclean’s, May 9, 1959; excerpted, edited, and poemized.

 

nobody could say bill’s washed up

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bun + bill cook 1930

“This notion that Bill Cook is through, that his legs have gone back on him, is all nonsense. Ask Doc Clauss if there’s anything the matter with his legs. Why, Bill’s got at least two seasons more of great hockey in his system! He can’t be over 36. Speaking of ages, there’s his brother, Bun Cook. Bun hasn’t been going any better than Bill. Yet he’s only 25 or so. Nobody could say Bun’s washed up.”

Frank Boucher’s heart was in the right place, even if his math was bad: in December of 1930, his New York Rangers linemates, Bill Cook (above, right) was 35, while his younger brother Bun (left) was 27. It is true that the Rangers hadn’t started the season as well as they might have, winning just three of their first eight games. But to lay the blame on captain Bill — well, as Boucher told Harold C. Burr, the time to count out old Bill wasn’t now. The headline on Burr’s Brooklyn Daily Eagle column: “Frank Boucher Just Laughs at the Idea Bill Cook’s Through.” True enough: by season’s end, he was the Rangers’ leading scorer. He was to play a further seven seasons in the NHL, topping the league in scoring in 1932-33. That was the year, too, that he put a puck past Lorne Chabot of the Toronto Maple Leafs in overtime to win the Rangers the Stanley Cup.

 (Photo: courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection)

dickie moore, 1931—2015

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dickie m

Dickie Moore was 84 when he died on Saturday in Montreal. A Hall-of-Fame left winger, he twice won the Art Ross Trophy as the NHL’s leading scorer. While he also turned out, later in his career, for the Toronto Maple Leafs and the St. Louis Blues, it’s as a Montreal Canadien that he’ll be remembered, a Habs’ legend on six of their Stanley Cup-winning teams through the 1950s. The New York Times has an obituary here — though better, first, to read Red Fisher’s heartfelt memoir of his long-time friend from Montreal’s Gazette. Then, maybe, these few views of Dickie Moore’s years on ice:

1

He was supposed to be headed for New York, the Rangers, in exchange for Dean Prentice, it was in the papers, except for, well, then, no. The Canadian Press reported that Rangers GM Frank Boucher called up Selke to say he didn’t have anyone of Moore’s calibre to trade, other than maybe Danny Lewicki. Selke: You can’t trade Lewicki, he’s playing too well. As Selke told it, Boucher said Prentice and Ron Murphy weren’t good enough and they left it at that. Next day, Rangers’ president General J.R. Kilpatrick phoned up to say he’d pay cash for Moore. “I told him,” said Selke, “we couldn’t play with cash.”

So he stayed, as did Mazur, though the latter was sent down to the Montreal Royals, and eventually found his way to Chicago. Three seasons later, Moore topped the league in scoring for the first time.

2

His nickname, of course, was Digging Dickie.

As a rookie for Montreal in 1952, he played with Elmer Lach and Dick Gamble on what was described as the league’s most torrid line. His most famous linemates: Maurice and Henri Richard.

3

Adjectives that appear next to his name in the register of Hall-of-Famers include aggressive and robust. Stan Fischler has called him brash to a fault and at first believed to be uncontrollable.

In sundry newspapers he was described as the problem child of Quebec junior hockey (1950) as well as a bellicose showboating rugged winger and colorful type and darling of the crowd and paradoxically, roundly despised by others because of his flair for showmanship (1950); speedy young forward (1951); brilliant rookie (1952); chippy operator (1952); aggressive, two-way performer (1955); also plucky (1961); a dependable playoff performer (1962); battle-scarred (1967); and once-proficient (1967). Toronto GM Punch Imlach called him a great competitor (1964) and sore-legged all-star (1966).

4

For his first Art Ross in 1957-58 he scored 36 goals and 84 points in 70 games. The following year he piled up 41 goals; his 96 points that years were the most an NHL player had ever accumulated in a season.

A brilliant goal from the Habs’ 1959 Cup-winning game against Chicago was described this way:

Instead of passing from the end boards, he sprinted out and jammed the puck past Hall.

5

Some wounds and infirmities:

He went to hospital in 1952 with badly bruised knees.

In 1958 his fractured hand impaired his stickhandling and shooting. Canadiens’ physiotherapist Bill Head said it was a small bone just under the thumb that was broken, and that it was injury often incurred by baseball players.

Irwin Spencer of the New York Rangers slashed him in 1961, fractured a bone in his foot.

Later that year, in the playoffs, he was on a list of Hab casualties compiled by Bill Head that included: Billy Hicke, concussion and head gash; Tom Johnson, pulled groin; Phil Goyette, mild concussion; Ralph Backstrom, leg and ankle; Jean Béliveau, head injury; Dickie Moore, wrist; Jean-Guy Talbot, loose teeth.

In the summer of 1961 he had surgery on his left knee to remove cartilage. At training camp that September the knee was weak.

With the Leafs in 1964, he bruised the base of his spine hitting the boards backwards in New York, an injury he concealed for two weeks until he couldn’t skate.

A word often associated with his knees was gimpy. Back again in 1962, he was 31 with a limp and a question mark hovering just in front of him, in front and up a bit. He’d had knee surgery in the summer, the left knee again, this time the doctors removed a cyst. Moore hoisted the leg of his trousers for a reporter to study the aftermath of all the hospital work: three six-inch scars.

“The thing is that I have to work at this game,” he explained. “The knee will never be perfect and I have to do some things a little differently. I have to know how to twist and turn without straining it and to expect a little pain once in a while.”

At training camp in Verdun he had his best day on September 19 when he scored a picturesque goal and set up another by Lou Fontinato and (Pat Curran wrote in The Gazette) “was skating much like The Digger of old.”

“I should have had another goal but that Patate picked it off when I tried to flip the puck past him.”

Patate: wily old Jacques Plante.

6

Youths attacked him: youths. The Habs were in Detroit, April of 1952, in the finals. The Red Wings won the game, 3-0, to take a three-game lead, it was all over, except for the hallway scuffling. The Ottawa Citizen told the tale: a jostling group of youthful fans was waiting for the Canadiens outside their dressing room when

One youth laid into Moore with a body check. Moore shoved him and the band grabbed the Canadiens. But [Red Wing Leo] Reise and [Ted] Lindsay, passing by, grabbed two of the youths and ended the scuffle.

7

He couldn’t do it any more in 1963, his ailing legs wouldn’t let him. He was 33 a year later when Punch Imlach plucked him off waivers and brought him to Toronto (he also grabbed Terry Sawchuk). “When I draft players,” Imlach said, “I tell them to throw away the medical reports and birth certificates

“We have nothing to lose by taking a shot with Moore, we’ve had guys play with almost broken legs so I’m certainly not worried about a couple of sore knees.”

He played 38 games for the Leafs before he decided his knees really weren’t up to the work.

He did come back for one more season, in 1967-68, when the St. Louis Blues convinced him to give them a whirl. On a team that iced Glenn Hall, Doug Harvey, and Red Berenson, Moore only played 27 regular-season games, but he was instrumental in getting the Blues into the playoffs, and he was the team’s leading scorer (seven goals, 14 points) as they fought a way to the finals, where Montreal beat them in four games.

“They’re paying me well and when a guy likes the game as much as I do, it’s pretty hard to turn down something like this,” he said as the season got underway. “They’re not expecting the world from me. They want me to set my on pace and I don’t think I’ll disgrace anyone.”

“I mean, people don’t go out now strictly with the idea of knocking somebody down. In my day, guys would come off the bench with only one idea in mind: run the other guy into the boards or knock him off his skates.”

 

(Photo: Louis Jaques, Library and Archives Canada/e002343728)

all georges vézina’s children

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vezina 17

For as long as the NHL hands out trophy for goaltending excellence in his name, Georges Vézina will be remembered for his proficiency in stopping pucks. Still, it is 90 years this fall since Vézina played his last period of NHL hockey, which means we don’t really have much of a sense of the man, his demeanor, or how he conducted himself, on or off the ice. His goaling statistics remain impressive, if not exactly overwhelming. Between 1910 and 1925, he was the only goaltender to ply the Montreal Canadiens’ net. He won two Stanley Cups before the NHA made way for the NHL. Of the 203 games he played over nine seasons once that happened, 113 of them were wins. You can study all this at one of the online stats archives, where you’re liable to learn that Vézina’s lack of a QSP and his relatively modest career GPS of 38.8 don’t seem to have affected his standing on the Elo Fan Rating ladder.

Not a fan of analytics? Fair enough. What about fantastical stats? Those are different from the fancy metrics with which the NHL game is now measured in that they don’t necessarily have anything to do with on-ice performance and, plus, they’re not true. For instance: you may have read, possibly in a book published newly this fall, that by the time he died in 1926, 39-year-old Georges Vézina had fathered 24 children.

myths sticksIf the book in question is Kevin Gibson’s Of Myths & Sticks: Hockey Facts, Fictions & Coincidences (Douglas & McIntyre), then you may know already that it doesn’t profess to be a major work. It’s a slim volume, light-hearted in tone, “a lively compendium of little-known hockey trivia,” as the publisher promises, from a “stats archaeologist.” More than a third of its 176 pages are devoted to a humdrum calendar of on-this-day-in-history reminders from the hockey past.

“I am,” Gibson volunteers in his introduction, “the TSN Research, Stats and Information Department.” As such, he’s all about facts, a word that choruses through both the author’s manifesto and the book’s marketing material along with notable others like urban legends, conspiracy theories, debunking, and falsehoods. The truth is, when it comes to hockey history, you just can’t believe what you’ve read. “I’d like to go through some old wives’ tales,” Gibson announces, “legends and confessional stories and get to the bottom of what is fact and fiction in the world of hockey.” Never fear, Gibson’s here, to separate the faux from the facts, all of which he’s analyzed and researched and uncovered.

Great. Happy to hear it. Lots of us who love hockey history revel in fine detail and quirky ephemera, and we’re always eager to learn more. Some of us have even gone before where Gibson goes, delving (for example) into Georges Vézina’s family history. That’s how we found out that the story of his multitudinous children is exactly that: plain fiction, a fanciful not-true made-up fallacious falseness that has been making the rounds for almost as long as the Montreal Canadiens have been around, ever since Léo Dandurand put it on a hook to see whether the newspaper boys might bite.

Family records do suggest an entirely tragic truth that may, somehow, have informed Dandurand’s fictionalizing: Vézina’s wife, Stella (née Morin), may have had as many as six children die at birth, while another, named Robert, lived just three months.  The only two Vézina children to survive were were two sons: Jean-Jules, born in 1912, and Marcel, who made his debut on the last day of March of 1916, the night after the Canadiens won the Cup. There’s a famous (and adorable) photograph of him sitting in the Stanley Cup, as well as a popular tale that his parents gave him the middle name Stanley in recognition of the Cup. While it’s possible that he bore it as a nickname, baptismal records show that he was christened Joseph Louis Marcel.

Dandurand is, of course, a towering figure in Montreal Canadiens history, an owner who also coached and managed the team. He could have been a serial fabricator, I guess, but then again the story of his goaltender’s populous family might just as well have been a moment’s joke taken up by a newspaperman who didn’t bother to verify it with Vézina himself. The goaltender’s English doesn’t ever seem to have been very good, so maybe that was part of it. D’Arcy Jenish dates the original Dandurand telling to the spring of 1925, when Montreal was in Victoria to play for the Stanley Cup.

Gibson certainly isn’t the first reputable writer to repeat the error. When Vézina fell ill and left the Canadiens in the fall of 1925, various newspapers gave him a brood of 17 — “enough for two hockey teams, plus substitutes,” according to The Springfield Missouri Republican, who also saw fit to add six years to his age and promote him to police chief of his hometown, Chicoutimi.

After his death the following March of 1926, newspapers variously pegged his progeny at 17 (an Associated Press report in The New York Times) and 22 (Winnipeg Tribune). While I should say that the French press seems to have gone unfooled from the start, Montreal’s English papers preferred the fantasy version in which, for example, (The Gazette) “two sets of twins were born in the first two years of his married life.”

The numbers have fluctuated over the years. By 1936, The New York Post was at 18 — though two years later they’d revised themselves down to 14. Strange to say, but Rosaire Barrette’s 1952 biography of Léo Dandurand reiterated its subject’s original lie, hoisting the number back up to 22.

Stan Fischler settled on 20 in The Flying Frenchman (1971) but 22 is the number that’s proved the most persistent. It’s the one in both Ron McAllister Hockey Stars (1950) and Andrew Podnieks’ otherwise authoritative Players: The Ultimate A-Z Guide of Everyone Who Has Ever Played in the NHL (2003). Podnieks notes that only two of the many were alive by the time Vézina died — true enough, in its way.

“He began fathering babies like he was aiming at a world record,” Brian McFarlane breezes in The Habs (1996). In Canadiens Legends: Montreal’s Hockey Heroes (2005), Mike Leonetti mentions Vézina’s devout Roman Catholic lifestyle: “He was married at 20 and produced 22 children!” That’s good enough, too, for Jack Falla, who paid tribute to Vézina in his 2008 book Open Ice, devoting a whole chapter to the man in which he described a pilgrimage to visit Chicoutimi and alluded awkwardly to Mrs. Vézina’s partnership.

The truth is out there. Michel Vigneault’s straightforward entry in The Dictionary of Canadian Biography gets it right. Online, The Hockey Hall of Fame successfully splits myth from truth, as does Vézina’s Wikipedia page. In ‪The Montreal Canadiens: 100 Years of Glory (2009), D’Arcy Jenish makes no mistake. And as recently as this very fall, Pat Hickey’s 100 Things Canadiens Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die tells (a little wearily?) the truth.

Is it such a big deal that Of Myths & Sticks: Hockey Facts, Fictions & Coincidences gets it wrong? Other than the several times the error is trumpeted on the book’s cover and in marketing materials, Vézina’s imaginary family occupies one small paragraph within one slim book. It is interesting that Gibson ups the ante more than almost anyone previously — only Stephen Cole, in The Canadian Hockey Atlas (2006), has ever claimed 24 minor Vézinas before now — but in the wider swing of things, it’s not such an egregious blunder.

Except for … it’s not the only one in the book. I gave up looking after not too long, but just before I got truly exasperated, I came across a glaring error of fact involving Gordie Howe hattricks along with a pair of Ching Johnson mistakes. I don’t have a ratio on how much faux Of Myths and Sticks contains compared to its facts, but whatever the number, it’s not favourable. Continue reading →

hitman

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leo boivin

Bashful: The Toronto Maple Leafs thought that a young defenceman named Leo Boivin might be the man to replace Bill Barilko on their blueline after Bashin’ Bill went missing in the summer of 1951. Andrew Podnieks says when 19-year-old Boivin didn’t crack the Leafs’ line-up that fall, he decided to quit the game and head back to his hometown of Prescott, Ontario, to drive a truck. Conn Smythe talked him out of it and the following season he was a regular in Toronto. “The little man of iron,” coach Hap Day was calling Boivin, who was barely 5’8’’. “When you’re built low, you hit ’em low, and I like to hit,” Boivin happily told The Globe and Mail’s Al Nickleson. “When you hit a fellow good, you feel good.”

He was traded to Boston after two seasons — Bill Ezinicki went the other way — and it was there that he ended up spending the majority of his 19-year Hall-of-Fame NHL career. Above, in 1955, he took to the Garden ice with his wife and daughter at the Bruins’ annual Christmas party.

(Photo: Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection)

priceworthy

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Montreal Canadiens goaltender Carey Price was named winner yesterday of the 2015 Lou Marsh Trophy as Canada’s topmost athlete. He’s the ninth hockey player to be so recognized since the award was first given in 1936, and the only goaltender. Those who’ve gone before: Sidney Crosby (twice), Wayne Gretzky (four times), Mario Lemieux, Guy Lafleur, Bobby Clarke, Phil Esposito, Bobby Orr, and Maurice Richard. When he wasn’t whistling at hockey games, Lou Marsh was a beloved Toronto Star sports columnist and editor who also made his mark on the football field, as a sprinter, and as an arbiter of boxers and wrestlers.

this week: out there at twilight with a big machete, chopping up a beaver dam

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As the Toronto Maple Leafs approach their centennial, the team is thinking of maybe updating, altering, or otherwise rejigging their logo — possibly. That was the news today, from the website sportslogos.net, quoting “sources” and hinting at plans for new sweaters, some of which may or may not be St. Patricks-green.

“Centennial plans will be announced in the New Year,” Dave Haggith, senior director of communications for Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment, was telling Kevin McGran, from The Toronto Star. “We won’t be commenting until that time. There’s some fun stuff planned.”

Erik Karlsson is the most game-changing defenceman since Bobby Orr, said Adam Gretz this week at CBS Sports. And he is only getting better. (Italics his.)

The city of Edmonton commissioned artist Slavo Cech to fashion a small steel sculpture of a bison to present to former Oilers coach and GM and dynasty-builder Glen Sather this week. Cech, an Oilers fan, was honoured. “It’s not hockey-related,” he said, “but he’s more than hockey, right?”

“It’s difficult for me to put in my words the gratitude I feel for this honour,” Sather said on Friday night as a banner bearing his name lifted to the rafters of Rexall Place. “My sincere wish is that every one of you in this building gets to experience something, anything in your life that makes you feel like I’m feeling right now: the luckiest person on earth.”

New-Look Leafs: A Globe and Mail correspondent browsed the aisles at a Jordanian refugee camp earlier this week.

Brand New: A Globe and Mail correspondent browsed the aisles at a Jordanian refugee camp earlier this week.

“I say,” tweeted Don Cherry, “what kind of a world would we live in without the police?”

Everyone who paid attention to the New York Rangers’ advanced stats saw their struggles coming, said someone, on social media, somewhere.

On the ice in Boston a week or two back, it’s possible that a Bruin winger, Brad Marchand, may have kneed a Ranger goaltender, Henrik Lundqvist, in the head. Boston coach Claude Julien said that Lundqvist was acting.

“Who would you rather have as a son,” said his New York counterpart, Alain Vigneault, “Henrik or Brad Marchand?”

David Akin of The Toronto Sun reported this week that hockey historian Stephen J. Harper has been sighted just twice in the House of Commons in Ottawa since he lost his day-job as prime minister of Canada in October. Akin writes:

His front-row seat is immediately to the left of the Speaker. That location lets the former prime minister enter and exit the House with little fanfare and without having to go near the press.

Paul Martin used the same seat after his Liberals lost the 2006 election.

To pass the albeit brief time he’s spent in the Commons, Harper arrived last time with a book: A just published biography by Eric Zweig of Art Ross, the Hockey Hall of Famer, NHL founding father, and long-time member of the Boston Bruins. Harper is a big hockey history buff.

Speaking of the Speaker, there’s a new one, Harperside: Nova Scotia Liberal MP Geoff Regan. He was on CTV’s Question Period today comparing the House of Commons to a hockey game.

“Only certain people get to play and it’s shaped in a lot of ways like an arena, with the two sides,” said Regan.

“And the people who aren’t actually in the game, they’d like to be in the game, and sometimes want to react to something, want to say something, the way you’d see at a game. But we’re not in a rink. We’re in the House of Commons.”

“I just love anything Michael Keaton is in,” Don Cherry told Jim Slotek of Postmedia.

Sather was a master psychologist: that’s what a defenceman who worked his blueline, Steve Smith, told Jim Matheson of The Edmonton Journal. “You can take Roger Neilson, maybe the best Xs and Os guy, but he didn’t win, maybe because he didn’t have the players elsewhere. But Glen managed all these personalities in Edmonton. That’s a special art to manage all those guys and keep them happy. It’s like Phil Jackson in basketball. He understood his players in Chicago and what buttons to push.”

“It was the managing of people that made Glen really good.”

No Logo: Leaf fans weighed in at The Toronto Star earlier today, hours after word of a possible new logo emerged online.

No Logo: Leaf fans weighed in at The Toronto Star earlier today, hours after word of a possible new logo emerged online.

Fighting is on its way out of the NHL, mostly everybody agreed this week — as they have been agreeing, more or less, since the season started in early October.

A kinder, gentler NHL is taking shape, said Dave Feschuk of The Toronto Star:

Given the rise in concern about the permanent nature of head injuries, there is also, in some eyes, a growing mutual awareness of the ultimate fragility of the human condition.

“Back in the day it used to be pretty malicious,” said Nazem Kadri, the only Leafs player who’s been penalized for fighting this season. “I think guys now respect the game and respect each other’s bodies and hope nobody gets seriously injured. I mean, anytime you see someone go down, it’s a frightening feeling because you know it could be you.”

Back in October, The Globe and Mail ran an editorial at that time to bid farewell to the age of the goon, noting that the NHL might even be showing signs of getting serious about dealing with its concussion problem. And yet:

… if players are still allowed to punch each other in the head during prolonged, staged fights, what’s the point? It is hypocritical to express concern for concussions on the one hand, and allow fighting on the other.

Pierre LeBrun of ESPN was wondering the same thing this week. “Shouldn’t we be asking why the NHL still allows bare-knuckle fighting?” he wrote in a piece you’re advised to read for yourself. “I’ve said this before, but it just seems so hypocritical to have introduced Rule 48 (illegal hit to the head) in 2010 but still allow bare-knuckle punches.”

More required reading: writing at Vice Sports, Dave Bidini’s take on the complicated cultural significance of fighting is a smart, counterintuitive view you haven’t heard before.

“My big heroes,” continued Don Cherry, “are Sir Francis Drake, Horatio Nelson, and Lawrence of Arabia. I really loved Seven Pillars of Wisdom.”

A latterday Oiler, Taylor Hall, on Sather:

“He was a guy who brought everyone together; he seemed like a great button-pusher. Having that much skill and that much talent on your team isn’t an easy thing.”

Blackhawks preternatural confidence rubs off on new players

was a recent headline on a Mark Lazerus feature in Chicago’s Sun-Times in which the coach praised his captain, Jonathan Toews:

Joel Quenneville calls it a “competitive” nature, that the Hawks, perhaps more than any team he’s ever played for or coached, are better physically prepared and better mentally equipped to handle any situation. And he said it starts at the top, with the captain.

“As a coaching staff, you’re in a good spot knowing that the message is always there [about] doing things the right way,” Quenneville said. “Guys definitely notice Jonny’s intensity and professionalism right off the bat.”

 Don Cherry gave another Postmedia interview, this one to Michael Traikos:

Q: Is it OK that enforcers have been run out of the league?

A: I never ever believed in guys that should sit there for two periods and then get thrown out there for a minute and fight. I never believed in that. I call that ‘Mad Dog Thinking.’ I remember with my Boston Bruins, we had more tough guys than any team and every one of them got 20 goals. That’s what they have now. Every one of them can play the game. And that’s the way it should be. You should never have a guy sitting on the bench like a mad dog.

A Nashville rookie named Viktor Arvidsson used his stick to neck-check a Buffalo defenceman, Carlo Colaiacovo. The former left the game with a five-minute major and a game misconduct on his record; the latter departed with what the Sabres at first classed, inevitably, as an upper body injury.

His coach, Dan Bylsma, had an update following the game: “Carlo is doing OK. He got the cross check to the throat. He did go to the hospital; he’s there now. I guess they’re saying he has a dented trachea.”

Bryan Trottier wrote a letter to his youthful self and posted it at The Player’s Tribune for himself to read, along with everybody.

When you tell people how you learned to skate later in life, they’ll think you’re messing with them. They’re not going to believe how your handyman father would clear off the frozen creek across from your house after a snowstorm. You know how he walks out there at twilight with a big machete and floods the creek by chopping up a beaver dam? That’s not a normal thing. Other kids’ dads have Zambonis, or at least a hose. Your dad has a machete and some Canadian know-how. Thanks, Mr. Beaver.

Sometimes you just have to go out to the beaver dam with a machete and start chopping wood.

Brandon Prust of the Vancouver Canucks paid $5,000 last week to spear Boston’s Brad Marchand in the groin.

“Best money I’ve ever spent,” Prust told reporters.

Why did he do it? “It was frustrations,” Prust explained. “It happens out there. I wasn’t trying to injure him. I was just coming back as the puck was coming back up the boards. On my swing by, I got my stick active.”

 “It wasn’t that hard,” he said. “He sold it pretty good. I saw him laughing on the bench afterwards.

Marchand, for his part, was only too glad to talk about what happened to Amalie Benjamin of The Boston Globe. “I think it was Prust,” he said. “I didn’t really see who did it when it happened, but just kind of gave me a jab, got me in the fun spot.”

Assuming it was who it may have been, Marchand understood. “Honestly,” he continued, “even if he wasn’t fined, I wouldn’t have been upset. It’s fine that he is, but I wouldn’t want to see him lose that much money over what happened. I think suspensions are worthy when guys get hurt or it’s a really bad shot. Like I said, I’ve done that before, lots of guys do that all the time. It is what it is. It’s part of the game.”

On he went, and on:

“It clearly doesn’t feel good,” Marchand said. “It hurts, so whether you’re upset at someone or you want to take a shot, it’s an easy place to target. You know it’s going to hurt. I think that’s why a lot of guys do it.

“A lot of guys take cheap shots, when there’s that much emotion in the game and it happens all the time. If you’re down by a few goals, if you’re having a bad game, someone takes a shot at you, someone says the wrong thing, guys get upset and they take shots at guys. I think it’s just human nature.

“There’s a lot of good players that take jabs at guys. People can say whatever they want. I’m not overly upset about what happened. It’s part of the game. I’ve done it. I’m sure he’s done it before. I’m sure it won’t be the last. It won’t be the last time I do it. It is what it is. It’s part of hockey.”

prust fine

Continue reading →

journeyman, scrapper, tomato: I always liked playing

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1976-77 O-Pee-Chee WHA #56 Glen Sather

The Edmonton Oilers are honouring erstwhile captain, coach, GM and president Glen Sather tonight, ahead of their game against the New York Rangers, for whom he left them. Now 72, the pride of High River, Alberta, oversaw five Oiler Stanley Cup championships in the 1980s, of course, with teams of Gretzkys and Messiers, Kurris and Coffeys, Lowes and Fuhrs, and now a banner bearing his name will hang with theirs in the rafters of Rexall Place.

With Sather stories trending today all around the Alberta capital, you’re advised to take in a few choice offerings from veteran Oiler-watchers like Jim Matheson at The Edmonton Journal and Terry Jones at The Edmonton Sun. The Oilers, too, are savouring Sather at their website.

Peter Gzowski got to know Sather when he spent the 1980-81 season embedded with the young, rising Oilers. His first impressions, from the inimitable book that followed, The Game of Our Lives (1981):

He has light hair and a pale complexion that rouges when he is emotional. When he was a player, his nickname, Slats, which is still used by those who are or would be his friends, occasionally gave way to Tomato. There are blushes on his cheeks tonight.

“I played my first game as a pro in this rink,” he says. “No, wait, I played my first game as a defenceman here.”

Sather sometimes has difficulty remembering the details of his career. He was a prototypical journeyman, a scrapper. In nine seasons, he played for six teams: Boston, Pittsburgh, New York Rangers, St. Louis, Montreal, and Minnesota. He racked up an impressive number of penalty minutes, 724, but a paltry number of goals, 80. Wherever he went, he impressed both his coaches and his teammates with his competitive zeal. “You can tell it’s getting close to the playoffs,” Vic Hadfield, then the captain of the New York rangers, wrote in a diary he kept for the season of 1972-73. “Slats is getting bitchy.” Hadfield, the thirty-second highest goal-scorer in NHL history, sits down the pressbox from Sather tonight, smoking a cheroot. In the off-season, he is a successful golf professional, and the owner of substantial golfing real estate. But in hockey he is a part-time scout for the Oilers and Sather is his boss.

“I thought you were a defensive forward,” someone says to Sather.

“Yeah, sure,” he replies. “But sometimes they put me back on defence.” His mind seems to be somewhere else for a moment. “Jeez, I liked playing,” he says. “I always liked playing.”

(1976-77 O-Pee-Chee WHA card image courtesy of Hockey Media)

veal scallopini sather, with a side of beef gretzky stir-fry

/ puckstruck

The Edmonton Oilers published a cookbook during the 1980-81 season as fundraiser for the Evelyn Unger School for Language and Learning Development. I don’t know what they were selling it for, but I can report that the cerlox-bound, 62-page epic includes everything you need to know to whip up Jari Kurri’s Karelian Ragout, Glenn Anderson’s Cherry Cheese Cake, and/or a Kevin Lowe Tourtiere. Not to mention:

gretzky beef

sather veal

messier cake