Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  Richard never made a political speech other than to complain, quite rightly, that in his day the owners treated the players, who drew in the fans and filled their coffers, more like serfs than heroes. But that was a common grievance throughout hockey and not limited to francophone players.

  Introverted and shy, Richard remained apart — not aloof, but apart — from the camaraderie in the locker room and the kibitzing on the hockey award banquet circuit. Richard led by example, not words, as Canadiens goalie Jacques Plante observed decades after the legendary player had hung up his skates. “The Rocket was a very quiet man and on the road trips, he would watch us play cards and laugh at the jokes.” More important, “He always took the blame himself for a loss, never faulting anyone else. If a player wasn’t working hard enough or playing smart, one glare from the Rocket usually corrected the problem.”

  That silence, that distance, left plenty of space for sportswriters and pundits to speculate about the extraordinary surge of emotion this smouldering-eyed, taciturn lumberjack on skates could summon from the stoniest heart. There isn’t a single answer, but the best explanation is probably that fans and foes alike recognized in Richard a simple man driven by love — for the game, his family, and his country — all of those basic values that need no fancy filigree to shine brighter than precious metals.

  JOSEPH HENRI MAURICE Richard, the eldest of eight children of Onésime and Alice Richard (née Laramée), was born on August 4, 1921, in Montreal. His parents, who were both from the Gaspé region, had moved separately to the city, seeking work during the First World War. They met, courted, married, and found a small house to rent in the east end, near Lafontaine Park. By the time Maurice was four, his father, a woodworker for the Canadian Pacific Railway at their Angus Yards, had saved up enough money to build a small house in the Bordeaux district, near rue Jean-Talon in the northeast part of the city. That’s where Maurice learned to play hockey on a backyard rink flooded by his father.

  Organized hockey teams began when he entered the school system. He played peewee, bantam, and midget while a student at Saint-François-de-Laval elementary school. After Grade 9 he went to the Montreal Technical School and played for its team as well as the community one in his neighbourhood. As a teenager he added boxing and baseball to his sporting repertoire while continuing to play as many as two games of hockey during the week and four on weekends — adopting aliases such as “Maurice Rochon” so he could be on more than one roster.

  He even met his future wife, Lucille, through hockey: she was the younger sister of Georges Norchet, his hockey coach at the Paquette Club, in the Parc Lafontaine Juvenile League. Norchet often invited team members back to his parents’ house after games. Unlike his more outgoing teammates, Richard would stand quietly off to the side, sipping a soft drink, when the rugs were rolled back and the gramophone wound up. Lucille, then only thirteen, was a petite and pretty redhead with a ready smile and easy social skills. “I took it upon myself to teach Maurice to dance and to act as his fashion consultant too,” she reminisced later. Much to her parents’ shock, the couple became engaged when she was seventeen. By then Richard had quit school and was working with his father as a machinist as well as earning some money as a player for the Canadiens’ senior farm team in the Quebec league.

  They married on September 21, 1942. The Richards had reared seven children and had been married for more than half a century when Lucille died of cancer in July 1994. Richard was so devoted to his wife that he refused to leave her side to accept a symbolic appointment to the Privy Council. The Queen herself was to convey the honour at Rideau Hall on Canada Day, 1992, in commemoration of the 125th anniversary of Confederation. Adding the designation L’honorable to his name paled next to comforting his ailing wife. The PMO offered to send a nurse to the Richard home, but the Rocket declined. Finally, Richard agreed to accept the honour in a special ceremony organized in his hometown.

  As a player, Richard was fast and relentless. He got his nickname “Rocket” in 1942 from another player. Left-winger Ray Getliffe was sitting on the bench in the Forum watching Elmer Lach feed “a lovely pass” to Richard. “I leaned over [to one of the other players] and said, ‘Wow, Richard took off like a rocket.’” The comment was overheard by Montreal Star sports writer Dink Carroll, who immortalized it in print.

  In his short biography Maurice Richard, Charles Foran describes Richard as having the upper body of a logger, complete with barrel chest, broad shoulders, tree-trunk arms, thick hands, and permanently swollen knuckles. “He does not skate over the ice so much as impose himself upon it with each pressuring stride. His strokes are economical rather than elegant, commanded by force more than grace,” Foran writes, having watched Richard’s solitary skate in a 1975 CBC documentary. “Shoulders square and elbows at 90 degrees, chin up and gaze ahead . . . he manoeuvres the puck side to side on the blade of his stick with the ease of someone stirring milk into coffee.”

  Even more often than documenting Richard’s glide, journalists and opposing players invariably commented upon Richard’s gaze, especially the ferocious stare in his “anthracite eyes” as he barrelled towards the opposing team’s goal. Over the years several opposing players described the effect. “When he came flying toward you with the puck on his stick, his eyes were all lit up, flashing and gleaming like a pinball machine. It was terrifying,” said Hall of Fame goalie Glenn Hall.

  In his memoir, Tales of an Athletic Supporter, Trent Frayne described Richard as the “most spectacular goal scorer who ever played hockey.” Nobody “electrified onlookers the way the Rocket did, dashing from the blue line in. And nobody I’ve seen since had his hypnotic flair, either. When he was battling for the puck near the net, driving for it with guys clutching at him, you could actually see a glitter in his coal-black eyes, the look wild horses get.”

  Roch Carrier used the same animal image. “He’s half wild horse, half well-disciplined soldier . . . with a face as rough as a stone in a Gaspé field and the piercing eyes of someone who has the gift of seeing things invisible to others,” he wrote in Our Life with the Rocket: The Maurice Richard Story.

  Richard’s eyes even became part of the homily delivered by the archbishop of Montreal, Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte, at Richard’s funeral at Notre-Dame Basilica on May 31, 2000. “What a look! Such strength, such intensity in those eyes. Poets have said that the eyes are the mirror of the soul. All of Maurice was in his eyes. We will not forget that look,” the cardinal promised. And so it has become.

  But, for all his power and spell-casting, Richard was injury prone. Even before he showed up at training camp for the Canadiens in 1942, the year he married Lucille, he had suffered a broken ankle and a broken wrist. That season he fractured his leg in December, after only sixteen games. Canadiens general manager Tommy Gorman tried to trade him to the New York Rangers, but the American team scoffed at the deal.

  Despite the conscription crisis at the outbreak of the Second World War and the nationalist Québécois opposition to fighting for the British Crown, Richard wanted to enlist in the army and go overseas to fight the Germans. He tried twice to join the combat forces, beginning in 1939, but was refused as unfit because X-rays showed his injuries hadn’t healed properly. Finally, in 1944, he applied as a machinist but was rejected because he had neither a high school diploma nor a technical trade certificate, even though he had been working at the trade in a local factory since he was sixteen. Frustrated but determined, he enrolled at the Montreal Technical School, but by the time he had earned his certificate, the war was over.

  Instead of serving the war effort overseas, he kept the home spirits stoked by playing hockey. After Richard’s wife, Lucille, gave birth to their first child on October 23, 1943, he went to Canadiens coach Dick Irvin and asked if he could switch his number from fifteen to nine to commemorate the lusty birth weight of his daughter, Huguette. For Richard, the number became a talisman symbolizing his love for his baby
and his wife and his need to express that emotion, not in words but on the ice, as he skated, stick-handled, and scored goals. Hockey, plus whatever jobs he could get in the off-season, combined later with endorsements and commercials for a variety of products — from hair dye to fishing tackle — were essential in supporting a wife and seven children. Despite his fame and his prowess, Richard never made more than $25,000 a season playing hockey.

  In 1944 the Canadiens won the Stanley Cup, with Richard scoring thirty-two goals in the regular season and twelve in the playoffs, including all five goals in a 5–1 victory over the Toronto Maple Leafs in the semifinals, a stellar achievement that culminated in Richard’s being awarded all three stars at the end of the game that night. The following season Irvin switched the left-handed Richard to right wing, alongside Elmer Lach and Toe Blake in what came to be called the “Punch Line.” That was the year he put fifty goals in the net in as many games.

  Richard rarely started a fight, but he didn’t back away from one either, often using his training as a boxer to give back more than he got. He had a notoriously short fuse and, once ignited, his temper exploded like a fuel-injected missile. Heckled by rival players, victimized by referees, Richard was drafted into a symbolic martyrdom by a francophone minority who felt persecuted in their home province — the way they felt he was abused on the ice — by the mercantile and political masters of the rest of Canada.

  One cultural commentator, Benoît Melançon, author of The Rocket: A Cultural History of Maurice Richard, has actually gone so far as to compare a colour photograph of Richard in the April 1955 issue of Sport magazine with a seventeenth-century painting of Saint Sebastian, the early Christian martyr, by the Baroque painter Luca Giordano: “both bodies stand out against a black background; where one has an arrow in his side, the other holds fast to his stick.” But Melançon isn’t content with visual similarities between the painting of the martyr and the photograph of the hockey player. He contends that the photograph, which was hanging in the Montreal Forum before the March 1955 riot, gave marauders “the image of the martyr Richard was to become that very evening,” an overstretched juxtaposition that collapses under its own hyperbole.

  In a much more restrained and powerful article in Saturday Night magazine in January 1955, novelist Hugh MacLennan wrote presciently about the “gentleness and ferocity” that co-existed in Richard and warned of the danger in provoking his rage: “Every great player must expect to be marked closely, but for ten years the Rocket has been systematically heckled by rival coaches who know intuitively that nobody can more easily be taken advantage of than a genius. Richard can stand any amount of roughness that comes naturally with the game, but after a night in which he has been cynically tripped, slashed, held, boarded, and verbally insulted by lesser men he is apt to go wild. His rage is curiously impersonal — an explosion against frustration itself.”

  Less than two months later Montreal itself exploded in what came to be known as the Richard Riot. Tensions had been percolating for years between Richard and the unilingual, authoritarian NHL president Clarence Campbell, a Rhodes Scholar, former NHL referee, and lieutenant colonel in the Canadian Army.

  A year earlier, Richard, in a ghostwritten column in a Montreal weekly that he hadn’t even read, had called Campbell a dictator for the way he had “over-penalized” his brother Henri and Boom Boom Geoffrion for vicious behaviour in fights they had not initiated. Campbell went ballistic, with the result that Canadiens general manager Frank Selke persuaded Richard to offer an abject apology and to post a thousand-dollar bond. Campbell publicly released the details, which infuriated the French media. They accused the NHL of muzzling their hero, who by then had agreed to stop allowing his name to appear as a byline on somebody else’s prose.

  An anglophone referee named McLean seemed to be blind when Richard was under attack and yet omniscient when the Rocket retaliated. Encountering the referee in a New York hotel lobby, Richard grabbed him and began swinging. That earned him a $500 fine from Campbell. Then, in a losing game against the Bruins in Boston on March 13, 1955, Richard got into an altercation with opposing defenceman Hal Laycoe. Sticks were raised, and Laycoe opened a gash in Richard’s scalp. Trent Frayne, who was there, described Richard attacking the defenceman with his stick: “wielding it across Laycoe’s shoulders and neck as though taking an axe to a tree.” The benches emptied, and in the ensuing brawl Richard punched linesman Cliff Thompson, a retired defenceman for the Bruins, in the face — twice. Campbell ordered that Richard, the Canadiens’ leading scorer, be suspended for the rest of the season, including the playoffs.

  The lengthy suspension outraged fans and killed Richard’s hopes of winning his first league scoring title. Everybody had an opinion on Campbell’s verdict, including Mayor Jean Drapeau, who publicly warned him to skip the Canadiens’ next home game because even showing up would look like a “provocation.” Campbell refused, which inflamed the already angry fans. When he arrived at a game against the Detroit Red Wings, who were tied for first place with the Canadiens, Campbell was pelted with tomatoes and other debris. A fan punched him in the face, another hurled a canister of tear gas. The game was abruptly forfeited to the Red Wings and attendees were ordered to leave the arena, swelling the militant crowds rampaging through the streets of downtown Montreal.

  The rioters caused an estimated $100,000 in property damage, thirty-seven injuries, and a hundred arrests before the police exerted control. Even the Rocket himself was persuaded to speak on radio the next morning, in French and English, to calm the crowd. Richard’s teammate Boom Boom Geoffrion won the scoring title that season and the Detroit Red Wings took the Stanley Cup. The following year Richard returned to the ice and led his team to the first of five successive Stanley Cup victories.

  After that, his glory days on the ice were over. He showed up at training camp in the fall of 1960, but nothing seemed the same, and impulsively he decided to retire in September, a month after his thirty-ninth birthday. He had put on some pounds, his reflexes were slowing down, and he had suffered injuries, including a broken bone in one of his ankles and a severed Achilles tendon, which had kept him from playing the full season in his last three years. Management wanted him to go while the crowds still roared as he slapped the puck into the net — sooner rather than later — and offered him a three-year post-retirement job in public relations at his playing salary.

  Years later Richard admitted that he had left the game too soon. He really didn’t know what to do with himself off the ice. Several post-playing positions, including as inaugural coach of the Quebec Nordiques, fizzled. Unlike his teammate Toe Blake, who had a distinguished post-playing career as coach of the Canadiens, or Jean Beliveau, who moved into the executive ranks of the organization, Richard was really only at ease on the ice or at home with his family. Eventually he split with the Canadiens and started a number of business ventures, including owning a tavern, selling fishing tackle, and appearing in commercials endorsing hair products.

  What brought him back into the fold and the public eye was the closing ceremonies for the venerable Forum on March 11, 1996. The game itself was not memorable. Instead of one of their traditional rivals — the Leafs, the Bruins, or the Red Wings — the Habs were up against the upstart Dallas Stars. After the final whistle sounded and the three stars had been named in a game in which the bleu-blanc-rouge defeated the Stars 4–1, a work crew unrolled four red carpets stretching in a huge square from the blue lines. As funeral music was played, surviving Hall of Fame players, wearing their team sweaters, walked on to the ice as the crowd roared. The last to appear was Richard. The building erupted in a standing ovation that lasted nearly eight minutes, despite the Rocket’s attempts to quell the cascading waves of applause. It was as though the fans — many of whom were too young to have ever seen him play — recognized the depths of passion in the vulnerable, ageing figure with the taciturn demeanour. They bathed him in love and admiration as though he represen
ted all of their grandfathers. By the time francophone announcer Richard Garneau intoned, “Mesdames et messieurs, vous avez devant vous le coeur et l’âme du Forum,” the crowd was spent and Richard himself was weeping.

  It was a living tribute, one that would be echoed four years later, when more than 100,000 fans lined up around the clock and around the block to pay their last respects as his coffin lay in state in the new Molson Centre on May 30, 2000. They then thronged the streets the following day to watch the funeral procession wend its way to Notre-Dame Basilica in Old Montreal. It was the end of an era — and the birth of Rocket Richard, nationalist hero.

  June Callwood

  Writer and Social Activist

  June 2, 1924 – April 14, 2007

  AFTER SHE WAS diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2003, June Callwood talked about gliding over Georgian Bay, contemplating all the pain she had experienced in her life and wondering whether there was “anything spiritual” that could help ease her misery. “And I thought, floating up there, ‘This is what it’s all about. It’s kindness. Not top-down kindness, giving a toonie to a street person and treating them like a slot machine, but stopping and talking to them. If people can behave well to each other, that’s all that there is,’” she told Globe journalist John Allemang. An atheist, she took that philosophy of kindness, which was as close as she could come to a religious belief, and sprinkled it liberally as she carried on her personal campaign against injustice, even as cancer rampaged through her body.

  Known as a doer, a “secular saint,” a fundraiser, a civic activist, a fierce campaigner for human rights, and a “general nuisance,” she wrote thirty-odd books, more than a thousand magazine articles, close to five hundred newspaper columns, and hosted at least two television shows, In Touch and National Treasures. She helped establish fifty organizations — more than most people join in their lifetimes. The institutions range across the arts, human rights, civil liberties, and social welfare. In recompense, she was given nearly twenty honorary degrees, named a Companion of the Order of Canada, and had a street, a park, and Ontario’s volunteerism award named in her honour.