left wingers

bobby hull, 1939—2023

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The NHL Alumni Association is reporting this morning that Bobby Hull has died at the age of 84. His pre-eminence as a left winger who played 15 years for the Chicago Black Hawks can’t be denied. He led the team to a Stanley Cup championship in 1961 and, continuing to unleash his slapshot through the ensuing decade, scored and scored. Hull became the first NHLer to score more than 50 goals in a season when he notched 54 in 1965-66.  Three times he won the Art Ross Trophy as the NHL’s leading scorer, and he remains Chicago’s all-time leading goalscorer, in both the regular season and playoffs. Twice he won the Hart Trophy; he was ten times a First Team NHL All-Star. He kept scoring in the WHA afters million-dollar defection from the NHL in 1972.  With the Winnipeg Jets, he won a pair of Avco World Trophy championships with the Jets and was twice named the league’s MVP.  He was voted to the Hall of Fame  in 1983.

Hull’s legacy also includes accusations of abuse from two of his wives. He was charged in 1986 in Illinois for an assault on his third wife, Deborah; that charge was subsequently withdrawn when she told the court she did not want to proceed. In that same incident, Hull was fined $150 for assault of a police officer.

 

(Painting by LeRoy Neiman)

jean-guy gendron, 1934—2022

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Hats Off: A 25-year-old Jean-Guy Gendron shows a smile after scoring his first NHL hattrick on February 1, 1959, at the Boston Garden as his Bruins dismissed the Toronto Maple Leafs by a score of 6-4. “First time this year anyone take my picture,” he said afterwards, wearing his hat and showing off the puck with which he scored his third goal. That one went into an empty net; the first two he put past Johnny Bower.

Sorry to be hearing of the death last week, on June 30, of Jean-Guy Gendron at the age of 87. Born in Montreal, he made his NHL debut as a left winger for the New York Rangers in 1955. He subsequently played for the Boston Bruins, Montreal Canadiens (just a single game), and Philadelphia Flyers, with whom he posted his best numbers, in 1968-69, when he scored 20 goals and 65 points. Gendron played a couple of seasons, too, in the WHA for the Quebec Nordiques. He coached the Nords, too, in the mid-1970s, steering them to the Avco Cup finals in his first year, 1974-75, where they lost to the Houston Aeros.

 

 

ted talk

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“Straight ahead is the only direction Ted Lindsay has ever travelled in thirteen years in the National Hockey League,” Trent Frayne proposed in 1957 in a Maclean’s profile of the indomitable left winger, who died on a Monday of this same date in 2019 at the age of 93. “As a snarling, mocking, richly talented performer for the Detroit Red Wings from 1944 until he was traded to the Chicago Black Hawks last summer, he recognized no detours in becoming the highest-scoring left winger of all time, and one of the stormiest. Lean and scarred and built like a middleweight boxer, he has taken on defencemen who outweigh him by fifty pounds, and while they’ve cut him up and knocked him down they’ve never changed his mind. He has publicly charged the president of the NHL, Clarence Campbell, with prejudice. He has fought on the ice with his own teammates and off it with fans, policemen, and even his long-time employer, general manager Jack Adams. They stopped speaking to each other two years ago.”

johnny gottselig: the deftest puck-nursing virtuoso in the league 🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦

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Johnny Gottselig was only ever, and very much, a Chicago Black Hawk: a useful left winger in his skating days, which lasted 16 NHL seasons, captain when they won an unlikely Stanley Cup championship in 1938, he later coached the team and (later still) served as its long-time director of public relations. He was born in 1905 in what today is very much Ukraine, in the village of Klosterdorf, on the Dnieper River, in Kherson Oblast. He was three months old when he emigrated to Canada with his parents, landing as homesteaders in Holdfast, Saskatchewan. Gottselig grew up Regina, which is where he learned his hockey.

He picked up a stick early on, but as the story’s told, he only started on skates when he was 16. Seven years later, he made his NHL debut with the Black Hawks. He was a key figure when Chicago won its first Stanley Cup championship in 1934. That year, Chicago’s Scottish-born goaltender Charlie Gardiner became the NHL’s first European-born captain to win the Cup; Gottselig was the second, in 1938. Gottselig was also the league’s second European-born head coach, after the Black Hawks’ Emil Iverson, who started in Denmark.

As a Black Hawk, Gottselig scored some goals, leading the team five times in scoring. A noted stickhandler, he was a renowned killer of penalties. “The best solution to a Hawk penalty, Chicago Tribune sportswriter Ted Damata wrote in 1945, “was to send John onto the ice. He became the deftest puck-nursing virtuoso in the league, tantalizing full-strength teams with his nimble touch in mid-ice.” Damata would remember him as the only player he’d ever seen who’d controlled the puck for the entire two minutes of a penalty.

A noted baseball player, Gottselig was also a manager in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, steering the Racine Bells, the Peoria Redwings, and the Kenosha Comets in the 1940s. He died in Chicago in 1986 at the age of 80.

Hawktalker: In his time as Chicago’s PR director, Gottselig lent his voice to game broadcasts in the late ’40s and into the ’50s.

smell the glove

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September 27 was an off-day in 1972 for the Canadians and Soviets who were locked in the battle for hockey supremacy at the Summit Series. The day before, September 26, Canada had prevailed in game seven on Luzhniki ice in Moscow, with Leafs left wing Paul Henderson scoring the decisive goal in a 4-3 win. Frank Mahovlich, another leftside winger, didn’t dress for that game, but Canadian coach Harry Sinden planned to bring him back in place of Bill Goldsworthy for the series finale the next day, September 28. “You’ve got to have Frank on the ice in the big one,” Sinden said of the Montreal Canadiens star. “He can bust a game wide open. He wants to beat ’em badly, perhaps too badly, but I’ve got to have him.”

Depicted here is Soviet defenceman Vladimir Lutchenko taking the man in game four of the series, where the man = Frank Mahovlich, and the taking = punching him in the face.

(Image: Frank Lennon, Library and Archives Canada, e010933356)

armand mondou, 1934: a trip and a penalty-shot miss

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Armand Mondou played on the left wing for the Montreal Canadiens for a dozen NHL seasons from 1928 through to 1940, winning a pair of Stanley Cups along the way, in 1930 and ’31. 

Born in 1905 on a Tuesday of this date in Saint-David-d’Yamaska, Quebec, he was the first NHLer to take a penalty shot after the league added a new rule in 1934, 18 seasons into its early history. It happened on opening night that year, when the Canadiens were playing at Maple Leaf Gardens on the night of Saturday, November 10. In the third period Toronto’s Bill Thoms tripped Georges Mantha of Montreal as he broke in on Leaf goaltender George Hainsworth.

The rules for penalty-shooting were different in those years: ’34 through ’37, the puck was placed in a 10-foot circle located 38 feet from goal, just inside the blueline. As I’ve described before, in this post delineating the history of the penalty shot, the shooter couldn’t make contact with the puck outside the circle, either standing still in the circle and letting loose, or skating at the puck full tilt from farther back. The goaltender, meanwhile, had to stay where he was: he wasn’t allowed to advance more than a foot off his line.

That night in 1934, 29-year-old Armand Mondou was standing in on Montreal’s top line for Wildor Larochelle. Mondou had scored just five goals the year before, so it’s a little surprising that Canadiens’ coach Newsy Lalonde picked him to revenge Mantha’s fall, especially since he had a formidable scorer (and future Hall-of-Famer) in Aurèle Joliat on the bench that night. Mondou decided on a speedy approach for the league’s inaugural penalty shot. That’s according to Montreal’s Gazette: “Mondou, with a running start, and his bullet-like slap shot, made the play against Hainsworth.”

Toronto’s hometown Globe had its own view of the same scene: “The fans were quite interested, but Mondou’s shot was a dud. It never left the ice and Hainsworth stopped it with his usual nonchalance.” 

According to the Gazette (interestingly), Hainsworth switched out his regular goaling stick for the penalty shot with “a lighter stick.” I’d like to know more about that, but I’ve yet to see another reference to this specialty tool. 

The Leafs won the game, 2-1. The NHL’s first successful penalty shot came a week later, when Ralph Bowman of the St. Louis Eagles put a puck past Alec Connell of the Montreal Maroons. 

réal deal

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Born in Timmins, Ontario, on a Monday of this date in 1932, left winger Réal Chevrefils was briefly a Detroit Red Wing but he spent most of his eight-year NHL career with the Boston Bruins. Goalgetting, his best year was 1956-57, when he scored 31 for the Bruins. Leo Labine was a sometime linemate of his: he called Chevrefils “a finesse hockey player who had the strength and the ability and didn’t give up on the puck.” Here he is in on Black Hawk goaltender Al Rollins at Chicago’s Stadium, on a Friday night, February 27, in 1953, when Rollins shut out the visitors by a score of 3-0. Chevrefils struggled with alcoholism during his career and afterwards. He died in 1981 at the age of 48.

jet lag

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Scorecarded: Born at Point Anne, Ontario, on a Tuesday of this date in 1939, Bobby Hull is 82 today. In the fall of 1976, he was in his fifth season left-winging for the WHA Jets when he hit the ice in his Jofa tracksuit at the Winnipeg Arena with figure skater Toller Cranston, winner of a bronze medal that year in the men’s individual figure skating competition at Innsbruck’s Winter Olympics. (Image: University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections, Winnipeg Tribune fonds, PC 18 A81-12 Box 3 Folder 97 Item 1)

red baron

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Coach Red: Berenson was an assistant in St. Louis before succeeding Barclay Player behind the bench in 1979.

Born in Regina in 1939 on a Friday sharing this date, Red Berenson turns 81 today. Would we agree that it’s long past time he got his invitation into hockey’s Hall of Fame, as a builder if not as a player? He was a left winger in his day, a junior star with his hometown Pats, and played for two Memorial Cups in the late 1950s. As a 19-year-old, he helped the Belleville McFarlands win the 1959 World Championships in Prague, finishing tied atop the tournament’s scoring chart with a Czech and an American. He hit the NHL ice as a Montreal Canadien, then joined the New York Rangers, before making his mark with the expansion St. Louis Blues as the ’60s turned into the ’70s. On memorable night in 1968, Berenson scored six goals in an 8-0 win over the Philadelphia Flyers. He played five seasons with the Detroit Red Wings before finishing his career back in St. Louis. He was a member, too, of Team Canada in 1972.

And as a coach? He was an assistant in St. Louis before succeeding Barclay Plager as principal on this very date in 1979, his 40th birthday. His Blues tenure lasted three seasons; he won a Jack Adams as the NHL’s top-rated coach in 1981. In 1984, he returned to his alma mater, the University of Michigan, to take over as head coach as the hockey Wolverines. His 33-year stint there yielded a pair of NCAA championships, in 1996 and ’98, before he retired from the bench in 2017.

 

it was fergie who was to blame

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“He was hardness itself,” Hanford Woods wrote of John Ferguson the elder, in a 1975 short story about a famous fearful fight, “The Drubbing of Nesterenko.” Born in Vancouver in 1938 on a Friday of this date, Ferguson was a left winger who was, yes, renowned through his eight-year career with Montreal’s Canadiens for his rugged, fist-first, penalty-incurring brand of play. He had some goals in him, too, scoring 20 one season and 29 in another. In 1963-64, he finished runner-up to teammate Jacques Laperriere in voting for the Calder Trophy, recognizing the NHL’s best rookie. Before he retired, Ferguson helped Montreal win five Stanley Cups; afterwards, he served stints as coach and GM of the New York Rangers, as well as GM of the Winnipeg Jets. He died in 2007 at the age of 68.

It was 1972, of course, that Ferguson was blooded as a coach, answering Harry Sinden’s call to aid in steering Team Canada through its epic eight-game showdown with the Soviet national team that played out 48 years ago this month. In the cover story for the early-August edition of The Canadian Magazine pictured above, Ferguson was front and centred as Sinden explained how he’d gone about building his team for the series that everybody was talking about “as if it’s as important as the Second Coming.”

“I got this job June 7,” Sinden wrote, “and the very next day I hired John Ferguson as my assistant. … The main reason I chose him is that my personal record against the Canadiens, when he was playing for them and I was coach of the Bruins, was not good. The Canadiens kept beating us all the time. When I analyzed it, I figured it was Fergie who was blame as much as anyone. If anyone’s a born leader on the ice, it’s Fergie.”

Hab Habit: Ferguson spent all eight of his NHL years in Montreal livery. (Image: Louis Jaques / Library and Archives Canada / e002343750)

bentley bro

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Dipsy Doodle Doug: A birthday today for Doug Bentley, Hall-of-Fame left winger and Saskatchewan wheat farmer, who was born on a 1916 Sunday of this date in Delisle. He died in 1972 at the age of 56. He played 12 of his 13 NHL seasons for Chicago’s Black Hawks, turning out (alongside brother Max) for one final campaign with the New York Rangers in 1953-54. In 1942-43, he led the NHL in scoring, amassing 33 goals and 73 points in 50 games. There were six brothers in the Bentley brood growing up in Saskatchewan, and seven sisters. “The girls had a hockey team when they were kids,” father Bill Bentley told Maclean’s in 1948, “and they could beat the blisters off the boys nine times out of ten.”

eddie shack, 1937—2020

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Sorry news today: Eddie Shack died last night at the age of 83. Irrepressible on the ice and off, the Sudbury-born left winger with the outsized personality was most memorably a Maple Leaf. He won four Stanley Cups with Toronto, in 1962 and ’63 (he scored the Cup-winning goal that year), as well as in ’64 and ’67. He also saw service with the New York Rangers, Boston Bruins, Los Angeles Kings, Pittsburgh Penguins, and Buffalo Sabres during an NHL career that lasted from 1958 through 1975. In recent weeks he had been in palliative care, suffering from the effects of throat cancer.