The redoubtable Gump Worsley was part of four Stanley Cup-winning teams with Montreal in the 1960s. The first championship he was in on came at the start of May in 1965, when he shared the net with Charlie Hodge through a seven-game series against the Chicago Black Hawks. Worsley got the call for the game that decided it at the Forum on May 1 of ’65, and he didn’t disappoint — unless you’re thinking of Chicago fans and their beloved Black Hawks themselves, who were thwarted to the tune of 4-0. 

Born in Montreal on a Tuesday of this date in 1929, Worsley would commemorate his career in They Call Me Gump, the entertaining 1975 memoir he wrote with Tim Moriarty’s aid. “Nothing has ever matched the thrill,” they wrote therein of climbing the championship heights in ’65. “The first Cup victory is always the biggest moment in a hockey player’s life.”

Worsley recalled shaking hands with the Black Hawks after that final game at the Forum, and thinking how grateful he was that he’d persevered through tough times in the early days of his career to make it to this point.

“Then I thought about drinking. I’d been good for about eight weeks, laying off the hard stuff while I was on a diet. Now it was time to forget that damn diet.”

Somebody handed him a bottle of champagne as he arrived in the team’s dressing room, and Worsley shared that with Quebec Premier Daniel Johnson.

Then, next, came what we’re seeing pictured here: “I telephoned my kids and parents. They’d always prayed I would be on a Cup winner, and now that I’d made it they were having a party too.”

(Worsley doesn’t, in the book, mention getting Maurice Richard’s congratulations, or kicking back for his regular post-game smoke.)

“Well,” he does write, “the champagne really hit me hard. I must have been out of shape. Because when we got to the Queen Elizabeth Hotel for a victory party, I was sick as hell. So I switched to drinking poor man’s rye.”

“My hangover the next day was worth the price. How many times do you get a chance to celebrate your first Cup victory? Once.”  

(Images: Michel Gravel, La Presse, Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)