by Bobby Orr
So we were impatient to get the playoffs under way. Our first challenge was the Canadiens. They had frustrated us in previous years, though the year before they hadn’t even made the playoffs. At the end of the 1970–71 season, we’d played them twice and dominated them. Maybe it would have been better if we had lost.
Coaches always warn against overconfidence. To win at anything, you have to give absolutely everything. That may be even more true in hockey, where not only are you doing your best, but a pretty good athlete is doing his best to stop you. You see it again and again, especially in the first round of the playoffs: a team that plays with determination can beat a team that finishes higher in the standings. The trouble is, no one ever thinks they are overconfident. It is a mistake you never know you are making.
I don’t know if we were overconfident going into that series. We were confident, but every team is. To win, you have to believe you can win. But whether overconfidence was the problem, I can’t say. It is easy to identify one problem, though. At the other end of the rink, a rookie named Ken Dryden was in net. He had joined the Habs after graduating from Cornell University, and had played only six games in the league. So few, in fact, that he was rookie of the year the following season. And there he was, standing on his head. You see it year after year. You can’t win without great goaltending. Great goalies give their team a kind of confidence that is hard to explain. And we could feel that Habs team was confident they could beat us, even though we’d handed them a couple of lopsided losses in the regular season.
They did beat us, of course. Far from repeating as champions, we were out in the first round. Every guy in the room knew we had let an opportunity slip through our fingers. Losing hurts, and losing a game seven hurts a lot. But knowing you had what it took to win and you didn’t deliver is about as crushing a feeling as there is in sports.
• • •
We started the next season on a mission. Again, we had pretty much the same players in the room, so we knew what we could do. There were a couple of additions, though. Ace Bailey joined the team, and my friend and business partner Mike Walton came over from Toronto. Mike was another Northern Ontario guy and we ran a hockey camp together in Muskoka.
It was great having Mike on the team, and more than a little strange having a former Leaf on the Bruins. Games in Toronto were always intense, and particularly after my run-in with Pat Quinn. Toronto fans seemed to dislike me, and they took to booing me whenever I had the puck on my stick. Since I liked to have the puck on my stick as much as I could, I heard a lot of booing at Maple Leaf Gardens.
Mike’s mom was one of the sweetest ladies you could ever meet, and she never had a bad word to say about anything or anyone. One night, Mrs. Walton was at the Gardens when the Bruins were in town, and she happened to know that my mother was in the stands as well. Mom didn’t come to see me often, but she was there that night. Getting to Toronto was a lot easier for my mother and other family members than having to make the hike to Boston, so on this night she decided to see her son in action. Unfortunately, that meant listening to thousands of people boo him.
As a player, you can’t make out specific comments fans direct at you at ice level (though, believe me, when an entire crowd is booing, you hear it). But when you’re in the stands, you know exactly what people are saying. Finally, sweet Mrs. Walton had heard enough. She happened to be sitting beside one of the ringleaders, so she turned to him and said, “You really shouldn’t be booing Bobby Orr like that.”
The guy looked at her indignantly and asked, “Why do you say that, lady?” to which she responded, “Because his mother is here.” I’ve always had a laugh thinking of that story, because I can visualize that kind and wonderful lady coming to my defense. Thank goodness for mothers! But the booing never ceased, in spite of her request.
I wasn’t thinking about the booing, though. I was thinking about the same thing as everyone else on the team: the playoffs. We were still a great regular-season team, and we loved winning, but if the disaster of the previous season’s playoffs had taught us anything, it was that the regular season meant little. We had something to prove in the ’72 playoffs.
We faced the Leafs in the first round, and though they gave us a tough series, we won in five. Next was the Blues, who may have been getting sick of us. We swept them in four. Finally, we were back where we had wanted to be for the past two years.
We were up against a great team. The Rangers had taken care of the Habs in six games and swept the Black Hawks. If we had been a little bit full of ourselves the year before, no one was making that mistake this time. The Rangers had proven they knew how to win, and they had no shortage of talent on their bench.
Still, we took the first two games in Boston, and though we lost game three in New York, we held on to win the fourth by a goal. We were heading back to Boston with a 3–1 lead in the series. At least, the rest of the team was.
Back then, the NHL would put on a luncheon during the final series in order to recognize the various award winners from the league for that season. That particular year, they scheduled the affair in New York the afternoon after the fourth game of the series, and I was supposed to be there in order to accept an award. Staying for that luncheon meant I wouldn’t be able to head out with the rest of the team back to Boston, and that was not what I had in mind. I wanted to get as much rest as possible, and so I told someone with the team that I would prefer to skip the luncheon.
Apparently, the word of my plan got back to the league president, Clarence Campbell. I happened to see him in a hallway at Madison Square Garden, and he looked at me and asked sternly, “Son, do you think you’re too big for this game now?” This was the president of the National Hockey League who was questioning me, and not someone to be taken lightly. He was a Rhodes scholar, had served as a senior officer in World War II, and was already in the Hockey Hall of Fame. (A couple of years later, the league would name the Western Conference after him.) What was I going to say?
I answered, “No, sir!” and promised I would be in attendance the next day.
When I got back to Boston, we had the chance to win another Cup on home ice. You could feel the energy in the city, and since just about everyone on that team knew what it felt like to win, the energy in the dressing room was intense. But the Rangers came out and played brilliantly. It can’t have been easy to win in the Garden that night—and all credit to them, that’s what they did.
Now it was up to us to do the same in their rink. We just wanted it done. We came out flying, but as great as everyone played, at the end of the game we had to thank Gerry Cheevers. He got the shutout, and with that in hand, the game was ours. And so was the Cup.
• • •
That was May 11, 1972. Within weeks, I was back in surgery. My left knee had started to bother me midway through the season. I kept expecting it to improve, but it just got stiffer and more painful as the year went on and we went deeper into the playoffs. Some nights it hurt more than others, but I was usually able to focus on the play rather than the pain, the same way I had always pushed distractions away and kept my focus on what I needed to do. But I began to worry that the knee wouldn’t hold up long enough for me to raise the Cup again. Once there was no hockey to focus on, I needed to go back under the knife.
That surgery stuck in my memory in a way that the others didn’t—because it cost me in a way that the others didn’t. I faced a summer of rehab to get ready for something the whole country was looking forward to: the Summit Series. The idea of matching up Canada’s best players against the Soviet Union’s was irresistible. I had played against a team from the USSR back in junior, and knew how different their game was, and how the desire to win takes on a whole new dimension when you play for your country. I wanted to play in that series as badly as I’ve ever wanted to play.
But there was no way my rehab would be done in time. I went to training camp alongside the rest of Team Can
ada and skated a bit. But I knew my knee wasn’t going to be ready. It was stiff and tender, and swelled ominously afterwards. I held on to the hope I’d be able to play, and I stuck with the team.
The guys in the lineup may not have expected it, but they were getting all they could handle from the Soviets, and plenty more. It was a team we knew very little about. The scouting reports that came back were about players who had been seen individually, not playing together on the national team. Those same scouts told us the Soviets were weak in net. We had watched them in practice before the first game, and they didn’t look very impressive. In hindsight, maybe they were setting us up. We thought it was going to be a romp. We had the best skaters in the NHL, yet the Russians were a step faster. We figured out pretty quickly that this was a heck of a hockey team. I would have done anything to help. But there was nothing I could do.
It’s difficult to describe the frustration I felt being on the sidelines for that series, invited to travel with the team and not being able to contribute on the ice. It’s probably the same for any kid who loves the game. When you see the ice, you just want to play. As a kid, when you look out the window and see the windswept surface of the frozen bay, all you can think about is getting out there. Or when you arrive at the rink for an early-morning practice and see the fresh ice that has been waiting all night, you tie your skates in a hurry, hoping to get just a few extra minutes out there. I wanted to be on that ice for the Summit Series with all the eagerness and impatience of a kid. But I didn’t get that chance.
It is a chapter from my playing career that still disappoints me, because that series was a defining moment for Canadians, and I had to miss out.
Would I have loved to be part of that? Absolutely. But missing out on it doesn’t in any way diminish my sense of what those guys did. I tip my hat to everyone who made it happen and those players who showed all of us what Canadian pride looked like down the stretch. What our team was able to achieve in that series stands out in my mind as one of the greatest accomplishments not just in the history of hockey, but of all sport. It was an especially impressive victory given that we were able to overcome such great adversity, culminating in our winning the series on foreign soil. The group that was assembled for those eight games will always be special in the hearts of all Canadians, and their place in hockey history has been assured forever.
• • •
Heading back to the NHL after a series with that kind of drama wasn’t easy. But that fall, the Bruins opening-night lineup included a guy who showed the same kind of determination against seemingly impossible odds.
When our first-round pick, drafted fourteenth overall the year before, showed up at our training camp in the fall of 1971, he was not what everyone had expected. We had already won a Cup, and we had a very established lineup by that time. If any draft choice was going to make our roster, he would have to be pretty impressive coming in. I was surprised, to say the least, at what I saw when Terry O’Reilly stepped onto the ice.
He came to us from my old junior team, the Oshawa Generals, and because he was a high pick, we all figured he would have a very high skill level. But it became obvious early on in our scrimmaging that Terry could not cut it. The guy was a rough skater, and there was simply no way he was ready to play at the NHL level. Frankly, based on what he showed that first training camp, I had my doubts he would ever be ready. Some of us began wondering about our scouting system if that was the best they could come up with.
But the one thing you could see in Terry right from his very first shift was his absolute passion for the game, and it was all expressed through his toughness. Terry was a very tough young man who would not back down from anybody. That first pro season, he had only one game with us in Boston and spent the remaining part of his rookie campaign in the minors with the Boston Braves. But by the start of the 1972–73 season, you just knew there was no way we could keep him out of a Bruins uniform. The rest is history.
Terry had a heart as big as the Boston Garden, and he went on to become a key part of the Bruins organization, so well respected he would eventually have his number 24 retired. And he would go on to coach Boston to the Stanley Cup finals. But not before he had racked up four twenty-goal seasons and over two thousand penalty minutes, and made himself one of the most beloved players ever to wear the black and gold. If you gave me an entire team of players made of the same stuff as Terry, I can guarantee you we wouldn’t lose many games. Terry O’Reilly is a shining example of a person who had complete passion for his profession, and his attitude has always been an inspiration to me. If you care about something and have passion for it, you have a legitimate shot.
• • •
The players on those teams in those years knew that expectations for the Bruins were high, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t have some fun. Several of my teammates always seemed to come up with a one-liner at just the right moment to keep everyone loose. One of the best at that was our goaltender Eddie Johnston, also known as EJ—or Popsie, as his teammates called him, because he was so much older than the rest of us. EJ was always looking to put the needle into somebody or would simply try to get you laughing. I could write an entire book on his shenanigans alone.
For example, as my career unfolded, some people in the media took to commenting that the defensive part of my game wasn’t what it could be, because I was always up the ice with the puck. I suppose there was some merit to that criticism. EJ picked up on that theme one day just before we started a game. He was in net that night, and, as is customary, the national anthem was being played before the game began. I was in the starting lineup, so I stood at attention along the blue line with my teammates until the music had finished playing. Just before the puck was dropped, I went for a last-second skate toward our goalie to tap his pads and wish him good luck, and he lifted up his mask and said, “See you after the game, Bobby!” I had to talk to myself in order to control my laughter. I’ll bet you EJ had been waiting all day long to deliver that line, and the smile on his face as he pulled his mask back down was priceless. (The NHL has never been a place for players with thin skins. You better be able to give and take the inevitable jabs, and it doesn’t matter who you are on the roster.)
On another occasion, we were playing in Maple Leaf Gardens. I got off to a great start and had a couple of goals early, but then things started to go south for me. The puck began taking some weird bounces, almost as if the guy responsible for all the pucks that evening had forgotten to freeze them. As the game wore on, I believe I had scored four goals in total: two of them against the Toronto goalie, and two against our own goalie that night, good old EJ.
After I had deflected the second puck past him, Eddie came out of his net, looked at me, pointed to the Bruins crest on the front of his sweater, and shouted, “Bobby . . . I’m on the same team as you!” Then, as he turned away and headed back to his net, there was that big grin again that always came over his face. After the game, when he was talking to the press, he deadpanned, “Yeah, you have to watch that Orr all the time.”
Yet another time, Popsie waited for just the right moment to get a laugh out of the boys. This happened immediately after I had scored a goal that made me the first hundred-point defenseman in the history of the NHL. The fans were standing and applauding as the announcement was made over the PA system, so there was a delay in the action for a couple of minutes. I remember the play, because Eddie had stopped a puck in behind his net off a dump-in, set it up for me, and then leisurely returned to his crease. I came back, retrieved the puck, and headed up ice with it. I saw an opening, made a move, was soon one-on-one with the goalie, and managed to find the back of the net.
An end-to-end rush that results in a goal is always pretty special, and under the circumstances it was even more special. As the fans continued to applaud, I saw EJ making his way toward our bench. He came over to where I was sitting, lifted up that mask, and in a very matter-of-fact way, stated, “T
hat was a hell of a pass by me on that play, eh, Bobby?” The boys got a kick out of that one. He was just one of those guys who always had something to say, always had a sense of the moment, always had great delivery, and almost always made us all laugh. You need teammates like that, ones who don’t take themselves or events too seriously.
Every once in a while during the course of play, the comic relief might come not from your own team, but from an opposition player. Yvan Cournoyer, the great Montreal Canadiens star, had a wonderful sense of humor. Yvan always seemed to be in high gear whenever he played against the Bruins, and he was one of those athletes who would have been the quickest guy on the ice regardless of the era. He could flat out fly when he got it in high gear and was very difficult to defend against because of that blazing speed. One night in Boston, he seemed to be blowing by all of us. While the teams were squaring off for a face-off, Gerry Cheevers, our spare goalie that night, was sitting at the end of our bench and Yvan was lined up on the ice right in front of him, perhaps only two feet away. Gerry leaned over the boards and said, “Yvan, for goodness sake, slow down, will ya?”
Yvan looked back, and with a big grin responded in a classic French accent, “No, no, Gerr-ie, I ’av da tail winds tonight!” It cracked up everyone on the bench. Moments like that always helped keep players loose. It can’t be all business all the time.