THE TRUE TEST OF A CHAMPION

JACQUES PLANTE WAS A man of routine. It was a routine based on trial and error, on what Plante had learned through years of experimentation and experience. All with one goal in mind: to be the greatest goaltender the sport of hockey had ever seen.

His preparation was remarkably meticulous and scientific, almost robotic in its approach. He would always wrap the tape exactly 17 times around the blade of his stick, ensuring that the balance and the weight of the stick were the same for every game. He would sharpen his skates only once each season, exactly at the halfway point. Such was the precision of his routine that he would even schedule certain days to cut his fingernails and toenails. “There’s not a part of goaltending that Jacques Plante hadn’t thought about and analyzed, formed his opinion, and then blocked out the rest of the world,” commented noted hockey writer Jack Falla.¹

Plante possessed the game’s most analytical mind. As goaltender, there could be long stretches when he didn’t face any shots from the opposing team. These times of calmness allowed him to contemplate and then process the many intricacies of the sport.

He was astute enough to recognize any weaknesses in his own game and then make necessary adjustments. Such had been the case with his weight, a constant concern in his first few years in the league as it plummeted to dangerously low levels. He was officially listed as being six feet tall and weighing 175 pounds, but it was not uncommon for him to lose pounds during a game, and by the end of the season his weight could sometimes be as low as 149 pounds. To combat the loss, the Canadiens’ medical team prescribed pills designed to help him maintain his weight. He also began eating five meals a day. To maintain his strength, he would take a nap every afternoon and attempt to sleep for at least 10 hours every night.² Nevertheless, he always seemed to find himself feeling lethargic right before games, so he began taking a prescribed half tablet of Aspirin two hours before the opening faceoff. According to Plante, the medication sharpened his reflexes and helped relieve his sluggishness.

Unfortunately, Plante’s battle with asthma was not as easily solved as his weight problem, as illustrated by his bronchial attack in the 1956– 57 season. Plante’s difficulties with asthma would continue into the 1957–58 season.

Even worse, Plante’s asthma would be only one of many afflictions that would handicap the 1957–58 Montreal Canadiens. Only three players, Dickie Moore, Claude Provost, and Phil Goyette, would participate in all 70 of the team’s games that season, though Moore played the last five weeks with his left hand in a plaster cast.

Training camp provided a harbinger of what was to come as the parade to sick bay began before the season was even under way. Boom Boom Geoffrion, who had been unable to play the whole schedule since leading the league in scoring in 1954–55, found himself back in the hospital with a flu that developed into a case of pneumonia that shelved him throughout a large part of training camp and the first five games of the season.

He was soon joined in the hospital by Plante, who underwent a sinus operation that kept him out of the season’s first six games. Into the breach stepped Charlie Hodge from the Montreal Royals.

It was three years since Hodge had been called up to replace an incapacitated Plante, and this time he was determined to make an impression. In his six games, the Canadiens won four and tied two. Even more impressive was that the undersized Hodge had allowed only 10 goals during his stint, for a 1.67 goals-against average. Despite his performance, there was no discussion of keeping him with the Canadiens, even as a standby for an increasingly unreliable Plante.

Plante resumed his position in the net on October 26 and back-stopped the Canadiens to a 4–3 win over the Boston Bruins.

Four nights later, the Canadiens were in Toronto to play the Maple Leafs. And once again, Plante was felled by an asthma attack and unable to play. Coach Toe Blake was forced to go with the standby goalie provided by the Maple Leafs. Normally the goalie for the Toronto Marlboros (the Leafs’ junior team), 19-year-old Len Broderick, was paid $25 per game by the Leafs to sit in the stands and be at the ready. Plante’s absence and the presence of an untested youngster didn’t help the Leafs, who once again fell victim to the Canadiens’ powerful offence in a 6–2 defeat.

After sitting out another two games, Plante made his triumphant return against the Red Wings on November 7 at the Forum, shutting out Detroit in a 6–0 Canadiens whitewash.

The real test for Plante would come six days later, when the Canadiens once again made their way to Toronto, where Plante had suffered his last few asthma attacks. Looking to avoid another attack by changing his environment, Plante, with Blake’s approval, checked into the Westbury Hotel, which was farther uptown and closer to Maple Leaf Gardens than the Royal York Hotel where the rest of the team continued to stay. The change appeared to do him good as the Canadiens faced off against the Leafs on November 13, with Plante, asthma free, patrolling the Montreal goal in a 4–2 Canadiens victory. But the real story once again was Rocket Richard – this time, though, for all the wrong reasons.

Despite his advancing age, the Rocket was enjoying the best start of his distinguished career. Heading into that night’s game against the Leafs, the 36-year-old Canadiens captain found himself once more in hot pursuit of that long-elusive scoring title. In the first 13 games of the season, the Rocket led all scorers, with 11 goals and 12 assists for 23 points, highlighted a few weeks earlier when he had become the first player to hit the 500-goal mark in career goals.

On this particular night, however, there would be no celebration. On a seemingly innocuous play in front of the Leafs net, the Rocket found himself at the bottom of a pileup when Toronto’s Marc Reaume inadvertently stepped on Richard’s right foot, almost severing his Achilles tendon. It would be another three months before the Canadiens had the services of their captain, and even then many weren’t certain he would come back the same player.

A month later, Jean Béliveau suffered a rib injury that sidelined him for a month. According to the count of Toe Blake, it was the Canadiens’ sixth major injury of a season still not halfway completed.

And then, on the morning of January 28, 1958, another accident made all the other injuries pale in comparison. In a spirited practice, Boom Boom Geoffrion collided with a teammate and fell. Soon, Geoffrion was writhing around on the ice in extreme pain.

He was rushed across the street to the hospital, where doctors immediately diagnosed a ruptured bowel and performed two hours of emergency surgery. His outlook was so dismal that before the surgery, a priest was called in to administer the last rites.

Fortunately, the operation was a success. In the Montreal Star, Red Fisher reported on “the delicate, painful sewup job that probably will keep him from active competition for the remainder of the season. The doctors certainly wouldn’t want to risk him taking any more body checks this season with that kind of a delicate injury. Geoffrion’s injury is a tragic climax to what has been a catastrophic string of injuries to the Stanley Cup champions.”³

As if that wasn’t enough, a week later reports began to surface of a wrist injury suffered by Dickie Moore.

Under Blake’s tutelage, Moore had finally blossomed into the league’s leading scorer and was hoping to join his two fellow members of the Class of ’31 – Béliveau and Geoffrion – in winning an Art Ross Trophy for the most points in the league. X-rays hadn’t revealed a break in the wrist, and Moore had played on, but the pain refused to subside, and a week and a half later he was diagnosed as indeed having a fractured left wrist.

Facing the prospect of missing both the remainder of the season and the playoffs, Moore made the daring decision to play the rest of the year. Bill Head, the Canadiens’ physiotherapist, who was rapidly becoming the most valuable member of the team in a year dominated by injuries, constructed a cast that left Moore’s thumb free and allowed him to slide his plastered hand into a glove. In one of the most courageous displays in the annals of hockey, Moore finished the season, capturing the league’s scoring title with 84 points.

If there was one other constant to the Canadiens’ season besides the injuries, it was the team’s ability to keep winning despite the continued shuffling of players in and out of the lineup. Since his sinus and asthma troubles early in the season, Plante had been at his best, a fact that wasn’t going entirely unnoticed as the Canadiens held an insurmountable first-place lead – and as their goalie maintained an overwhelming lead in the race for the Vezina Trophy.

The maladies continued, and even Toe Blake wasn’t immune. On February 20, immediately after a game against the Bruins, he entered the hospital to have an unwanted item dislodged from his chest.

Reported the Montreal Star, “Blake was probably the happiest ingoing patient in the history of the medical profession after last night’s caper in which the remarkable ‘Rocket’ Richard returned to action after a three months layoff and promptly accounted for two of the Canadiens’ four goals in a 4–0 Montreal win.”⁴

Despite the plethora of injuries, the team continued to win at an astounding clip, clinching first place on February 27 in Toronto, almost a month before the season’s conclusion. It was a true test of the team’s mettle, one they were passing with flying colours, but one they would have to take again and again.

In a practice in Toronto on the morning of March 11, Plante took a wicked shot from Henri Richard and slumped to the ground in obvious pain as he gripped his left shoulder. Fortunately for the Canadiens, Plante had suffered no more than a seriously bruised shoulder.

Two nights later, the Canadiens found themselves in Boston, and Plante, despite his sore shoulder, took to the nets. The “game was savage in its conduct, shattering in its bodychecking and brutal in its high-sticking,” proclaimed the Montreal Star. “It was a game that teetered dangerously out of control on several occasions, and one that finally lost its final vestige of sanity or usefulness at 6:15 of the second period,” with the Canadiens leading 1–0.⁵

Vic Stasiuk of the Bruins had parked himself in the Montreal crease with his stick held high. In an effort to remove him, Canadiens defence-man Doug Harvey bumped into him. Stasiuk collapsed into Plante, whose skull struck the crossbar as Stasiuk’s stick ravaged his face. Plante would remember nothing of the collision.

“I was watching the puck in the corner of the rink and the next thing I knew I was on the ice and Hector” – Canadiens trainer Hector Dubois – “was pouring water into my mouth…. I blacked out for the first time in my life.”⁶

“He lay prone on the ice for several moments, and finally was removed from the site where a police ambulance rushed him to Carney Hospital …,” wrote Red Fisher the following day. “For a time last night when Plante was carried off the Boston Garden ice bleeding profusely and his head rolling from side to side as he fought off the blackness of insensibility there were grave fears that the National Hockey League champions would lose their goalie for a long period.”⁷ There were in fact fears that he’d suffered a spinal injury.

There still remained 34 minutes to play, and with Plante obviously unavailable, Blake and the Canadiens were forced by the rules of the day to replace him with a goalie provided by the Bruins.

Sitting beside his father was 26-year-old John Aiken, former goalie for Boston University, who had graduated three years before and had played only semi-professional hockey since. He hurried towards the Canadiens dressing room.

Earlier in the season in Toronto, the Canadiens had been able to weather Plante’s absence and defeated the Maple Leafs with loaned goaltender Len Broderick. They wouldn’t be as fortunate on this evening.

Over the next seven minutes and 19 seconds, four shots eluded an overmatched Aiken. By the end of the second period the Bruins were ahead 6–1 and the game was effectively over. When the final buzzer sounded 20 minutes later, the score read 7–3 in the Bruins’ favour.

Plante would spend the night in the hospital with a concussion, his injuries not as serious as initially feared. Not that he emerged completely unscathed: he had two nasty gashes on his face, one two inches in length, the other three inches. Plante would miss the next week’s schedule of games, and would once again be replaced by the more than capable Charlie Hodge.

Plante returned for the season’s last few games, winning his third consecutive Vezina Trophy, and he was firmly ensconced in the Montreal net as the Canadiens began their playoff quest for a third consecutive Stanley Cup championship.

Injuries had been the recurring theme of the season, with an astounding 32 different players being used. Yet in spite of all the turmoil the Canadiens still finished atop the standings, 19 points clear of their nearest competitor. In many ways the season represented a triumph for Frank Selke. He had built an organization so strong, with such a bounty of talented players, that despite the constant changeover, the inability to ice a consistent lineup, and serious injuries to each of his best players, the team didn’t miss a beat.

Boom Boom Geoffrion watched the Canadiens drop the final two games of the season from the sidelines, and over his wife’s objections, and those of his parents, he made the fateful decision to return to the ice.

The Canadiens’ opposition in the semifinal round that year was the Detroit Red Wings. It was their fourth playoff meeting in the past five years, and while some of the names were familiar – Howe, Sawchuk, Kelly, and Pronovost among them – this Red Wings team was merely a shadow of its former glory, as the Canadiens would conclusively prove in the first two games of the series, held at the Montreal Forum.

In the Canadiens’ 8–1 opening-game thrashing, Red Fisher wrote that “for Richard, it was a two-goal, two-assist night, and for Phil Goyette, a wondrous hat-trick, the first he has ever scored in National Hockey League play. And between them, along with goals by ‘Boom Boom’ Geoffrion, Jean Béliveau and Dickie Moore, they wrote the script for one of the easiest playoff victories in Canadiens history.”⁸

Lost amidst the offensive explosion was the play of Jacques Plante, who had allowed only one shot to cross the goal line while keeping the other 39 out of the net. In the second game, two more goals from the Rocket’s smouldering stick provided the margin of victory as the Canadiens took a two-game lead with a convincing 5–1 win.

Having been humiliated twice in Montreal, the Red Wings returned home a dispirited bunch. However, game three would be different. It would bring to mind the glorious playoff contests of a few years before. And once again, it would pit Jacques Plante and Terry Sawchuk in a personal battle for goaltending supremacy.

There Plante and Sawchuk stood, once again, on opposite ends at the Detroit Olympia. On one end stared the game’s greatest goaltender; while on the other end stared the former owner of the title.

Plante was the first to blink as a long shot from centre ice launched by Forbes Kennedy evaded his grasp. The 1–0 Detroit lead held into late in the second period, when the game was stopped for a long stretch after Plante was victimized by a Bob Bailey charge. A wobbly Plante left the ice, and fearing an extended wait the referees immediately ended the second period and tacked the remaining time into the third period. Suddenly, the direction of the game and the series were uncertain. But Plante returned, and in what was described as the “greatest goaltending display of the season,” held the charging Wings at bay until Dickie Moore tied the score minutes later.⁹

Plante and Sawchuk were now taking turns in a performance for the ages. The Red Wings had the better of the play in a scoreless third period but were unable to beat Plante. In the overtime, the Canadiens were turned away by Sawchuk on three breakaways.

It truly was “sudden death.” As soon as reserve forward André Pronovost’s first shot of the game, 12 minutes into the extra period, made its way past a heroic Sawchuk, the collective groan of a sellout Olympia crowd told the tale.

For the goalie, overtime rewards the one who is able to survive the longest, and celebrates his achievement, and on this night it rewarded Jacques Plante.

“Plante had been tremendous,” remarked the Montreal Star. “He had been unbeatable in a first period when the clawing Wings, fighting desperately to restore a measure of dignity to their name after 8–1 and 5–1 capitulations in Montreal, threw everything at him. Twelve times they tested this lean, almost unhealthy looking goalie, and 12 times he hardly betrayed a flicker of emotion with miraculous saves. Sawchuk was equally brilliant at the other end of the rink but with only six saves to handle.”¹⁰

Two nights later, Plante, after a scoreless first period, was bombarded by a 15-shot Red Wing attack in the second period that saw three goals go past him. Countering for the Canadiens with their lone goal had been Rocket Richard. The Red Wings entered the third period with what appeared to be a comfortable 3–1 lead over the Canadiens. However, if the Red Wings thought their third-period lead was safe, the Rocket was about to disabuse them of the notion.

The Red Wings made the mistake of taking a penalty two minutes into the period and thus unleashed the game’s most lethal power play. Parked at the side of the net, the Rocket made the score 3–2. Four and a half minutes later, the undisciplined Red Wings inexplicably took another penalty, and this time Dickie Moore made them pay, tying the game at three.

The next day’s Montreal Star told the remaining tale. “The crowd shrieked madly when Henri Richard stole the puck from defenseman Warren Godfrey and was stopped spectacularly by goalie Sawchuk a moment later, but there was still the ‘Rocket’ to be heard from. He stood about 20 feet in front of Sawchuk, making squishing sounds on the ice with his hockey stick while Moore and the ‘Pocket Rocket’ battled desperately in front of the net. Then it fell clear and after a split second of hesitation, the shoulders that have powered more shots into National Hockey League goals than any player in the history of the game jerked convulsively, and before Sawchuk could move, the puck had whistled over his left shoulder into the net.”¹¹

Ten minutes still remained in the game, but now playing with a lead, Plante was unbeatable, and the Canadiens swept the Red Wings out of the playoffs. The final tally from the four-game series saw the incredible Rocket score seven goals, while the entire Red Wings team managed only six.

For the second consecutive season the Canadiens would be facing off in the finals with the Boston Bruins. In the regular season, Montreal finished 27 points ahead of the Bruins in the standings, and the enmity between the two teams had only grown in its intensity. Part of this was because of the Bruins’ self-acknowledged ruggedness when playing the Canadiens. Realizing that they couldn’t compete with Montreal on a skill level, they tried to shift the focus of the play into the physical sphere.

The opening game featured an astounding 21 penalties. In the end the Canadiens beat the Bruins 2–1; it was surprising that each goal was not scored on a power play. The game also highlighted how important Doug Harvey was to the Montreal cause.

“Harvey, who came out of the game with a slight cut over the eye and two glaring sores on his lips, was the giant of the evening,” an impressed Red Fisher relayed to his readers. “He checked and blocked and placed himself unafraid in front of the Boston shots, and he did it without benefit of more than a token rest in each of the periods. He was clocked for 15 minutes and 34 seconds of action in the first period, 15 minutes and 44 seconds in the second, and altogether was on the ice more than 44 minutes during the energy-sapping game. It was a glorious hour for him, but he’s had them before.”¹²

A certain degree of shock greeted the Bruins’ victory in the second game. The shock wasn’t that Boston had equalled the series; the surprise was the ease of their 5–2 victory.

Returning for a home game, the Bruins found in the third game that their ability to put pucks behind Jacques Plante had been left back in Montreal, and with the Rocket punching in two goals, the Canadiens had all the offence they needed in a 3–0 whitewash. Plante, however, was not as sturdy in the fourth game, and the Bruins evened the series with a 3–1 win on home ice, setting up a crucial fifth game at the Montreal Forum.

The Toronto Star’s Red Burnett described the fifth game as “a hockey classic that rates with anything served up in Stanley Cup play. It was by far the best game of this set, replete with sparkling passing plays and scintillating individual efforts executed at a lightning pace.” For the first time in the finals, the Canadiens displayed “the prowess that characterized their march to an easy pennant and new team scoring record during the regular season. But despite this increased tempo, they were life and death to shade this amazing Boston club, chiefly because of the superb goaltending of Don Simmons. The Habs blasted 47 shots at him, compared to 40 leveled at Canadiens goalie Jacques Plante.”¹³

In addition to the sellout crowd at the Montreal Forum, millions of television viewers sat watching the game unfold in the comfort of their living rooms or at their local bar. As everyone anxiously waited for the overtime to commence, Hockey Night in Canada host Tom Foley asked his intermission guest, Frank Selke, the question on everybody’s mind: What did he think was going to happen? “Maurice Richard hasn’t done much tonight,” Selke confidently replied. “He usually comes through at a time like this. I think he’ll score the winning goal.”¹⁴

The astute Selke was correct. In the first three periods the Rocket had been unusually quiet, mustering only one shot on a seemingly unbeatable Simmons. Five and half minutes into the overtime period, however, he posted his second shot on Simmons. Game over.

“Henri won the face-off in our end and passed to Dickie Moore after carrying it out,” the Rocket told the assembled media after scoring his fourth game-winning goal of that spring’s playoffs. “Dickie gave it to me at the right time and I cut to the left. I was thinking of a pass, but when their whole team folded to the right after I gave a little deke, I just carried on and let go from about 35 feet.”¹⁵

It was a motivated group of Montreal Canadiens that took to the ice in Boston three nights later to try to end this toughest of Stanley Cup finals. And no player was more intent on winning the game and finishing the series that night than Jacques Plante. On the morning of the game he had suffered another asthma attack. In this season, in a year in which the Canadiens had overcome so many obstacles, their goalie would have to overcome his biggest challenge yet.

He had been unable to partake in his usual nap on the day of the game because of a persistent cough and shortness of breath. He walked around aimlessly, feeling as if he wasn’t really there.

On the afternoon of the game, Toe Blake took his team to a movie theatre, where they watched the World War II epic The Bridge on the River Kwai. It was a savvy move by the canny Blake to have his team watch a movie in which the twin themes of bravery and perseverance in the face of overwhelming circumstances played out.

No doubt inspired by the movie and desperately wanting to end the series, the Canadiens stormed out to a quick 2–0 lead before the game was even two minutes old. Montreal added two more goals in the second period to offset a late first-period goal by the Bruins. With three points, Boom Boom Geoffrion, near death only three months before, was sparking the Canadiens, who in between periods found themselves whistling the theme from The Bridge on the River Kwai.

With the temperature at 80 degrees on ice level, Plante’s problems became exacerbated. As the air grew stale, his breathing gradually became more shallow. The third period became a matter of survival for him, as the Canadiens clung to their lead, which shrank to a dangerously close score of 4–3 after two goals by the Bruins.

With only seven minutes standing between the Canadiens and a third consecutive Stanley Cup triumph, Plante began to seriously labour. He found himself gasping for air that wasn’t there. Standing up was starting to become difficult, and his ability to focus on the opposition was becoming steadily weaker. Somehow, he continued to block the shots of an increasingly desperate Bruins squad anxious to tie the game. He refused to give in. He reached inside himself and found the limits of his fortitude and he pushed past them.

With a little over a minute remaining, the frantic Bruins pulled Don Simmons in favour of an extra skater. Boston quickly attacked, but Doug Harvey stood up at his own blue line, intercepted a pass, and sped towards the vacated Bruins net. His first shot was blocked by a desperate dive from Larry Regan. Harvey then gathered up the rebound and sealed the game and the Stanley Cup.

An exhausted Jacques Plante collapsed into the arms of his teammates. He had gone to a place within himself he had never gone before. Carried off the ice by the team’s publicist, Camil DesRoches, and physiotherapist Bill Head, he broke down and sobbed in the dressing room, releasing all the stress and tension that he had been holding in.

“I’m glad it’s over,” Plante told the Toronto Star. “It was a tough series. Tonight it was very tough.”¹⁶

It had been the toughest of years for Jacques Plante and the Canadiens. And on that warm spring night in Boston they sat in a sweltering dressing room with the Stanley Cup, champions once again.