Here’s to the blockaders, hats off to their instinct to impede, all hail the higher calling of self-sacrificing interception, and all the fine arts involved in getting in the way of predatory pucks travelling at the speed of punishment.

There will never be a hall of fame for hockey shot-blockers, but maybe would someone organize, I don’t know, a vestibule or a … pantry? It would have to big enough to accommodate Horace Merrill, from the earliest days of the NHL, along with Lionel Conacher, Bucko McDonald, Earl Seibert, Al Arbour, Bob Baun, Rod Langway, Mike Ramsay, Craig Ludwig — oh and the greatest obstructionist, maybe, of them all, Bob Goldham.   

Born in Georgetown, Ontario, northwest of Toronto, on a Friday of this date in 1922, Goldham was renowned for his willingness to drop in front of pucks during his 12-year career as a defenceman for the Toronto Maple Leafs, Chicago Black Hawks, and Detroit Red Wings. He played a part in two of the Leafs’ Stanley Cup championships in the 1940s and was a key component with three more Cup-winning teams with Detroit through the ’50s. 

“Goldham was like another goalie back there,” Scotty Bowman recalled in the ’90s. He himself credited Bucko McDonald with having schooled him in just how and when to throw himself in front of a shot. Here’s a sequence showing Goldham with the Wings putting in the work (and paying the price).

He played until 1956, announcing his retirement on the train back to Detroit from Montreal after the Canadiens dethroned the Red Wings and took the Stanley Cup for themselves. He was 33, with a job lined up as a salesman with a Toronto construction firm. Detroit GM Jack Adams praised him as “one who gave his everything in every game as the bulwark of the defence.” 

Looking back over his own career, Goldham noted that he would have liked to have won more Stanley Cups. He had this to report, too: “You know, I’ve never played with a fellow I didn’t like. I’ve played against fellows I didn’t like, but never with one.”

Goldham later went to serve as a popular analyst on Hockey Night in Canada when it was still a CBC enterprise. He died in 1991 at the age of 69.