Don’t Stop: A Rangers’ fan shows his stuff at the Montreal Forum on Saturday, February 4, 1989, the night a famous former Hab by the name of Guy Lafleur returned to the fold in New York blue. Raucous ovations greeted Lafleur that night as he scored a pair of goals on Patrick Roy, though Montreal, in the end, won the game 7-5. (Image: Bernard Brault, Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)
Crowdsourcing: Fans throng the foyer of the Montreal Forum on a Saturday night, March 27, in 1965. The visiting Bostpon Bruins surpassed the Canadiens on this occasion, 6-2, with Tommy Williams scoring the winner for Boston. (Image: Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)
Have Stick, Will Travel: Hall-of-Fame centreman Nels Stewart was born in Montreal on this date, another Friday, in 1899. He was a Montreal Maroon in the 1920s, and a dominant one, leading the NHL in scoring in 1926, as his team surged to a Stanley Cup championship. He won the Hart Trophy that year, too, as league MVP, adding a second Hart to his quiver in 1930. After seven years in Montreal, his contract was sold in 1932 to the Boston Bruins, for whom he played in parts of four seasons, serving as team captain in 1934-35. He’s pictured here in ’34 among fans and friends at a Boston community hockey clinic. Nels Stewart finished out his NHL career with the New York Americans before calling it a career in 1940. (Image: Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection)
Here’s To Habs: The result was a good one on the night of Saturday, March 11, 1944, for these Montreal fans as their beloved Canadiens beat the visiting Detroit Red Wings at the Forum. The score was 4-3, with Elmer Lach scoring a pair, the winner included, with 25 seconds left in the game. Buddy O’Connor and Ray Getliffe added to the home team’s account as well. Syd Howe (with two) and Hal Jackson scored for Detroit, who had Connie Dion in net facing Montreal’s Bill Durnan at the far end. With the win, their tenth in a row, the high-flying Habs tied the NHL record for most points accumulated in a season, 77, set by the 1929-30 Boston Bruins. Five nights later they set a new mark with a 3-2 win over the Chicago Black Hawks. Canadiens went on to win the Stanley Cup that season, beating Chicago in four straight in the Finals. (Image: Fonds Conrad Poirier, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)
Eyes Left: The Montreal Canadiens got the better of the hometown Bruins on the night of Wednesday, December 15, 1948, beating Boston 4-2 on the strength of two goals by Norm Dussault and a solid outing from goaltender Bill Durnan. The 1948-49 season was the Bruins’ 25th in the NHL; this representation of the team’s attentive roster features (from left) Kenny Smith, Paul Ronty, Johnny Peirson, Ed Kryzanowski, Jimmy Peters, Woody Dumart, and Ed Harrison. Among the close-packed and many-hatted spectators, my favourite is the unapologetic cougher at lower right, just over Dumart’s shoulder. (Updated. Thanks to Fred Addis and Kevin Vautour for help in player identifications, and to Jeff Miclash for pinpointing the where and the when.)
Baz O’Meara from the Montreal Star was on location at the Chicago Stadium on that Tuesday night in late March of 1961 when the Montreal Canadiens barged in on the Chicago Black Hawks for the fourth game of their Stanley Cup semi-final. “The crowd tossed a lot of paper cups on the ice,” he wrote, “and they littered the surface with paper darts and pieces of torn programs. They love rough hockey and they reveled in the fight featuring Bonin and Vasko, but there were no fights in the stand as last year when it took four or five policemen and ushers to quell tow quarrelsome customers.”
That’s the scene here, viewed from on high: somewhere beneath that knot of irked players is the first-period fracas between Montreal winger Marcel Bonin and Chicago defenceman Moose Vasko. Identifiable Canadiens are (#14) Claude Provost and (#3) J.C. Tremblay and for Chicago (#10) Ron Murphy and, viewing from afar, goaltender (#1) Glenn Hall. Jacques Plante is another distant spectator.
After much punching, grappling, and (as the Star’s Red Fisher wrote) “some expert shoving,” referee Eddie Powers sanctioned Bonin with a five-minute fighting major and two 10-minute misconducts. Vasko got five for his fighting and just a single misconduct. Bonin’s additional misconduct was for grabbing Powers’ shirt. Each of the misconducts came with a $25 fine.
Montreal won the night, going on to a 5-2 win that tied the series at two games apiece. It was Chicago, though, who won the next two games to take the semi-final, and the Black Hawks would continue on to beat the Detroit Red Wings to take the Stanley Cup that year.
(Image: © Chicago Sun-Times Media, ST-17500275-E1, Chicago Sun-Times collection, Chicago History Museum)
The current-day Maple Leafs saw several team and individual streaks stopped last night when they lost 3-1 in New York to the Rangers, and you can find out about those elsewhere. In March of 1980, the Leafs were in the middle of a four-game losing slide when a fan shed his clothes, jumped the glass, and vaulted onto the ice near the end of a game against the St. Louis Blues. He kept his socks on, red ones, and brandished a sign: “Leafs are # 1.”
Maybe you recall the reality of the Leafs in the early ’80s: they weren’t. Sitting fourth out of five teams in the old Adams Division, the Leafs fell in the first round of the playoffs that year to the Minnesota North Stars.
A couple of Toronto policemen, Rene Lessard and John Pepper, chased the streaker down. According to one local account, Thomas Enright, 25, got a “semi-standing ovation” as he was taken away to be charged with indecent exposure. Down 3-1, the Leafs took heart and got a late goal from Darryl Sittler, thought that was as close as they came.
“I have never seen something like that before,” said the Blues’ Wayne Babych, who scored a pair of his team’s goals. “”You had to chuckle about it for a while after that and it was a bit distracting.”
“It was a great performance by that guy,” Maple Leaf Gardens president Harold Ballard said, adding that he was pleased to have an attraction in the building that he didn’t have to pay for. Enright’s naked ambition was front-page news in the Toronto Star next day.
A week later in Provincial Court, a fully dressed Enright pleaded his guilt. Judge Sydney Harris wasn’t having it, and dismissed the charge. “Naked in a public place, maybe, but not indecent exposure.”
“I just wanted to liven things up,” Enright told reporters afterwards. “It was just in fun. I’ll never do it again. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”
Born in Quebec City on a Monday of today’s date in 1881, Hall-of-Fame goalkeep Percy LeSueur won three Stanley Cup championships (in 1909, 1910, and 1911) with the original Ottawa Senators, for whom he also served as team captain and playing coach. He was a referee and a hockey commentator, too, in his time, as well as an innovator (designing an early hockey net) and an author (publishing, in 1909, How To Play Hockey). “Do not listen to remarks from the spectators,” he advised prospective netminders therein. “It is a habit, particularly at the general admission end of the rinks, to call all kinds of things at the goalkeeper and he cannot listen to them and keep his mind on the game. It requires very little extra will power to overcome this and it should certainly be practiced to the fullest extent.”
It was a Saturday night, February 4, 1989, when Guy Lafleur visited the Montreal Forum for the first time as a New York Ranger to take on the local Canadiens. Stephane Richer (below, right) opened the scoring for Montreal in the first period, beating Bob Froese in the New York net. Lafleur put a pair of his own past Patrick Roy in the second period, though it wasn’t enough: Montreal prevailed 7-5 on the night. Bill McCreary was the referee; that’s him on the chase in the background.
(Image: Bernard Brault, Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)
Class Time: Guy Lafleur signs autographs at Montreal’s École Victor-Rousselot in December of 1979. Earlier that week, Lafleur had scored his NHL-leading 22nd goal of the season against the Rangers in New York.
(Images: Pierre McCann, La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)
Din And Bear It: Duncan Macpherson’s “Hockey game in Chicago,” ink, wash, and textured card glued on board. (Image: © McCord Museum)
Famous for the din of their allegiance to their beloved Black Hawks, fans who used to frequent Chicago’s old Stadium also, occasionally, got the team into trouble.
In April of 1944, for instance, when Chicago was vying with the Montreal Canadiens for the Stanley Cup. With Canadiens having won the opening game of the finals at the Forum, they took their show on the road, riding a Maurice Richard hat trick to secure a 3-1 game-two win in Chicago.
It wasn’t pretty. “It was an unruly crowd that held up the game for almost a quarter of an hour after Richard scored his final goal in the third period,” the Montreal Gazette reported the next morning. “It heaved everything — papers, pennies, compacts, decks of cards, and vegetables — down on the ice to show its displeasure over Referee Bill Chadwick’s refusal to call a penalty against Elmer Lach. It blew automobile horns and beat tin pans that it brought with it into the big rink. There were 16,003 fans in the crowd and they made a lot of noise.”
One of the quieter members of the audience was baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, sitting in the good seats and thereby, in the line of line. “It’s an unusual contest at the Stadium when hockey fans do not shower the rink with pennies, paper, hats, fruit, and other objects that endanger the safety of contestants,” Arch Ward noted in his Chicago Tribune column. On this night, he continued, a chair came sailing out of the upper balcony, narrowly missing Landis, “who promptly decided there were more enjoyable ways of spending an evening than watching a hockey game.”
For his part, NHL President Red Dutton was not best pleased by Chicago’s game-two enthusiasm. His statement ahead of game three went like this:
In response to a telegraphic vote which I requested from the board of governors of the National Hockey League resulting from a 20-minute delay in the third period in the Stanley Cup game in Chicago on Thursday, while the ice was being cleared of debris thrown by fans, I have been empowered to forfeit any future game to the visiting club if a repetition of this kind occurs in any of the forthcoming games, and I definitely intend to exercise my authority.
Game three hit the ice on a Sunday of this date. Fans arriving at the Stadium was subjected to searches. The Gazette:
The big throng of 17,694 spectators were frisked for missiles on the way in, particularly those who had seats in the top gallery, and the following is an inventory of articles collected: coat-hangers, nuts, steel bolts, smoked fish, bags of rice, bags of flour, lemons, oranges, limes, boxes of soap flakes, rolls of toilet paper, megaphones, candy, peanuts, beer and pop bottles, large and small bells, playing cards, pieces of steel, cartons, pennies in 25c rolls, 1,000 paper scooters, and several folding chairs.
Paper scooters, anyone? Airplanes is my guess. The good news, for Red Dutton and lovers of public order:
The denuded onlookers had nothing left to throw and there was no debris hurled on the ice.
Montreal won that game 3-2, with Phil Watson notching the deciding goal. They wrapped up the series in Montreal four nights later with a 5-4 overtime win (Toe Blake scored the winner), sweeping up their first Stanley Cup since 1931.
None of this implicates the two cacophonous Black Hawk fans depicted here: there’s no evidence that Mrs. Georgia De Larne (top) or Irving Birnbaum (below) ever partook in any missile-launching. Seen here in Chicago Stadium’s upper balcony during a Black Hawks game in 1941, these two seem to have been more committed to making a racket than a bad example. A contemporary newspaper described Mrs. De Larne as “one of the many noisemakers present in the galley.”
(Artist: Wesley Irwin)
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