This Day in Hockey History (Goalie Plante Becomes NHL’s 1st Masked Marvel)

Nov. 1, 1959—So badly cut up by a shot on goal that time needed to be called so the ice rink at Madison Square Garden could be cleansed of his blood, Jacques Plante re-entered the game with a piece of equipment he’d only used so far in practice: a goalie mask.

But braving onlookers’ gasps and stares (including that of coach Toe Blake), the goaltender stopped 29 of 30 shots, leading the Montreal Canadiens to a 3-1 victory over the New York Rangers—and becoming the first National Hockey League goalie to wear a mask on a regular basis.

It’s too bad that hockey isn’t as much of an obsession in the United States as it is in Canada or elsewhere in the world: otherwise, someone would have dramatized this key moment in sports history. Plante’s innovation might not have happened at all, or been copied by others, except that athletes were willing to defy the macho conventions of the time to promote greater player safety.

Plante’s move came after a backhanded blast from Rangers right wing Andy Bathgate landed beneath his nose in the first few minutes of the game. With blood spurting from his lip and nose, Plante was helped off the ice and into the dressing room, where seven stitches were applied to close the wound.

With stars like Bathgate, Bobby Hull, and Tim Horton shooting the puck from only five to 10 feet away, goalies were accustomed to hearing coaches say, “Use your head”—i.e., block the shot with that.

By the time of the Rangers game, Plante had endured more than his share of injuries to the head: more than 200 stitches to his face, a broken nose (four times), and a fractured cheek and jawbone.

Deciding that something had to change, he reached for a mask molded to his facial contours in the offseason by a fiberglass salesman named Bill Birchmore. It featured a rubber lining around the forehead, held in place by elastic straps that attached to the top and to either side of the mask.

Blake had tolerated Plante wearing the mask in practice, but like other coaches of the time, he saw no use for it in a game. It would limit the goalie’s peripheral vision, he believed, and worse than that, it was simply cowardly. He told Plante not to wear it.

The goalie stood his ground: He would not go back on the ice without it—and, since backup goalies were still not common then, Blake had to accede, however reluctantly, to his demand.

After facing down the Rangers, the Canadiens went on a 10-0-1 tear with the masked Plante. As if proving the goalie’s claim for the effectiveness of his new safety equipment, the streak ended only when he temporarily gave in to Blake’s request that he do without the mask.

Plante would play the remaining two-thirds of his Hockey Hall of Fame career with the mask, winning three of his seven Vezina Trophies as the best goalie in the NHL during this period. The next goalie to wear a mask, Don Simmons of the Boston Bruins, did so six weeks later, and, together with Plante, would constitute the first masked goalies to face each other a month after that.

The next goalie of consequence to follow their lead, Terry Sawchuk, used a mask described by author Bruce McDougall as “a bedpan with eyeholes.” But it worked.

The last game featuring a goalie without a mask, Andy Brown, took place on Dec. 31, 1974.

Quote of the Day (Russell Banks, on Boyhood Hockey’s Enduring Emotional Significance)

“[F]or a child raised in the northeastern United States and southern Canadian provinces, hockey and ice skating in general are of surprising emotional significance, combining as they do, so early and for so long, social and private experience. Also, they provide an arena in which other people and an intense physical environment are positioned precisely to confront one's young and relatively untested, unknown body. As evidence of the staying power the experience holds, this past winter I've walked down to the pond in the meadow in front of my house perhaps as many as eight or nine times, where, lacing on my skates, pushing off, gliding in slow, rhythmic ovals around the pond, alone and out of sight of the house, my mind backtracks in time, until, before I am aware of it, my physical responses (to the glassy smoothness of the ice, a slight pinch of the toe in the left skate, ears, nose, and chin crystallizing in the breeze caused by my body's  swift movement through still, cold air). and the loose flow of my fantasies (of suddenly breaking free of a tie-up at the boards, he's got the puck, he's going all the way in, the goaltender's ready for him…and whap! a slapper, and the goaltender goes down to his right for the puck, too late, and HE SCORES! glides humbly, suddenly relaxed, past the net, shakes loose clumps of ice shavings from his skate blades, moves like a gentle bear down the ice toward his own goal and his jubilant teammates…), at times like that, when I'm skating alone, my physical responses and my fantasies are coming straight out of childhood.”—American fiction writer Russell Banks, “Defenseman,” in The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (2000)

Photo of the Day: Its (Stanley) Cup Runneth Over

Well, not quite—but it will if, for many New York area fans such as myself, the New York Rangers win the championship of the National Hockey League for the first time since the electrifying 1994 playoffs.

I took the image accompanying this post, by the way, late last week in New York’s Times Square, where a promotion involving the Stanley Cup was being held.

This Day in Sports History (Hobey Baker, Beau Ideal of Athletes and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Killed in Accident)

December 21, 1918—Hobey Baker, a legendary collegiate football and hockey star of the early 20th century who was celebrated for his personal and athletic grace by F. Scott Fitzgerald and other writers, died test-flying a plane in France, on the same day that he received orders to return home from his WWI squadron.

Faithful reader, I must confess: If a month, even a fortnight, elapses without my mentioning Fitzgerald, I fear that something is…missing…in this blog. Baker figured at most tangentially in the life of the great writer, but he loomed with extraordinary power in his imagination. Indeed, nobody who saw this athlete-pilot could ever forget his natural charisma.

How strongly did Baker figure in Fitzgerald’s consciousness? Well, consider this: Fitzgerald paid tribute to Baker not in one, but two characters in his first novel, This Side of Paradise. The surname of the protagonist of this academic bildungsroman, Amory Blaine, derives from Baker’s full name: Hobart Amory Hare Baker.

Fitzgerald depicted him in even greater detail as a character named Allenby, “the football captain, slim and defiant, as if aware that this year the hopes of the college rested on him, that his hundred-and-sixty pounds were expected to dodge to victory through the heavy blue and crimson lines."

Football obsessed Fitzgerald. He preserved a ticket stub from the 1911 Yale-Princeton game in his scrapbook; he tried out for the Princeton squad as a freshman but was cut within a week; and in the midcareer short story, “Basil and Cleopatra,” his male fictional alter ego stars in the Yale-Princeton game. It’s not surprising that he would so admire Baker, any more than that he would feel the same toward Irving Thalberg, the Hollywood studio head who inspired his last unfinished work, The Last Tycoon.

Fitzgerald and Baker lived in probably the first American generation that could view football as something other than a crunching death sport. (College football had enacted new rules in 1906, after President Theodore Roosevelt had invited representatives of the three most important school powers at the time—Harvard, Yale and Princeton—and jawboned them into eliminating much of the foul play and brutality that had hitherto marked the sport.)

But when you read the physical descriptions of Baker and Fitzgerald (or, come to think of it, look at the picture accompanying this post), it’s hard not to think that the nonpareil novelist saw in the nonpareil athlete—whom he’d met briefly when the two attended Princeton University--the fulfillment of what he longed to be but couldn’t. Both were not considered tall in their own time, let alone ours; both were blondes; and both were regarded as exceedingly attractive, with soft eyes that concealed considerable melancholy.

You can almost see the wheels of Fitzgerald’s mind move on this point: God, if I were only five feet nine like Hobey and weighed as much as he does, I’d be the toast of Princeton. Every woman would want to sleep with me, and every man want to drink with me. What a cruel world!

(Incidentally, Baker was not the only athlete-pilot transformed into an indelible Fitzgerald character. The other, Tommy Hitchcock, a star polo player, inspired the creation of Tommy Barban, the lover of Nicole Diver, in Tender Is the Night, and, even more memorably, Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. Ironically enough, Hitchcock, like Baker, was a former member of the World War I squadron, the Lafayette Escadrille, who died while test-flying a plane.)

Though Fitzgerald was the most significant writer to remember Baker in his work, he was by no means the only one. Mark Goodman wrote of the athlete as a symbol of his time in the 1985 novel, Hurrah for the Next Man Who Dies. Geoffrey Wolff briefly summed up his impact in the 1990 novel, The Final Club. I doubt very much if he’s in much demand with young male readers, but as a pup I sought out such midcentury juvenile athletic novels by John R. Tunis as The Kid From Tompkinsville and Highpockets. Well, wouldn’t you know that the figure who inspired his clean-cut athletes was Baker?

Aside from Fitzgerald, though, the most memorable description of Baker might have been provided by Boston Globe columnist George Frazier, who recalled the athlete—in terms redolent, of course, of Fitzgerald—as the epitome of a world where “all of a sudden you see the gallantry of a world long since gone—a world of all the sad young men, a world in which handsome young officers spent their leaves tea-dancing at the Plaza to the strains of the season; a world in which poets sang of their rendezvous with death when spring came round with rusting shade and apple blossoms filled the air."

Among Baker’s athletic accomplishments at Princeton University were:

* He played baseball, football and hockey.
* He led Princeton to one national championship in football in 1911 and two in hockey (1912 and 1914).
( He became the only athlete elected to both the College Football Hall of Fame and the Hockey Hall of Fame—and, in the latter, was the first American-born player inducted.
* Collegiate hockey’s equivalent of the Heisman Trophy is named in his honor.

That list, however, gives only the faintest of ideas of why Baker came to be associated with a quality that Frazier styled duende—i.e., the ability to attract others through spellbinding personal magnetism.

Baker set the standard for a code of behavior on the athletic field that couldn’t seem more foreign to our current world of big-bucks glory, trash-talking, and taunting opponents. He adhered to the rules; acted modesty in victory, crediting teammates for his achievements; and drew no attention to himself by conduct or appearance. He was penalized only once during his entire hockey career at Princeton. If you want the essence of this code, think of the advice of the great football coach Paul Brown to his players on displays in the end zone after scoring a touchdown: “Act like you’ve been there before.”

It seems to me that there’s a kind of WASP reserve to this behavior. Perhaps it’s one that Baker learned at St. Paul’s prep school in Concord, N.H., which, according to New Yorker writer Ben McGrath, is “the cradle of American hockey,” since many credit the school as the site of the first U.S. hockey game back in 1883. (Though, come to think of it, a later hockey-playing product of that school, former Presidential candidate—and recent shameless Cabinet post-seeker—John Kerry strikes me far more as the type to hog the puck.)

After graduating from Princeton, Baker briefly worked at J. P. Morgan, but his heart wasn’t in it. It was with something like relief that he jumped at the chance to prove his mettle in a new arena: as a pilot in World War I. Another part of Baker’s full name, “Hare,” could apply to the lightning-fast reflexes he brought to both athletics and aviation.

During the war, he served with the Lafayette Escadrille, where he was credited with three confirmed kills to his name. (His Spad XIII was painted orange and black in honor of Princeton.)

Recent writers, such as Sports Illustrated’s Rom Fimrite and biographer Emil Salvini, have suggested a disappointment and restlessness at the war’s conclusion that led Baker to go up in the plane one last, completely unnecessary time. How else to explain why he would do so:

* after receiving orders to return home;

* after disregarding the vociferous protests of his own men, who feared that Baker’s stated rationale—that he would take “one last flight in the old Spad”—would prove to be exactly that;

* after being told that the carburetor of the plane he would test had failed in flight only a few days before;

* or why, instead of conducting a crash landing—something the plane could easily have handled—Baker tried to maneuver the stalled plane back to the air base.

The world of Baker, like that of the Jazz Age that Fitzgerald was fortunate enough to live and chronicle in his short life, is gone now. You can recover something of Fitzgerald’s world from reading his magical prose. The essence of Baker, however, remains far more quicksilver, like the man himself—a faint, darting shadow who lived before the rise of newsreels or TV, now only recalled from memorial plaques and awards for sports whose spirit has departed drastically from the gentleman’s sportsman image conveyed so powerfully by the Princeton legend.

This Day in Sports History (The Great Gretzky)

March 23, 1994—In Los Angeles, Wayne Gretzky slapped the puck into the net against Vancouver goalie Kirk McLean for the 802nd goal of his career, eclipsing the previous record set by childhood hero Gordie Howe. It was just another milestone in a statistic-laden career probably only matched in professional sports by the Yankees’ Babe Ruth.

As a 10-year-old in Brantford, Ontario, Gretzky had been visited by Howe, who, out of curiosity, wanted to see for himself a youngster who was already mighty prolific at scoring—385 goals in just 85 games. The older sports legend gave the budding phenom advice that was heeded: Work on your backhand.

As Gretzky achieved fame in the 1980s and 1990s with the Edmonton Oilers, the Los Angeles Kings, the St. Louis Blues, and the New York Rangers, Howe remained a constant and appreciative fan of the man who surpassed each of his records one by one. (Entering the league, Gretzky wanted to wear the same number that Howe had —9—but it was taken, so he took the next best thing—99.) Yet the two could not have been more different.

Howe piled up his scoring totals day in, day out, year in, year out. If you attempted to interfere with the puck while he was within five feet of it, God have mercy on you, because Howe wouldn’t, making sure you got a nice, sharp elbow that would send you flying. (Admittedly, this was nothing like the mayhem perpetrated by Derek Sanderson in the 1970s.)

If Howe beat opponents with sheer durability and grit, Gretzky defeated them with blinding speed. If Howe’s playing style was strictly blue-collar—he had a job to do, and he’d find a way to get it done, every day, come what may, no matter how much his bones ached—Gretzky’s was more Hollywood, a natural for the highlight reels. (And he was not a puck hog—Mario Lemieux, himself a scoring wunderkind, called him “probably the best passer who ever played the game.")

His sense of speed and puck-handling flash was made for Hollywood—and wouldn’t you know that The Great Gretzky ended up marrying actress-model Janet Jones in July 1988, in a union dubbed “Canada’s Royal Wedding.” (I enjoyed Jones’ most notable Hollywood film, The Flamingo Kid, but more for its unpretentious coming-of-age story and the fun supporting turn by Richard Crenna than for the lead actress’ thespian skills—such as they were.)

In a 2004 poll, respondents to a survey by the Canadian Broadcasting Co. voted Wayne Gretzky one of the 10 greatest Canadians of all time. That’s how seriously they take their hockey up there!