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:
“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:
Clarence Campbell (+ everybody else in the Montreal Forum), 1955
“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.”
Boom-Boom Geoffrion, 1961
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.
Brad Park, 1972
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.
Dave Forbes, 1975
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.
Ed Giacomin, 1975
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.”
Wayne Gretzky, 1988
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.
Fan Base: Prime Minister Brian Mulroney (and son Mark) alongside Wayne Gretzky (and Stanley Cup ring) watch the Hull Olympiques beat the visiting Shawinigan Cataractes 11-3 in a QMJHL game in September of 1985. (Image: Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)
Sorry to see the news this afternoon that Brian Mulroney has died at the age of 84. Canada’s 18th prime minister presided in the True North from 1984 to 1993, which makes him the last Canadian leader to reign over a homegrown Stanley Cup champion. It was in June of ’93, of course, that the Montreal Canadiens outlasted the Los Angeles Kings to win the Cup, just before Mulroney resigned as prime minister. Whatever you want to say about the Mulroney years, they were good ones for Canadian Cups: between Montreal (two), the Edmonton Oilers (four), and Calgary Flames (one), northern teams won championships in seven of the nine years he was in office in Ottawa. Pictured below, that’s Mulroney in January of 1985 with Phil Esposito at a Team Canada ’72 get-together in Toronto.
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.
Happy 50th To You: A birthday today for the inexorable Phil Esposito, who was born in 1942 on a Friday of today’s date in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario: happy 81st to him. He made a habit, on birthdays past, of scoring milestone goals: on this date in 1971, as he was turning 29, he scored for his Boston Bruins in a 5-4 loss to the Kings in Los Angeles to became the fourth player in NHL history (after Maurice Richard, Bernie Geoffrion, and Bobby Hull) to score 50 goals in a season. (He would finish, that year, with 76.) Three years to the day later, on his 32nd birthday, Esposito became to first NHLer to register four 50-goal seasons in a row as he notched a hattrick (the 21st of his career) in a 5-5 Bruins with the North Stars in Bloomington, Minnesota. That regular season he scored 68 all in. Esposito had one more landmark season left in him: the following year, 1974-75, he scored 61 goals.
Marie-Philip Poulin is the winner of the Northern Star Award as Canada’s top athlete, so here’s a sustained flourish of a Bauer Vapor 1X Composite stick to her. The 31-year-old forward, who hails from Beauceville, Quebec, captained Canada to golden finishes this year at both the World Championships in Denmark and the Olympics in China.
The Northern Star is the former Lou Marsh Trophy, of course; the name change happened in November. Poulin is the tenth hockey player to win the award since its inception in 1936, and the first woman among those. She joins an august company: since Maurice Richard won it in 1957, the others have been Bobby Orr (’72), Phil Esposito (’70), Bobby Clarke (’75), Guy Lafleur (’77), Wayne Gretzky (’82, ’83, ’85, ’89), Mario Lemieux (’93), Sidney Crosby (’07, ’09), and Carey Price (’15).
Born in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, on a Friday of this very date in 1942, Phil Esposito is 80 today: many happy returns of the day to him. Here he is in April of 1973, when he was 31 and a main motor of Boston’s mighty Bruins … only to be knocked out of the Bruins’ defence of their 1972 Stanley Cup championship in the second game of the an opening round playoff series that they would lose to the New York Rangers in five games.
Esposito, the Art Trophy-winner again that season, was felled by a hip check from Rangers’ defenceman Ron Harris. “I carried the puck across the blueline,” Esposito narrated the next day for reporters as he lay in Room 509 of Phillips House at the Massachusetts General Hospital, “and then I saw Harris coming at me. I tried to cut, but I had nowhere to go. I was brushed by somebody or stumbled and lost my footing. My right foot swung around and that’s when Harris hit me. I knew Harris would come in low and I tried to duck, but I couldn’t. It was a clean check. I’m sure there’s no way that Ronnie tried to injure me.”
Dr. Carter Rowe performed the surgery that Esposito was still awaiting when these photos were taken. It was Esposito’s right knee that Dr. Rowe repaired, a tear of the medial lateral ligament. (Three times he’d already performed similar operations on Bobby Orr, by then.)
The fact that Esposito was laid up in a cast for eight weeks didn’t mean that he missed out on the Bruins’ last supper. In mid-April, after having been eliminated by the Rangers, the team gathered to say their farewells at a Boston steakhouse, the Branding Iron, not far from where Esposito lay abed at Mass General. A Bruins’ raiding party that included Orr, Wayne Cashman, and Dallas Smith soon had Esposito busted out of recovery, across the plaza, into the restaurant — in the very hospital bed pictured here. They got him back again, his teammates, after a couple of hours of revelry.
As Esposito told Evan Weiner in 2009, his recuperation was strictly policed after that. “In that hospital that year, I was the only guy they told me ever in the history of Mass General — and they had Katherine Hepburn in there, John Wayne, Elizabeth Taylor — that was ever locked in his room. They locked me in my room, I was in there three-and-a-half, four weeks, and it was nuts.”
Come the fall, Esposito was back on the ice to launch what turned into yet another Art Ross-worthy campaign, his fourth in a row. He finished the 1973-74 season with even better numbers than the previous year, netting 68 goals and 145 points to top the scoring table ahead of teammates Orr, Ken Hodge, and Cashman.
Stopgap: Curt Ridley’s 1977 O-Pee-Chee hockey card.
Sorry to say that Curt Ridley has died at the age of 70. Born in Winnipeg in September of 1951, he got his NHL start at the age of 23 with the New York Rangers in 1974 when Ed Giacomin was sidelined, nursing a wonky knee. Ridley was tending goals for the AHL Providence Reds that year when his coach, John Muckler, told him he’d be starting for the Rangers against the Boston Bruins. “Was he surprised?” Muckler was asked. “I dunno,” Muckler said. “He had his mask on.” The Bruins rang up six goals on Ridley before Giacomin limped in to relieve him. With Phil Esposito notching three goals and four assists, the Bruins won 11-3. Ridley found some redemption (and his first NHL win) ten days later when he was back in net for New York’s 2-1 triumph over the Kansas City Scouts. Ridley’s did his steadiest NHL work for the Vancouver Canucks, with whom he played parts of four seasons. He took several turns, too, in net for the Toronto Maple Leafs before his NHL career came to its end in 1981. In 2015, Curt Ridley was inducted into the Manitoba Hockey Hall of Fame.
“He was smarter than me,” Phil Esposito lamented after Canada’s 3-2 game six win over the Soviet Union in September of 1972, when the subject of Alexander Ragulin came up. A stalwart of the blueline for CSKA Moscow and the Soviet national team for more than a decade, Ragulin died on a Wednesday of this date in 2004 at the age of 63. He won Olympic gold with the Soviet Union in 1964, 1968, and 1972, and he was in on 10 world championship titles.
“Rags,” the Canadians dubbed him in ’72. Along with the rest of Canada’s forwards, Esposito saw a lot of him through the eight games of the Summit Series. In the sixth game, contacts between the two resulted in several penalties for the Canadian. In the first period, Esposito took a double minor penalty after clashing with Ragulin. “After I got the charging penalty,” Esposito recounted after the game, “he came at me and like you’d do in the NHL, I reacted defensively by giving him this,” raising a notional stick. “That’s those international rules. You can’t do that. He was smarter than me.”
In the third period, Canada’s big centreman added a five-minute major to his account after he was seen to high-stick Ragulin. “I wasn’t going to get a penalty until he went begging to the referee,” Esposito groused.
(Image: Frank Lennon, Library and Archives Canada, e010933352 /)
Saddened to hear the news that former Boston Bruins centreman Fred Stanfield has died at the age of 77. Born in Toronto in 1944, he broke into the NHL with the Chicago Black Hawks in 1964 before he was traded (along with Phil Esposito and Ken Hodge) to the Bruins in 1967 in exchange for Pit Martin, Gilles Marotte, and Jack Norris. In Boston, he often lined up with Johnnys Mackenzie and Bucyk, and in so doing, piled up six successive 20-goal seasons, aiding in a pair of Bruin Stanley Cup championships, in 1970 and ’72. He played two seasons with the Minnesota North Stars and parts of four others with the Sabres in Buffalo before he stowed his skates in 1978.
Special Ed: The epic Eddie Shore, as seen in a Boston Garden program from March of 1936.
If the measure of NHL success is whether or not your team hoists the Stanley Cup to finish a given season, then Patrice Bergeron’s first campaign as captain of the Boston Bruins was a flop.
The season itself wasn’t so dire. The Bruins, you’ll recall, finished third in their division, the old MassMutual East, accumulating 73 points, which was good enough for tenth overall in the NHL’s regular-season standings — just three points behind the eventual Stanley Cup champions, the Tampa Bay Lightning. Boston won their first-round playoff series, dismissing the Washington Capitals in five games. Then, of course, they faltered, losing out in six to the frisky New York Islanders.
Historically, in the annals of Bruinly seasons going back to the team’s founding in 1924, Bergeron’s first as captain rates … fairly well. Measured by the percentage of points earned during the regular season, Bergeron’s Bruins (who went 33-16-7 in wins/losses/overtime losses) come in at .652, which ties them for 21st on the chart showing 96 seasons played to date.
That’s well behind the Bruins best season, 1929-30, when the team compiled a .875 record in Lionel Hitchman’s second year as captain. But it’s better than a whole raft of other Boston seasons, including those in which some of the greatest names in team history took over as captain.
Nels Stewart’s 1934-35 Bruins registered a .604 record before departing the playoffs in the semi-finals. Red Beattie’s 1936-37 team put together a .552 record, losing out in the quarter-finals. Bobby Bauer oversaw a .525 Bruins season in 1946-47; his Bruins lost in the semi-finals. Eddie Shore? He led Boston to a .521 record in 1935-36 and then out of the post-season in the quarter-finals. Marty Barry and Bill Cowley fared worse still: their respective teams, from 1933-34 and 1944-45 respectively, show points percentages of .427 and .350. Cowley’s team failed to get through the semi-finals; Barry’s missed the playoffs altogether.
Six times the Bruins have won the Stanley Cup in their history; it’s not unreasonable to imagine Patrice Bergeron raising a seventh during his tenure as Boston captain. Until that happens, he can take solace (maybe?) in the fact that the team he plays for actually acknowledges his captaincy.
It’s the least the Bruins could do, of course, though not (for the Bruins) so straightforward as you might think. Because while Boston does celebrate (and proudly) Bergeron’s role as team captain, the team still doesn’t allow that Barry, Stewart, Shore, Beattie, Cowley, and Bauer preceded him in the role.
Yes, it’s back to that refrain again, which is to say, this one.
To sum up, quick-like: at some point in the Bruins’ 97-year history, the team has mislaid a prominent chunk of that history, somehow overlooking the captaincies of at least six of their most famous players. Bergeron isn’t the 20th man to captain the Bruins, as the team is content to claim: he’s the 26th (or possibly the 28th).
Red Beattie captained the Bruins in 1936-37, as noted in a Garden program from that season; according to the team’s erring record, it was Dit Clapper.
It’s not clear when exactly the forgetting originated, just that it’s well-entrenched and, now, widespread: the team’s erroneous record-keeping has become the standard for a bevy of (mostly otherwise) reputable online registers of hockey history. I could go on (and have) about the team’s carelessness when it comes to its own rich past. I took an interest in Bobby Bauer’s unacknowledged captaincy in 2019, following where others, like Bruins historian Kevin Vautour, have gone before. Finding evidence of Bauer’s tenure wasn’t hard, and before long I happened on references to all the others — Barry, Beattie, Shore, Cowley, et al — who’ve been ignored.
I first contacted the Bruins in December of 2019 to ask about this and (politely) to offer to share my files. I’ve previously quoted the response I got, but it’s worth repeating here. It was Heidi Holland I heard back from, the Bruins’ the team’s director of publications and information, and thereby the gatekeeper of the team’s history, statistical and otherwise, as enshrined in the team’s annual Guide & Record Book.
Focussing on Bobby Bauer’s claim, she wrote:
This question has come up a couple of times over the past several years but unfortunately, I have no way of confirming it. The list of captains from earlier media guides lists John Crawford as captain in that season. The earliest media guide that I have is 1947-48 and Crawford’s bio in that book only says that he has “been captain or assistant captain of the Bruins in recent seasons.” Bauer does not have a bio in that guide.
When the subject first came up, I asked Milt Schmidt (as the only person who was active at that time) if he remembered Bobby being named Boston’s captain and he did not have any recollection that he did.
Fair enough, I guess … if also fairly dismissive of the idea that there just might be proofs out there that go beyond Milt Schmidt’s memory.
News of Bobby Bauer’s appointment reached the pages of Herb Ralby’s Boston’s Globe on October 17 of 1946.
Evidence of the overlooked captains has been out there, of course, for going on 90 years, available for the finding by anyone, including club employees, willing to bother to take the initiative to look for it. I keep coming across references in my archival wanderings, as do others, like Kevin Vautour and Jeff Miclash, a researcher in Burlington, Ontario, who’s working on a book about the Bruins in the 1930s. At this point, we have a regular online marketplace going where we gather to share newfound references to the snubbed captains and roll digital eyes at the Bruins’ ongoing oblivion. It was this past January, as Patrice Bergeron inherited the C, that I piled up the evidence and made my case in that puckstruck.com post of mine. I cc’d that to Heidi Holland and several other interested parties attached to the team without hearing anything back. At the risk of annoying these same people, I got back in touch in July, in the quietude of Boston’s post-season, in the interest of getting the record straightened out in time for the upcoming season. The response, again, was … none.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that the Bruins are doubling down on the institutional inattention to detail that’s prevailed to this point. The end of their willful neglect of this history of theirs might well be on the horizon, even if we can’t see it yet, or access it on our browsers.
Because here’s the thing: as a new NHL season approaches, the Bruins will be, in the next few weeks, unveiling their 2021-22 Guide & Record Book. It’s entirely possible that the team has tidied up the register of captains altogether quietly, on their own, righting the record that’s been wrong.
I’ll be happy to see it; I’ll salute their diligence. Meet me back here when — if — that happens.
Meantime, I’m happy to barge back into the question of just how the Bruins came to not remember that Bobby Bauer and Eddie Shore et al. served the team as captains. The answer is probably lost for good, actually — but maybe can we narrow in to take a look at the timeline of the neglect?
In that e-mail of hers, Heidi Holland mentioned the 1947-48 Bruins guide as the earliest edition she’s seen. That’s the one with Milt Schmidt on the cover, proudly wearing his C in the centre of his sweater. I haven’t tracked down a copy of that one, but I do have in hand the guide published ahead of the previous season, 1946-47 — that is, the one over which Bobby Bauer presided as captain.
It’s hard to discern just how involved the team was in this producing this 64-page booklet that bears the subtitle “The complete story of a great hockey team” on its opening page. Compiled by a pair of Boston Globe sportswriters, Harold Kaese and Herb Ralby, it was promoted and sold through the paper (35 cents a copy, plus another five for postage), I’m surmising that it was a Bruin production through and through. I think it may be the very first Bruin guide to have been published, though I can’t confirm that. It’s packed with player profiles, historical rosters, team records — all the usual fodder you’d expect, if not (notably) a comprehensive listing of team captains.
There’s no mention, in fact, of any captain in this ’46-47 guide. As the Bruins erringly tell it, defenceman John (a.k.a. Jack) Crawford skippered the team that season, continuing in the role he’d had the previous year. As I’ve noted before, Bauer had changed his mind about retiring in the fall of 1946, rejoining the team for one more campaign. On October 16, he was named captain of the team.
The Bruins guidebook pictured above was published a month later, on November 13. I’m speculating here, but my guess is that it was already in production when Bauer was crowned. That would explain why his captaincy isn’t mentioned.
Game for a little more esoterica? I thought so. The NHL had an official guide of its own in the 1940s. Overseen by a former newspaperman from Vancouver, Jim Hendy, it had been keeping scores and stats since the early 1930s. By the start of the 1947-48 season, it had split into two publications: Who’s Who In Hockey, which compiled active player data, and the Official Guide and Record Book, overseeing the NHL as a whole as well as minor and amateur leagues.
It’s the latter of these booklets that’s of interest here: specifically, the write-up on page 37 and the photograph following on page 56. The former commemorates the winner of the 1947 Lady Byng Trophy: “Bobby Bauer, Boston Bruins’ great little captain.”
The latter, reproduced here, shows Bauer front and centre, proudly wearing the C denoting his rank between the 1 and the 7 on his sweater. As previously noted, the 1946-47 season was the first in which letters were added to NHL sweaters to denote captains and their alternates. Bauer’s deputies show their As here: Murray Henderson standing tall beside coach Dit Clapper and, seated three places to Bauer’s left, then-former captain Jack Crawford.
One last (for now) thread from the fabric. Fast-forwarding through the decades, we find the Bruins heading into the NHL’s 1973-74 season looking forward to their 50th anniversary. This is duly noted on the cover of the team guide they published that fall:
A gallery of remarkable hockey players on that cover, you’ll agree. Of the 11 depicted, all but four (goaltenders Frank Brimsek and Tiny Thompson, along with Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito) served with distinction as Bruin captains.
And yet two of them shown here — Bill Cowley and Eddie Shore — are still (then as now) missing from the historical record.
Their captaincies, along with those of Marty Barry, Nels Stewart, Red Beattie, and Bobby Bauer, are plain facts, despite what the Bruins recall. What the ’73-74 guide tells us is that the neglect that still seems to be in place goes back at least 48 years. The proof that the team was getting it as wrong in 1973 as it was in 2021 is on page 38:
Error Page: Boston’s overlooked captains have been missing from the record for at least 48 years, dating back to the team’s 1973-74 Official Guide.
What this may also illuminate is the how — and the who — of just what happened here. I don’t mean to be casting blame, or getting anybody into historical trouble, but, well, um, the man in charge of the ’73-74 guide was, somewhat remarkably, one of the men who’d collaborated on that ’46-47 edition, 27 years earlier.
Herb Ralby was a sportswriter for the Boston Globe starting in the 1930s, when he was in his early 20s, and he was on the job until 1970, when he left journalism to join the Bruins full-time as the team’s director of publicity. (He died in 1994 at the age of 81.) Ralby was on the scene, that’s to say, going back all the way to the time Eddie Shore’s tenure as captain, and even reported on Bobby Bauer’s (below), well before he took charge of — and didn’t repair — the Bruins’ not-so-well-tended history that nobody since has bothered to set right.
Stitches In Time: News you can use from a Herb Ralby column in the Boston Globe from November of 1946, a quarter century before he became the Bruins’ director of publicity.
A birthday today for Tony Esposito, born in Sault Ste. Marie on a Friday of this date in 1943: he’s 78 now, and thereby the younger of the family’s two Hall of Famers. Tony launched his NHL career with the Montreal Canadiens, starting his first game in Boston in 1968 against brother Phil … who promptly scored both Bruin goals in a 2-2 tie. Claimed by the Chicago Black Hawks, Tony O won the Calder Trophy as the league’s outstanding rookie in 1970. He played 15 seasons with Chicago, winning the Vézina Trophy three times along the way. “Tony Esposito used everything he had,” the Boston Globe’s Fran Rosa wrote in 1974 on an April night when the Hawks overcame the Bruins in the playoffs, “his stick, his pads, his body, his skates, even his head once, and of course, his glove. Oh my, that glove. It grew bigger and bigger as the game progressed.”
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