Don’t Stop: A Rangers’ fan shows his stuff at the Montreal Forum on Saturday, February 4, 1989, the night a famous former Hab by the name of Guy Lafleur returned to the fold in New York blue. Raucous ovations greeted Lafleur that night as he scored a pair of goals on Patrick Roy, though Montreal, in the end, won the game 7-5. (Image: Bernard Brault, Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)
Wayne To Go: The 2024 Edmonton Oilers take to the ice tonight seeking to wrap up their first-round playoff series with the Los Angeles Kings, which is reason enough to visit with Wayne Gretzky in February of 1983 when Edmonton stopped at the Montreal Forum to play the Canadiens. Edmonton lost by a score of 2-4 that night, sorry to say, with Gretzky scoring both of his team’s goals, as confirmed by referee Bryan Lewis. Rick Wamsley was Montreal’s goaltender that night; the goals were Gretzky’s 47th and 48th goals of the year. He finished with 71 in the regular season, scoring another 12 in the playoffs as the Oilers made it to the Finals, where they succumbed to the New York Islanders. (Image: Denis Courville, Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)
Et Le But: Vancouver Canucks goaltender Gary Smith can’t do it all on his own on the Thursday night of February 21, 1974 at the Forum, and so that’s Canadiens’ Murray Wilson scoring his team’s final goal in a game that ended 5-2 for Montreal: you can see the puck, just, behind the butt of Smith’s stick. Marooned behind the net, that’s Vancouver defenceman Bob Dailey, while Montreal’s Frank Mahovlich circles in the corner. The referee is Bob Kilger. (Image: René Picard, Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)
A birthday today for erstwhile battling Hall-of-Fame defenceman Ken Reardon, who was born in Winnipeg on a Friday of today’s prankish date in 1921. It was in a game against the Toronto Maple Leafs in October of 1949 that he suffered the damage shown here. Leafs won the game 2-0, with Toronto centre Fleming Mackell stealing the puck from Reardon to score the winning goal in the third period. Previous to that, Reardon had incurred a five-minute first-period major for high-sticking Leaf defenceman Bill Juzda, drawing blood — or as the Montreal Star’s report classed it, “claret.” Later, when Toronto captain Ted Kennedy clubbed Reardon, cutting him and knocking a tooth free — no penalty. Star columnist Baz O’Meara had some thoughts on that, and the referee:
George Gravel is a personal friend of ours, but we never saw him clog up a game as much as he did last night. He was impartial with both sides in getting in the way of attacks. He missed out on the incident when Reardon lost a tooth and was nicked in the face. Kennedy, who is a bit careless with his butt ends, got away with that one. Kennedy gets away with a lot of things and he is one of the great lawyers of hockey. He never stops riding referees and Gravel took plenty from him.
We sat on the promenade last night and heard a lot of comment out on the ice. [Referee Bill] Chadwick would have given a few misconduct penalties to straighten things out, let the boys know there was a strong hand at the helm.
(Image: Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)
Finish For A Forum Fracas: Montreal goaltender Steve Penney shakes on it with Quebec’s Dan Bouchard after the Canadiens eliminated the Nordiques from the playoff in a fight-filled game on Friday, April 20, 1984. (Image: Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)
It was on Good Friday in 1984 that the Montreal Canadiens ousted the Quebec Nordiques from the Stanley Cup playoffs in the decisive game of their Adams Division final with a 5-3 Montreal win that sealed the series 4-2. But no-one was talking hockey by the time that brawl-bent game was over. There were fights upon fights that night in a game that’s remembered as the Good Friday Massacre, blood and injuries — in the case of Montreal defenceman Jean Hamel, an eye injury that marked the beginning of the end of his career, suffered when Quebec winger Louis Sleigher punched him in the eye, knocking him unconscious. Roundly criticized for losing control of the game, referee Bruce Hood called 252 minutes in penalties and ejected ten players on the night.
“Shame,” Gazette columnist Michael Farber wrote the next day, sparing neither team when it came to laying blame for the violence. “There are two sides to the tale but only one conclusion: the sport was desecrated by players all too willing to reduce it to its lowest common denominator. They took the national sport and trashed it.”
Crowdsourcing: Fans throng the foyer of the Montreal Forum on a Saturday night, March 27, in 1965. The visiting Bostpon Bruins surpassed the Canadiens on this occasion, 6-2, with Tommy Williams scoring the winner for Boston. (Image: Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)
Rocket Fuelled: It was on a Thursday of this date in 1944 that Maurice Richard ran over the Toronto Maple Leafs, scoring all five Montreal goals in a 5-1 win at the Montreal Forum. Toronto had taken the first game of the opening-round Stanley Cup playoff match-up, but Montreal roared back to win the series 4-1, clinching it with an 11-0 win in which Richard notched two goals and five points. Montreal went on to beat the Chicago Black Hawks to take the Cup that April. On Richard’s five-goal night, Montreal coach Dick Irvin dressed three defencemen and eight forwards, and had the Rocket double-shifting on two lines. Toe Blake collected five assists and Elmer Lach, four; Paul Bibeault was the unfortunate Toronto goalkeep. Artist Jack Reppen commemorated Bibeault’s agony (along with Richard’s determination) in this 1961 painting.
On Point: Born in Parry Sound, Ontario, on a Saturday of this very date in 1948, Bobby Orr is 76 today. In late August of 1976, when he was 28, hockey’s greatest defenceman suited up for his country in an intra-squad as Team Canada prepped for the Canada Cup in early September. He was no longer a Boston Bruin: once the tournament ended, his surgically repaired left knee willing, Orr would be on the job for the first time with the Chicago Black Hawks. On this day, in front of 18,002 fans, Orr’s team won, 7-3, with Marcel Dionne leading the way with a pair of goals. Orr contributed an assist. “The knee’s fine,” he said after the game. “It’s the conditioning that needs some work. Practices are all right, but what you need to get into shape are games like tonight.” The tournament went as well as it could have, with Canada sweeping Czechoslovakia in the best-of three final. Orr was named to the All-Star team and selected as tournament MVP. (Image: René Picard, Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)
Guy Lapointe is 76 today, so here’s to him. Born in Montreal on March 18, 1948, he stoutened the Montreal Canadiens’ defence in the 1970s, playing his part (with teammates Larry Robinson and Serge Savard) in no fewer than six Stanley Cup championships. He played briefly towards the end of his career for the St. Louis Blues and the Boston Bruins before retiring in 1984. Today he works as coordinator of Amateur Scouting for the Minnesota Wild. Lapointe is seen here at the Forum in January of 1976 trying to contain Philadelphia Flyers’ captain Bobby Clarke and allow goaltender Ken Dryden do his job. Montreal’s Pete Mahovlich looks on from the blueline. Montreal prevailed on this night by a score of 5-3, with Clarke notching a goal and an assist. Lapointe assisted on Doug Risebrough’s empty-net goal in the latter stages of the third period. (Image: Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)
“There Was Always Crying in Sports,” the New York Times clarified in the headline of a front-page story earlier this month, “The Kelces Made It Cool.”
This was in response, of course, to the retirement of Jason Kelce after 13 seasons of snapping footballs and blocking rival colossi on behalf of the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles, which he announced at a press conference. Other than Kelce’s illustrious career (and, I guess, as ever, his brother Travis’ girlfriend, Taylor Swift), the news of the day was that he (and Travis, too) cried and cried and cried some more.
There were a lot of tears, apparently.
“Pro athletes have cried before, of course,” Scott Cacciola wrote in the Times. “But the Kelces seem to cry more voluminously and with greater frequency than their predecessors. … With their brand of vulnerability front and center, the message is clear: it is normal and healthy for men to cry.”
Sounds about right. Then again, hockey’s crying has been fairly voluminous and frequent for … well, a while now. Today, as it so happens, is the anniversary of what might be the cryingest day in hockey history. It’s a March 17 in Montreal from 69 years ago I’m thinking of here, although the tear gas probably had more to do with that than anything else.
Still, seems like as good a cue as any to review seven instances from hockey history when the tears flowed. So here goes:
“I’ve seen lots of panics, but never anything like this,” NHL President Clarence Campbell said of the events of Thursday, March 17, 1955, when Montreal exploded in the wake of Campbell’s suspension of Canadiens’ superstar Maurice Richard. (More on those pyrotechnics here.)
Campbell probably should have stayed away from the Forum that St. Patrick’s Day, when the Canadiens were taking on the Detroit Red Wings, but he couldn’t be convinced to take a miss. He sat in his regular seat, next to his secretary, Phyllis King, who you can see flinching in the photograph at the top, though she’s mistaking named Smith in the caption there. She was 35 that year, which I only mention because she and Campbell, who was 50, got married later that same year, and took their honeymoon in Bermuda.
In March, in Montreal, Campbell was soon under fire from irate Canadiens’ fans, who pelted him with tomatoes and toe-rubbers. It was at the end of the first period that a fan tried to tackle him, after which someone else tossed what was described as “a U.S. Army type tear-gas bomb.” The game was suspended after that, as tearful fans poured out of the Forum, and mayhem ensued in the streets beyond. As the arena emptied, it’s worth recalled, the organist played “My Heart Cries For You,” which was a hit that very year for the American singer Guy Mitchell. “An unimportant quarrel was what we had,” is how some of the lyrics go, “We have to learn to live with the good and bad.”
It was on a Thursday of almost this date in 1961 that Bernie Geoffrion wept at the Forum, March 16, 1961, to be precise. Six years after the Richard Riot, Canadiens were on the ice playing the Toronto Maple Leafs when the Boomer became the second player in NHL history to score 50 goals. Jean Béliveau and Gilles Tremblay got the assists on that third-period marker as Montreal went on to win the game 5-2. Before they did, there was a pause to cheer Geoffrion’s achievement as he followed Maurice Richard (who had retired a year earlier) into the record books. (The Rocket’s 50 came in 1944-45.) Here’s Elmer Ferguson of the Montreal Star describing the damp aftermath of Geoffrion’s historic goal:
Exuberantly, the players on the ice and a few more who were moving in as replacements, had poured on the Boomer in gleeful red torrent, their congratulations so fervent that Geoffrion was knocked off his feet, and the horde of happy Habs fell over him.
They were pounding him on the back as he lay there, chose whose hands could reach him, they were tousling his hair and shouting their greetings. But at last, the Boomer struggled up, threw his arms around slim Gilles Tremblay, who had passed him the puck for a sizzling close-range shot that completely eluded Cesare Maniago in the Toronto nets, and sank deep into the twine behind him for Boomer’s goal No. 50, equalling the record set years back by Rocket Richard, and excelling any other such scoring total in modern times.
On his feet, the Boomer skated slowly to the boards in front of the Canadien bench. The big Forum was rocking with cheers. A rain of rubbers, a hat or two, programs, newspapers, were pouring on the ice, the tension-release of a delirious crowd. And the Boomer had tension, too. For, when he reached the fence, he dropped his head as it exhausted, and tears ran down his cheeks. The pent-up emotions that had been with him for 24 hours broke loose. And in the stands nearby the Boomer’s pretty wife, daughter of hockey’s immortal Howie Morenz, quietly shed tears too, tears of relief from strain.
Ah, the tumultuous days of early September of 1972, when Canada’s very future as a viable nation hung in the balance. The best of the NHL’s (healthy + non-WHA) hockey players were in a mortal struggle, you might recall, with their rivals from the Soviet Union, and it was not going well. On Friday, September 8, 1972, at Vancouver’s Pacific Coliseum, Canada lost by a score of 3-5, leaving the with a 1-2-1 record as they prepared to head for the Moscow ending of the eight-game series.
In 1973, John Robertson wrote a scathing retrospective in the Montreal Star of how the Canadian stars lost their poise in Vancouver. (To their credit, he allowed, they did recover to stage “one of the greatest comebacks in the history of any sport.”)
After losing Game No. 4 the entire team was awash in self-pity. Phil Esposito launched into a childish tantrum on television because the Vancouver fans booed the Canadian team. Bill Goldsworthy said he was ashamed to be a Canadian. Brad Park stood outside the dressing room with tears in his eyes, explaining how the players had sacrificed so much only to be turned upon by the ungrateful wretches who followed hockey in this country.
It “may have been the ugliest hockey game in the history of the Metropolitan Sports Centers.” That was Minneapolis Star Tribune writer John Gilbert reporting on a game in Bloomington, Minnesota, on the Saturday night of January 4, 1975, between the local North Stars and the visiting Boston Bruins. Ugliest of all in a bad-tempered 8-0 Bruins win was the incident that saw Boston’s Dave Forbes butt-end Henry Boucha from Minnesota in the face. Here’s Gilbert on what happened next:
Forbes jumped on top of Boucha, who was sprawled face-down in a widening pool of blood and continued punching in the most savage assault Met Center officials said they have ever witnessed.
Boucha was evacuated to Methodist Hospital, where he was treated (30 stitches) for extensive lacerations near his right eye. Doctors reported that there appeared to be no fractures and no threat to his vision.
Forbes called the hospital to apologize. NHL President Clarence Campbell subsequently suspended him for ten games. The Hennepin County attorney got in on the action, too, indicting Forbes on a charge of aggravated assault. It was the first time in the United States that an athlete had been charged with a crime for something that had happened during a game.
That July, at the trial, Boston coach Don Cherry was one of the witnesses called to testify. Part of the Associated Press report from the courtroom:
The Bruins coach testified that Forbes had tears in his eyes when he came to the Boston bench following the scrap with Boucha. “He said, ‘What have I done? What have I done?” said Cherry. “I put my arms around him and I said, ‘Let’s take it easy and go to the dressing room,’ Cherry told the court.
After reaching the dressing room, Cherry said all Forbes “wanted to do was go to see Henry. He (Forbes) had tears in his eyes and his face was white as a ghost.”
The trial ended with a hung jury and thereby, no decision: after deliberating for two days, the jurors reported that they were deadlocked at 9 to 3 in favour of convicting Forbes. The Hennepin County attorney did not seek a new trial.
Goaltender Ed Giacomin was distraught in late October of 1975 when New York Rangers GM Emile Francis cast him onto the NHL’s waiver wire, from which the Detroit Red Wings hooked him. “Ten years with the club and they treat you like garbage. They throw you to the wolves. Why didn’t they let me go gracefully?”
The Rangers shed another goaltender when they pitched Giacomin, with Gilles Villemure departing for the Chicago Black Hawks as the Rangers went with a young John Davidson and Dunc Wilson as his back-up.
As for Giacomin, he got his first start for his new team a week later, when the Red Wings visited Madison Square Garden to play the Rangers. The home fans, 17,000 of them, came bearing signs calling for Francis to be traded. They hooted and hollered for Giacomin, booing their own Rangers all night long as the Red Wings surged to a 6-4 win. Here’s Parton Keese of the New York Times on the game’s emotional start:
Before the opening whistle, the goalie who had spent 10 years with New York, the only National Hockey League club he had ever played with, received a standing ovation. The yelling drowned out the National Anthem and reached a crescendo when the tears ran unabashedly down Giacomin’s face until he had to wipe them off with his hand.
“I cried, didn’t I? Well, it’s not the first time I’ve cried about hockey.” Bobby Orr didn’t specify the other occasions, but it’s fair to say that none was sadder than the Wednesday in November of 1978 when a wonky left knee that surgeries could no longer restore led to hockey’s greatest defenceman announcing his retirement at the age of 30 from the NHL after playing just 26 games with the Chicago Black Hawks.
Orr took a job that season as an assistant to Chicago coach Bob Pulford. On a Tuesday night the following January he was back in Boston for another tearful day as the Bruins retired his number 4.
He was celebrated that day at the Massachusetts State House, Boston City Hall, and Boston Garden. “I’ve been crying all day,” Orr’s wife Peggy said. The Boston Globe seconded that emotion, with Steve Marantz reporting on efforts to honour “an athlete who seemed to transcend human limitation.”
“It was a day for reminiscing, for nostalgia, and for an anguished reflection that we’ve seen the best, and that everything after it can’t be enough.”
Orr himself told the Garden crowd, “I’ve spent ten years here, the best ten years of my life. And I’ve been thinking, ever since Harry Sinden called me to ask if they could retire the sweater tonight, how do I thank you? I’ve had tears in my eyes every time I’ve come back to Boston for three years, and I have tears in my eyes now.”
Is there is any hockey weeping more famous than Number 99’s in 1988? Not any that has a book named after it (see Stephen Brunt’s 2014 volume Gretzky’s Tears: Hockey, America and the Day Everything Changed).
The trade that sent the Great One from Peter Pocklington’s Edmonton Oilers to Bruce McNall’s Los Angeles Kings was, of course, a seismic shocker. “I’m disappointed leaving Edmonton,” Gretzky said that summer’s day at his Alberta press conference. “I really admire all the fans and respect everyone over the years but …” Then, as the Edmonton Journal reported, “Gretzky broke down and couldn’t continue with the formal part of the press gathering.”
But not everybody believed that the tears that Gretzky shed at his Edmonton press conference on August 9 were real. Pocklington, for one. “He’s a great actor,” the Oilers’ pitiless owner said. “I thought he pulled it off beautifully when he showed how upset he was.”
“Gretzky’s tears at the Edmonton press conference this week were not crocodile tears,” Lisa Fitterman insisted in Montreal’s Gazette in August of 1988. “He was genuinely upset at having to leave the Oilers.”
Gretzky himself responded later in August when he appeared as a guest of Jay Leno’s on The Tonight Show. He was no actor, he protested. “I was a guest on a soap opera [The Young and the Restless] in 1981, and obviously he never saw a tape of that,” Gretzky said.
Pocklington’s sneer, he added, “bothered me.”
You’d like to be able to read the debris on the ice here at the Montreal Forum the way a tasseomancer interprets tea leaves, but alas, alack, I’m only getting a general sense of upset from this scattering of toe rubbers and programs. Good upset or bad, though? The Montreal fans might well have been celebrating a goal by their beloved Canadiens, which would explain why Detroit Red Wings goaltender Roger Crozier looks so dejected as he considers what went wrong. Then again, the faithful might well have been protesting a goal that was denied their Habs, or maybe a penalty they didn’t think was deserved, which would make sense, given the appearance of Crozier’s cool insouciance. Who knows? I will say that while there is plenty of joy written into hockey’s history of tossing stuff and piling up on-ice debris, there’s more bitter feeling and derision, overall.
Not entirely sure of the year here, either. Mid-1960s, ish, when Crozier was starring for the Red Wings. He won the Calder trophy as the NHL’s top rookie in 1965. The following year, Detroit and Montreal squared off in the Stanley Cup finals. While Montreal won, Crozier was crowned playoff MVP, winning the Conn Smythe Trophy, making him the first goaltender to do so as well as the first player to claim it in a losing effort.
Roger Crozier died at age 53 on a Thursday of today’s date in 1996.
(Image: Michel Gravel, Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)
Bill O’Brien started his career as a railway baggageman in Montreal with the old Grand Trunk line, but in the early years of the 20th century he took to the sporting life, making a career as a trainer in baseball, lacrosse, football, and hockey that lasted 38 years.
Rinkside, he went in at the top, tending the Renfrew Creamery Kings, the famous Millionaires, of the NHA in 1909-10, when their line-up featured a galaxy of greats, including Lester and Frank Patrick, Cyclone Taylor, and Newsy Lalonde.
Big and genial and expert in the arts of skate-sharpening, sutures, rubdowns, charley-horse mitigation, and the all-round management of hockey players, O’Brien signed on in the 1920s with the Montreal Maroons, making his name with them.
“Bill O’Brien was more than a trainer of hockey teams,” Red Dutton said when the trainer died in 1944 at the age of 57. “He was an institution in the National League, known by everybody, liked and respected by everybody.”
The Gazette’s Dink Carroll weighed in sorrowfully at that time, too. “Something has gone out of sport in this city with the passing of his enormously kindly and competent man.”
“He had all the technical competence of a first-class man at his job. He knew anatomy and something of osteopathy. His hands were those of a natural healer. He understood the lamps and diathermal machines and kept abreast of every new development along those lines.”
He was an early advocate of fitness training for NHLers at a time when they mostly … didn’t do that. To keep the Maroons trim during the summer months in the late ’20s, he conspired with team captain Dunc Munro to see a full range of gym apparatus installed at the Montreal Forum, along with a rowing machine and a badminton court.
He went over to the Canadiens late in his career, and he was revered on their side of the Forum, too.
Away from the ice, O’Brien tended Ottawa’s football Roughriders, too, in his time, as well as baseball’s International League Montreal Royals and, in the early ’40s, the mighty major-league Brooklyn Dodgers.
In 1938, Marc McNeil of the Gazette asked O’Brien and another multi-tasking trainer, Eddie Froelich, to rate the major North American sports by toughness, which is to say, which was the most punishing on players. O’Brien’s ruggedness rating had hockey at the top, followed by basketball, football, and baseball.
Froelich, who was the trainer for the Chicago Black Hawks as well as baseball’s White Sox, the Boston Red Sox, and the New York Yankees at one time and another, put hockey, football, and baseball on a par. Baseballers didn’t see as much contact, of course, but he felt that it was more difficult for them to return from injury because of the movement needed to bat and throw and field. Hockey players, he said, didn’t generally absorb as much punishment as people thought: on skates, his logic went, they moved too fast to absorb the full force of most blows.
Bill O’Brien and his wife Mary had two sons, who turned out to be distinguished hockey chroniclers both. Larry O’Brien was a reporter for the Montreal Standard as well as the Star, and then a broadcaster of Montreal Royals games before ending up as golfer Jack Nicklaus’ publicist. Andy O’Brien started out as selling programs at the Forum when his dad was working for the Maroons, then graduated to serve as the team’s stickboy the year they won their first Stanley Cup, 1926. He worked for the Standard and the Star, too, covering 12 Olympiads, 45 Stanley Cup finals, and 31 Grey Cups in his time. Andy O’Brien also published a respectable shelf’s worth of hockey books, including Firewagon Hockey: The Story of the Montreal Canadiens (1967), The Jacques Plante Story (1972), which he co-authored with the goaltender himself, as Hockey Wingman (1967), a novel.
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