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)
Long Time Coming: Ken Doraty ends what still stands as the NHL’s second-longest game, in the early hours of Tuesday, April 3, 1933. (Image: City of Toronto Archives, Globe and Mail Fonds 1266, Item 29471)
The Boston Bruins were the favourites to beat the banged-up Toronto Maple Leafs that spring in the Stanley Cup semi-finals but (retroactive spoiler alert) that’s not what happened: the Leafs won. It was early April in 1933. Four of the five games in the series the teams played went into overtime, including the famous last one, which continued on at Maple Leaf Gardens 164 minutes and 46 seconds before it finally came to end, at ten to two on a Tuesday morning, when Boston superstar Eddie Shore made a mistake and the Leafs’ Ken Doraty took a pass and plunked an ankle-high shot past Tiny Thompson.
Toronto 1, Boston 0.
This was, at the time, the longest game in NHL history. The crowd of 14,539 also registered as the biggest crowd in NHL and Canadian history to that date. A new overtime mark — the one that stands to this day — was set just a few seasons later, when the Detroit Red Wings outlasted the Montreal Maroons in March of 1936. (Lorne Chabot was Toronto’s winning goaltender in 1933; in that record-setting ’36 game, he was on the losing end for Montreal.)
Toronto’s reward 91 years ago was joy, no doubt, and relief — for sure — but not much rest: within hours of dismissing the Bruins, the Leafs were boarding a chartered train and tracking down to New York to get the Stanley Cup Final underway against the Rangers.
As for Shore, he did what you do when your season comes to an abrupt end in Toronto in the middle of the night: he headed for the farm.
“Boys, you deserved that one,” Leaf managing director Conn Smythe told his team in the aftermath, “you kept coming and coming and coming.”
Leafs of Yore: The 1933-34 Leafs featured many returning players from ’33, with the notable exception of goaltender Lorne Chabot. Lined up here, back row, from left: Benny Grant, Buzz Boll, Charlie Sands, Alex Levinsky, Red Horner, Andy Blair, Busher Jackson, Bill Thomas, Joe Primeau, Hal Cotton, trainer Tim Daly, George Hainsworth. Front, from left: Hec Kilrea, King Clancy, Hap Day, Dick Irvin, Conn Smythe, Frank Selke, Ace Bailey, Ken Doraty, Charlie Conacher.
Doraty was 27 that year, a third-line right winger who can fairly be described as a fringe player — earlier that season the Leafs had demoted him to the IHL Syracuse Stars because he was considered too small to stand the pace of the NHL. But the man summoned to replace him, Dave Downie, didn’t work out, so Doraty was recalled. He was not large, it’s true: 5’7” and (as Baz O’Meara of the Montreal Star put it) “128 pounds soaking wet” were his specs.
A son of Stittsville, Ontario, he spent much of his life, hockey-focussed and otherwise, in Saskatchewan. With the Leafs in 1933 he was — like coach Irvin and teammates Andy Blair and King Clancy — living in the Royal York Hotel, paying (he later recalled) $1.10 a night for his room — about $25 in 2024 dollars. (Doraty’s salary that hockey season was $3,300 — about $74,000 or so in today-money.)
Boston did score a goal in the third period, by way of defenceman Alex Smith, but referee Odie Cleghorn said he’d already blown the play dead. The goaltenders, Thompson and Chabot, went on stopping everything that came their way. The NHL didn’t keep a record of shots on goal at that time, but some newspapers did, and while the puckstopping that went on that night may not constitute an official record, it deserves its due: Chabot deterred 93 shots on the night, Thompson 114.
Erstwhile Beantowners: The 1932-33 Boston Bruins lined up, standing, from left: Red Beattie, Billy Burch, Obs Heximer, Tiny Thompson, Art Chapman, Art Ross, Marty Barry. Seated, from left: George Owen, Percy Galbraith, Harry Oliver, Frank Jerwa, Nels Stewart, Eddie Shore, Lionel Hitchman, Dit Clapper.
As the game clocked on, later and later, the fans sagged along with the players. “The ice was about gone,” a Boston paper recorded.
Boston Globe writer Victor Jones maybe put it best: “It wasn’t hockey after the first hour of overtime, but it was Homeric nevertheless.”
After the fifth overtime, the restart was delayed a further 20 minutes as officials considered their options. Bruins coach manager Art Ross thought the teams should flip a coin to decide the outcome, and Smythe agreed. NHL president Frank Calder was on hand: he didn’t like the idea. Smythe suggested they should replay the game. Calder’s idea was to play on with no goaltenders, but neither Ross nor Smythe wanted to do that. So they continued into a sixth overtime.
The Daily Boston Globe: “Eddie Shore had the puck just inside his blue line and was wearily trying to get up steam for another trip down the ice.” Blair of the Leafs intercepted him —
“the long-legged pokechecker.” He passed to Doraty, who was on his right, coasting, he and beat Tiny Thompson with a sharply angled forehander into the far corner.
The Toronto papers, as might be expected, made more hay. Here’s Lou Marsh, from the Daily Star:
The goat of the sensational upset is the greatest hockey player of them all … Eddie Shore … highest paid and most feared foeman in all hockey … the pride of Boston … of the Great West … and of all Canada, for that matter … wonder man of hockey.
That is the irony of fate!
Lady luck kisses the lowly and turns her back on the mighty!
And etcetera. Marsh eventually gets to the goal itself, relishing every moment, giddied, too, maybe, from watching all that hockey:
Shore, weak and weary from a terrific effort, gets the puck down at his own end on a despairing Leaf shot from mid-ice … circles and dodges to and from … looking for a place to break through as the spearhead of another of Boston’s power thrusts.
Shore weaves to and fro behind his own blue line trying to dodge that long-armed, long-legged, mid-ice checking limpet, Andy Blair. Suddenly Blair reaches out with a stick that seems as long as a fishing-pole … hooks the puck away just inside the blue line. Down the right boards comes the smallest man on the ice … the lightest and tiniest man in that grim struggle … scuttering and hopping along like a little bow-legged terrier. Blair shoots the puck back of the leg weary Shore as Doraty comes chop, chopping in like a man with club feet … he isn’t even a good free skate … but he gets there … strongest man on the ice at the moment.
Doraty picks the puck up.
Doraty shoots!
Doraty scores!! He scores!!!
Pandemonium. Shore’s head dropped. “Slowly and idly batted loose pieces of paper to and fro and then climbed wearily over the boards and staggered to the dressing room.”
All over. The Leafs caught their train to New York and were out on the ice at Madison Square Garden that same night — losing by a score of 5-1 to Lester Patrick’s Rangers. “Ten minutes of dazzling speed and they were ice-drunk,” was how one wire service summed it up.
“What could you expect from a team barely out of 164 minutes of play,” wondered Conn Smythe.
The game was over on this night by 10.45 p.m. By 11.30, the Leafs were back on the train and headed home for Toronto. The next three games played out at Maple Leaf Gardens, where it didn’t end well for the Leafs, with the Rangers taking the series 3-1 and captain Bill Cook collecting the Stanley Cup from Frank Calder.
Artist’s Impression: A fanciful rendering of Ken Doraty’s famous goal, featuring Eddie Shore blocking Andy Blair, along with a frozen Tiny Thompson.
The nowadays New York Rangers have a first-round series victory to sing about: last night, Peter Laviolette’s President’s Trophy-winning squad cruised past the Washington Capitals with a 4-2 series-clinching win to step up to the second round.
In 1980, when Fred Shero was coaching the Rangers, the team beat the Atlanta Flames in the preliminary round of the playoffs before falling to Shero’s old team, the Philadelphia Flyers, in the quarter-finals. Some of the Rangers made their musical mark that year, too — or, at least, they sang a song and put it on a record that sold by the scads to raise money for diabetes research.
Canadian-born songwriter and actor Alan Thicke was the force behind “Hockey Sock Rock,” a 45 showcasing the … adequate? somewhat unhorrid? trying-hard? stylings of Rangers star Phil Esposito, backed by teammates Dave Maloney (the Ranger captain that year), Pat Hickey, Ron Duguay, and goaltender John Davidson. The b-side featured Dionne And The Puck-Tones —Los Angeles Kings’ Marcel Dionne, Charlie Simmer, and Dave Taylor — working their way through “Please Forgive My Misconduct Last Night.”
In 1980, the single was something of a hit across North America, which is to say it sold 120,000 copies in three months. You can judge both songs, at your peril:
Ranger Recessional: Wayne Gretzky played his last NHL game 25 years ago today, bowing out as his New York Rangers fell 2-1 to the visiting Pittsburgh Penguins on this date in 1999. The 38-year-old centre played 22 minutes and 30 seconds that Sunday afternoon, leaving the ice on a shift-change at the at 5:55 p.m. EST, just before Pittsburgh’s Jaromir Jagr put a definitive end to Gretzky’s career with an overtime goal. The Rangers had failed, for the second consecutive season, to make the playoffs, so that’s all he wrote. Gretzky registered two shots on that final afternoon, and assisted on Brian Leetch’s second-period goal. The Madison Square Garden crowd of 18,200 gave number 99 a 15-minute ovation before he skated into retirement. “This is a great game, but it’s a hard game,” he told reporters. “Time does something to you, and it’s time.”
Another Saturday, April 13, another Stanley Cup championship: on this date in 1940, the New York Rangers powered to their third Cup win by toppling the Toronto Maple Leafs in a six-game series that ended with New York’s 3-2 overtime win at Maple Leaf Gardens in front of 14,894 fans. (They wouldn’t win a fourth Cup, of course, until 1994.) Bryan Hextall beat Turk Broda with a backhand in 1940 to end it and claim the Cup. The final four games of the series played out at Toronto’s Gardens, the circus having ousted hockey from New York’s Madison Square after the first two games. Shown here, that’s Ranger coach Frank Boucher, hatted at left, during one of the Toronto games, overseeing Neil Colville (6), Muzz Patrick (15), and Alex Shibicky (4).
The great Phil Watson was a beloved New York Rangers winger (later coached them, too), for parts of 11 seasons in the 1930s and ’40s, but due to wartime complications, he also played a single season (1943-44) for his hometown Canadians, with whom he sometimes refreshed himself between periods with a wedge of orange.
Watson died on a Friday of today’s date in 1991 at the age of 76.
Here ’s an introduction to him and his tumultuous (and inimitable) ways, courtesy of Robert Lewis Taylor in a classic New Yorker profile from February of 1947:
Phil Watson, a professional hockey player of twelve years, standing, has long been regarded as the most belligerent member of the New York Rangers, a belligerent hockey team. At thirty-two, he is reaching the peak of a career comfortably filled with action, honors, small fractures, and numerous cuts and bruises.
He was born in Canada, of a Scottish father and a French-Canadian mother, and his temperament is highly volatile. He often bursts into tears at critical moments of play, and the opponent who gives him a gratuitous bounce or whack is plainly inviting mayhem. Since he is by no means the largest player in hockey (he stands five feet ten and a half and weighs one hundred and seventy-five), his encounters with the opposition group are frequently more soothing to his spirit than to his body. Many times his teammates have patiently dug down into a swirl of flying sticks and arms and rescued their truculent colleague, occasionally gathering miscellaneous lacerations for themselves in the process.
As a result of his firecracker style and his exceptional all-around skill, Watson has always been a favorite of the New York fans. They feel that, win or lose, he will send one or two members h of the visiting team away bandaged and limping and sorry they came.
Looking Up: A quartet of New York Rangers, gathered ’round in February of 1943. From bottom left they are right winger Gus Mancuso, left winger Joe Shack, goaltender Bill Beveridge, and coach Frank Boucher. With a roster depleted by wartime call-ups, New York wallowed that year, finishing the ’42-43 season at the bottom of the six-team NHL standings.
“There wasn’t much that didn’t happen.” That’s how the Associated Press summed up the game that the Detroit Red Wings played against New York’s Rangers at Madison Square Garden in front of 12,043 fans on the Sunday night of November 22, 1942. “The wildest fuss” Manhattan had seen all season: that was another description.
Where to begin? In the first period, New York’s Lynn Patrick loosed a shot that struck Detroit goaltender Johnny Mowers in the lower lip, loosening four of his teeth and adding eight stitches to his visage. Unless it was Bryan Hextall’s shot: several New York papers credited him with the damage. The Rangers subsequently claimed that another of Hextall’s had beaten Mowers, only to pass clean through the cords of the net, but referee King Clancy didn’t see or credit any such thing.
In the third period, Detroit’s Jimmy Orlando hit New York’s Grant Warwick over the head with his stick. “Clouted” was the word one Brooklyn reporter chose; another one called it “a free-handed chop.” Warwick was knocked to the ice and out cold; New York captain Ott Heller punched Orlando. Warwick revived and proceeded to the penalty bench with Orlando: that’s what passed for concussion protocol in those fractious years. Back together again, left to their own devices on the sidelines, Warwick and Orlando got back to fighting. That’s what we’re seeing here, the aftermath, I think, though the antagonists themselves aren’t in view. That’s Lynn Patrick beneath the upraised stick, with Detroit’s Alex Motter behind him, and teammate Gord Davidson just ahead.
That was all pretty much regular business for the NHL as it was then. Something more remarkable? Rangers’ left winger Hub Macey from Big River, Saskatchewan, was 21 that year season, playing in his second major-league season. In the first period, he assisted on Scotty Cameron’s goal for New York, then in the second beat Mowers to tie the game at 3-3. The game ended in a 4-4 tie (as per wartime strictures, there was no overtime).
Macey wasn’t around to see the finish, though: he left the game after the second period to catch a train to Toronto to enlist in the Canadian Army. He did that and was soon posted to Kingston — in fact, he was back on the ice within a week, suiting up as a soldier-in-training to play with the Kingston Frontenacs in the Ottawa City Senior league alongside the RCAF Flyers, among others, the team that Milt Schmidt, Bobby Bauer, and Woody Dumart had joined in 1941-42, winning the Allan Cup. Macey’s Kingston team was bolstered by others with NHL pedigree, including Gus Giesebrecht, a former Red Wing, former Leaf Gus Marker, and erstwhile Maroon Glenn Brydson.
Macey did make it back to the NHL eventually, after the war: in 1946-47, he caught on with the Montreal Canadiens.
A birthday today for erstwhile NHL centreman Phil Goyette, who’s 90 today: many happy returns of the occasion to him. That’s him above, middle, in 1959, when he was 26, alongside wingers (left) Claude Provost and Andre Pronovost.
Born in Lachine, Quebec, on a Tuesday of this date in 1933, Goyette was a dependable member of the Canadiens for seven seasons in the 1950s and ’60s, partaking in four Stanley Cup championships with Montreal. A 1963 trade took him (and Don Marshall and Jacques Plante) to the New York Rangers, in return for Gump Worsley, Dave Balon, Leon Rochefort, and Len Ronson. He played another seven seasons in New York before wrapping up his NHL career with stints as a St. Louis Blue and a Buffalo Sabre. He scored 20+ goals in four seasons, recording hits best offensive stats in 1969-70 with St. Louis, when he scored 29 goals and 78 points while securing the Lady Byng Trophy for conspicuously courtly conduct. In 1972, he was appointed the very first coach of the expansion New York Islanders, though the job didn’t last: Goyette was fired halfway through the season and replaced by Earl Ingarfield.
Smoke Show: A birthday today for the stylish former centreman Cal Gardner, born Winnipegside, in Transcona, on a Thursday of today’s date in 1924. He started his NHL career playing three seasons for the New York Rangers before a 1948 trade took him to the Toronto Maple Leafs, with whom he won a pair of Stanley Cup championships, in 1949 and 1951. He also suited up for the Chicago Black Hawks and Boston’s own Bruins. Gardner died in 2001 at the age of 76.
We’ve kept a close eye here at Puckstruck on the evolution of NHL grooming standards, combing through hockey’s history to investigate the league’s earliest moustaches while keeping an eye, too, on the hairstyles of the mid-century Boston Bruins as well as developments on Brent Burns’ face. And so, this past April, as the puck dropped on another season of hockey playoffs, Stan Fischler’s short video post for The Hockey News on the origin of playoff beards caught our interest. You can watch it here, or endure this quick synopsis: according to the venerable broadcaster and historian, the NHL’s favourite unshaven tradition began with the 1980 New York Islanders.
Fischler credits left winger Clark Gillies with the original idea. Heading into the playoffs that spring, Gillies pulled aside New York captain Denis Potvin and suggested that the team stow its razorblades. In Fischler’s imagining of the conversation that ensued goes something like this:
Potvin: Why?
Gillies: It’ll bring camaraderie to the team, we’ll be like the House of David, that baseball team where all these guys had beards.
Potvin: Okay.
And so it was. The Islanders stopped shaving and kept winning. “And guess what,” Fischler narrates: “by the time these guys reached the third round of the playoffs, they all were pretty bearded. They all looked great.” In the Finals in 1980, the Islanders took on the Philadelphia Flyers. “And what do you think happened? The bearded Islanders won the Stanley Cup. How do you beat that?”
Fischler isn’t the first to credit the Islanders in ’80 as the NHL’s original beard-growers: it’s a tale often retailed, reviewed, and re-told. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s accurate.
In fact, another New York team, the Rangers, were whiskering up before the Islanders, and deserve recognition in the annals of unkempt hockey players, if any team does. If indeed Gillies was the one to suggest that the Islanders stop shaving in 1980, chances are that he borrowed the idea from the Rangers five years earlier.
It was in the spring of 1975, in their third season in the NHL, that the upstart Islanders made the playoffs for the first time, with Al Arbour’s team matching up with Emile Francis’ Rangers in the best-of-three preliminary round. Two days before that series got started, the Rangers and Islanders met at Madison Square Garden to wrap up the regular-season schedule. Here’s Wes Gaffer writing about the Ranger coach after that game in the New York Daily News:
… Emile (Cat) Francis, who now finds himself the coach of a Ranger team sprouting incipient beards, a team calls itself hockey’s House of David. The House of David Rangers lost to the Islanders, 6-4, for the first time ever in the Garden.
Gaffer elaborated later in his dispatch:
No word on who the “non-signers” were. Giacomin does seem to have been the one to have dubbed the team the “House of David Rangers.” Defenceman Brad Park apparently preferred the “Raunchy Rangers.”
Elsewhere, Ranger centreman Derek Sanderson claimed credit for the whole caper. Sanderson had arrived in New York via a 1974 trade with Boston with his famous moustache intact, but early in April of ’75 he’d shaved it off after losing a bet. As the playoffs neared, a reporter asked him about the state of his stubble: was he growing a beard?
“The whole team is,” Sanderson repleid. “Nobody is going to shave until the playoffs are over. I was on the plane the other night and I got a little petition up and everybody agreed to it. The Cat went along 100 per cent. He didn’t argue.”
According to a Ranger spokesman, “eight or nine” players were in on the scheme.
“Maybe growing beards will link everybody in a common bond,” Sanderson mused. “Just some little thing to pull things together. Everybody could wear yellow slippers to bed. I don’t know.”
“Little things like that sometimes work. I’ve seen it happen before. Boston had great spirit like that. Boston was a very superstitious club. The Bruins always warmed up the same way, and they always went out in the same order. With Phil Esposito around, nobody could cross sticks. Bobby Orr touched everybody before he went on the ice.”
As it was, the Rangers’ beards had only limited success in 1975, with the Islanders taking the playoff series with a 4-3 win on April 11, freeing the Rangers to shave reach once more for their shaving cream. Clark Gillies scored the opening goal in that game that decided the Patrick Division showdown, with Denis Potvin adding a pair of his own before (a clean-shaven) J.P. Parise scored the OT winner to decide the matter.
So that’s worth noting. As, too, is this: whether Giacomin, Sanderson, Francis, or anyone else at the time knew it or not (probably not), the Rangers had another hairy precedent rattling around in their past, going all the way back to 1938 when (yes) Lester Patrick himself was running the show as New York’s coach and GM.
This wasn’t a playoff thing: back then, in November of ’38, the NHL season was just getting underway when Harold Parrott launched his Brooklyn Daily Eagle column on the Rangers’ home-opener against the Detroit Red Wings with this:
Before the start of tonight’s Ranger homecoming game on Garden ice, you may have to look twice to make sure the combatants aren’t from the House of David, instead of from Lester Patrick’s stable of skaters.
Captain Art Coulter and Murray Patrick, young defencemen, haven’t shaved in three weeks. As you might suspect, there’s a reason. A good one: money, dough, a bonus.
In this case, the idea was hatched during the Rangers’ training camp at Winnipeg. According to Parrott, Lester Patrick had, “in an unguarded moment,” commented on a particularly close-cropped haircut that his captain, Art Coulter, was sporting, calling it (and I quote) “silly” and predicting that the style wouldn’t last. “Those ideas pass quickly,” he’s reported to have said. “Why, I would give a bonus who’d have the nerve to go through a season without shaving.”
Another version of the story had Coulter telling his coach that no-one paid him to grow his hair long. Patrick said (“jokingly”) that he’d pay $500 if Coulter would let his beard grow all season.
That was in Winnipeg. When, a few days later, the team moved on to Saskatoon, Lester’s younger son Murray (a.k.a. Muzz) decided he wanted in on the action, and the challenge was on: the first player to shave would lose out on the purse.
As Doc Holst of the Detroit Free Press told it, Patrick was surprised to learn, a few days later, that the players had taken him seriously. “One of Lester’s prides,” Holst wrote, “is his reputation for never going back on his word to players.” Hence the coach’s problem: “They look like a couple of heathens and I don’t know what to do about it,” the coach told the reporter. “Maybe I can get President Frank Calder to make beards illegal in the National Hockey League. It would be awful if Murray and Art started a fad for beards.”
To wrap up the pre-season, the Rangers played the New York Americans across western Canada, running up a six-game winning streak as they beat the Amerks twice each in Winnipeg, Saskatoon, and Edmonton. When the Rangers won their NHL season-opener on the road in Detroit, Lester Patrick himself must have wondered whether the beards were lending the team some luck.
The Rangers won their next three games, too, but Patrick’s patience didn’t last. By November 22, he’d ended the challenge by opening his wallet, paying his two hirsute holdouts $100 apiece to shave their beards.
He can’t have been happy to pay the price — nor to see his smooth-faced team take its first loss of the season as they did that same Tuesday night, in Boston, losing 4-2 to Eddie Shore and the Bruins.
Chin Muzak: A bearded Rangers’ captain Art Coulter (right) inspects Murray Patrick’s heathen look in November of 1938.
Ranger Room: Gump Worsley, who was born in Montreal on a Tuesday of today’s date in 1929, started his NHL career in 1952 with the New York Rangers. He’s at home in his rec room here in 1963, the year he was traded to his hometown Canadiens in a deal that saw Dave Balon, Leon Rochefort, and Len Ronson join him in a trade that sent Jacques Plante, Don Marshall, and Phil Goyette to the Rangers. “I never wear a mask, not even in practice,” Worsley said during his New York years. “Cuts and nicks are part of the game. Many people will tell you goalkeeping is the toughest job, but I don’t think so. If you know what you’re doing you should be okay.” (Image: Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)
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