Silver Gelatin Seven: A William Notman portrait of the St. John’s School hockey team from Montreal, readying for action in the winter of 1907. Note the goaltender’s pose, in the centre, at the back, foretelling Ken Dryden. (Image: Notman Photographic Archives Collection, McCord Museum)
Born in 1902 on a Sunday of this date in Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, northeast of Regina, the volatile Eddie Shore won a pair of Stanley Cup championships with Boston; four times he was handed the Hart Trophy as the NHL’s most valuable asset.
“Undoubtedly the greatest individual player in the game,” Niven Busch called Shore in 1929, when Boston’s number 2 was in full fettle.
“This Eddie Shore is an odd chap,” Busch pronounced in the pages of The New Yorker. “He was born at a Hudson Bay Station, and as soon as he had made some money playing hockey, he went back to Saskatchewan and bought a big farm there. He works on his farm in the summer, and does well at it for a fellow whose agricultural experience after boyhood consisted of such glimpses of the country as he was able to get from the locomotive cabs in which he was a fireman. Last year Boston paid him twelve thousand dollars and this year he asked for five thousand more, and got most of it — how much was not announced. At seventeen thousand dollars, if that’s what they pay him, he is the highest-paid player in hockey, as well as the ablest. In spite of what you can say for Dutton, Bourgault, Johnson, or Lionel Conacher, he is the only defenceman who also ranks as a great forward. He is perfectly built for hockey; not particularly heavy in the shoulders, but with a solid, barrel-shaped trunk, tremendous legs, and wide hips. He and Conacher are natural rivals. Both about the same size and equally aggressive. Conacher, an all-round athlete, good at baseball and lacrosse, and one of the best football players in Canada, is far better known in the North than Shore, who has made the most of his reputation in the United States.”
(Image, from 1937: Richard Merrill, Boston Public Library)
No quick thought-piece here on why Bobby Orr did what he did, or how terrible the disappointment tastes, or how patently absurd it would be to write a sentence like “President Trump has delivered for all the American people, regardless of race, gender, or station in life,” let alone submit it for publication. The ad that Orr paid to mar half of page A9 of today’s New Hampshire Union Leader is here, if you want to study it.
Me, I’m admiring “Winter on the Don,” above, another of Winnipeg photographer Diana Thorneycroft’s masterpieces, from her 2007 series “Group of Seven Awkward Moments.” Her interest here, she’s said, is in combining “iconic northern landscapes, which have come to symbolize Canada as a nation,” with “scenes of accidents, disasters, and bad weather.”
“By pairing the tranquility of traditional landscape painting with black humour,” Thorneycroft writes, “the work conjures up topical and universally familiar landscapes fraught with anxiety and contradictions.” For more of her bracing views of our north, visit dianathorneycroft.com.
Flash Frozen: Details are few on this magnificent archival image, but my guess is that’s Montreal Maroons forward Paul Runge we’re seeing posing here on picture day. His seven NHL seasons included campaigns with Boston and Canadiens along with two stints with Montreal’s long-lost other team. I’d venture that we’re looking at Runge’s second go-round with the team, when he was in his later 20s, 1936 to 1938, a period that includes the final Maroons’ season in the NHL before they suspended play for good. And the photographer at his camera, under his cloud of flash powder? He’s unidentified, too, as is the photographer of the photographer and his subject. Update: @hockeytician suggests that the man in the hat is probably Montreal photographer James Rice. I think that’s probably right. (Image: Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec)
Show And Tell: Bruins’ captain Johnny Bucyk shows off the Stanley Cup to the Boston Garden faithful on Sunday, May 10, 1970, after Bobby Orr’s inimitable overtime goal won the team their first NHL championship since 1941. (Image: Brearley Collection, Boston Public Library)
Boston Bruins’ fans won’t soon forget the most famous goal to have been scored in the old Garden, but just in case there’s an 800-pound statue of Bobby Orr flying bronzely through across the concourse in front of the rink the nowadays Bruins play in, when they’re playing, the TD Garden. It was 50 years ago today, on another Sunday, Mother’s Day of 1970, that Orr scored the memorable overtime goal, just prior to take-off, that put paid to the St. Louis Blues and won the Bruins their first Stanley Cup since 1941.
Fans of that famous goal and/or of the unforgettable image that Boston Record-American photographer Ray Lussier snapped of it have plenty to keep them busy this anniversary weekend.
I recommend Dan Robson’s new oral history of the goal at The Athletic, where you’ll hear from Orr himself along with Derek Sanderson, Phil Esposito, Bruins coach Harry Sinden, and his counterpart from St. Louis, Scotty Bowman.
Also? At NHL.com, Dave Stubbs has a piece previewing an NHL Network Originals documentary that’s debuting tonight. The 1970 Boston Bruins: Big, Bad & Bobby is on-screen tonight across North America (8 p.m. ET on Sportsnet and the NHL Network).
In the flurry of remembrances, would we note how, 50 years ago, in the immediate chaos of the Bruins’ championship celebrations, a 22-year-old Orr accounted for what he’d done a few minutes earlier?
“I don’t know what I did,” Mike Widmer from UPI quoted him saying the dressing-room aftermath. “I saw it go in the net as I was flying in the air. Then I hit the ice and before I could get up the guys were on top of me.”
Another unbylined UPI dispatch started with this:
How would you expect a 22-year-old to describe the biggest moment of his spectacular young life?
How about: “The Stanley Cup! Wheeeeee!!!”
A little in that same piece, Orr did venture a little further into detail:
“Turk [Sanderson] made a helluva play out of the corner,” Orr recalled while pleading with the team doctor “to please prescribe a beer for me.”
“I saw it go in,” Kevin Walsh from Boston’s Globe managed to glean from Orr. “Oh ya, it was in.”
“I didn’t know where it was going. I just shot the darn thing. I think it went between his [St. Louis goaltender Glenn Hall’s] legs.”
“Don’t ask me how the play started. I don’t remember. I don’t know how it happened.”
“I know what this win is for me. It’s so great.”
Something I would like to get cleared up — maybe tonight, in the documentary, we’ll learn the truth? — is just where Orr’s mother, Arva, was during all the nostalgic rejoicing that night in 1970.
Reading Gerald Eskenazi in the May 11 edition of the New York Times, you might have been gladdened to hear this:
Scoring in today’s game, the only close one of the series, started with Rick Smith of the Bruins getting a rising shot past Glenn Hall, underneath a sign that read ‘Happy Mother’s Day Mrs. Orr.’
This was for Bobby’s mother who had come from their home in Canada.
Orr himself mentions this Mother’s Day banner in his 2013 memoir, My Story, though he doesn’t say one way or the other whether the woman to whom it paid tribute was actually on the property.
The Canadian Press report that ran across Canada had her in the building, too:
Bobby Orr, the 22-year-old wonder defenceman who scored the winning goal in overtime, stood grinning under television lights as his father fought through the crowd toward him.
Doug Orr, who came down from his Parry Sound, Ont., home with Mrs. Orr, left his wife outside the dressing room.
“This is the best day of my life,” he said.
Mr. Orr spilled more of his teeming heart to the Boston Globe’s Martin Pave. “Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but tonight I don’t care if Bobby gets higher than a kite. He deserves it. I’ve never seen him drunk, but the way we’re all feeling, who cares?”
Wheeeeee! Sculptor Harry Weber bronzed Orr flies through the Boston air in front of the modern-day TD Garden.
Pave wondered how Mr. Orr had reacted when his son scored. “I jumped,” the ebullient father said. “I screamed. Then I rushed to the phone to call my wife in Parry Sound. I can’t even remember what she said because she was crying her eyes out.”
“Then,” Pave continued, “Doug rushed to the Bruins dressing room and embraced his son. He grabbed a bottle and joined the celebration.”
Definitely in the tumultuous room, even if Mrs. Orr wasn’t: Dit Clapper. He’d been the Bruins’ captain, of course, back when they’d last lifted the Cup in 1941. Remarkably, he’d played on all three of the Bruins’ previous Stanley Cup-winning teams, in 1929, 1939, and ’41.
Now 63, he’d flown in from his home in Peterborough, Ontario. “This is a helluva club,” he said in the team’s dressing room as 1970 celebrations turned increasingly liquid. He was up on a bench, surveying the scene, as Globe columnist Harold Kaese told it.
“It was never like this when we won in 1941,” he quoted Clapper as saying. “I think we had a bottle of beer, maybe.”
The Goal: Photographer Chad Coombs echoed Number Four’s famous goal in “Hockey Night In Canada: A Bobby Orr Tribute.’ For more of his work, visit http://www.chadcoombs.com. (Image courtesy of Chad Coombs.)
He’s been called, inevitably, the Wayne Gretzky of hockey photography, as well as the Einstein. Both are meant to measure and honour Bruce Bennett’s rinkside genius with a camera, of course; the latter pays additional tribute to his grey head of mad-scientist hair.
Whichever way you want to label him, there’s no disputing that Bennett, who turned 60 this year, is hockey’s pre-eminent modern-day photographer. Born in Brooklyn, New York, he got his first assignment for The Hockey News in 1974. By the end of last hockey season, he’d photographed 4,678 NHL games, along with dozens of Olympic, international, junior and college games. If you’re a hockey fan, it’s no exaggeration to say that most of the best hockey images you’ve seen over the past 40 years were formed and frozen in Bennett’s camera.
After 30 years in the business, Bennett sold his business to Getty Images, for whom he continues to shoot and oversee hockey coverage. For Hockey Greatest Photos, he’s chosen 246 images from an archive surpassing two million — “a monumental task,” he writes in his Backword here — to assemble what is a stunning scrapbook of hockey history.
As is usual for him at this time of year, Bruce Bennett has his camera in hand this fall and his eye on hockey players. When Puckstruck caught up to him late last week, he was en route from New York to Toronto for the weekend’s Hockey Hall of Fame ceremonies. Via e-mail, we questioned and he answered:
I won’t ask you outright what your favourite image is in the book (though you’re free to mention it), but what about this: is there one, to you, that best captures the essence of the game?
Wow. Good question and since there are 246 favorite images in the book, your twist works well. And at least I have a few minutes to page through and pick one. The logical conclusion of any sporting event is that there is a winner, and a loser. That is summed up with my photograph of Henrik Lundqvist, alone in the crease as the Los Angeles Kings celebrate their Cup victory around him. The essence of the perfect sports photo that captured jubilation and dejection. And number two, if you would allow me, is an image from last season as Alex Ovechkin dives to hit the puck past Lundqvist. To me the image summarizes the dedication, perseverance and tenacity that it takes to be successful in this sport. And seeing Ovechkin’s eyes following the puck is a bonus.
Did you admire particular hockey photographers as a boy and/or as a young photographer? Your forebears behind a camera at the rink include many great names, from Turofsky to Bier to Brodeur. Is there one whom you especially admire? Is that a hockey photograph of someone else’s that’s a favourite of yours?
I was an Ansel Adams fan growing up and as I started my hockey career I became more aware of the hockey photographers around me. Among them was another Long Island native Joe DiMaggio who mentored me and I learned so much from him about photography and life in general. Then there was Mel DiGiacomo who was, and still is, a creative genius. He moved from hockey to tennis and then on to photojournalism and is the epitome of an “old master” shooting black-and-white images that tug at the heartstrings. And yes David Bier and Denis Brodeur were two guys who I admired as much for their willingness to share techniques and knowledge as I did for their immense talent.
How does hockey rate on the chart of hard-to-photograph sports? What’s the biggest challenge?
It would be easy for me to say it’s the hardest but I’m probably not one to judge since my experience with other sports is limited. But many other photographers have said that the combination of playing in low light venues, the speed of the game, its unpredictable nature and the poor photo positions certainly make this a real challenge.
Have advances in photographic equipment made your job easier over the years? Anything that’s been lost along the way, or is it altogether better to be shooting now than in the 1970s?
I really can’t think of anything about photography that was better when I started. The natural evolution of the equipment, along with the entrance into the digital age has changed the profession in countless ways. Improvements in equipment included moving from manual focus to autofocus and then the continual improvements in autofocus, sharper lenses, and faster motor drives have been great advances. As for the digital cameras, the use of digital cards with the ability to shoot thousands of images before reloading, seeing instantly what you’ve captured (or missed!), and being enable to shoot high-quality images in lower light situations have all improved the craft of sports photography.
Is there a shot you didn’t get that haunts you?
Countless images lost — in fact a game doesn’t go by that I regret something I missed. I do remember one specific one maybe ten years ago but don’t even remember the teams. It is always important to fill the frame and get in tight. On this image I was filling the frame as two guys stood in front of the net. A floating shot towards the net came in very high and both guys lifted off like basketball players going to the net. And there they were maybe three feet off the ice … and I cut their heads off! But like a goaltender you need to clear your head when you miss one or you won’t be prepared for the next shot. Have to just shake it off!!
Do you play?
Nope. I played through high school and college and a few times a year for many years after that until I was about 40. Then at one pickup game after I miraculously moved around some guy, he dove and slashed me on my high school style shinguards. I realized then that I wasn’t that interested in playing anymore. Have to get up in the morning and be physically able to shoot a hockey game each day!!
Hockey’s Greatest Photos: The Bruce Bennett Collection
The Hockey News, Photographs by Bruce Bennett
(Juniper/ Simon & Schuster, 256 pp., C$39.95/US$34.95)
Embed from Getty Images
If the name doesn’t speed a shutter in the memory, his images will. Hockey’s foremost active photographer, Bruce Bennett will shoot his 5000th game tonight when the New York Islanders host the Ottawa Senators at the Nassau Coliseum. Brooklyn-born, Long-Island-based, Bennett has been working rinkside since 1974. Over the past 39 years, he’s shot more than 45,000 photographs, including many of the sport’s iconic images. Since 2004, he’s served as Director of Photography, Hockey Imagery at Getty Images. He’s showcasing some of his own favourite shots there today, including this one, above, of a wounded Mark Messier circa 2002 and, below, Mike Bossy playing with fire for a 1980 Hockey News cover.
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