99

by Wayne Gretzky

  Bailey pulled through, but he wasn’t the same. It took a year for him to get his full functions back and he had a hospital bill that ran over $1,000. At thirty, hockey was over for him and he was out of a job.

  To raise money for Bailey and his family, the NHL board of governors arranged for the first benefit All-Star game to be played between the Leafs and the rest of the league’s star players on Valentine’s Day 1934. The money helped Bailey tremendously.

  They did the same thing three years later after Howie Morenz died. Morenz left behind three kids—Howie Jr. who was eight, Donald who was six, and Marlene who was three. His widow Mary was just twenty-six years old and faced a tough challenge to raise three kids on her own. The league arranged a game between a team full of Canadiens and Maroons and an All-Star team at the Forum on November 2, 1937.

  But the money went only so far. Mary had to find a job so she moved back in with her parents and put her three kids in an orphanage. She spent hours on the trolley to see them every Sunday and never missed a visit.

  Eddie Shore was suspended indefinitely but was eventually given sixteen games for that hit. Conn Smythe settled a lawsuit with Kenworthy, the fan he had slugged, for $200 plus $100 for his own lawyer. He said it was the best $300 he ever spent.

  At the All-Star game, Shore and Bailey shook hands at center ice. Bailey was wearing a topcoat, fedora, and dark glasses, but you could see a six-inch scar from the top of his ear straight up into his hairline. It covered the silver plate the doctors had to put in his head. The Leafs retired Bailey’s jersey number 6 that night. It was the first time a number was retired in the NHL.

  • • •

  Hockey’s past has a way of finding its way into hockey’s future. Marlene Morenz, Howie Morenz’s baby daughter, would grow up to marry Boom Boom Geoffrion, one of the greatest right-wingers in an era that included Maurice Richard and Gordie Howe. (Though he played the point on the power play, along with Doug Harvey. In part that was because of his legendary shot, and in part because Richard was on the right wing, playing with Jean Bélieveau and Dickie Moore. Back then, penalized players served the full two minutes. That line could score a couple goals or more with the man advantage. Finally the league had to take mercy on opposing teams, and let the penalized player out of the box after a goal.)

  I played against their son, Danny Geoffrion, when I was with the Oilers and he was with the Jets. Danny’s son, Blake Geoffrion, played at the University of Wisconsin and was the 2010 Hobey Baker winner, the top college player in the country.

  Blake was drafted in the second round by the Nashville Predators and traded to the Canadiens in 2011–12. In November 2012, he was playing with the AHL farm team, the Hamilton Bulldogs, at the Bell Centre in Montreal. In the first period, his fourth shift going down on the left-wing side, he was checked hard by the Syracuse Crunch defenseman JP Côté. As Blake went down, Côté’s skate caught him above his left ear, causing a depressed skull fracture that required a four-hour emergency surgery.

  The doctors removed all the broken bone and replaced the shattered part with a two-and-a-half-inch plate held in his head with five screws. At twenty-five years old, Blake’s hockey-playing days were done. But he has great hockey sense and he’s a great kid. Today he scouts for the Columbus Blue Jackets.

  Afterward, Côté got hold of Blake and said, “I’m really sorry for what happened.” And Blake said, “It was a good, clean hit, JP. No hard feelings.” There wasn’t anything more that needed to be said.

  Twelve

  FIRE IN HIS EYES

  It’s hard to believe, but in the 1930s, hockey didn’t draw much of a crowd in Montreal. Some nights at the Forum there might have been only a couple thousand fans. Then, in 1942, Maurice Richard came along.

  Ken Reardon, who would come back to play defense for the Canadiens after his time in uniform, was playing on an army team in an exhibition game against the Habs when he first encountered Richard. “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. Well, he went around me like a hoop around a barrel.”

  Everybody always talked about the look in Richard’s eyes when he had the puck and was coming in on the net. Glenn Hall, who played against him in Detroit and then Chicago, said that his eyes were “all lit up flashing and gleaming like a pinball machine. It was terrifying.”

  The Rocket got his nickname in his second season with the Canadiens. Left-winger Ray Getliffe watched him pick up an Elmer Lach pass at the blue line and head for the net. He said, “That kid just went in there like a rocket!’” Dink Carroll, a longtime sports reporter for the Montreal Gazette, heard him say it and reported it in the paper. The rest is history.

  Dick Irvin was the coach of the Canadiens. Richard played the first part of the 1942–43 season with Tony Demers and Elmer Lach on what was called the “Broken Bones Line” or the “Ambulance Line” because the three of them were so injury-prone. But Irvin juggled his lines a little and when Joe Benoit enlisted after that season, he put Richard in his spot alongside Toe Blake and Elmer Lach. They would go on to become one of the most famous lines in NHL history—the Punch Line. They won the Stanley Cup that year.

  In his third year with Canadiens, Richard became the first NHL player to score 50 goals in 50 games. That was 1944–45. The season before, he was the first to score 12 goals in an NHL playoff year. The Forum was now filling up with fans.

  Richard was always the first guy on at practice and the last guy off. He’d stay to skate and shoot. He worked to develop speed, accuracy, and the hardest shot in the league. He had a bomb off the rush and would also set up in the slot for the one-timer like Mike Bossy and Bobby Hull. Goalies like Glenn Hall didn’t wear masks back then. It wouldn’t have been easy to stand in front of that cannon.

  The Rocket wasn’t a huge man at 5’10” and 170 to 180 pounds, but the strongest NHLers aren’t usually monsters like NFL linebackers. There aren’t many guys who can move Sidney Crosby off the puck, there weren’t many players who were eager to tangle with Wendel Clark, and there was almost no one as fast or as strong as Pavel Bure. They were all about Richard’s size. He had incredibly strong arms and legs and a huge chest.

  These names also give a pretty good sense of what it would be like to try to stop Richard. He didn’t look for fights, but he would drive so hard to the net that guys would have to bend the rules just to slow him down. And he would retaliate. If he wanted to get to the net, he was going to get to the net. There’s a famous story about big defenseman Earl Seibert, who was with Detroit at the time. This is the same player who broke Howie Morenz’s leg. Detroit and Montreal were playing at the Olympia when Seibert jumped on the Rocket’s back to stop him. But Richard just kept on coming. He put the puck in the net and then he shook his shoulders like a big bear and Seibert went flying.

  When Seibert got back to the bench, Jack Adams gave him grief for not taking his man. But Seibert, who was a two-hundred-pound player, told Adams that any guy who could carry him in from the blue line to the net and score deserved the goal.

  • • •

  The Wings and the Canadiens played each other twelve to fourteen times a season, and although Gordie Howe and the Rocket respected each other, they didn’t like each other. In Gordie’s third NHL season, on January 29, 1949, in their only recorded fight, King Clancy was the referee. He let them go at it. Gordie landed a couple of punches and Richard ended up on the ice. Clancy tied Gordie up, so his linemate Sid Abel came up to the Rocket, stood over him and made some remarks. Richard got up and broke Abel’s nose.

  The two teams hated each other so much that the police had to stand by at the Westmount station in Montreal when both teams had to catch the same train.

  In the 1952–53 season, the Wings finished number one, fifteen points ahead of the Canadiens. In the last game of the season, they were up against Mont
real. Gordie had accumulated forty-nine goals and was going for number fifty. At that point the Rocket was the only NHL player ever to have scored fifty in a season. Gordie had a couple of good chances in that final game, but Canadiens left-winger Bert Olmstead was all over him all game. Gordie didn’t score.

  Gerry McNeil was in goal for the Canadiens and when they got back to the dressing room he said, “Well, Rock, he’s got to start at one again.” I know a little what they must have felt about Richard’s record. Glen Sather used to push us as individuals to pursue individual awards. You could be totally unselfish and still strive to be the best. I think that’s because he had played with Orr in Boston and so many greats in Montreal. He knew that players who wanted to be the best made their teams better. So in training camp he would say, “This year I want to win the Stanley Cup. And I want to win the scoring race, and I want to win the Norris,” and so on. In his view, individual honors are team awards, so I can see why the Canadiens wanted to protect Richard. His record was theirs too.

  On December 29, 1954 in Toronto, in the last minute of the first period, the Rocket scored his 401st goal and the crowd gave him a standing ovation. He was fifteen points ahead of Gordie in overall scoring that season. And then in the third period with five minutes left, twenty-three-year-old Bob Bailey, who was just up from the Leafs’ farm team, the Pittsburgh Hornets, and trying to make a name for himself, went after the Rocket. During the fight, Bailey tried to gouge Richard’s eyes. The linesmen separated them, but the Rocket was furious. He somehow got a stick and went after Bailey, but one of the linesmen, George Hayes, tried to stop him. The crowd was booing. The referee, Red Storey, gave Maurice five for fighting and two ten-minute misconducts.

  A few months later, on March 13, things got even uglier. Richard and former teammate Hal Laycoe got into a stick-swinging incident that quickly spiraled out of control. The linesmen jumped in to break it up and one of them, Cliff Thompson, held the Rocket down. Richard later said that this action opened him up to a few punches from Laycoe.

  In a move he may have regretted later, Doug Harvey pulled Thompson off Richard, who then grabbed another stick. Hal Laycoe covered up as the Rocket came after him. Bruin player Fleming Mackell said it was at this point the fight wasn’t fun anymore. The crowd went silent. The Montreal Gazette reported that Thompson tried to intervene again and the Rocket “nailed him against the boards.”

  First of all you’ve got to be courageous to be a linesman because the game is so fast and players are so strong. You may not have to be quite as fast, but you’ve got to be at least as strong. Today, if you hit an official, that will cost you twenty games. Back then it was up to the league president, Clarence Campbell. He suspended Richard for the last three games of the regular season as well as the playoffs. That would be like taking Peyton Manning or Tom Brady out of the Super Bowl. Habs fans were furious.

  The Canadiens and Detroit Red Wings were tied for first place when they played at the Montreal Forum four nights later. Clarence Campbell was in the rink, and fans threw tomatoes, eggs, and programs at him. When someone threw a tear-gas canister into the crowd the fire chief ordered Canadiens manager Frank Selke to clear the building. And so Selke had to forfeit the game. As fifteen thousand people left the building, the bars and taverns were emptying at the same time, and some people started to riot. They picked up bottles and huge chunks of ice and started breaking windows. They overturned newsstands and kiosks and cars and looted shops along St. Catherine Street.

  The Canadiens lost the Stanley Cup to Detroit in the seventh game and missing the final three games of the regular season took away the Rocket’s chance of winning the Art Ross Trophy as the league’s leading scorer. As it turned out, he never won the league scoring race his entire career. Canadiens fans never forgave Clarence Campbell.

  • • •

  On New Year’s Eve 1959, Jack Adams told the papers that the Rocket, who along with Doug Harvey formed the backbone of the Canadiens, couldn’t go on forever. Richard was thirty-eight and recovering from an injury. Adams said, “When the time comes he doesn’t get twenty goals, he’ll hang up his skates.” It turned out Richard had been thinking the same thing.

  Richard had gained a few pounds and that slowed him down. He also started to worry about ending up badly hurt like Howie Morenz. Richard hadn’t played a full season since severing his own Achilles tendon with his skate in November of 1957. (By 1964, the NHL had a rule that every skater had to wear a plastic “safety heel” that CCM developed because of that injury.)

  Canadiens GM Frank Selke tried to convince Richard that he would have at least five good years left if he got himself into shape. But at thirty-nine, the Rocket was ready to retire. He made the announcement at a press conference at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel on September 15, 1960. He said that the fans had started to boo him and that was something he never wanted to happen. He’d won eight Stanley Cups for Montreal.

  I am sure it was the toughest decision he ever made. It was for me.

  I thought I would retire an Oiler. When that didn’t happen, I thought maybe I would finish my career in Los Angeles. But my ice time was dropping. I understood. I was in my mid-thirties and coach Larry Robinson had some young players he wanted to groom for the future. But I wasn’t ready to retire by any means.

  I loved St. Louis and thought that might be my last stop. It’s Janet’s hometown, and I loved playing there. We had fantastic defense with two future Hall of Famers in Al MacInnis and Chris Pronger, and Grant Fuhr was in net. I loved playing with Shayne Corson and Brett Hull. Brett was the only player who ever played with, against, and for me. We brought him into Phoenix when I was coaching there. The trouble was that I was a little older when I played in St. Louis, so when my contract with them was up I started looking for the right place to end my career.

  When I was a kid, there were really only two teams in my eyes—the Leafs and the Red Wings. The Leafs because they were down the road from Brantford and the Red Wings because of Gordie Howe. Playing in Toronto would give me the opportunity to move back closer to my family and to finish on one of Canada’s greatest teams.

  At the start of the 1996–97 season the Leafs had a lot of pieces in place. They had a lineup with some good young guys like Mats Sundin, Sergei Berezin, and Fredrik Modin and some great veterans like Dougie Gilmour, Wendel Clark, and Larry Murphy. In a way they were like the 1967 Leafs. I thought Toronto had the potential to go deep into the playoffs, as they had in ’93 and ‘94. And if I could help the team at the same time, it would be fulfilling a boyhood dream.

  My agent, Mike Barnett, had known Toronto’s GM Cliff Fletcher for a long time. Cliff consulted with their owner, Steve Stavro, who owned a grocery chain called Knob Hill Farms. But the timing was off. Steve was under some financial pressure and so Toronto was out.

  I was also interested in playing for the Canucks but didn’t approach them until Toronto was off the table. At that point Mike and I flew on our own dime to Vancouver as a show of good faith. I loved the team, loved the city, and really respected Pat Quinn, who was now GM. They had a deep, talented lineup. Marty Gelinas had won a Cup with the Oilers in 1990, Pavel Bure had led the league in goals in 1993–94, and Alexander Mogilny was an absolute wizard with the puck. They had defense covered with Dave Babych and Bret Hedican, and they had goaltending in Kirk McLean and Corey Hirsch. Needless to say, Trevor Linden was a well-respected young captain, who had led his team to the final in 1994.

  Mike and Canucks VP Stan McCammon were negotiating final terms and it got late. I went to bed pretty happy at the thought of playing for Vancouver. At about one a.m., Stan said, “This is the best we can do, this is where we’re at.”

  Mike said, “Well, it’s pretty close. We’ll have an answer in the morning after breakfast.” But Stan wanted an answer that night. Mike assured him the offer looked positive but told him it was unreasonable to wake everyone up when he could get a decision first thing
in the morning.

  Stan said, “If you don’t give me an answer now, the offer’s off the table.”

  Mike came to my room and woke me up. I told him, “I like it, but I’m not going to call Janet in the middle of the night and I’m not going to make the decision without talking to her. So if they honestly are giving me an ultimatum after we’ve come up here at our own expense and told them we like the offer and given our word we are not going to shop it, then it’s up to them if they take it off the table, but I hope that they don’t.”

  Mike called Stan back and said, “Look, we are not attempting to do any better in negotiations. We are not taking the offer anywhere else. It’s simply that Wayne’s not going to bring his wife into the final decision and choice of cities and schools and their lives and all that in the middle of the night. He’ll call as soon as he gets up so you won’t need to wait long. We’ll be back here very early.”

  Stan said, “Well, I wish you would have told me otherwise.” And the next morning they told us that the offer was off the table. Maybe because they were convinced we were trying to leverage their offer, they followed up by sending out a fax to all the other teams in the NHL saying that they were ceasing further negotiations to acquire my services.

  One of the teams that received the fax from the Canucks that morning was the New York Rangers. Mike and I were at the Seattle airport heading back to Los Angeles when he got a phone call from Dave Checketts and Neil Smith saying, “We just received this fax that Vancouver’s out. Will you talk to us?”

  We talked to them in the Seattle airport for forty-five minutes and picked it up again when we got back to Los Angeles. New York, with Mark Messier, Brian Leetch, Luc Robitaille, and Adam Graves, was a good fit. It was a really good fit. On July 21, 1996, I signed with the Rangers.