injury list

rocket richard, 1957: grounded in toronto

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Injuries bit the Montreal Canadiens hard through the 1957-58 NHL season. Jean Béliveau missed 15 of 70 regular-season games with a painful cartilage injury he suffered in December of ’57 in a collision with Dave Creighton of the New York Rangers. The following February, Bernie Geoffrion went down in practice after what seemed like an innocuous bump with teammate Andre Pronovost resulted in a ruptured bowel. “I don’t think I was ever so close to death,” Geoffrion said from Herbert Reddy Memorial Hospital after surgery set him back on the road to recovery. He missed 28 games.

Captain Maurice Richard fell in November of ’57, victim of an accidental slicing from a skate worn by Toronto Maple Leaf defenceman Marc Reaume that nearly severed his right Achilles tendon. That’s 36-year-old Richard here in the Montreal dressing room at Maple Leaf Gardens with Canadiens trainer Hector Dubois. Richard ended up missing 42 games.

To say that Montreal still prospered that season is … well, that’s just fact. This was the 1950s, after all, and the Canadiens were defending champions x 2. Another Montreal forward, Dickie Moore, ended up winning the NHL scoring title that season, despite having played for much of the year with a broken wrist. Béliveau, Geoffrion, and Richard were all back for the playoffs as Montreal overturned the Boston Bruins in the Final. Richard scored the overtime winner to wrap up Game 5 of the series, while Geoffrion scored the winning goal in Game Six to clinch a third straight Stanley Cup for Montreal.

day-to-day

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On The Mend: When last we saw our hero, here, it was December of 1958 and Jean Béliveau had suffered a ruptured tendon in a finger on his right hand, and then surgery to repair it. Here he poses with Canadiens coach Toe Blake late that same month, not long before he returned to the Montreal line-up, on December 18, for a 4-1 Montreal win over the Toronto Maple Leafs at the Forum. (Images: Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)

goldie’s rush

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From The Front: News of Goldie Prodger’s shrapnel wound reached Canada in October of 1918.

The goal came late, with four minutes left in the game.

With the visiting Rosebuds tied 1-1 with the hometown Montreal Canadiens, Portland winger Smokey Harris shot the puck, which Montreal goaltender Georges Vézina saved: that’s where things got started. Vézina cleared it to the corner, where Newsy Lalonde picked it up, the Canadiens centreman. He left it for a defenceman who then, well — Goldie Prodger skated through just about the entire Portland team, is what Goldie Prodger did.

It was a “rough journey,” the Montreal Gazette noted, but Prodger kept going. He beat Harris at centre ice, then barged into defenceman Del Irvine: “his weight toppled the Portland player over.” He evaded the second Portland defender, Moose Johnson, with some ease, and by then he only had the goaltender, Tom Murray, to hoodwink. He paused, to test Murray’s patience. “As the Portland goaltender came out to meet him,” the Gazette narrated, “Prodgers [sic] skated around him and lobbed the puck into the nets.”

And that was it: with Montreal leading 2-1, they fell back into defence to see out the decisive game of the Stanley Cup Finals, which they duly did on the penultimate day of March in 1916, to outlast the PCHL Rosebuds and take the series 3-2 at Montreal’s Westmount Arena.

It was, of course, Canadiens’ very first Stanley Cup championship, and 25-year-old Goldie Prodger, who was born on a Wednesday of today’s date in 1891, was the man who clinched it.

He was from London, Ontario, where he was christened George. Though his surname was often pluralized throughout his career (and continues to be, in many of the standard references, including at NHL.com), his birth registration and other vital documents confirm that it was, properly, Prodger.

Goldie? He owed that sobriquet, a press profile from 1912 helpfully explained, to “his sunny complexion.”

That was the same year Prodger won his first Cup, playing for the NHA Quebec Bulldogs, whose formidable line-up also featured Joe Malone, Joe Hall, and goaltender Paddy Moran.

In May of wartime 1916, Prodger flocked to his country’s colours, enlisting with the Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force. He was soon following Howard McNamara, his captain with the Canadiens, into the highly hockey-focussed 228th Battalion. Just how puck-minded was the 228th? Later that year, having recruited to the unit’s ranks some of hockey’s best talents, the 228th iced a team in the NHA alongside the Canadiens et al. (I’ve written about that whole fantastical finagle before, over here, if you’re interested.)

Prodger’s military career began with trip to the hospital: that August, probably while the battalion was in training at Camp Borden, north of Toronto, he broke an ankle playing baseball. That didn’t end up interfering with his skating: once hockey season got going in late December, he would play in all 12 of the 228th’s NHA games.

Along with many of his teammates, Prodger did eventually make it overseas, in 1917. The battalion was converted from an infantry to a railway construction unit; Prodger, for this part, was soon promoted corporal and then company sergeant-major. He took time to write home to remind friends just how vital hockey was, as the Ottawa Journal reported in a morale-boosting column:

Even if we are at war [Corporal Prodger rationalized] with an enemy that threatens our very existence, it is no reason why the great winter sport should be allowed to die. In fact, just such diversions are required at this time to keep the minds of those at home away from the horrors of war.

In 1918, as noted in the clipping from that October presented above, Prodger was added to the casualty list again, suffering a shrapnel wound in the back in (I think) France while attached to an Australian field artillery battery.

Battle Bulletin: Casualty report from Montreal’s Gazette in October of 1918.

He recovered, again. Following his CEF discharge in 1919, Prodger headed back to the ice, though not before some dramas played out, both medical and contractual. Another baseball injury befell him that fall, and this one got complicated when he came down with blood poisoning and had to have a finger amputated.

Meanwhile, in the fledgling NHL, Prodger’s rights were owned by the Quebec Hockey Club. He wanted to play in Toronto, and for a while it seemed as though he would sit out the season rather than report to Quebec. In December, Quebec traded him to his old team, the Canadiens, in exchange for Eddie Carpenter. But Prodger didn’t want to play there, either, so he waited until mid-January when Montreal’s George Kennedy worked a deal to send him the Toronto St, Patricks for Harry Cameron.

After finishing the season with the St. Pats, a trade took him to Hamilton the following season, and it was there with the Tigers that he played the rest of his NHL career, five seasons, through to 1925.

Goldie Prodger died in October of 1935 at the age of 44.

Habs Have It: Goldie Prodger and the rest of the 1915-16 Stanley Cup champions.

 

bonnie prince chuck

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Sew-Sew: Rangers’ doctor Dr. Vincent Nardiello stitches up long-suffering New York goaltender Charlie Rayner in February of 1951.

Born in Sutherland, Saskatchewan, on a Wednesday of this very date in 1920, Charlie Rayner played a couple of seasons with the New York/Brooklyn Americans before he made his mark with the New York Rangers through the late 1940s and into the ’50s. For all his heroics in those years, they were mostly strugglesome for the Rangers, though the team did make it to the Stanley Cup final in 1950, the year Rayner won the Hart Memorial Trophy as the NHL’s MVP, outpolling Ted Kennedy and Maurice Richard. He was elevated to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1973.

To play goal in the early decades of the NHL was to be cut, contused, and concussed, by even by the painful standards of the profession, Rayner stands out for his suffering. In a feature published midway through the 1950-51 NHL campaign, The New York Post noted that Rayner had already been carried from the ice eight times to date.

“So far this season, he’s lost five front teeth and required a total of 20 stitches.” Several of the latter were applied in an October game at the Montreal Forum, when Rayner was cut once (on the nose) and then a second time (on the back of his head) by skates belonging to Canadiens forward Frank King.

All in all, the Post calculated, Rayner’s 12 years of hockey goaling had cost him four broken noses and “innumerable stitches” along with fractures of the jaw and cheekbone. It was a knee injury that put an end to his NHL career, in the winter of 1953, when he was 32. A 23-year-old Gump Worsley was his successor in the New York net.

Down And Out: Rangers’ staff attend to Charlie Rayner after a shot by Boston defenceman Jack Crawford felled him at Madison Square Garden in November of 1947. The referee leaning down is Bill Chadwick; linesman George Hayes is beside him. Boston goaltender Frank Brimsek looks on at left along with teammates Joe Carveth (9) and Milt Schmidt (15). The gloveless Ranger looks to me like Alf Pike, except that he wasn’t with New York that year. Could be … Neil Colville?

 

supper body injury

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The NHL’s inaugural season, 1917-18, was, unavoidably, a year of firsts.

Dave Ritchie of the Montreal Wanderers scored the league’s very first goal, and his teammate Harry Hyland notched its original hattrick while suffering (possibly) its earliest maiden concussion. The Wanderers’ coach and captain was Art Ross, and he took the NHL’s earliest penalty, though nobody seems to have noted down, officially or otherwise, just how he transgressed.

For all their trailblazing, the Wanderers didn’t survive, of course: in early January of 1918, they made their mark even as they erased it, becoming the first NHL franchise to fold.

That left the infant league with just three teams: Torontos, Ottawa Senators, and Montreal Canadiens. Later in January, the storied Canadiens made history as the first NHL club to fall sick on an eastbound train as a result of supping on a bad batch of broth in Canada’s capital.

There’s not much more we know. How did the sickness manifest itself? Where on the line between Ottawa and Montreal did it strike? Which early Habs suffered? What was the name of the restaurant that served the quease-causing potage? What kind of soup was it?

That we do know, actually: the soup was a tomato soup.

For its opening act in 1917-18, the NHL divided its 22-game regular season schedule into two. As the end of January approached, Montreal stood atop the standings with 14 points ahead of Toronto (12) and Ottawa (six). On the Monday night of January 21, Canadiens visited Ottawa for an 8.30 date with the Senators.

The 6,000 fans who packed Dey’s Arena that night saw a bevy of future of Hall of Famers. Ottawa’s line-up featured Clint Benedict in goal in back of Eddie Gerard, Jack Darragh, and Cy Denneny. Georges Vézina guarded the Montreal goal, with Joes Hall and Malone working in front of him alongside Newsy Lalonde and Didier Pitre. Paced by a hattrick from defenceman Hall, Canadiens solidified their lead by beating the home team by a score of 5-3. The game was mostly without incident, which is to say none of the notorious malefactors involved, including Hall and his Montreal teammates Billy Coutu and Bert Corbeau, were caught swinging their sticks at their rivals, or butt-ending them, as they tended to do, to fearful extent. “The cleanliness of the hockey appeared to tickle the big crowd,” the Ottawa Citizen was pleased to report the next morning.

It’s thanks to the report, above, from the Canadian Press that we know that the winners went for a post-game feed that included the fateful soup. If only we knew more. Where did they eat? What else was on the menu? Did all nine players eat the soup or just the six reported to have been indisposed? Who were the unfortunates, and who was spared?

Dey’s Arena was on Laurier Avenue in those years, facing the canal, occupying the southwest corner near the modern-day Confederation Park. Is it fair to surmise that they bunked nearby, taking their late supper in their hotel’s restaurant? Probably, though that doesn’t really help us much. Then, as now, there are plenty of hotels in that area of downtown Ottawa. Did the 1918 Canadiens alight at the Chateau Laurier? That wasn’t far from the rink, though the Windsor Hotel at Metcalfe and Queen would have been closer. Or what about the Russell House Hotel that still then occupied the corner of Sparks and Elgin? From a hockey history perspective, that would be satisfying: it was at a banquet at the Russell House, of course, that the Lord Stanley’s donation of a challenge cup was first announced in 1892. Then again, the Canadiens may have been lodged at an entirely different hotel. And indeed, on their way back there after the game, it’s true too that they could have stopped in at any local restaurant along the way. The New Idea, for instance, located at the corner of Sparks and Metcalfe, ads for which appear in the pages of Ottawa newspapers around this very time, featuring the slogan “For Quality, Quantity, and Quick Service.”

Not that I’d want to impugn their soup, even retroactively, without further evidence. What I can say is that this was wartime, remember. The First World War had been seething for more than three years, and November’s armistice was still, at this point, ten months away. While the Canadian government didn’t impose food rationing on the general population in aid of the nation’s war effort, the federal Food Board was, by early 1918, limiting hotel and restaurant menus.

An article in the Citizen a week before the Canadiens fell ill explained the lengths that local eateries were cutting back. “The purpose of the food controller in laying restrictions on hotels and restaurants,” it reported, “was to effect a saving in the three commodities most needed by the men at the front and by the Allied people — beef, bacon, and wheat, and to awaken the public conscience to the need of the hour.”

For at least three months, it seems, restaurants in the nation’s capital had been going beefless and bacon-free on Tuesdays and Fridays. At the Chateau Laurier, to conserve flour, no bread was being served at breakfast “except rolls and corn muffins,” while at lunch and supper, patrons were allowed nothing but “rolls and perhaps a couple of slices of brown bread.”

People didn’t mind, said the manager of the Russell House, where bread cutbacks were also in effect. “Bread is by no means a necessity in the hotel meal,” he confided. “I find that it is only eaten when people are waiting for the next course.”

Soupwise? All I can tell you is that the Chateau in earliest 1918, white flour was no longer being used to thicken soups and sauces: “cornstarch and arrowroot are taking its place,” the Citizen says.

Impossible to say whether this had any effect on the Canadiens. How did they know it was the soup that turned their stomachs? That, to me, is the nub of the whole thing. Did Jack Laviolette look over his spoon and wince his suspicion at Louis Berlinguette that something was up with the bisque? Could it be, perhaps, that club captain Newsy Lalonde, going on instinct, tried and failed to wield his authority with a plea for the team to order the untainted cream of mushroom instead of the tomato?

We just don’t know. Tuesday morning, the players boarded the train, whereon some of them sickened. They would have been home in about two hours. Montreal newspapers don’t seem to have noted their plight.

On Wednesday, Canadiens played a return date against Ottawa at the Jubilee Arena on St. Catherine Street East. Only Lalonde was missing from the Montreal line-up, though the reason for his absence doesn’t seem to have been soup-related: he had what the Citizen (painfully) refers to as “a spiked foot.”

Ottawa dominated this time out, prevailing by a score of 4-3. “The result came as a surprise,” reported the hometown Gazette; Canadiens were “listless.” The Ottawa papers took a slightly different view, crediting the victory to the stalwart work of captain Eddie Gerard, who played almost the entire game, and goaltender Benedict, who withstood an unrelenting Montreal barrage in the third period. “Canadiens set a smashing pace,” the Journal reported. “Canadiens piled in with everybody but Vézina and it looked as if they might batter in a goal by sheer weight.”

Joe Malone did score a pair in the final frame to tie the score, but Harry Hyland, who’d joined Ottawa after the demise of the Wanderers, got one back to make the difference. It as the fifth time the two teams had met in the history of the NHL, and Ottawa’s very first victory over Montreal.