Dispatches from the Sporting Life (28 page)

Morenz was our Babe Ruth. Alas, I never saw him play; neither was I present in what must be accounted the most tragic night in hockey, January 28, 1937, when Morenz, in a rush against the Chicago Black Hawks, crashed into the boards and suffered a quadruple leg fracture. He was still in the hospital early in March, complications set in, and the Stratford Streak was no more. His fans, French-Canadian factory workers and railroaders, had once filled the Forum’s cheap seats to the overflow, and to this day that part of the Forum is known as the “millionaires’ section.” “His body,” wrote Andy O’Brien, “was laid out at centre ice and the greats of hockey took turns as guards of honour around the bier day and night. Then a sportswriter with the old
Standard,
I arrived at the Forum to find the front doors jammed. I entered by the furnace room and, as I walked toward the Closse Street entry, the stillness made me wonder—was nobody else in the building? But there were fifteen thousand fans, quiet and motionless in a tribute to a man—and hockey—that has never been matched.”

Morenz played on three Canadiens Stanley Cup winning teams, but with his passing a drought set in. The Flying Frenchmen, or the Habitants, as they came to be known, a team that has won the Stanley
Cup twenty-two times, more often than any other club, did not claim it again until 1943–44, with the lineup that became a golden part of my childhood: Toe Blake, Elmer Lach, Ray Getliffe, Murph Chamberlain, Phil Watson, Emile “Butch” Bouchard, Glen Harmon, Buddy O’Connor, Gerry Heffernan, Mike McMahon, Leo Lamoureux, Fernand Majeau, Bob Fillion, Bill Durnan, and, above all, Maurice

“Rocket” Richard.

To come clean, this was not the greatest of Canadiens teams—that came later—but it remains the one to which I owe the most allegiance.

In 1943–44, cousins and older brothers were overseas, battling through Normandy or Italy, and each day’s
Star
brought a casualty list. Others, blessed with a nice little heart murmur, stayed home, making more money than they had ever dreamed of, moving into Outremont. But most of us still lingered on St. Urbain Street, and we seldom got to see a hockey game. Our parents were not disposed to treat us, for the very understandable reason that it wouldn’t help us to become doctors. Besides, looked at closely, come playoff time it was always our pea-soups, which is what we used to call French Canadians in those days, against their—that is to say, Toronto’s—English-speaking roughnecks. What did it have to do with us? Plenty, plenty. For, much to our parents’ dismay, we talked hockey incessantly and played whenever we could. Not on skates, which we also couldn’t afford, but out on the streets with proper sticks and a puck or, failing that, a piece of coal. Saturday nights we huddled around the radio, playing blackjack for dimes and nickels, our eyes on
the cards, our ears on the score. And the man who scored most often was Maurice Richard, once, memorably, with an opposing defenceman riding his back, and another time, in a playoff game against Toronto, putting the puck in the net five times.

I only got to see the great Richard twice. Saving money earned collecting bills for a neighbourhood butcher on Sunday mornings, my friends and I bought standing-room tickets for the millionaires’ section. And then, flinging our winter caps ahead of us, we vaulted barriers, eventually working our way down to ice level. Each time we jumped a barrier, hearts thumping, we tossed our caps ahead of us, because if an officious usher grabbed us by the scruff of the neck, as often happened, we could plead, teary-eyed, that some oaf had tossed our cap down and we were only descending to retrieve it.

Among the younger players on ice with the Rocket during the last years was the consummate artist who would succeed him as the leader of
les Canadiens:
Jean Beliveau.

I was, by this time, rooted in London, and used to make a daily noontime excursion to a Hampstead newspaper shop especially to pick up the
International Herald Tribune,
seeking news of big Jean and his illustrious teammates. Such was their prowess on the power play that they were responsible for a major change in the NHL rulebook. The Canadiens, with the man advantage, could score as many as three goals in their allotted two penalty
minutes. Consequently, a new rule was introduced. It allowed the penalized team to return to full strength once a goal had been scored.

I didn’t get to see Beliveau play until 1956 and was immediately enthralled. He was not only an elegant, seemingly effortless skater but an uncommonly intelligent playmaker, one of the last to actually carry the disc over the blue line rather than unload before crossing, dumping it mindlessly into a corner for the others to scramble after, leading with their elbows. “I not only worry about him when he’s carrying the puck,” said Punch Imlach, then coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs, “but about where the fuck he’s going once he’s given it up.” Where he was going was usually the slot, and trying to budge him, as Toronto’s Bill Ezinicki once observed, “was like running into the side of an oak tree.”

Ah, Beliveau. Soon, whenever I was to fly home from England, I would first contact that most literate of Montreal sportswriters, my friend Dink Carroll, so that my visit might coincide with a Canadiens game, affording me another opportunity to watch big Jean wheel on ice. I was not alone. Far from it. In those halcyon days knowledgeable Montrealers would flock to the Forum to see Beliveau on a Saturday night as others might anticipate the visit of a superb ballet company. Big, handsome Jean was a commanding presence, and as long as he was on the ice, the game couldn’t degenerate into Ping-Pong: it was hockey as it was meant to be played.

Beliveau was truly great, and a bargain, even if you take into account that
le Club de Hockey Canadiens
had to buy an entire team to acquire him.
In 1951, Beliveau, already a hockey legend, was playing for the “amateur” Quebec Aces, his salary a then stupendous $20,000 a year. The cunning Canadiens bought the Aces, thereby acquiring the negotiating rights to Beliveau. He received a $20,000 bonus and signed a five-year, $105,000 contract, which was unheard of in those days for a twenty-three-year-old rookie. Beliveau went on to score 507 goals for
les Canadiens.
He made the all-star team nine times, won the Hart Trophy for the most valuable player twice, and led his team to ten Stanley Cups in his eighteen years with the club as a player.

If Beliveau was the leader of the best Canadiens team ever, it’s also necessary to say that decadence, as well as grievous loss, characterized those memorable years. Decadence came in the unlikely shape of one of the team’s most engaging and effective forwards, Bernie “Boom Boom” Geoffrion, who introduced the slap shot, wherein a player winds up like a golfer to blast the puck in the general direction of the net, sometimes scoring, more often watching the puck ricochet meaninglessly off the glass. Loss, irredeemable loss, came with a change in the draft rules of 1969. Until then,
les Canadiens
had call on Quebec’s first two draft choices, but come ‘69 and expansion, that was no more. In practical terms this meant that Marcel Dionne and Gil Perreault, among others, were lost to Montreal. Sadly, if either of them had a childhood dream it was certainly to play with
le Club de Hockey Canadiens,
but when they skate out on the Forum ice these days, it is as dreaded opponents.

A tradition was compromised in the dubious name of parity for expansion teams. For years, years
and years,
les Canadiens
were a team unlike any other in sports. Not only because they were the class of the league—for many years, so were the New York Yankees—but also because they were not made up of hired outsiders but largely of Québécois, boys who had grown up in Montreal or the outlying towns of the province. We could lend them our loyalty without qualification, because they had not merely been hired to represent us on ice—it was their birthright. As boys, Beliveau and I had endured the same blizzards. Like me, Doug Harvey had played softball in an NDG park. Downtown had always meant the same thing to Henri Richard as it had to me. So the change in the draft rules meant that
les Canadiens
were bound to lose a quality that was unique in sport. Happily, however, the time was not yet. Not quite yet.

For one player promising true greatness did slip through the revised draft net. After Morenz, following Richard and Beliveau—Guy Lafleur. Lafleur, born in Thurso, Quebec, in 1951, was, like Beliveau before him, a hockey legend even before he came to
les Canadiens.
In 1970–71, still playing with the Quebec Remparts, a junior team, he scored a record-making 130 goals and graduated to
les Canadiens
under tremendous pressure. Universally acclaimed Beliveau’s heir, he was even offered Beliveau’s number 4 sweater. “He asked me what he should do,” said Beliveau. “I told him if you want number 4, take it. But, in your shoes, I would take another number and make
it
famous.”

Lafleur chose number 10, and for his first three years in the league, helmeted years, he was a disappointment. His manner on ice was tentative, uneasy.
Seated on the bench between shifts, he seemed a solitary, almost melancholy figure. Even now, having acquired some of Beliveau’s natural grace by osmosis, perhaps, he is far from being a holler man, but then in the winter of 1974 he suddenly bloomed. Not only did Guy score fifty-three goals, but, eschewing his helmet, he was undoubtedly the most dazzling player on ice anywhere that year, leading old-style end-to-end rushes, splitting the defence, carrying the puck as if it were fastened to his stick with elastic, unleashing swift and astonishingly accurate wrist shots, deking one goalie after another and coming back with the play, going into the corners. Once again the Montreal Forum was a place to be, the Saturday-night hockey game an occasion.

Even so,
les Canadiens
failed to win the Stanley Cup in 1975, ignominiously eliminated by Buffalo, an expansion team, in the semifinals. Little Henri Richard, then thirty-nine years old, silvery-haired, the last player who had skated with the vintage Canadiens, kept his stick after the final defeat, a clue that he would be retiring. The end of one era and, it was to be hoped, the beginning of another. Though the
Gazette’s
Tim Burke was far from convinced. After
les Canadiens
went out, seemingly with more golf than hockey on their minds, he sourly observed that the league, and
les Canadiens
in particular, was not what it used to be.

“Most fans apparently feel the same way. They no longer concern themselves about the Canadiens the way they once did.”

Before brooding at length on reasons and rationalizations for the fall, I should emphasize once more that the Canadiens are a team unlike any other. From Howie Morenz through Richard and Beliveau to Lafleur, they have been a family. This team was not built on haphazard trades, though there have been some, or on the opening of the vaults for upwardly mobile free agents, but largely on the development of local boys who had dreamed of nothing more than wearing that red sweater ever since they first began to play peewee hockey at the age of eight. They are the progeny of dairy farmers and miners and railway shop workers and welders. There is a tradition, there is continuity. Eighty-seven-year-old Frank Selke, who built the original dynasty, still sits brooding in the stands at every game. If the late Dick Irvin, a westerner, was the coach who fine-tuned the team for Mr. Selke, it is now his son, also called Dick, who still travels with the team, working on the television and radio broadcasts. Gilles Tremblay, a star with the team until asthma laid him low in 1969, handles the French-language telecasts. Scotty Bowman was a player in the organization until he fractured his skull, as was Claude Ruel until he lost an eye. Beliveau is still with the team, a vice-president in charge of public relations, a job Guy Lafleur would like to fill one day. Another former player, Floyd “Busher” Curry, acts as road secretary. Former GM Sammy Pollock comes from one end of Montreal, and his successor, the embattled Irving Grundman, from another. Traditionally, following the Stanley Cup parade, the team repairs to Henri Richard’s brasserie. “Every year,” Richard told me, “I think they will forget—they won’t come this time. But win or lose, the boys are here.”

However, the man who most personifies continuity
on the team today is Toe Blake. Originally a winger on the high-scoring Punch Line—with Elmer Lach and Maurice Richard—in the forties, then the team’s most successful coach, at the age of sixty-eight he was still padding up and down hotel lobbies on the road, remembering never to throw his fedora on the bed, which could only bring bad luck; a once-fierce but now mellowing Toe, available to all the players, a consulting vice-president with the team. “But vice-president of what,” he says, “they never told me.”

Try to understand that in this diminishing city we have survived for years confident that any May the magnificent Canadiens did not bring home the Stanley Cup was an aberration. An affront to the fans. Or just possibly an act of charity.
Pour encourager les autres.

Yes, yes. But in 1980, in the very Forum where the rafters were festooned end to end with Stanley Cup pennants, our champions, who came back—even after Tim Burke pronounced them dead in 1975—to win the Stanley Cup for four years running, had been humbled by the sadly inept Colorado Rockies and the St. Louis Blues. On the road, they had come up shockingly short against the kind of pickup teams they were expected to toy with: the Edmonton Oilers, the Winnipeg Jets, and the Quebec Nordiques.

Bob Gainey maintained that the rot, such as it was, had set in in 1979. “Looking back, people remember we won the Stanley Cup again, so they
think we whistled through another year. But we didn’t whistle. We dropped fourteen points on the previous season and twenty goals against. We snuck out with the Cup. We were lucky enough to have the momentum of the previous year to carry us, and that, with the talent and experience, got us by. We ran the tank empty last year and now it’s showing up.”

Actually, fissures in the dynasty began to appear as early as the summer of 1978, when Molson’s Brewery bought the Canadiens from Peter and Edward Bronfman for $20 million. A month later, Sam Pollock, the unequalled dealer and hoarder of draft choices—with the organization for thirty-one years, the last thirteen as GM—took his leave with the Bronfman brothers. Pollock, who built the present dynasty, anointed Irving Grundman as his heir. Grundman had come to hockey and the Forum with the Bronfmans in 1972; he was now appointed executive vice-president and managing director of the Canadiens, that is to say, GM. Coach Scotty Bowman, who believed he was going to get the job, exploded. “The Second World War could have broken out in the Forum and I wouldn’t have known a thing about it.” An embittered Bowman, who had agreed to a two-year contract with the club a couple of months earlier, let it be known that he had been conned. He never would have signed, he said, had he realized that Pollock was leaving. “I’ve got my own future to think about,” he said. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life behind the bench.”