JUST LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE WHO IS OLD ENOUGH TO remember Thursday, September 28, 1972, I have a Paul Henderson story about where I was when The Goal was scored.
I was fourteen years old, in grade eight at LaSalle Catholic Comprehensive High School. Unlike some other students, I didn’t take the day off school to watch the game, even though I was a huge hockey fan (still am to this day, of course). I didn’t have to because there were television sets at school so students could watch, as there had been all week.
Because of the time difference, it was the middle of the school day while the games from Russia were on, and the ever-wise teachers at our school decided that if students knew the game was on TV at school, maybe they’d actually go to school instead of skipping class. That fact – and the fact that my mother would definitely not have approved of skipping class to watch a hockey game – ensured I was at school when game eight from Moscow was on.
Even though there were televisions all over the school, if I remember correctly, the prime viewing locations for the game were in the gym or in the library.
We had a teacher at the school named Edna Gardner who was a stern disciplinarian. You did not fool around with Mrs. Gardner, but even she realized that the magnitude of this hockey game took precedence over the run-of-the-mill day at school in late September.
She was stationed in the library, where there had to be hundreds of kids gathered around the TV taking in the final minutes of the game. Clearly she did not approve of such a mass of students in one area, and normally she was so stern that she’d just stare any student down who dared not to be in class at any given moment in the day (I was scared to death of her, I freely admit that now). But even she laid low, just surveying us all with her steely eagle eyes while we watched the final minutes unfold.
When that Paul Henderson shot slid past Vladislav Tretiak, the library, normally a sanctuary of silence, exploded into a crescendo of noise that only several hundred students delirious with joy could have possibly made. I mean, so help me God, the walls in that room shook from the eruption of sound.
I remember the delirious cheers, I can even remember Foster Hewitt’s infamous “Henderson has scored for Canada!” call. But I can also remember Edna Gardner’s screams too, as she demanded that we all calm down as she snapped off the TV set in an attempt to quell what I’m sure she thought was going to be a riot.
She needn’t have worried. There was no anger in that response, just pure joy mixed in with a palatable sense of relief. We all believed that there was no way Canada was going to lose that Summit Series to the Russians, and by God, we didn’t. Thanks to Paul Henderson, of course.
So fast-forward nearly forty years later, and my friends at Heritage Hockey ask me to help to put together the story of Paul Henderson in time for the fortieth anniversary of the Goal of the Century. We’ll call it The Goal of My Life, they tell me, which is a sort of double entendre of The Goal in Russia and Paul’s ultimate goal of the purpose statement that he follows in his life.
To many Canadians under the age of forty, Paul Henderson is as much known for being a Christian as he is a hockey player. To those of us on the north side of forty, he’ll always be better known as the player who scored the biggest goal in the history of hockey in this country (and sorry, Darryl Sittler, Mario Lemieux, and Sidney Crosby, his goal was bigger. Trust me, you had to be there to understand. There is really no argument – if you were alive in 1972, you know why).
So my task was simple: meet with Paul Henderson as often as possible, listen to his stories, and write eighty thousand words in his voice. And the end result of that is what you hold in your hands today.
This was my pleasure, believe me. In many ways it was my honour, without trying to sound too sappy about it. Paul Henderson’s final story to the world, in his words, all about The Goal of His Life – I was just thrilled to do it.
Paul has lived a dynamic and fascinating life both on and off the ice. He beat the odds just by making it to the NHL out of Lucknow, Ontario, and enjoyed a solid professional hockey career. He scored the most important goal in Canadian hockey history, but he battled demons after that for several years. He finally found his calling to his ministry, but only after being denied careers as a broker and as a broadcaster. It was an interesting road he travelled.
Paul Henderson’s life story can teach us a lot of things about perseverance and discovering what really matters in life. But it taught me – or I guess I should be honest and say it reminded me, as I’ve always really known this – that no good or bad things happen to us: everything is indifferent. It’s our attitude and how we react to life’s challenges that make an experience good or bad for us.
Paul had a challenging relationship with his father, for instance, which can be bad; but without it, he knows he wouldn’t have become the player that he became. His father was clearly a driving force in his life, but he was also a demanding man, as you’ll read later, and could be very hard on Paul. As Paul says many years later, he spent a lot of his life, especially his younger life, trying to please his father.
Paul Henderson scored the biggest goal in Canadian hockey history, which can be great; but that fame led to perhaps the darkest period of his life. He was denied careers as a broker and broadcaster, which can be bad; but those roadblocks led him to his true calling and a satisfaction that he could never have achieved without that adversity.
What a story it is, and what a challenge this will be, I thought as I sat down to help him put it all together. Now, where to start? Well, as the ever-wise Dorothy said in The Wizard of Oz, the best place to start … is at the beginning.