Plante Life: The goaltender in an earlier (and pre-mask) incarnation, circa 1956-57. Cruising at the top is Chicago’s (best guess) Zellio Toppazzini. The Montreal defenceman? Could be Wally Clune.

Jacques Plante played three seasons for the Toronto Maple Leafs in the early 1970s, toward the end of his eventful career. His wife Jacqueline and their two boys stayed in Montreal during the season, so Plante was on his own mostly in his apartment. That’s where Trent Frayne found him, as later recounted in Maclean’s:

One day I visited him there when he was 42 years old and in his 17^th NHL season. He sat on a couch with one leg on an ottoman. Strapped to his shoe was a 16-pound lead weight. He’d read three pages of a book, then pause to raise the leg three times, then three more pages, then three more raises. Then he switched the weight to the other foot. This day he was reading two books alternately: Jean-Jacques Marie’s biography of Stalin in French and Mary Barelli Callaghan’s biography of Jacqueline Kennedy in English.

Plante said lifting the leg was boring. To relieve the boredom he’d read. Or he’d knit tuques. “Feel,” he commanded, indicating his right thigh. It was like a piece of iron. “Pulled groin and hamstring muscles are the goaltender’s most common injuries, eh? This prevents them.”

(Image: Library and Archives Canada, e011161495-v8)