Sad news tonight: Ken Broderick has died at the age of 74. I met him last year towards the end of a night where hockey players sat at the front of the room and told stories about their careers. On the way out, at the back of the room, he was friendly, pleased to talk. Then and later, too, when I phoned him at his home in Niagara Falls, he seemed as though he was still getting used to the idea that he’d been permitted to make a life out of putting a stop to pucks. He’d done that for Canada at two Winter Olympics, 1964 and again in ’68, where the team took the bronze medal, before carrying on into a long minor-league career and, eventually, stops in the NHL and WHA with Minnesota, Boston, Edmonton, and Quebec. I was doing a piece for Slapshot Diaries — this one — and we talked about playing without a mask and his brother, Len, also an NHL goalie, if only for one game. Ken told me about practicing with Bobby Orr and some of the coaches he’d had, Turk Broda early on, when he was starting out with his hometown Marlboros, and then later what it was like to play for Father David Bauer and Don Cherry. I was interested in an incident at the ’64 Games when, during Canada’s game against Sweden, a Swedish player named Carl-Goran Öberg broke his stick and maybe accidentally (but maybe not) threw the pieces into the Canadian bench, cutting Father Bauer and Father Bauer calmed what could have been a bad situation and forgave Öberg and invited him to be his guest at the Soviet Union’s game the next night with Czechoslovakia and for this Father Bauer received a special medal from the IOC for his good grace and sportsmanship even as, at the end of the tournament, the Canadians felt that they’d been cheated out of a medal. Broderick didn’t remember too much about the stick that hit Father Bauer; what he recalled of that game was that with the score 2-1 at the end of the second period, the coach had pulled the starter, Seth Martin, and put him in. He wasn’t sure why; he did know that he’d answered the call, allowing no goals, and that Canada had won the game, 3-1.

I also asked him whether he’d had any superstitions when he played. He said, “The only thing I had as a ritual, I wanted Stouffer’s Macaroni and Cheese for lunch on a game-day. At home — you couldn’t get it on the road. I still eat it today.”

(Image, from 1975-76: hockeyMedia & The Want List)