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Passing of a Legend

Memories of a hockey icon

Maurice Richard stood in this hockey cathedral, tears streaming down his face as the noise grew and grew…minute after minute for 10…11 minutes …until there was no longer just noise in the Forum, but thunder engulfing it. Now and then, he would raise an arm… often both arms… pleading to the people…his people:

"Enough," he seemed to be saying to them on this March 11, 1996, night, the night the building's lights would go dark forever. "Enough. I was only a hockey player."

Richard, who died Saturday in his 79^th year after a battle of more than two years with cancer, was much more than a hockey player. He was the first National Hockey League player to score 50 goals in a 50-game season among his 544 in 1978 regular-season games. He was the most intense athlete this game, this city, this province, this country ever has seen. He was everything that personified greatness. It was in this place — the Montreal Forum — he was to become an icon, a legend. He was, in every way, one of a kind.

As related by Chrys Goyens and Allan Turowetz in their book Lions In Winter, "Born August 4, 1921, Maurice was the eldest son of Onesime and Alice Richard, who were part of the post War exodus to the cities by young francophones all over Quebec. Onesime and Alice left their native Gaspé and settled in Montreal, where he went to work as a carpenter for Canadian Pacific Limited. After a short time spent in the Plateau Mont-Royal area, they moved to the isolated Nouveau-Bordeaux district, north of the city and across the Rivieres des Prairies from Laval. It was on that river, and in the schoolyards of the Bois-de-Boulogne and Laval that Maurice Richard developed his formidable talents."

His best years already were behind him when I started covering the Canadiens at the start of the 1955-56 season. By then, after 13 NHL seasons, he had lost a step. He carried weight he found increasingly difficult to lose. But now and then in his last five seasons, he was once again The Rocket. On those nights, there was no finer sight anywhere this game was played.

Richard's eye-snapping career numbers don't begin to describe what he meant to hockey in general and the Canadiens in particular. Winning at any cost was what he was all about. He was prepared to pay the price for every goal he scored, and no price was too high. He scored important goals, lifting spectators out of their seats everywhere in the six-team NHL, because he was as much The Rocket on the road as he was in Montreal. At any moment, anywhere, he could erupt with another big goal.

There was the night of March 23, 1944, when the Canadiens played host to the Toronto Maple Leafs in the second game of their best-of-seven Stanley Cup semi-final. The Richard who was to explode into full flower the following season when he became the first player in NHL history to score 50 goals in 50 games, had shown what he was all about that year. He had scored 23 of his 32 regular-season goals in his last 22 games. (A dislocated shoulder sidelined Richard for four games of the Canadiens' stunning 38-5-7 season, including a 22-0-3 home record.)

He would be getting special attention from the Toronto Maple Leafs on this March night, particularly since the Leafs had upset the Canadiens 3-1 in Game I two nights earlier. The Leafs' best defensive forward, Bob Davidson, drew the assignment. His instructions: go everywhere Richard goes. Don't let him out of your sight.

Richard couldn't shake loose from Davidson's clutch-and-grab tactics in the first period. Everywhere The Rocket went, Davidson followed, but Richard left the Leafs reeling with three goals in the second period. He added two in the third in what was to become the greatest individual performance in NHL playoff history. Maurice Richard 5, Toronto 1.

Until that night, no other NHL player had scored five goals in a playoff game. The Canadiens eliminated the Leafs with victories in the next three games and then swept the Chicago Blackhawks in four. He was to score 12 goals in nine playoff games that season. The Canadiens won their first Stanley Cup in 13 seasons, and the marvelous legend of Maurice Richard was born.

"He was a war-time hockey player," one-time Canadiens general manager Frank Selke once told a reporter. "When the boys come back, they said, they'll look after Maurice. Nobody looked after Maurice. He looked after himself. When the boys come back, they said, they'll catch up with him. The only thing that caught up with Maurice is time.

"When he's worked up," said Selke, "his eyes gleam like headlights. Not a glow, but a piercing intensity. Goalies have said he's like a motorcar coming on you at night. He is terrifying. He is the greatest hockey player that ever lived. I can contradict myself by saying that 10 or 15 do the mechanics of play better. But it's results that count. Others play well, build up, eventually get a goal. He is like a flash of lightning. It's a fine summer day, suddenly…"

"I first saw him in 1942," Ken Reardon, a former teammate who went on to become a Canadiens vice-president, told an interviewer. "I was playing for an Army team. I see this guy skating at me with wild, bloody hair the way he had it then, eyes just outside the nut house. 'I'll take this guy,' I said to myself. He went around me like a hoop around a barrel.

"'Who's that?' I asked after the game.

"'That's Maurice Richard,' the guy said. 'He's a pretty good hockey player.'

"'Yes,' I said, 'he is.'"

The Richard legend wasn't supposed to develop as quickly as it did. The fact is, some hockey people felt it would never happen. His bones were as brittle as peppermint sticks, some people said. Injury-prone, they muttered. The problems started when he was invited to the Canadiens Seniors' training camp in 1940. He made the team, scored two goals in the first 20 games, suffered a broken wrist in his 21^st, missed the rest of the regular season, but returned to score six goals in four playoff games.

The next season, 1942-43, was his first with the NHL Canadiens: this time he fractured his right ankle. Three major injuries in three years. Maybe, just maybe, his critics were right. Maybe, he was indeed too brittle to play in the NHL.

The Stanley Cup year erased those fears, followed by his stunning 50-in-50 season, a feat hockey fans and officials had thought impossible, a season that was remarkable in many ways. He failed to score in only 16 games. At no time did he go more than two games without scoring.

His best streak was during a nine-game stretch between Jan. 20 and Feb. 10 when he scored 14 goals. His worst came in the last 13 games of the season when he scored only seven. He didn't stop with his 50-goal regular season, adding six while the Canadiens were being upset in six games by the Maple Leafs in the Stanley Cup semi-final. Fifty-six goals in 56 games! His place in Canadiens history and in the hearts and minds of his people was now assured.

It has been suggested, and there's a valid argument for it, that Richard's passion for winning was the start of the French-English "thing" in Quebec. If he had been "only a hockey player," his suspension for the final weeks of the 1954-55 regular season and the playoffs after getting involved in a savage, stick-swinging duel with Boston defenceman Hal Laycoe, would have been little more than a hiccup in NHL history and, by extension, Quebec's. Instead, it fanned the flames of a cultural revolution which went far, far beyond Richard, the player.

He meant everything to his people, on and off the ice. When he and the Canadiens won, they won. When the Canadiens lost, they lost. When the perception was that he was treated harshly by constituted authority, it was they, his people, who felt the pain and the anger.

Has it really been more than 45 years since that St. Patrick's Day morning in 1955? There was a hint of snow in the air, but nobody in Montreal was thinking about the weather on this day. The Detroit Red Wings were in the city, but the Canadiens would be playing without Richard. His people were in a foul mood. There was trouble ahead. You could sense it … breathe in the sour smell of it.

"Go to the Forum," I was told by my sports editor at The Montreal Star. "Just hang around. See what's happening. See if Richard is there. Talk to Howe. Find out what he thinks about this business."

'This business' was a city poised to explode because hockey's most electrifying player had been suspended for the last three games of the regular season and the entire playoffs. Richard had been in trouble with NHL president Clarence Campbell earlier that season, once for referring to the president as a "dictator" in an article ghost-written for him in a French-language newspaper, another time for butt-ending Toronto rookie Bob Bailey in the face. Worse, he repeatedly tried to renew his attack on Bailey and refused to leave the ice when ordered by the referee. Now, there had been an ugly, stick-swinging incident in Boston with Laycoe. There was also the matter of Richard striking linesman Cliff Thompson in his attempt to get at Laycoe.

Three days later and the day before this Canadiens-Red Wings game in Montreal, Campbell brought down the decision which shook the hockey establishment in general and Canadiens fans in particular. Richard, poised to win his first-ever scoring title, was suspended for the remaining three games of the regular season. He was also suspended for the playoffs. Gone was his opportunity to win his first scoring title. Also gone were the Canadiens' hopes in the playoffs.

President Campbell, who had been urged not to attend the game by major Jean Drapeau, had arrived at his Forum seat several rows above ice level roughly halfway through the first period. By that time, the Wings led 2-0. The moment Campbell was spotted settling into his seat, there were angry cries and threats from groups of fans. Now and then, eggs and tomatoes were thrown at the president, who sat in his seat staring straight ahead trying hard not to pay attention to the fires of anger and ugliness stoked by his appearance.

At period's end, a fan walked up several steps toward Campbell, offering to shake hands with the president. When Campbell reached for his hand, he was slapped in the face. Seconds later, a tear gas bomb exploded. The thick, yellow mass of smoke sent fans screaming toward the main lobby. People were choking, coughing and retching, their eyes streaming. Many yelled fire. The building was ordered cleared, and with the Canadiens trailing the Red Wings 4-1, the decision was made to forfeit the game to the visitors.

Even today, people remain bitter over the suspension which quickly developed into hockey's worst case of violence off the ice. In a matter of minutes, there was an outpouring of looting and burning. Cars were overturned. A mob of thousands shattered windows along St. Catherine Street. Thirty-seven adults and four juveniles were arrested. The wonder of it, though, was that nobody was killed on that black night which was to become known as the Richard Riot. The next day, a visibly shaken Richard, who had attended the game, sat behind a forest of microphones, pleading with the people, his people, to exercise calm.

What made Richard the icon he was to become was the way he scored his goals. From the blueline in, there was nobody as fierce, or as intense. There was nobody as strong. It was the passion within him each time he swooped in on an opposing goaltender, often with another player, or players, clinging to his back.

It was in his arms and in the barrel of his chest which threatened to burst out of his sweater at any moment. It was in the tight line of his mouth, and in the snarl it formed when he was challenged. It was in the terrible rage with which he played. It was in his eyes.

Big goals were all he was about. Playoff goals - 82 in 133 post-season games, a record which was to stand for more than two decades. Remarkably, after all these years his six overtime goals remain a playoff record. His seven three-or-more-goal games in the post-season are behind only Wayne Gretzky's NHL — high 10. And even Gretzky was unable to match the five goals Richard scored in his 5-1 victory over the Toronto Maple Leafs.

The Canadiens were to become hockey's greatest dynasty — five consecutive Stanley Cups — during the first five seasons I covered the team with Richard as its captain. By that time, the Richard flame didn't burn as brightly or as often as it had during the previous 13 seasons.

Injuries and the calendar had cut into his brilliance, although not into his dedication for winning. There was only one Rocket.

It's why in early July 1975, almost 15 years after Richard's retirement, Rick Salutin sat with me outside Banff, Alta., talking about the Canadiens, in general, and the franchise's brightest star in particular. Salutin was there because he had been commissioned to write a play about Les Canadiens.

"Tell me," he said, "about the Canadiens. What do they mean to the people of Quebec?"

I told Salutin that if you fight but don't win the real battle against those who are perceived to be the real rulers, you try to win elsewhere in a form where you are successful. In other words, on the ice with the Canadiens. Later, in an introduction to his play, which was first performed at the Centaur theatre in Montreal in February 1977, he wrote that it was very much the same answer he got at a bar in Quebec City. "I watched a hockey game on television and marveled at the frenzied involvement of the patrons," he wrote. "I put to my drinking partner this question: 'How come?'

"She said: 'The Canadiens — they're us. Every winter they go south and in the spring they come home conquerors.'"

If the Canadiens were the conquerors, Richard was their commander-in-chief. He brought to them a tradition of winning which reached remarkable heights. He wasn't the Richard of old when the Canadiens embarked on the marvelous adventure which would produce five consecutive Stanley Cups from 1956 through 1960, but they were the only five years I would see Richard play. It's true his game had lost some of its shine except for the first two years when he scored 38 and 33 goals. What remained, however, was the fire in his eyes, and the intensity. He was still the flag-bearer for a culture, for his people. Anything less than winning was unacceptable and remained that way until he scored what turned out to be the final goal of his career in the 1960 Stanley Cup final against the Maple Leafs. It was his 34^th in the finals.

It was also the only goal he scored in the playoffs that year, one in which the Canadiens allowed only 11 goals in series sweeps over Chicago and Toronto. (Jacques Plante posted three shutouts.) Richard got his goal in the third game of a 5-2 victory at Toronto and, as it developed, it was to be his last.

He reported to training camp several months later, scored four goals in a morning practice and later in the day, was asked to report to general manager Frank Selke.

I happened to be sitting outside Selke's second-floor office at the Forum when a grim-faced Richard, accompanied by an advisor, strode in. Thirty minutes later, Richard stormed out.

"What's happening?" he was asked.

"They want me to retire," he snapped… and kept on walking.

Selke had pointed out to the 39-year old Richard that in his last three seasons, injuries had sidelined him for 89 of 210 games. It was time … time for the torch to be passed. That night, a special 30-minute CBC live telecast delivered the news to homes across the country.

Richard's 544 regular-season goals are the most in Canadiens history, he was also this historic franchise's most revered player, but was he the franchise's best? Guy Lafleur, who ranks No. 2 behind Richard with 518 goals, lifted people everywhere with his speed and flair, racing from end to end, golden mane flying. Jean Beliveau scored most of his 507 goals with matchless style and a free-flowing grace.

Others could skate faster than Richard. Some could shoot harder and pass better. Nobody, however, approached his intensity from the blueline in. Nobody wanted to win more. Not Gordie Howe. Not Gretzky. Not Mario Lemieux. Not anybody.

He brought the entire package to the arena. He inflamed his people on and off the ice. He stirred their souls like no other player before him or since.

He was, after all, the Rocket.