smokers

hab it your way

/ puckstruck / Leave a comment

Man + Machine: Claude Provost’s record as a smothering checker and all-round redoubtable right winger for the Montreal Canadiens is hard to match: in 15 seasons, he helped the mighty Habs carry off nine Stanley Cup championships across a career that lasted from 1955 through 1970. In 1968, he was the first winner, too, of the Bill Masterton Trophy for hockey perseverance. Here he is at 40 in 1973, out for a rip three years after his retirement from the NHL, still repping the bleu, blanc, et rouge. (Image: Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)

how many times do you get to celebrate your first cup victory?

/ puckstruck

The redoubtable Gump Worsley was part of four Stanley Cup-winning teams with Montreal in the 1960s. The first championship he was in on came at the start of May in 1965, when he shared the net with Charlie Hodge through a seven-game series against the Chicago Black Hawks. Worsley got the call for the game that decided it at the Forum on May 1 of ’65, and he didn’t disappoint — unless you’re thinking of Chicago fans and their beloved Black Hawks themselves, who were thwarted to the tune of 4-0. 

Born in Montreal on a Tuesday of this date in 1929, Worsley would commemorate his career in They Call Me Gump, the entertaining 1975 memoir he wrote with Tim Moriarty’s aid. “Nothing has ever matched the thrill,” they wrote therein of climbing the championship heights in ’65. “The first Cup victory is always the biggest moment in a hockey player’s life.”

Worsley recalled shaking hands with the Black Hawks after that final game at the Forum, and thinking how grateful he was that he’d persevered through tough times in the early days of his career to make it to this point.

“Then I thought about drinking. I’d been good for about eight weeks, laying off the hard stuff while I was on a diet. Now it was time to forget that damn diet.”

Somebody handed him a bottle of champagne as he arrived in the team’s dressing room, and Worsley shared that with Quebec Premier Daniel Johnson.

Then, next, came what we’re seeing pictured here: “I telephoned my kids and parents. They’d always prayed I would be on a Cup winner, and now that I’d made it they were having a party too.”

(Worsley doesn’t, in the book, mention getting Maurice Richard’s congratulations, or kicking back for his regular post-game smoke.)

“Well,” he does write, “the champagne really hit me hard. I must have been out of shape. Because when we got to the Queen Elizabeth Hotel for a victory party, I was sick as hell. So I switched to drinking poor man’s rye.”

“My hangover the next day was worth the price. How many times do you get a chance to celebrate your first Cup victory? Once.”  

(Images: Michel Gravel, La Presse, Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)

ranger royalty

/ puckstruck

Lester We Forget: In his playing days, he was a legendary point and rover  — and also an occasional goalkeep. A league-builder, a rink-raiser, a rule-maker, a master of the game and also ever a student, Lester Patrick was, in short, an all-around hockey powerhouse. Born on a Monday of this date in 188 3 in Drummondville, Quebec, he forged the New York Rangers into their NHL selves after succeeding Conn Smythe at the expansion team’s helm in 1926, guiding them to Stanley Cup championships in 1928, 1933, and 1940. That’s Ranger centre Neil Colville by his side here, in 1941. when Patrick was 58. Inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1947, Lester Patrick died at the age of 76 in 1960.

billy burch took his skates to bed

/ puckstruck

No Sudden Coughing: In 1928, Billy Burch did his best to recommend Lucky Strikes to hockey’s tobacco-craving players.

Billy Burch was the ideal captain for New York’s new hockey team in 1925, but you’ll understand why, for fans back in Hamilton, Ontario, the choice might have burned so bitterly.

Born on a Tuesday of this date in 1900, Billy Burch was a stand-out centreman in the NHL’s first decade, winner of the Hart Trophy as the league’s most valuable player in ’25, ahead of Howie Morenz and Clint Benedict. Two years later, he won Lady Byng’s cup for superior skill combined with gentlemanly instincts. He was elevated to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1974.

Burch was born in Yonkers, New York, just north of Manhattan on the Hudson. His hockey-playing future seems to have been secured a few years later, when his parents, Harry and Helen, moved the family (probably in 1906) to Toronto. Home for the Burches was in the city’s northwest, where it’s purported there was a rink in their winter yard. Accounts of this date to later years, when he was establishing himself as an NHL star, and so it’s possible that they and the anecdotes attached to them may be tinged with romance as much as they’re founded in fact.

I do like this one, though, from an unbylined 1925 profile:

For young Mr. Burch — or Billy as he was called and still is for that matter — was not satisfied with the training hours allotted to him on the backyard rink by his mother. He skated vigorously from the back steps to the back fence and back again and performed various juvenile antics in between but was not content to leave it at that.

When the time came to go into the house and go to bed, he obeyed without discussion. He only made one qualification. He took the skates with him. He did this so often that taking skates to bed became sort of a tradition.

He won a Memorial Cup as a junior in 1920, playing with the Toronto Canoe Club alongside future NHL stars Lionel Conacher and Roy Worters. He played in the Senior OHA for a couple of seasons after that with Aura Lee, where Conacher and Doc Stewart were teammates.

In 1923, Burch signed with the Hamilton Tigers. The team was in its third year in the NHL, all of which had been seasons of struggle: the Tigers had to that point only ever finished at the bottom of the standings.

Billy Babe Burch Ruth

They were the lowliest of the NHL’s four teams in 1923-24, too. But the year after that, led by Burch and the brothers Green (Red and Shorty) and goaltender Jake Forbes, Hamilton was the NHL’s best team when the regular season came to an end, which got them a bye to the league final and the chance to play for the Stanley Cup.

None of that happened, of course: after the Hamilton players went on strike demanding to be paid for the extra games they’d played that year, NHL President Frank Calder not only refused to pay, he fined the players, and declared the Montreal Canadiens league champions. That was the end of Hamilton’s run in the NHL: by fall, the team had its franchise rescinded, and all the players’ contracts had been sold to the expansion team from Manhattan, Bill Dwyer’s Americans.

So that’s how Burch ended up back in New York. He was appointed captain, and the team played up his local origins to help sell the new team in its new market. “A big, strapping, fine-looking young man,” the Yonkers Statesman proclaimed Burch in the fall of ’25, “who occupies the same position in professional hockey as Babe Ruth does in baseball.” He was reported to have signed a three-year contract in New York worth $25,000, making him (along with teammate Joe Simpson) one of the NHL’s highest-paid players.

Burch had a pretty good year that first one in New York, scoring 22 goals and 25 points to lead his team in scoring. He ceded the Hart Trophy to Nels Stewart of Montreal’s Maroons, but finished second to Frank Nighbor of Ottawa in the voting for the Lady Byng.

Billy Burch played seven seasons in all in New York. His NHL career finished up with shorts stints in Boston and Chicago before he shelved his skates in 1933. Burch was just 50 when he died in 1950.

 

alcoholic drinks? the best they can do is ruin your health

/ puckstruck

Tabletop: Red Wings defenceman Black Jack Stewart catches up on the day’s news in the Detroit dressing room during a rubdown from team trainer Honey Walker, circa 1946.

When Black Jack Stewart played his defence on the left side for the Detroit Red Wings, a lot of the time Bill Quackenbush was on the right. I’ll let Stewart tell you where he got his nickname:

I bodychecked some fellow one night and when he woke up the next day in the hospital he asked who’d hit him with a blackjack.

He couldn’t remember the player’s name. In other tellings of the tale, it was his own dark visage and disposition that got him the moniker. He was a devastating hitter, says the Hall of hockey’s fame, to which he was inducted in 1964. His online bio there also includes the words: complete package, rock-solid, poise, work ethic, excellent stamina, brute force, and subtle clutching and grabbing. He played a dozen NHL seasons in all, the first ten for Detroit, then the final two for the Chicago Black Hawks, where he was the captain. He won two Stanley Cups with the Red Wings; three times he was a First Team All-Star.

Best-Dressed: Stewart featured in a three-page fashion spread in the February, 1948 edition of Sport magazine. “In picking out the leisure wardrobe he is wearing on these pages,” readers were advised, “Jack looked for about the same things most men want in their Winter garments. He kept his eyes open warmth, comfort, and up-to-date styling.”

He never argued with referees. “I figured,” he said, “for every penalty I got I used to get away with around 19.” He carried one of the heaviest sticks at the time he played, in the 1930s and into the ’40s and ’50s. People remembered his bodychecks in Detroit for years after he was gone: when Howie Young played there a decade later, they said he hits almost as hard as Black Jack Stewart. Stewart’s philosophy? He said this:

A defenceman should bodycheck if possible, picking the proper spots and making sure that he gets at least a piece of the opposing player. But it isn’t wise to go in there with the sole idea of bodychecking everything on skates.

Some dates: born in 1917, died 1983, on a Wednesday of this date, when he was 66. The love he had of horses was nurtured in Pilot Mound, Manitoba, where he grew up on the family wheat farm. He went back home to work on the farm in the off-season when he was in the NHL. Later, after he’d hung up his skates, when he was making a living as a salesman for a Detroit lithograph firm, he was a judge for the Canadian Trotting Association.

He’d always remember the day a teenager showed up in Detroit in the later ’40s, fuzzy-cheeked, name of Gordie Howe, with no great fanfare. “We knew he had it all,” Black Jack said, looking back:

He showed spurts of being a really good one. But I think he held back a little that first year. He didn’t seem relaxed enough. But of course he overcame that after he’d had a couple of fights.

There weren’t too many ever got by Black Jack, someone who knew from trying said. I guess he had a little bit of feud with Milt Schmidt of the Boston Bruins: so he said himself. Something else Stewart said was that every team had two players who were tough, for example for Chicago it was Earl Seibert and Johnny Mariucci.

Here’s a story, from ’48, about another Red Wing rookie, the great Red Kelly, who was in his first year in the NHL, a 20-year-old fledgling. That January, driving in downtown Detroit, Kelly made an illegal left turn and hit a car belonging to one John A. Watson. Summoned to traffic court, Kelly appeared before Judge John D. Watts with his teammate Stewart standing by him to argue his defence.

Kelly’s license, it turned out, was Canadian, as was his insurance. Convicted for the improper turn, Judge Watts gave him a suspended sentence and told him to pay $52 in damages to Watson.

“You had better get another attorney before you go to jail,” the magistrate was reported to have told Kelly regarding Stewart’s courtroom efforts. “This man sounds more like a prosecutor.”

Watts did ask Stewart to make sure that his teammate paid the damages and secured a Michigan license. “I’ll see that he does both,” Stewart is said to have promised, “if I have to break his neck.”

The proceedings came to jocular end. “I fine you two goals,” Judge Watts told Kelly, (laughingly, according the Detroit Free Press), “and you’d better deliver them tonight or I’ll have you back in court tomorrow.”

Stepping Out: Stewart’s wool overcoat (with zip-out lining) would have set you back $55 in 1948. His imported capeskin gloves? A mere $7.

Detroit did dispense with the New York Rangers at the Olympia that night, by a score of 6-0, but Kelly wasn’t on the scoresheet. The team, the Free Press noted, “left for Canada shortly after the game.”

Alertness on face-offs was, to Stewart, a cardinal rule. That’s what he said in 1949, when he and his fellow All-Stars were asked to share their hockey insights.

When it came to off-ice conditioning, Stewart said he tried to go walking as much as he could. “I eat foods,” he added, “that my system has been used to and at regular hours. I go easy on pickles and pastries. A steak dinner is the thing not less than three hours before playing a game. I aim at eight hours’ sleep nightly. As for alcoholic drinks, leave them strictly alone — the best they can do for you is ruin your health.”

Smoking? “A boy who is really serious about coming a topnotch player will be wise to shun smoking until he has attained his 21st birthday,” Black Jack Stewart said.

hockey smokers: herbie lewis

/ puckstruck

Lighting Up: Born in Calgary on a Monday of this date in 1905, Herbie Lewis started playing left wing in Detroit in 1928, turning out over the next decade for all three of the city’s NHL incarnations, Cougars, Falcons, and — from 1932 — Red Wings. He captained the team during the 1933-34 season, and assisted in the effort, in ’36 and ’37, that won them back-to-back Stanley Cups. Lewis was inducted in the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1989. And? I guess he liked to smoke Camels, all the live-long day — during meals, even! — commending them here, in ’37, for easing his digestion and upping his all-around well-being.

hockey coaches in hospital beds: down goes dutton

/ puckstruck

American Lit: Red Dutton gets a light for his cigarette from an unnamed nurse during his stay at Gotham Hospital in February of 1938.

Another month, another loss.

That was the story in the winter of 1938 for the New York Americans, who ended January with a 4-2 home defeat at the sticks of the Montreal Canadiens. Four days later, the Amerks started their February schedule with a 6-1 drubbing at Madison Square Garden by the Detroit Red Wings. That was their fourth loss in a row, and extended their winless streak to nine games. With a little over a month to go in the regular season, the Americans were in a fight for their playoff lives, just two points ahead of the Montreal Maroons and the basement of the NHL’s International Division.

Forty-year-old Red Dutton was in his third season as the New York coach and manager. His interest in the team, shall we say, ran deeper still: having captained the Americans as one of the NHL’s most effective and bruising defencemen until his retirement as a player in 1936, he was also a co-owner of the team.

The Americans’ slump had Dutton in a rage. He bent Harold Parrott’s ear after the Red Wings’ shellacking and Parrot, the hockey writer for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, was only too happy to share the coach’s none-too-complimentary musings with his readership.

Were the Americans altogether too clean-living to prosper in the rough and the tumble of NHL hockey? Dutton wondered, citing the example of his goaltender, Earl Robertson. “He never looks at a drink or a girl,” Dutton was quoted as saying, “goes to bed early and trains on a running track just to be in shape for hockey — and yet there must be spots in front of his eyes.”

Turning to defenceman Joe Jerwa, Dutton speculated that maybe he had too much money in the bank to care about buckling down and playing effective hockey. “But that can’t be the trouble,” Dutton went on, “because most of the other men haven’t the price of a ham sandwich and they still seem to play as if they didn’t care.”

Dutton advised Parrott that the team’s biggest lack was a defenceman who could rush the puck. He was apparently willing to name those he thought weren’t getting the job done, deeming fifth-year defender Al Murray “the worst of the lot,” according to Parrott.

I’m not the one who’s going to draw the line between that very public scorn and what happened next. It’s not for me to say that Dutton ending up in hospital a week later had anything to do with payback. I’m just reading old newspapers here and patching together what I’m seeing there.

That’s this:

The Americans played their next two games against the Montreals, tying the Canadiens 3-3 in Quebec, then coming home to beat the Maroons 3-1.

That was on the Tuesday, February 8. The Americans didn’t play again until the following Sunday, away to the Red Wings. With the annual Westminster Kennel Club moving in to occupy Madison Square Garden for the week, Dutton decided to take his team to Detroit early. Doc Holst of the local Free Press reported the exchange Dutton had with Jack Adams, his Red Wings counterpart, when the Americans showed up Friday at the Olympia to practice.

“Whatsa matter, Mervin [sic], no ice in the Gardens?” Jack Adams asked.

“Nope, no ice,” Red answered. “They drove us out to put on a dog show.” There was a bit of hurt pride in the redhead’s voice.

It was during that February 11 practice that Dutton suffered the injury that put him in the hospital and into the picture above. The coach was out on the ice, skating with his team when — well, here’s how the Associated Press accounted it:

He tried to carry the puck past his best body-checker, 155-pound Al Murray. Murray smacked his boss with a sound body-check, and Red went flat on his back.

He suffered through the weekend, much of which he seems to have spent abed at his hotel convinced that it was just a bad case of lumbago. He still managed to arrange a trade from that prone position, gaining winger Johnny Sorrell from the Red Wings in exchange for Hap Emms. The Sunday game finished as a 2-2 tie, whereupon the Amerks headed for home.

It was more than lumbago.

At some point back in New York, Dutton ended up in Gotham Hospital up on East 76th Street, under the care of Dr. Morton K. Hertz. A Thursday dispatch in The Daily News reported him to be “encased in a 10-pound plaster cast” as a result of his collision with Al Murray. The diagnosis was dire:

Dutton had torn the lower back (latissimus dorsi) muscles loose from the hip. They must heal before he can stand erect. Hemorrhages that produced a kidney stoppage further complicated his condition, causing intense pain.

The AP listed him as resting uncomfortably, if “very much ashamed of himself,” insofar as he’d never been seriously injured during his 15 professional seasons as a player. The last time he’d been in hospital, the Winnipeg Tribune cheerfully noted, was during the First World War, when he suffered “a bad dose of shrapnel.” That was a reference to his service with Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, with whom he’d been badly wounded near Vimy in 1917. During his recovery, he’d been in danger of losing a leg to gangrene.

In 1938, with Dutton sidelined, veteran defenceman Ching Johnson stepped out of the Americans’ line-up to take his place on the bench for a Tuesday meeting with the Canadiens. The As won that game, 4-0.

In fact, Johnson continued to steer the team through a further four games.

That in and of itself is worth a notation: nowhere in the annals of NHL coaching records can I find Johnson getting credit for this brief coaching career of his, including in the NHL’s online register, here. Attention, NHL coaching historians and stats-keepers: Johnson’s name should be added (and Dutton’s adjusted) to reflect the respectable 3-1-1 record that then Americans compiled under their emergency-measures boss.

Red Dutton returned to duty for the Americans’ February 27 home game against the Montreal Maroons. Though they lost that night, 4-2, Dutton’s crew did make it into the playoffs later in March, going two rounds before they fell to upstart Chicago Black Hawks in the semi-finals.

Clarence Campbell was the referee for the second game of that series, controversially calling back a goal by the Americans’ Eddie Wiseman that would have won the game for New York and sent them to the Stanley Cup finals. As it was, Chicago prevailed in overtime and in the next game, too, ousting the Americans. Dutton’s protests didn’t help that, of course, but they did include a vow that his team would have no part of any subsequent playoff game officiated by Campbell.

Campbell’s post-reffing career was in the Canadian Army during the Second World War. His return to hockey came in 1946, when he took over as president of the NHL, succeeding the man who’d taken the job after Frank Calder’s death in 1943 — Red Dutton.

The end of the 1938 season saw Ching Johnson call it quits as an NHL player, subsequently taking his talents west to serve as playing coach for the American Hockey Association’s Minneapolis Millers. Before leaving New York, he was rewarded as all the Americans were that season: as reward for their ’37-38 playoff successes coach Dutton handed each man a bonus of $250.

 

 

stay out of the city

/ puckstruck

bcook pkstrk

 

“I am sure the reason
I have lasted this long,”

he said,

“is because
I spend my summers
out on my ranch near
Saskatoon.”

“Stay in the city and you
unconsciously fall
into habits that are
not beneficial —
such as
staying up late and
oversmoking.”

• Bill Cook was 39 at the end of the NHL’s 1934-35 campaign, his ninth as captain and mainstay of the New York Rangers. As the season wound down, Cook talked to George Maguire from the Canadian Press, telling him that he wouldn’t be retiring any time soon — not while he still had goals to score. Hereabove (excerpted, edited, and poemized), his best off-season advice for players looking to lengthen their icy careers.

 

 

hockey smokers: captain bill durnan

/ puckstruck

smoker

There’s lots you could say about Bill Durnan. Maurice Richard volunteered that he was one of the nicest guys in the whole world — “He had a smile for everybody and never said a word against anyone” — not to mention that he was said to be the best softball pitcher in Canada during the time he was minding the nets for Montreal in the latter 1940s. He did that exceptionally well, of course, winning Vézina trophies in each of his first four campaigns, as well as two more subsequently: an amazing six in the seven NHL seasons he endured. He won two Stanley Cups with the Canadiens, in 1944 and 1946. In 1964 he ascended to the Hall of Hockey Fame.

And yet: they used to boo him at the Forum, hound him with jeers. After some games (Richard was one to recall), he’d return to the dressing room crying. “We want Bibeault,” the fans would holler the year of that second Cup, calling for Paul, the Montreal back-up. Another year, Dink Carroll reported, “the fans would deride him … with mock applause when he made a stop.”

All of which is to say, it’s no wonder the man had nerves. Not so shocking either that he sought to calm them with a post-game smoke. From our modern-day perspective, it is surprising, just a little, to find one of the man’s post-game cigarettes preserved in photographs: that’s something you do sometimes see in hockey scrapbooks and archives, but not so much.

La Presse ran the one above in the spring of 1947. It’s not a great reproduction, but if Durnan’s face is obscured, that’s largely due to the cloud of smoke he’s just exhaled. You can just see the cigarette in his right hand. It’s more obvious in the photo below, from the same night, wherein Durnan poses alongside teammates (from the left) Butch Bouchard, Roger Léger, Richard, Billy Reay, and Buddy O’Connor. The caption for the former reads:

The first thing he did upon entering the locker room was to take a cigarette and light it. He removed his pads only after his relaxation was complete.

durnan cigarette

It was the first game of the 1947 Stanley Cup final and not a particularly stressful one for Durnan, by all accounts. He’d shut out the Toronto Maple Leafs at the Forum by a score of 6-0. Tame, Montreal’s Gazette called it. “The boys got that for me,” the goaltender said — or in the paper’s telling grinned. “I had a good seat.”

Something else he’s supposed to have said (according to Dick Irvin, Jr. in his 1991 oral history, Habs), “How did the Leafs get this far?” They were eager to demonstrate, of course, and won the next game 4-0 and three more after that, too, to take the Stanley Cup. “I think it’s by far the toughest series I’ve ever played in,” Toronto’s Howie Meeker recalled, citing Turk Broda’s goalkeeping as the key for the Leafs. “I think when it’s all over and you have won the Stanley Cup, your goaltender has to be the best guy on your team. That year Broda was. I thought he was head and shoulders above Durnan, and Durnan was good. We were outplayed and outchanced in scoring chances, I would think, by about three to two. Turk Broda was the guy who won that series.”

Also worth a note is the C adorning Durnan’s sweater. The accepted wisdom is that he didn’t become a Canadiens captain until the 1947-48 season, specifically assuming the role in January of 1948 when the incumbent, Toe Blake, suffered the ankle injury that would prove the end of his playing career. That’s the timing suggested, as well, by modern references, from the Habs’ own historical website at Our History and the Hockey Hall of Fame’s to Wikipedia and Hockeyreference.com. From the photographs here, it’s clear that he was co-captaining the team a season earlier, too.

hockey players in hospital beds: derek sanderson

/ puckstruck

sanderson

Severely Sprained: Derek Sanderson jumped from the NHL’s Boston Bruins to a $2.6-million contract with the Philadelphia Blazers of the upstart WHA in the summer of 1972. The team lost seven games in a row to start the season but Sanderson, 26, was scoring — when he wasn’t sitting out penalties. In eight games he had three goals, three assists, 69 minutes of sanction. His final game, in Cleveland, in November, he came out of the penalty box, went for the puck and — let’s let him tell it himself, as he does in the 2012 memoir, Crossing The Line, written with Kevin Shea:

My left foot landed on a piece of garbage that somebody had thrown at me. I slipped and I could feel the pain go up my spine and right down my leg. Boom! I dropped like a stone. The left leg went out from under me and I kind of did the splits. My back took it all because I didn’t have my weight balanced. I couldn’t get up. I couldn’t move.

He doesn’t remember getting back to Philadelphia, but that’s where he ended up, at the Hahneman Hospital with a severe muscle sprain in the low back. The pain was “unbelievably bad.” Dr. Arnold Berman wanted to operate. Sanderson had only one condition: the doctor had to sign an agreement guaranteeing that if, post-surgery, Sanderson couldn’t play hockey again, Dr. Berman would personally pay Sanderson’s salary for life.

Second opinion: a week’s bedrest should do the trick.

A few days later, lying abed in his suite at the Latham Hotel, Sanderson (above) held a press conference. “In retrospect,” he says in his book, “I should have held my tongue, but my style was to say what was on my mind.” No athlete liked playing in Philadelphia, he told reporters, because the fans were all sourpusses — though only because the press was so very negative. As for marriage, he said he was looking for a girl who was “independent, strong, confident, intelligent, witty, beautiful, understanding and sensitive.”

He was ready to play again in December, but by then Philadelphia had decided that they couldn’t afford his contract. Early in the new year, Sanderson was back in Boston, a Bruin again.

smoke ’em if you got ’em, having just shut out detroit, while recovering from the chicken pox. plus, two stitches

/ puckstruck

abel + rollins

The Light Years: Chicago was in last place in December of 1953, thanks in part to first-place Red Wings trouncing them 9-0 and 9-4 to start the month. Still, a week later, the Black Hawks went into Detroit and beat them 3-0. Which pleased coach Sid Abel (left), understandably. With 40 saves, goalie Al Rollins earned the shutout and the smoke. A Detroit stick had cut him for two stitches by the left eye during the game. As game reports noted, he was also recovering from chicken pox.

The Toronto Star’s ever nimble Cathal Kelly wonders today (here, paywalled) about the nagging of athletes who might or might not smoke a cigarette every now and then. “While professional athletes and the stakes they play for are growing,” he writes, “players are perversely expected to avoid doing anything which puts themselves or others at risk of harm. That was once the whole point of most sports. Watching grown men trying to kill each other.

Now it’s the counterpoint — the constant reaction to violence in football, drugs in baseball, fighting in hockey and smoking everywhere.”