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 Mols
on’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.”
And later on, he would hint darkly that in making Grundman GM, Pollock had ensured his own continuing career with the Bronfman brothers’ investment company.
Along came the 1978–79 season. Bowman, a hot-tempered disciplinarian, seemed to let up some, and acute observers of the team noted that once-safe leads now tended to evaporate. Teams lacking the Canadiens’ talent made games much closer than they ought to have been. All too often games that should have produced a cozy two points became a tough one point, that is to say, ended in a tie.
Steve Shutt told me, “For the first couple of years here, Scotty was a yeller and a screamer. But it was his team, he built it. Besides, I think everybody needs a good kick in the ass once in a while. Last year, however, when it became obvious Scotty wasn’t going to get the GM’s job, he didn’t want to do anything. He was really, really upset.”
In the summer of 1979 the inevitable happened. Bowman, arguably the best coach in hockey, however personally unpopular—Scotty, ferocious leader of the team since 1971, a streetwise Montreal boy himself—walked out of the Forum to become general manager and director of hockey operations for the Buffalo Sabres.
Something else happened that summer. Ken Dryden, five-time winner of the Vezina Trophy, announced that he was retiring from the game to practice law. More bad news. Jacques Lemaire, just possibly the most complete centre in hockey, surprised even his best friends on the team by saying that he had had quite enough of Stanley Cup pressure, thank you very much, and that from now on he would be doing his skating in the more salubrious climate of the Swiss Alps.
Early in September, only days before training camp was to open, Bernie Geoffrion, a fifty-goal scorer, a regular with the greatest Canadiens team ever, was named coach. “A dream come true,” he said, beaming, but on the night of December 13 he was to resign. “I’m sick and tired of them. Guys coming in at two or three in the morning, laughing and joking around. They’re not acting like professional athletes. I’m not going to stick around and let everyone in Montreal blame me for what’s happening….”
Geoffrion named names, too.
“Larouche walking through the airport, smoking a cigar, acting like we won the Stanley Cup when we’d lost a game. I thought Savard would help me. But he’s more interested in his horses. I feel sorry for Robinson. How do you think he feels?”
The players, of course, told a different tale. “He flunked out in New York,” Shutt said, “he flunked out in Atlanta. Why would he come here, a town like Montreal, where the fans are so demanding?” Where, as yet another veteran put it, “You’ve got seventeen thousand assistant coaches and the fans are right behind you, win or tie.”
Other players, among them honest Larry Robinson, readily admit they came to camp out of condition. With Scotty gone, they grasped that they would not be scorchingly reprimanded for it. Geoffrion, a new boy, was out to ingratiate himself.
“Geoffrion didn’t want to push us,” Gainey said, “but we needed it.”
So faithful Claude Ruel, a former coach and then assistant to Scotty Bowman, stepped loyally into the breach. But come the Christmas break, the team that had lost only seventeen games in 1978–79 and a mere ten the year before stood at an embarrassing 17–13–6.
Something had happened. Something bad.
Where once the players on the other teams, knees wobbly, skated out on the Forum ice determined not to disgrace themselves, now they leaped brashly over the boards actually looking for two points.
“We are no longer intimidated by all those red sweaters,” New York Islander goalie Glenn Resch said.
Canadiens defensive forward Bob Gainey agreed. “When you start to slip, everybody else in the league sees it, the others catch on. Now even the fringe players on the other teams think they can score here.”
Since then, everybody’s been taking the pulse, few as knowledgeable as Henri Richard. Richard, who played with the team for a record-breaking twenty years and eleven Stanley Cups, feared the dynasty was coming to an end. “They miss the big guy,” he told me.
Sam Pollock.
“Nobody ever saw Sam,” the left-winger Steve Shutt said. “I noticed him in the dressing room maybe two or three times in five years. But you always knew he was out there somewhere. Watching.”
Watching, yes, but sometimes to inadvertent comic effect.
“Sam,” Doug Risebrough told me, “was very impressed with how scientific football coaching had become, and so for a while he tried to adapt their methods to our game. He would wander the highest reaches of the Forum, searching out patterns of play, and if he detected something he would quickly radio Busher Curry, who would be pacing the gangway, a plug in his ear. No sooner would the Busher get Sam’s message than he would rush up to Bowman with the words of wisdom. Once, when we were leading the Bruins here, 3–2, with a couple of minutes to go, Sam, watching above, got on the radio to the Busher, who immediately rushed to the bench with the message for Scotty, which Scotty passed on to us. The message was ‘Sam says don’t let them score on you.’”
The rap against fifty-year-old Irving Grundman, Pollock’s successor, is that he is not a hockey man, he lacks fraternity credentials, but neither did he inherit the team with his daddy’s portfolio. The taciturn, driving Grundman is a butcher’s boy, and when he was a kid he was up at 5:00 a.m. to pluck chickens in his father’s shop on the Main. He became a city councillor and went on to build a bowling empire, hooking up with the Bronfman brothers, who shrewdly took him to the Forum with them. “When I came here eight years ago it wasn’t with the intention of having Sam’s job. But once I got here I took a crash course with him. Five hours a day every day. He recommended me for the job. Now I’m in a no-win situation. If things go well, I did it with Sam’s team. If not, it’s my fault. However, we’ve already won one Stanley Cup, so I’m ahead of the game.”
It was also Grundman, obviously a quick learner, who engineered the trade—or theft, some say—that did so much to enable the troubled Canadiens to hang in there in 1980. He sent Pat Hughes and Rob Holland to Pittsburgh for goalie Doug Herron. The season before, the fans, in their innocence, were demanding more ice time for backup goalie Michel Larocque. In 1980 the same fans were grateful that Herron was number one.
Still, Dryden was missed. Bob Gainey felt that it was his retirement that had hurt the team most. “The other teams are overjoyed. They look down the ice and he isn’t standing there anymore.”
Red Fisher, sports editor of the Gazette, who travelled with the Canadiens for twenty-five years, allowed that Dryden used to let in soft goals if the team was ahead 5–1, “But if they were down 1–0 on the road, he was the big guy. He kept them in there until they found their legs.”
Others insisted that the most sorely missed player was Jacques Lemaire. Lemaire, hanging back there, brows knitted, scowling, as Lafleur and Shutt swirled around the nets. Certainly he would be missed in May. Lemaire, the leading scorer in the 1979 playoffs, accounted for eleven goals and twelve assists in sixteen games. But the biggest adjustment the team had to make in 1980,
according to Larry Robinson, was the loss of Scotty Bowman. Bowman was feared, maybe even hated, by most of the players, but he got the best out of them. “With Scotty gone, the fear and motivation is gone. He’s a great hockey man. He made us work hard. You never knew what to expect.”
Something else. In 1980, as all the players were quick to point out, the team had endured an unseemly number of injuries, and for the first time in recent memory, there was nobody down there in Halifax threatening to crack the lineup. The bench was thin.
Another consideration was that the one superlative defence hadn’t been playing up to par. “In the first half,” Shutt allowed ruefully, “Savard and Lapointe couldn’t have made Junior A.”
“We can’t do it all with one line,” Shutt said, and the other lines were simply not scoring.
But then, on New Year’s Eve, there was a miracle at the Forum. Playing fire-wagon hockey, buzzing around the nets like the Canadiens of cherished memory, a revived team put on a dazzling display, beating the Red Army 4–2 in a so-called exhibition game. Many a fan, his faith in mankind restored, was saying the Canadiens, awake at last, would not lose another game during the rest of the season. Look out, Flyers. Boston, beware. Les Canadiens sont là.
On New Year’s Day, rotund Claude Ruel, mistaken for a buffoon by some, announced, “The past is dead. They are playing a little harder now, with more enthusiasm and pep.”
Alas, the past was prologue. The following night les Glorieux ventured into Pittsburgh and lost again. They continued to play erratically, but with rather more success than in the first half, before Lafleur sounded off early in February. Some players, he said, were less interested in playing hockey than in drawing their salary. “It’s reached a point where some of them don’t want to play because they have a little headache. What do you expect a guy like Ruel to do then?” Lafleur also felt that some of the bigger players, say six-foot-six Gilles Lupien, were not doing enough hitting. “I know a number of players who are satisfied with thirty goals, while they could easily score fifty. But they don’t because they say then the public and the boss would be more demanding.”
Dispatches From the Sporting Life Page 21