ALONE ON BROADWAY

AS MANY SETTLED IN to watch news of the trade on television, they were confronted on their screens by a grim-faced Jacques Plante outside the downtown hotel that housed that day’s pension meeting. “The Rangers are on their way up,” Plante boldly pronounced with the stinging news of the trade still achingly fresh, “and the Canadiens are on their way down.”1

The gauntlet had been thrown down, and so began a summer in which a bitter Plante waged a one-man war of words in the media, all of it aimed directly at his former employer, the Montreal Canadiens. The result was that he quickly became ostracized from the only team he had ever known, and the fans who had always supported him began to desert him in droves.

It was quite a different story in New York. In a city that offered the country’s finest entertainment district and largest and most competitive sporting scene, the hockey team seemed to always come out second best. New York in 1963 could boast of the dynastic Yankees and the woeful Mets in baseball, the championship Giants and the nascent Jets in football, as well as the Knicks in basketball. There were also numerous boxing and wrestling cards held every week at the Garden, horse racing out at Aqueduct, tennis at Forest Hills, and golf at Shinnecock. As a result the Rangers had to constantly battle for newspaper space. It was usually a losing battle, until that summer of 1963, when a noted French-Canadian goaltender entered the local sporting scene.

Hoping to capitalize on the excitement building throughout the city, the Rangers rushed Plante down to New York to sign a contract instead of waiting until the traditional September signing period.

“General manager Muzz Patrick greeted him at Madison Square and they sat behind closed doors,” wrote Andy O’Brien later. “They talked for quite a while; Plante reported his eyesight and reflexes were good, he had no weight problem, his golf handicap was down to six.”

As Plante and Patrick got acquainted, waiting outside the closed doors was an impatient throng of New York media, eager for the introduction of the newest Ranger star. Inside the room, Patrick quietly slid the contract across the table for Plante’s approval. Plante scanned the contract for the salary, and his eyes bugged out at the sight of the figure: $24,000 per year. It was far more than he was making in Montreal and equal to, if not more than, what anybody else in the league was making. Jacques didn’t hesitate to reach for the pen.

“It is the first time in Ranger history,” Patrick announced to the assembled media minutes later, “that the Rangers ever signed a player this early in the summer, but in Jacques’ case we figured we should be different. After all, he’s the best goalie in the business and he deserves the best.”

As soon as a member of the media ventured a question about Plante’s history of asthma, the newest Ranger took over. “I’ve still got it, always will,” Plante admitted, “but I don’t think I will have the same trouble here. In Montreal the winters are much more severe; besides I think a lot of my trouble was caused by the unnecessary pressure under which I had to play there.”

The New York Times asked him about the pressure of playing in Montreal. “I’m glad to leave Montreal for New York because things have changed up there. The fans and the management have gotten so used to winning they put the pressure on you. You don’t mind the pressure when you have the players to handle it. At one time last year I was thinking of quitting but Jacqueline wouldn’t let me. ‘You can’t quit,’ she told me, ‘the boys need you.’”

The New York News asked him to expand on his earlier comment about the Canadiens being on the downswing and the Rangers on the upswing. Plante gladly obliged. “Canadiens have only four good scorers left: Boom Boom Geoffrion, Jean Béliveau, Henri Richard and Gilles Tremblay. The Boomer doesn’t shoot as hard as he used to. Béliveau has been sick. Henri loses too many scoring chances trying to pull the goalies and Tremblay always shoots off the wrong foot.”2

He said the Canadiens had weakened themselves in goal by replacing him with Worsley. He railed that the Habs were on an excessive “youth kick” and that many of Montreal’s newest recruits were at best unproven and at worst not up to the task.

And when the reporters asked what the trade meant in the standings, a confident Plante replied: “This means that the Rangers make the playoffs and Montreal finishes fifth.”3

It was a tirade built out of spite and loaded with malice. It isn’t clear whether Plante was convinced of his own words or whether this was merely the bluster of a disheartened man.

For Emile Francis, then the Rangers’ assistant general manager, Plante’s tirade was unforgettable. “I’ll never forget that first press conference,” says Francis today. “He started talking about the Montreal Canadiens. I’m sitting there saying to myself, would you keep quiet, what are you doing? The Canadiens never forgot that. It was like committing suicide.”4

The New York newsmen couldn’t write down Plante’s harsh critique fast enough. His words were a reporter’s dream and a boon for newspaper sales. In Montreal, his increasingly estranged teammates took in every word, every description of their abilities and lack thereof, and circled October 12 on their calendar, the date when they would face the Rangers and their alienated former goaltender.

Behind the scenes, however, there were more important considerations at work. It was decided by Plante and his wife that he would go alone to New York, leaving his wife and two sons behind in Quebec. For the first time he would be separated from his wife and family. In time, it would prove to be a tremendous strain for all.

As training camp approached in New York, the Rangers went out of their way to accommodate their newest acquisition, adopting what the newspapers called a “Be Kind to Plante” movement. Reporters asked general manager Muzz Patrick how the Rangers would deal with Plante’s infamous asthma attacks that always seemed to plague him in Toronto, and most specifically at the Royal York Hotel. Patrick informed the newsmen that Plante wouldn’t have to go near the Royal York, and would be excused from any pre-game meeting or meal that would be held there. “If he wishes,” Patrick added, “we’ll book a flight that lands at Toronto International Airport two hours before face-off time. In that way he’ll arrive at Maple Leaf Gardens full of vim and oxygen.”5 Plante’s new coach, Red Sullivan, took the special treatment even further, announcing that Plante was exempt from practising with the team if he felt tired.

“He just about drove our trainer and equipment guy crazy in New York,” remembers Emile Francis. “He had 42 pieces of equipment. He just kept coming up with all this stuff. I think you could have hit him with a bullet and not hurt him. He had pieces of equipment for inside his knee and outside his knee. You name it, he had a piece of equipment for it.”6

Jacques was in heaven. The high salary, the perks, the special concessions – he viewed them all as his due after a decade in professional hockey. “I would have liked to finish my career in Montreal,” Plante admitted to Red Fisher, “but if I had to change, I’m glad it’s New York. I couldn’t be happier with my contract. I like the team and we’re on the way up.”7

Plante’s new team shared his enthusiasm. “In all my years as a member of the Rangers, I’ve never seen anything to match the spirit on this year’s club,” proclaimed Muzz Patrick. “The reason? Plante. He’s working hard. He’s yelling at the forwards and the defensemen. He’s doing everything we expected of him.”8

Plante’s tenure with his new team officially began on October 9, 1963, in Chicago against the Black Hawks. It was an inauspicious debut. Plante was peppered with 43 shots, and the game was held up for 20 minutes in the third period so that he could receive seven stitches to close up a wound to the top of his head. In what would become an all too familiar pattern, Plante would allow only three goals, yet the Rangers would score only one in the 3–1 setback.

Of course, this was merely a prelude to the much-anticipated game two nights later in Montreal, where Plante would square off against his old teammates, many of whom had been relishing for months the opportunity to face their old goalie.

“Let them come,” Plante proclaimed from the front of the sports pages the day of the game. “I’ve been waiting for them too and I feel I’m in the best shape in some years right now. I look at their lineup, and too many of the big names are missing. As for our team we’ve got good spirit…. We have enough talent to handle the Canadiens.”9

If there had been one player who had taken the most offence to Plante’s public lambasting of the Canadiens and their players, it was Boom Boom Geoffrion, a man who according to Plante had lost some power off his famed slapshot.

“It happens to all of us sooner or later,” Plante reiterated on the eve of the game, fanning the flames, “but I expect him to try his hardest against us. He’ll probably shoot harder than he has in some time, but I’ll be waiting for him.”10

The Canadiens rewarded Plante for his bravado with a barrage of 59 shots in a 6–2 drubbing by the Canadiens.

“The fifty-nine shot output was a new high for the club at least in recent memory,” wrote Red Fisher. “Along the way Plante had to be spectacular to keep the count from mounting into the double figures in a game that saw the Habs score twice in the first, once in the second period, and then put the game beyond reach with a three-goal outburst in the final period.”11

“We were delighted to beat him,” Jean Béliveau told the Hockey News, “especially after some of the statements he made last summer.”12

Of all the shots that blitzed the besieged Plante, none were harder than the one that came off the stick of the Boomer.

“The first time we met I got hold of the puck close to the crease and put everything I had behind the shot,” Geoffrion remembered. “Plante still hasn’t seen the puck. It went like a bullet right between his legs and into the net. But I wasn’t through with him. As soon as the red light went on I skated up to the crease and gave him a little dig: ‘Hey Jacques, if my shot is so weak how come you can’t see it anymore?’”13

As Jacques slowly peeled off his sweat-soaked uniform in the unfamiliar confines of the visitors dressing room at the Forum, many newsmen pressed in to see what they had thought would be a humbled goalie. Instead they were confronted by a still defiant man, beaten but unbowed.

“In ten years with the Canadiens, I never saw them better,” he admitted. “Henri Richard told the boys at the All-Star game that they had to beat me tonight or they’d be all sent to Siberia. They won’t be that good again.”14

That same night he said, “I am not saying any more about Montreal. All I did was get them mad at me.”15 It had been a painful lesson.

In his first two games as a Ranger, Plante had been blitzed with 102 shots and allowed nine goals. Yet the results on the road did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm that greeted him on his home debut with the Blueshirts on the night of October 16, 1963. It was the largest opening-night crowd to attend Madison Square Garden in 16 long years. Although there was overwhelming support for Plante, there were still a few lingering doubts. Hanging from the rafters was a large banner that read, “Bring Back the Gump.” But by the time the second period came to an end, the banner had vanished. Plante exceeded all the hopes of the Rangers fans with a 34-save shutout over the Red Wings.

As the final buzzer sounded, his new teammates rushed out on the ice to surround an overcome Plante, who ripped off his mask and jumped for joy at the fifty-seventh shutout of his illustrious career and first victory as a Ranger. Plante was named the game’s first star, and the photographers begged him to repeat his victory leap. Plante happily complied as the crowd granted him an unprecedented standing ovation.

“Veteran hockey observers couldn’t recall the last time the Garden rattled with applause for an athlete as it did the night Plante skated from the ice after shutting out the Detroit Red Wings 3–0,” reported the Hockey News on its front page. “It was the greatest ovation ever given a hockey player.”16

“I had to play well tonight,” Plante told a crowded room of reporters after the game, “if only to make those guys in the balcony take down the sign.”17

Plante’s first win as a Ranger may have been the high point of his two-year stay in New York. Struggling with inconsistency, the Rangers split their first eight games, then lost seven straight, went undefeated in the next four, before going winless in their next nine to fall out of the playoff chase.

As New York floundered in the standings, the bloom soon fell off the rose for Plante and the Rangers. Plante’s early euphoria was replaced with the hard reality of a lonely life in an unfamiliar town. Perhaps expectations were too high for Plante. While still a great goaltender, he was apparently not the saviour the team had believed him to be.

And it didn’t help when his asthma flared up at the end of October.

“One afternoon in Montreal I went for a short walk,” Plante recalled. “We were staying in the Mount Royal Hotel. I got as far as the corner of Peel and St. Catherine Streets – barely 100 yards away – when I was seized by an attack. It was so bad that I couldn’t make it back to my hotel room for my spray and had to go into the drugstore at the corner for help.”18

And as the losses mounted, so did the schism between Plante and the Rangers, and in particular their head coach, Red Sullivan.

One night on a road trip, Plante was woken by the sound of his phone ringing. He found his coach on the other end of the line executing a curfew call.

“I was really mad,” Plante said later. “I told him ‘I have been in bed since nine o’clock and had just fallen asleep. Now I might be awake until three or four in the morning.’ I told him never to do any phone checking on me again. He didn’t.”19

Plante later admitted that he never could talk with his hard-nosed coach, especially when his left knee began to bother him. (His cartilage operation a couple of years before had been on his right knee.)

He also was coming to the realization that what he had left behind in Montreal could never be replicated in New York. “I had gone from a winner to a loser. You’d have to get a doctor of psychology to explain it but once a team gets that loser feeling, it takes a lot of inspirational work by management and an on-ice leader or two to shake them out of it. With the Canadiens, winning was a built-in complex and still is.”20

“It was difficult playing for the Rangers at the time,” remembers a sombre Andy Bathgate today. “We were just a fill-in for Madison Square Garden – we were not the number one priority. Plus, the ownership was changing all the time.”21

“The management wasn’t dedicated to winning,” says long-time Ranger Earl Ingarfield Sr. “They cared more about making money. I don’t think they appreciated the players very much.”22

Plante found out first-hand about the intentions of the Rangers ownership when he suggested that the team was defending the wrong end of the ice for two periods of every game at home. Because of the unique configuration of Madison Square Garden, the home team found their bench away from the net for the first and third periods, unlike in all the other rinks in the league. Plante believed – and justifiably so – that it made more sense for New York to defend the net closest to its bench for two periods so that the goalie could get to the bench quicker on a delayed penalty. After all, this was the way it was in the other five NHL ranks.

But the Rangers never acquiesced to Plante’s logic, because season-ticket holders had always picked their seats based on two periods of action. Rather than adjusting the seat holders, the Rangers maintained the status quo, which Plante felt was a detriment to the team.

Plante accepted the Rangers’ decision grudgingly, but made it clear that because of the distance, he couldn’t be expected to come sprinting off the ice whenever a delayed penalty was whistled.

“In Montreal and Toronto the rink was their own,” recalls Dick Duff. “If you were a player and you were injured and you needed to do a little skating on your own you would be given time at the Gardens or the Forum to work out alone on the ice. In New York, you didn’t have that luxury. You had to practise in a little tiny ice surface a few floors up that had aluminum boards. We were spoiled in Montreal and Toronto, where as opposed to New York hockey was given a higher priority.”23

Such was the heavy schedule of events at Madison Square Garden that the team was sometimes forced to practise out in Long Island. “In the 12 years that I played for the Rangers I never once practised on the Madison Square Garden ice,” remembers Bathgate. “Every game you went out there was a new experience. It was the worst ice in the league at the time.”24

As he settled in as a Ranger, Plante’s reputation as a loner grew. He had decided to live out in Long Island with some of his teammates but tended to keep to himself. He didn’t partake in the New York nightlife and remained distant from many of his new teammates.

“All the Montreal fellows lived in New Jersey,” recalls Bathgate. “That was one of the problems in New York: we were all so spread out. You don’t have that closeness that other teams do. It would be too expensive to live in the city, so everybody was spread out. I don’t think Plante enjoyed it in New York. His wife stayed behind in Montreal and his heart wasn’t in it.”25

As the year wore on, Plante found himself buckling under the strain of an increased workload every night. Night after night he faced more shots than he ever had in his career. Undoubtedly, the fact that the Rangers were fading from the playoff race while his former team in Montreal was romping to a first-place finish exacerbated the strain.

“He played a lot better in Montreal than he did in New York,” remembers Ranger teammate Harry Howell, “but we didn’t have the same team as the Canadiens. Instead of getting 20 shots a night in Montreal he was getting 40 in New York. It had to be quite a shock to him.”26

In his first year with the Rangers, Plante faced an average of 38 shots against him every game, the league’s most, and a full 10 shots more a game than he had faced as a Canadien the year before. Averaged over the whole season, it was an increase of 700 shots over the 1963–64 season.

In a season marked by disappointment and dashed expectations for the Rangers, there were isolated moments, however, where Plante still demonstrated his greatness.

No team had tormented Plante more that year than the Canadiens, who had beaten the Rangers in nine of their 11 confrontations and outscored them by a cumulative total of 51 to 27. Heading into a weekend home-and-home series beginning in Montreal on March 7 and culminating in New York on March 8, Plante was still searching for his first win in Montreal as a Ranger after five unsuccessful tries. The Canadiens and Rangers were two squads travelling in opposite directions. Much to the chagrin of Plante’s earlier predictions, Montreal was fighting for first place, while the Rangers were staring on the outside of the playoff race yet again.

Such was the deteriorating status of Plante’s relationship with his coach that when Plante told Red Sullivan on the morning of the game that he was suffering from a 102-degree fever, he was brusquely told, “I don’t care if it’s 105, you’re playing.”27

That night Plante stopped 38 of the 40 shots fired in his direction, as he led the Rangers to their first win of the year in Montreal, 3–2. Plante’s opposition in the net, Charlie Hodge, faced only 19 shots, in what should have been a Habs rout. The next night in New York, Plante stopped all 33 Montreal shots as he and Hodge duelled to a scoreless tie.

“Jacques Plante is not only the National League’s most colourful goalkeeper but now he has to be ranked as its most courageous as well,” announced the Hockey News on its front page, pronouncing Plante “one of the few bright lights in a dismal Ranger hockey season.”28

It was a sweet moment of vindication for Plante, albeit a fleeting one. The Canadiens went on to finish in first place; Charlie Hodge, long Plante’s understudy, won the Vezina Trophy. And for the first time in his illustrious career, Jacques Plante found himself a spectator when the playoffs opened, watching the playoffs from the Forum press box.

As the playoffs progressed, the TV producers scoured the arena for guest analysts. In years past it had become common for superstar players on the sidelines to step into the studio and offer their analysis of the game.

In the playoffs of 1964, Jacques Plante didn’t need to be asked twice for his opinion, and typical of Plante, even when he wasn’t playing, he found a way to gain the spotlight.

Soon, Plante was in the unusual position of being praised not in the sports pages but instead in the entertainment section, as TV reporters applauded his every utterance.

“Jacques Plante should be on every hockey playoff intermission,” raved Frank Moritsugu in the Toronto Star. “Last night he turned up for the second time in this round, and gave the between-period break a refreshing lift. The New York Ranger goalie is not only an articulate and thoughtful commentator, but he has more on-screen charisma and ease than the TV regulars surrounding him. Plante saved the two intermissions, which badly needed him, not having much videotape recaps to unspool. And after the game his explicit reasoning for his three star choices was the best example of conscientious consideration for the fan I have yet heard from a chooser. Ranger loyalists will froth at the thought, but it’s my hope that New York doesn’t make the playoffs next year either. Then we mistreated viewers could have Plante as a TV commentator as soon as the season ends.”29

“Two minutes with Plante and he would point out three things in the game that the casual observer wouldn’t have noticed,” remembers Frank Orr. “You go to Jacques for two minutes and you’d have your story.”30

Jacques Plante returned to Quebec that summer after his first year in New York a tired and disillusioned man. In contrast to the off-season before, the summer of 1964 was a quiet one for him. The fickle media had moved on to the next story. Jacques Plante in New York was simply not the newsmaker he had been the year before.

For his wife, Jacqueline, who cherished her privacy, it was a welcome relief, but for Plante, a man who yearned to be in the spotlight, the absence of cameras and newsmen was a little disheartening.

But it wasn’t long before he found himself back in the news when he signed up for the new four-team lacrosse league financed by some Quebec sportsmen. Plante starred for the Montreal Nationals, in a uniform strikingly similar to the Canadiens jersey he had once worn so proudly.

Playing lacrosse that summer, Plante rediscovered his love of competition, but when he rejoined the Rangers that fall, his renewed love was sorely tested. Some in the media questioned why he would go back to the Rangers at all. He was the most decorated goaltender in league history, and at 35 surely there was nothing left to prove. Many speculated that the money must have been too good to pass up. But for Plante, the motivation was a feeling of unfinished business.

“It wasn’t the money, believe me,” Plante said, “but because of something it may be hard for you to understand. I have always been win-crazy…. So, with that mentality, I just couldn’t go out on a dismal note. I wasn’t a starry-eyed rookie anymore. I knew the harsh side of pro hockey only too well. But I loved the game, loved its endless challenge and high excitement. One more big season – just one more, pray God, and I could say farewell to the Rangers and the New York fans with a feeling of all debts squared.”31

For those watching in the pre-season, it quickly became apparent that something was wrong. Plante claimed for all to hear that his left knee was in constant pain, but in a replay of what had happened in Montreal years before, his complaints went unheeded. The Rangers decided to send him down to Baltimore of the American Hockey League to “work himself into shape” on the eve of the season’s beginning.32 The truth was that New York’s newly installed general manager, Emile Francis, had seen enough.

Francis, put in charge with the directive to rebuild the Rangers, had come to the conclusion that the future of the team did not include Jacques Plante. It had only been a year since Plante had joined the Rangers to much fanfare, and so Francis kept his cards close to his vest. Despite his own doubts about Plante, Francis realized that he was still an asset, one that at the end of the season he would be able to cash in.

“I sent him down to Baltimore to give somebody else an opportunity,” Francis recalls today. “I wanted to see what I had…. I could see in building that team up that the goaltending wasn’t going to be good enough. Plante wasn’t the type of a goalkeeper that you’d want to build a team around. Plante had been on a winning team and he sure as hell didn’t want to be on a losing team. He was a loner, he didn’t mingle with the players. He was never going to be the type of goalkeeper that the players were going to work their ass off for. As a former goaltender I could pick that up right away.”33

Plante accepted his demotion, although according to various media reporters he didn’t do it quietly. Upon his arrival in Baltimore, there were reports that he called the Rangers “a cheap organization” and said he would never play for Red Sullivan again.34

Such was the extent of the firestorm that erupted that Plante was taken back to New York and dragged in front of the media, where he publicly denied the quotes attributed to him. For Emile Francis, it served to confirm his earlier decision. After this latest act of contrition, Plante was sent back to Baltimore, where he donned the jersey of the Baltimore Clippers, all the while believing that he would soon be called back to the Rangers.

Baltimore in the mid-sixties was unquestionably a football town, where the Colts, led by Johnny Unitas, were firmly established as a civic institution. Hockey was more of a curiosity, and in Plante the team now had a spectacle for the public to come out and see.

“Having Jacques Plante in the lineup is like taking unfair advantage,” wrote John Steadman in the Baltimore Sun. “The other team ought to be gifted with a courtesy goal to keep from getting discouraged. The Baltimore Clippers have Plante guarding their net and he really has no professional business being in the American League. He’s much too good.”35

On October 10, Plante made his debut as a Clipper in front of a crowd of 4,704 at the Baltimore Civic Center in a 3–3 tie. It had been a decade since he last suited up in the AHL, as a Buffalo Bison, and had played his last game against the Cleveland Barons. Now, after a decade distinguished by his goaltending excellence and innovation, he played his first game back against the same Cleveland Barons.

Plante soon discovered that the American Hockey League of 1964 was made up primarily of former NHL players as well as young prospects on the way up. Just one level before the NHL, the quality of competition was extremely high. On October 20 he squared off against the Rochester Americans, led by a young up-and-coming goalie named Gerry Cheevers. Five and a half years later, Cheevers and Plante would face each other in game one of the Stanley Cup finals.

“He was one of the best goalies to ever play the game,” Cheevers recalls today. “He played his angles so well, but above all, when I think of him, I think of a winner, and ultimately that’s what it’s all about.”36

Four nights later, Plante faced off against another future Hall of Fame goaltender, Ed Giacomin. However, this was merely the prelude to Plante’s return to his home province for a showdown with the Quebec Aces.

This game was easily Plante’s most noteworthy as a Clipper and attracted a tremendous amount of media attention as well as a season’s record crowd of 11,852. The Aces came into the game undefeated. Many of the faces on the Quebec roster were familiar to Plante. Coached by his former teammate Boom Boom Geoffrion, who was in his first year as a coach, and anchored on defence by his former partner in defensive dominance, Doug Harvey, the Aces also featured Plante’s oldest goaltending adversary, Gump Worsley, in the nets.

Since the Plante–Worsley trade a year and a half earlier, Gump had found himself struggling to stay in the Canadiens’ plans. Outshone by Charlie Hodge, Worsley, like Plante, was stuck toiling in the AHL. Now the Gumper and Plante crossed paths once again.

The record crowd that night didn’t go home disappointed, as Plante rose to the occasion. “Plante gave a superb exhibition of goaltending, but lost a 3–2 overtime decision,” wrote the Baltimore Sun the next day. “After being beaten at 1:25 of the first period, he booted out every conceivable type of shot up to the very final second of regulation time, when Léon Rochefort scored on a rebound to tie the score at 2–2 and send the game into overtime. Then with 44 seconds remaining in overtime, Ed Hoekstra scored the winning goal, to ruin a fine display by Plante…. It was one of the most exciting games played here in years, with Ace’s sensational finish setting the fans into a state bordering on delirium.”37

Plante was revitalized in Baltimore. He rediscovered his love of the game, and away from the withering spotlight of the New York Rangers and the NHL, he began to shine.

However, the Rangers soon came calling, and in this case it was an emergency request for him to come to Toronto to face the Leafs on November 7 for one game only. Marcel Paille, his replacement as the Rangers goalie, had suffered a twisted ankle, and Plante was suddenly thrust into the New York goal before a national television audience on Hockey Night in Canada. And with his usual flourish and impeccable timing, he proceeded to shut out the Leafs 1–0. “First star – Jacques Plante!” the public address system blared.

“I brought him up from Baltimore – you should have seen the exhibition he put on in Toronto,” Emile Francis remembers today. “He really didn’t want to go back down to the minor leagues.”38

“Did it practically on one leg,” Plante later told the Toronto reporters. “My right knee is so bad it needs surgery. I’m trying to convince the doctor. I had the left knee done a few years ago.”39

Plante’s single-game elevation to the Rangers roster was quickly extended into a 32-game stay, during which he shared goaltending duties with Paille.

Despite his best efforts, though, the Rangers were once again on the outside looking in, and the Rangers decided to send Plante back to the AHL. This time he went down to Baltimore without complaint and actually seemed to appreciate the demotion. “The Rangers have been good to me and this doesn’t affect the salary in my contract. Besides I like Baltimore and want to see the Clippers win the championship.”40 He happily rejoined the Clippers at the beginning of March, despite increasing pain in his knee.

Plante quickly made his mark in Baltimore, proceeding to win his first five games as the Clippers readied for the Calder Cup playoffs and a best-of-five series against Hershey.

“He had a bad knee in the playoffs against the Hershey Bears, and would get a needle before each game in the side of the knee,” remembers teammate Bryan Hextall. “I could hardly watch as it was a big needle.”41

Plante may have been playing in pain, but his performance didn’t betray any signs of discomfort. “The Masked Marvel turned back 31 shots during the long evening, with many of his saves near spectacular,” raved the Baltimore Sun the day after the Clippers’ overtime win in the series’ opening game. “His wandering out of the net also served to upset the Bears who had intentions of bearing down on the Baltimore goal, only to be confronted by some unorthodox tactics on Plante’s part, tactics which proved beneficial in the long run.”42

Plante was even better in the series’ second game. “The master was at work last night at the Civic Center,” wrote Albert Fisher of the Baltimore Sun. “Master, Masked Marvel, Jake the Snake, call him what you will, but goalie Jacques Plante put on one of the greatest exhibitions of goaltending ever seen in the Civic Center and the Clippers, with 9,621 fans looking on, whitewashed the Hershey Bears, 2 to 0, to take a 2–0 edge in the Eastern Division quarter-finals of the Calder Cup playoffs. Plante turned back 26 shots and again confounded the Bears with his incessant wanderings. He protected the shutout in the final 15 seconds, going behind the goal to rag the puck before finally passing out to a team-mate in the last five seconds.”43

Far away from the NHL, Jacques Plante was once again proving the doubters wrong with his stellar play. Throughout his career he had showcased his ability to elevate his game when the most was on the line. Now in Baltimore, he was weaving his special brand of magic again.

And while Hershey would go on to win the next three games and eventually the series, Plante had proven that he was still a big-league goaltender. Now, as teams in the NHL began adopting a two-goalie system, which he had been advocating for years, Plante saw an opportunity to extend his distinguished career.

By sharing the load with another goaltender, Plante would be able to play a reduced schedule that would in turn reduce the wear and tear associated with playing every game, night after night.

With the end of his season in Baltimore, he made plans to have surgery on his injured right knee as well as a sore right hand, painful from years of catching the puck. He even predicted in the Toronto Star that these two surgeries, in addition to the two-goalie system, would allow him to play goal for another decade.

Plante’s future with the Rangers was further cemented on May 17, when the Blueshirts traded Marcel Paille along with three other players to Providence of the AHL in exchange for Eddie Giacomin. It was assumed that Giacomin would share the goaltending duties for the next season with the resurgent Plante.

All that changed, however, upon Plante’s return to his home in Laval-des-Rapides.