Henri Richard

licence to thwart

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Pleased To Meet You: It was four years ago today that Harry Howell, long-time New York Ranger Hall-of-Fame defenceman, died at the age of 86. Hockey’s goalscorers, he mused in 1967, “get most of the ink,” but he said that growing up in Hamilton, Ontario, he never envied them. He said he “always wanted to be a defenceman,” laughing, “maybe because I realized I wasn’t going to make it as a forward.” Howell played in 1,000th game that year; all of them were in Ranger livery, making him only the second player in NHL history (after Gordie Howe) to play that many with a single team. Here, Howell hinders Montreal’s Henri Richard, probably during the ’67 All-Star game at Montreal’s Forum. Canadiens won that game 3-0, with Richard scoring the opening (winning) goal and ending up as the game’s MVP. Both Howell and Richard were penalized by referee Vern Buffey that night, for separate second-period transgressions by tripping. (Image: Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)

blur of the moment

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A Pocketful of Rocket: Born in Montreal on today’s date — sorry, yesterday’s — um, well, February 29, 1936, Henri Richard was in on an incredible 11 Stanley Cup championships in his 20-year career as a member of the Montreal Canadiens. That’s him in the middle here, dissolving his way past a — New York Ranger, it looks like? (Image: Antoine Desilets, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)

can’t stop, won’t stop

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Stop It: Boston goaltender Eddie Johnston gets in the way of J.C. Tremblay’s shot at the Forum in March of 1967. That’s Bobby Orr to the left and, in front of Tremblay, Bruin defenceman Joe Watson. Yvan Cournoyer is the other Canadien on the scene, tussling with Boston’s Ron Stewart. (Image: René Picard, Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)

The bustling Boston Bruins, who lead the NHL standings by a stretch, visit the Bell Centre tonight to play the Canadiens, who don’t, not even close: middling Montreal sits in 26th place, 35 points back of their Beantown rivals. It was another story on the Wednesday night of March 15, 1967, when the Bruins, last on the ladder in the six-team NHL, stopped in at the old Forum for an 11-2 pasting.

“Every time I looked up, they were shooting at me,” Boston goaltender Eddie Johnston said afterwards. He stayed in the whole game, facing 43 shots in all, including this one from Canadiens’ defenceman J.C. Tremblay, who finished the night with a goal and an assist and was deemed by his coach, Toe Blake, to have played his best game of the season. He praised his centremen, too, Jean Béliveau, Ralph Backstrom, and Henri Richard. “But the Bruins,” Blake added, “weren’t checking.”

The pick of the Bostonese, according to the Gazette’s Pat Curran? That would be 20-year-old rookie defenceman Bobby Orr, on the left here, who took nine shots on Montreal’s rookie goaltender Rogatien Vachon. Bruins’ captain Johnny Bucyk did manage to make some history of this otherwise woeful night, notching a goal and an assist to give him 538 career points as a Bruin. With that, he nudged ahead of Bill Cowley on the team’s all-time scoring list, in behind Milt Schmidt’s 575.

Bucyk would, in shortish order, surpass Schmidt, of course. As of today, he stands second in the points ledger of all-time Bruins with 1,339, behind Ray Bourque’s 1,506. Still-active Bruins who are high on that list are Patrice Bergeron (in third place with 1,019); Brad Marchand (seventh, 839); David Krejci (ninth, 767), and (between Schmidt, in 14th place, and Cowley, in 16th), David Pastrnak (15th, 569).

 

boxed set

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The officials on duty at Detroit’s Olympia for the Red Wings playoff meeting with Boston’s Bruins on the Thursday night of March 28, 1957, were (from left) referee Frank Udvari along with linesmen Matt Pavelich and George Hayes. Once they hit the ice, the home team ended up prevailing, by a score of 7-2, squaring the semi-final at a game apiece. Of note: Detroit goaltender Glenn Hall finished the game despite taking a first-period puck to the face and, to repair the resulting damage, 18 stitches. The night was a busy one for Udvari — the busiest, in fact, in NHL playoff history: the 22 infractions he whistled down set a new post-season record.

“The penalties stemmed from various reasons,” Marshall Dann of the Detroit Free Press reported. “Both teams decided to play it rugged at the start, returning to style the old-fashioned bodychecks so rarely seen. Then in the late stages when all was decided, the Bruins peevishly rammed away with the off-hand thought that maybe these rough tough Red Wings could be softened up for Sunday.”

Born on a Wednesday of today’s date in 1924, Udvari made his start in the village of Srpski Miletić in what was then Yugoslavia (today it’s Serbia); he grew up in Kitchener, Ontario. Active as an NHL official from 1951 through 1966, he was elevated to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1973.

On The Spot: Frank Udvari keeps an eye out as Detroit’s Gordie How hounds Henri Richard of Montreal.

 

toe aglow

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Their Cup Runneth Over (and Over Again): Montreal’s mighteous Canadiens celebrate another Stanley Cup championship in May of 1965. Gathered to the left are Gump Worsley, Noel Picard, Jimmy Roberts, a battered Henri Richard, a tooth-lacking Bobby Rousseau, and captain Jean Béliveau. Grasping the Cup from the right are Jean-Guy Talbot (#17) and Yvan Cournoyer (#12). Above it all is coach Toe Blake, who died on a Wednesday of today’s date in 1995 at the age of 82. Blake won 11 Cups in his career, three as a player with Montreal Maroons and Canadiens, the other eight as a coach. (Image: Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)

pocket watch

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Henri The Great: Henri Richard was born in Montreal on … well, actually, his debut in 1936 came on February 29, so we’re a day early here in observing his birthday. A veteran of 20 seasons with the Montreal Canadiens, he won 11 Stanley Cup championships in bleu, blanc, et rouge. Elevated, like his elder brother, Maurice, to the Hockey Hall of Fame, the man they called the Pocket Rocket served as captain of Montreal, which his brother never did. Henri Richard died at the age of 84 in March of 2020. (Image: Antoine Desilets, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)

decision day

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“When we’re skating and shooting the way we can, it doesn’t matter whether they put bulldozers out there against us. We’ll just go around them.” 

That was Montreal captain Henri Richard on another Monday, in another playoffs, as his Canadiens skated at the Forum ahead of a Stanley Cup semi-final against the Philadelphia Flyers to start the week of April 16, 1973. That’s Richard laid out third from the bottom in this team stretch, I think. Alternate captain Yvan Cournoyer is nearest the camera, with Steve Shutt next in line. Goaltender Ken Dryden is sprawled to the right of the night, beside (possibly) Guy Lapointe and one of the back-ups, Michel Plasse or Wayne Thomas. 

“We’ve been too tight so far,” Richard told reporters that day. “We have to loosen up to get going at our best.” Two nights earlier on this same Forum ice, the Canadiens had lost the first game of the series, 5-4 in overtime, with Rick MacLeish scoring the decisive goal for Philadelphia. The day after this practice, on Tuesday, April 17, Larry Robinson scored Montreal’s winner in a 4-3 OT win that tied the series.

Montreal would go on to dismiss the Flyers in five games. In the finals that followed that year, Montreal dispensed with the Chicago Black Hawks in six games to claim their 18th Stanley Cup.  

(Image: Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)

phil watson’s piston trouble

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Phil Watson’s credentials as an NHL coach were forged out of a 13-year NHL career as a rumbustious right winger, all but one season of which he spent with the New York Rangers. Born in Montreal on a Friday of this same date in 1914, Watson took up behind the bench the year after he hung up stick and skates in 1948, at first with the New York Rovers, then of the QSHL, and later with the QJHL’s Quebec Citadelles.

In 1955, a 42-year-old Watson succeeded Muzz Patrick as coach of the Rangers. Pictured here is the end of his first campaign, which came on a March night in 1956. On their way to another Stanley Cup that season, the Canadiens dispensed with Watson’s Rangers in five first-round games, completing the job with a 7-0 demolition at the Forum.

Doug Harvey, Henri Richard, and Dickie Moore each scored a pair of goals; the shutout was Jacques Plante’s. The Gazette described the moment we’re seeing here: “When the siren sounded to end the game the Ranger players shook hands with their conquerors. Then Phil Watson and Toe Blake, the rival coaches, met at centre ice. Toe took off his hat when he received Watson’s congratulations. The crowd liked it and roared approval.” 

Watson steered the Rangers through five not-specially-glorious seasons before he was fired midway through the 1959-60 season. He would go on to coach the Boston Bruins for another two seasons in the early 1960s. His coaching finale came a decade after that when he took charge of the WHA’s Philadelphia/Vancouver Blazers for two seasons in the ’70s.

Back when Gay Talese was writing hockey dispatches for The New York Times, he caught up to Watson after a game against the Boston Bruins. This was October of 1958; Watson explained the situation this way:

“My club is like a new car that has little things wrong with it. We got trouble with the windshield wipers, squeaks in the rear, and brakes need adjusting. It’ll take 10,000 miles to break this club in. In Boston I had piston trouble and we’re tied, 4-4. They also had the referee on their side.”

master class

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Listen Up: A birthday yesterday for the NHL’s canniest — and winningest — coach: Scotty Bowman rounded the corner to 87 on Friday. Five of the nine Stanley Cups he won, of course, came in Montreal, which is where he’s seen here, advising a Canadiens crew circa … I’m guessing it’s during the 1971-72 season, his first in Montreal. That hinges on whether I’m properly identifying the three goaltenders in the group. Tall number 29 is obviously Ken Dryden; wearing number 30 I’m thinking is Phil Myre. That leaves the ’minder fourth in from the left. Rogie Vachon was still with Montreal that year, but it doesn’t look like him, so possibly it’s the other man to have worn number 1 that year, Denis DeJordy? I’ll go with that. There are a couple of obscured players on the right side of the group. Excusing them, it looks like we’ve got, from left, Henri Richard, Pierre Bouchard, Guy Lafleur (who turns 69 tomorrow), maybe DeJordy, Guy Lapointe, Yvan Cournoyer, possibly Rey Comeau, Jacques Laperriere, Bowman, Jacques Lemaire, Rejean Houle, Frank Mahovlich, Ken Dryden, Serge Savard, Myre, Jimmy Roberts, and Marc Tardif. (Image: Antoine Desilets, Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec)

hockey’s mr. clean

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Born in Montreal on this date in 1936, a Tuesday, Reggie Fleming played professional hockey for nearly 20 years, a fearsome force for six NHL teams. Montreal was his first, and it was there that Henri Richard gave him the nickname “Mr. Clean” because he thought Fleming resembled the avatar for the popular Proctor & Gamble cleanser. The name stuck with when Fleming moved on to Chicago, where he helped the Black Hawks win a Stanley Cup in 1961. Later, he played a prominent role for the New York Rangers. That included scoring some goals and working effectively on the penalty kill, but mostly it played out with punches and sticks swung in anger.

Reflecting on Fleming in 1963, NHL referee Red Storey told Maclean’s this: “He may never be a great hockey player, but he probably works harder than anyone else in the league. He reminds me of what Leo Durocher one said of the ballplayer Eddie Stanky: ‘He can’t run, he can’t field, he can’t hit, but he’s a hell of a ballplayer.’ If every team in the league had a Reggie Fleming, they’d all be better teams.” Stu Hackel’s overview for the New York Times of Fleming’s career, published after his death at the age of 73, is worth your while — you can find it here.

Mention is made there of Earl McRae’s searing 1975 profile of Fleming and the cheerless end of his career, in which McRae introduces his subject as “one of hockey’s most brutal, meanest players; short on talent but long on the stick, a bully who carved his notoriety in the flesh of opposing players.” Read that, too, along with everything else you can find that McRae wrote about hockey, some of which is between the covers of his 1977 collection Requiem For Reggie.

The final, devastating chapter of Reggie Fleming’s story is the one that’s been written posthumously: late in 2009, researchers at Boston University disclosed that he was the first hockey player to have tested positive for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). I wrote about that, and him, in a 2017 feature for The Story of Canada in 150 Objects, published jointly by Canadian Geographic and The Walrus. That’s here. 

(Image: HockeyMedia & The Want List)

henri richard: a reader’s companion

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16 + 9: John Taylor’s 1960 still life with skates and sweaters, left behind by brothers (and Canadiens legends) Henri and Maurice Richard.

“Henri Richard, the Pocket Rocket, doesn’t want to be a little gale in the wake of a rumbling hurricane. He wants to swirl through the National Hockey League under his own power, creating his own storms, if any, and reaping the respect of his rivals strictly on his own merits.”

That was the opening to a Vince Lunny cover story for Hockey Pictorial in March of 1956, towards the end of the younger Richard’s rookie season in the NHL. It didn’t take long, of course, for Henri, who died on Friday at the age of 84, to skate up a storm of his very own alongside Maurice, 14 years his elder. It was only two years later that Milt Dunnell took to Hockey Pictorial’s columns with Maurice’s take on how Henri was faring in the league. “The Rocket gives the opinion faster than he breaks over a blueline,” Dunnell wrote in April of 1958: ‘Henri is a better skater than I ever was. He’s a better stickhandler, he’s a better puck-carrier. Henri is a better hockey player.”

Rocket’s view wasn’t, perhaps, universal at the time — Canadiens’ coach Toe Blake, for one, wasn’t yet willing to declare Henri supreme among Richards. All these years later, the question of which brother was the more valuable player might well still start a debate that wouldn’t necessarily finish. What we do know is that Henri played 20 seasons with Montreal, amassing 1,175 points in 1,436 games, regular season and playoffs, winning an unmatched 11 Stanley Cups along the way. He captained the Canadiens from 1971 through to his retirement in 1975. The team retired his number, 16, that year; he was voted into the Hall of Fame in 1979.

It’s true that Henri’s literary legacy doesn’t measure up to Maurice’s. A quick check of the bookshelf tells the tale: the elder Richard’s life and riotous times have been the focus of at least 12 books over the years, from Gerry Gosselin’s Monsieur Hockey (1950) to Jean-Marie Pellerin’s Maurice Richard: L’Idole d’un Peuple (1998) to The Rocket: A Cultural History of Maurice Richard (2009) by Benoît Melançon. No-one (to date) has published Henri’s biography or devoted a volume to his place in hockey or Quebec history.

That’s not to say the younger Richard doesn’t figure in more general histories of the game. Stan Fischler’s 1971 Hab history The Flying Frenchmen, for instance, delves into the brothers’ relationship during Henri’s early days in the NHL and offers up this telling anecdote:

The Canadiens were in the midst of a workout when Henri rounded the net at full speed from one side and Maurice approached on the same track from the other direction. They collided violently and both fell to the ice unconscious. When they were finally revived, both were escorted to the first-aid room where Maurice needed 12 stitches to close his wound and his kid brother, six stitches.

Then, in a masterful understatement, Maurice intoned: “You’d better watch yourself. Henri. You might get hurt.”

Henri rates a chapter in Michael Ulmer’s Canadiens Captains (1996). And he’s a voice throughout Dick Irvin the Younger’s 1991 oral history, The Habs. That’s where you’ll find Henri doing his best to explain his infamous 1971 outburst wherein he called Al MacNeil the worst coach he’d ever played for:

“I didn’t really mean it, but it came out because I was mad. Al was a good guy. But I was just mad, and they made a lot of things about that in all the papers. Even Guy Lafleur, in his book. He said I said to MacNeil that he shouldn’t coach the Canadiens because he didn’t speak French, and all that shit. I never said that in my life.”

Trent Frayne’s Henri essay in his 1968 anthology of hockey profiles, It’s Easy, All You Have To Do is Win is worth seeking out. While you’re arranging that, maybe settle in with the inimitable Frayne’s 1958 Maclean’s Henri profile, which is archived here.

So far as odes and obituaries published in the days since Henri’s death, recommended readings would start with this piece by Dave Stubbs at NHL.com, which includes reflections from Lafleur and Yvan Cournoyer.

Tom Hawthorn’s Globe and Mail obituary is deftly done and deserves a read, along with Roy MacGregor’s reminiscence, also in the Globe, which is here.

If you read French, take a look at Gaétan Lauzon’s coverage in La Presse, ici. Richard Goldstein wrote a New York Times obituary, published Saturday — that’s here.

If you missed Friday’s broadcast of CBC Radio’s As It Happens, you can download the March 6 podcast here (and should) to listen to Carol Off’s conversation with Henri’s Canadiens teammate Ken Dryden. It gets going at the 37.40 mark.

On Saturday night, Hockey Night in Canada opened with Ron MacLean’s conversation with Dick Irvin, which includes his thoughts on the origins of the nickname Pocket Rocket. There’s tape of that here, and worth your attention, if you didn’t catch it on the night.

One more? That would be Michael Farber’s Richard tribute at TSN, which you can find over this way.

(Top image: John Taylor, about 1960, silver salts on film, gelatin silver process, MP-1999.5.5032.4, © McCord Museum)

can’t beat a canadian bulky for style, said henri richard

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You can argue, go ahead, that the 1970s marked the golden age of hockey players styling handsome sweaters: you’ve got Bobby Hull, after all, to stand up and make your case, and John Ferguson, too. For me, though, I’m stuck in the ’60s, which is when Montreal’s Highland Knitting Mills were spinning their own marvels (below), even as (above) Henri Richard joined with Portland, Oregon’s own Jantzen International Sports Club to tout their newest wool cardigan in colours spanning the … “masculine range.” Can you see that the “stripes are newly designed in richer, muted tones,” or maybe not so much? No, me neither. Do real pros (and good amateurs, too), leave their flashiness on the ice, but never their flair? So many questions. All I know is that when it comes to sweaters, necklines rise and fall as knits and patterns adjust for tastes and times. I get that: styles shift. But can we agree that it’s just plain wrong that in the year 2020 we all can’t go out and get fitted for our very own Canadian Bulky?