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  “It has been a wonderful and delightful trip,’’ Moose telegraphed from London, “and our only hope now is that we can get to Chamonix at the earliest opportunity, so that we may start heavy training again and justify the confidence that has been placed in us and retain for Canada supremacy in the hockey world.”

  There was nothing to worry about. Canada, after all, had no competition to speak of in Chamonix. Moose himself set an Olympic scoring record—thirty-six goals, including thirteen in a 33–0 pasting of the Swiss—that will surely stand forever as the Canadian team waltzed through the competition and claimed the first-ever Winter Olympic Games gold medal for hockey.

  But that “confidence that has been placed in us” back in 1924 would eventually become an incredible stress on Canadian players, at times all but unbearable. Who among us watching that night in September 1972 will ever forget Phil Esposito’s impassioned plea following Canada’s 5–3 loss to the Soviets in Vancouver?

  “To the people across Canada,” Esposito said, near-teary eyes turned not to interviewer Johnny Esaw but full-on to the camera, “we gave it our best. To the people that booed us, geez, all of us guys are really disheartened. We’re disillusioned and disappointed. We cannot believe the bad press we’ve got, the booing we’ve got in our own building. I’m completely disappointed. I cannot believe it. Every one of us guys—thirty-five guys— we came out because we love our country. Not for any other reason. We came because we love Canada.”

  Thirty years later, in Salt Lake City in mid-February 2002, the emotional outburst came from Team Canada executive director Wayne Gretzky. “Nobody understands the pressure these guys are under,” a livid Gretzky told a post-game press conference following a lacklustre start by the Canadians, a decisive loss to Sweden, an unimpressive victory over weak Germany, and a tie against the Czech Republic. “The whole world wants us to lose,” Gretzky said.

  Whether Gretzky’s rant was calculated, as some—not me, and I was in the room—have argued, or merely an uncontrolled emotional outburst, as many of us believe, the Canadians in 2002 rallied and went on to victory, just as Esposito’s Canadians had in 1972. There is, some have said, a “controlled rage” to Canadian hockey that exists but is little understood, even by the players. “It scared the hell out of me that I would have killed to win,” Esposito said, looking back on his famous speech a quarter century on. “That really scared me.”

  It is a passion, fully understood or not, that applies to fans as well as players. Such a grand national itch for a game, however, can be difficult to explain to those who don’t readily share it, especially those Canadians who disdain the game and who argue, from time to time, that it has no reason to be carried on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation because, well, it has nothing to do with the culture of the country.

  They could not be more wrong.

  Bruce Hutchison once wrote in a newspaper column that hockey might be the country’s only authentic and indigenous art form. He also said, with uncanny foresight, that few realized the game was even “a political force” in the life of Canadians.

  Hutchinson was writing in 1952. Three years later, the most significant political act hockey has ever produced in this country would take place in Montreal. And it would involve a man named Maurice “Rocket” Richard—a player who always said he didn’t even much follow that other game called “politics.”

  “MERCI, MAURICE. Merci bien.”

  Georges Boudreault stood at centre ice, wiping tears from his eyes and speaking to a dead man.

  “Merci … merci … merci …”

  Boudreault and his grown son, Mario, had driven, hard, more than four hours from their home in the Saguenay, that rough and rolling, rock-and-pine area well north of Quebec City where the wild blueberries grow large and the people, known for their fervent nationalism, are referred to as bleuets. The two Boudreault men had taken turns at the wheel, one driving fast, one looking out for cop cars and speed traps, and had pulled off the autoroute, through the exit, and onto rue de la Gauchetière at exactly 10:05 p.m., May 30, 2000.

  Five minutes too late.

  Georges Boudreault, a man in his sixties with curling grey hair and a face that has known contact sports, had idolized Maurice “Rocket” Richard all his life. He’d grown up on the outdoor rinks of the Saguenay and was no different from young boys all over the province in those years, a time captured so lovingly by Roch Carrier in his children’s book The Hockey Sweater: “As for church, we found there the tranquility of God: there we forgot school and dreamed about the next hockey game. Through our daydreams it might happen that we would recite a prayer: we would ask God to help us play as well as Maurice Richard.”

  Carrier’s prayers were never answered, nor were those of Georges Boudreault. In that they were, again, the same as all young boys in Quebec during those years, for no one—not even with the help of God— ever played as well as Maurice Richard, either on the ice of the Montreal Forum or in the imagination.

  Now the Rocket was dead. He had succumbed to cancer earlier in the week at age seventy-eight, and the outpouring of grief had caught the rest of the country—but not Quebeckers, and certainly not Quebeckers of Georges Boudreault’s era—by surprise. Richard would lie in state at the Molson Centre, the famous Forum having been shut down so it could be converted to a multi-screen movie theatre. When Boudreault saw the television images of the people of Montreal lining up by the thousands to walk by the casket and pay their respects, he knew he had to be there. The Rocket would be lying in state until 10:00 p.m., at which time the doors to the Molson Centre—today known as the Bell Centre—would be closed. The funeral would be the following day.

  Georges Boudreault had only one chance to say goodbye to his hero. But the clock was against him. He and Mario had found a place to leave the car and were now running toward the rink.

  I was hurrying myself. I had flown to Montreal from Newark, New Jersey, having covered the opening game of the Stanley Cup final the evening before. The New Jersey Devils had beaten the Dallas Stars handily, 7–3, and would go on to win the Cup in six games, but there was far more talk about the death of the Rocket than whatever life might be left in the Stars. Many of the sportswriters covering the playoffs were also heading for Montreal to cover the funeral. I had packed quickly and left immediately for the airport, hoping to get a flight early enough that I might catch the last of the crowds filing into and out of the arena.

  The hockey rink lying-in-state fascinated me. Sixty-five years earlier, the great Montreal Canadiens’ hero of another generation, Howie Morenz, had entered hospital in late January 1937 after fracturing his leg in a game. He’d been kept in hospital so long that he was reported to have suffered a nervous breakdown. Then, six weeks after being admitted, he suddenly died of a heart attack. He was only thirty-four.

  The outpouring of grief had been so great that the hockey club and Morenz family had decided to hold the funeral at the Forum, with fifteen thousand fans/mourners surrounding the casket as it rested at centre ice and thousands who couldn’t get in milling about outside in the cold March wind. It is said that his funeral cortège passed by 200,000 more mourners who lined the snowy streets and roads all the way to the cemetery where Morenz was laid to rest.

  It gives you a sense of what this game, and its stars, have meant to the people of Montreal and Quebec.

  Georges and Mario Boudreault were too late to get in. They were too late even to sign the condolence books that had been set up near the front entrance to the Molson Centre, one of the entries reading: “My first words were Mama, Papa … and Maurice Richard.”

  They tried the main entrance but security guards were locking up behind the last few stragglers. Others were there as well, still trying to get in but being turned away. The guards couldn’t let Boudreault and his son in without hundreds more demanding the same, so they shooed the two men from the Saguenay away.

  Mario suggested he and his father go around the back. Try another door. They took off u
p the steps along the side of the building and I followed, thinking their desperation might make a few lines in the next day’s column. They pounded on the first door they came to. A security guard on the other side of the glass shook his head and walked away. They came to a second door and pounded. No one came. They hurried farther around the building to a third door—quickly running out of opportunities—and both father and son leaned against the glass here, slapping rather than pounding it as if they were running out of air as well as time.

  A security guard, an older man with whitening hair and a salt-and-pepper moustache, looked over. He could see Georges Boudreault gesturing as if it was an emergency—and to Georges it certainly was.

  The guard came over, opened the glass door a crack, and raised an eyebrow to invite the older man to explain himself—which he did with a passion that the great Richard himself would understand. He had loved the Rocket all his life. He had seen him play. He had talked to Mario all Mario’s life about the great Rocket. Mario had never seen him play. They had driven all this way. They had come from the Saguenay to pay their respects.

  The guard listened, the eyebrow dropped, and he opened the door wider, with a quick finger lifted to his lips that they should say nothing about this breach of security.

  He opened the door for Georges, for Mario, and then kept it open for me. I hadn’t said a word. He must have thought that I, too, had come all this way from the Saguenay to pay respects. Had I said I’d come from New Jersey, I wouldn’t likely have been allowed in. Had I said I was an Anglo from Ontario, I most assuredly wouldn’t have been.

  The four of us made our way along a corridor of the Molson Centre and in through a dark pulled curtain to the stands. We were on the second level. The guard led us down the stairs, across a row of seats, and then out through a door in the boards to the rink floor.

  We could see the coffin at centre ice, surrounded by flowers and bathed in a quiet, eerie light. The Rocket was all alone.

  Georges made Mario take off his cap. They moved toward the casket at what could be described only as a quick funeral pace: hands held in front like mass servers, heads bowed, short steps … but quick. They were afraid the other guards gathering on the floor might call a halt.

  But there were no whistles, no shouts. The guards were milling together and gathering at the far end of the empty rink, leaving the Boudreaults and me to approach the casket and say our farewells.

  I hadn’t expected this. Trailing them, I was astonished to think that I’d be the last mourner to pass by the Rocket’s open casket. I had no right to be there.

  I followed the two men closely. Georges crossed himself as he approached the casket. Mario followed suit.

  Maurice Rocket Richard was lying in a totally open casket. You could see him from the tops of his shoes to his head. He wore a dark blue suit, a white shirt, dark tie. But that was not what you noticed.

  He’d gone much whiter than the last time I’d seen him—far, far greyer than when he used to do those Grecian Formula commercials (“Hey Richard! Two minutes for looking so good!”)—and he looked wasted from the cancer. But that still is not what you noticed.

  What you could not help noticing as he lay in that strange coffin in that dark blue suit was that the famous eyes were closed.

  The black flame had gone out.

  SPORTS HEROES become known for many things. Power. Grace. Speed. In hockey it can be for the shot, the stickhandling, a player’s skating or his playmaking. In Rocket Richard’s case, it was none of these. He was not a great stickhandler. He had a good shot but not the best on his team. He wasn’t particularly fast. He wasn’t a playmaker. What he did have, in an abundance never seen before and not seen since, was passion—a burning passion that shone directly out of those fierce black eyes.

  In 1955 Sports Illustrated sent William Faulkner to Montreal to write about the Rocket. The Nobel laureate, a southern gentleman, knew nothing about this northern game and could not understand it, but he saw instantly the connection between the crowd and Richard’s eyes. Richard’s look, Faulkner said, had the “passionate, glittering, fatal alien quality of snakes”—almost as if the goaltender looking up might be hypnotized into helplessness, which so often appeared the case.

  It may have been as close as anyone has ever come to putting into words what those eyes said. Yet they were still only words, falling far short of what the photographs held. The photographs themselves falling short of what it was like to be that goaltender looking up and hit harder by the stare than any puck.

  “MERCI, MAURICE.”

  Georges Boudreault was in tears. He was speaking in a whisper, yet in the empty cave that was the Molson Centre at this late hour his whispers seemed as if they were coming from the public address system over the scoreboard.

  “Merci bien.

  “Merci … merci … merci …”

  We stood there a while, a French-only father and son from the Saguenay and an anglophone stranger who’d simply tagged along—and yet it seemed as if, suddenly, we were family. We had lost a favourite uncle, a boyhood hero, a national treasure—the word “national” taking on a somewhat different context in the Saguenay than it had in the rest of the nation. Georges Boudreault stood at the foot of the casket, wringing his big hands and periodically wiping away tears and crossing himself. Mario and I stood to the side, like two sons waiting for a father to finish.

  The older guard who’d let us in came over from the far side of the rink floor where other guards had gathered. With a hand signal, he indicated it was time for us to move along. The elder Boudreault bowed a very courtly thank you in his direction and we all moved off, Georges now openly blubbering.

  I was at the very end, thinking about the good fortune, as a journalist, to have witnessed Georges Boudreault’s great race to say farewell to his hero, thinking, foolishly, that, on a day when it was said 115,000 people had filed by the coffin of Maurice Rocket Richard, I could say now I was the very last person to pay my respects to one of the country’s great icons.

  But I wasn’t.

  Just as the three of us were about to go through the Zamboni chute and into the lower corridor and the front doors, I turned for one last glance at the darkened arena with the soft light and the flowers at centre ice. And I saw something I had never anticipated.

  The security guards had been organizing themselves into a small military formation. Young men and women with no military training ever, older men who might once have served—likely several had; clearly someone had put this together—were now marching across the arena floor in semi-formation. Backs straight, arms swinging, legs mostly in time, they walked across and came to a halt right beside the coffin of Maurice Rocket Richard.

  They turned, virtually as one. They faced the casket while still at attention. Several bowed their heads.

  The older guard saluted.

  ROCKET RICHARD’S FUNERAL was held the following day. They lined the streets by the tens of thousands. I remember standing on a street corner to watch the cortège pass and seeing the look on the faces of two very young girls travelling in the next-to-final black limousine of the long procession. Perhaps they were grandchildren, perhaps great-grandchildren, and they were pressed to the window. The look on their young faces was one of absolute shock, of bewilderment and wonder, perhaps even of a growing realization as they saw, firsthand, with their own dark Richard eyes, what the Rocket had meant to the people.

  They were hardly alone in their surprise. Those of us who’d long covered Canada’s game knew, of course, that fans of a certain age would turn out, just as the curious would. But we didn’t see this coming.

  Joseph Henri Maurice Richard had been a difficult man in the precious little time most of us knew him. He’d vanished from the old Forum for years after his retirement in 1960. Periodically, stories would be told of his being bitter and hard up. He sold oil products door to door and for a while had a basement shop where he wound fishing line onto small bails to sell to bait shops. In the ra
re times he appeared in public, he seemed shy and reclusive. Public appearances amounted to refereeing charity games played by former National Hockey Leaguers, a task he seemed to somewhat enjoy.

  Years passed, and eventually the Rocket began to show up at certain Canadiens functions again. He always seemed impenetrable: dark and brooding and desperate to avoid the limelight. He wasn’t approachable the way Jean Béliveau or Guy Lafleur, the two great heroes of later bleu, blanc et rouge dynasties, were. The last I’d seen him relatively well was the night of March 11, 1996—fifty-nine years to the day since the funeral of Howie Morenz—when the Forum was closed up and the Montreal Canadiens moved down the street to the Molson Centre.

  To open the ceremonies, the organizers had the three most famous Canadiens, the Rocket, Jean Béliveau, and Guy Lafleur, bring out the Stanley Cup, held high over their heads as if, magically, the team had just won a twenty-fifth cup. Richard, as the elder statesman, was to be the centre carrier. Béliveau was on one side of the older man—now generally known to be battling cancer—and the much younger Lafleur on the other.

  On his first step out onto the ice Rocket Richard slipped and nearly went down with the cup, only to be saved by the quick hands of the other two. Even so, you could see the embarrassment and fury in the old man’s eyes.

  To Richard, dignity meant everything. Nearly twenty thousand people in the building cringed in sympathy for him, and when he was introduced along with all the other great heroes of the legendary hockey club, the initial burst of cheering was significantly louder than for anyone else. But that wasn’t the end of it. The cheering continued, loudly, and then rose once, twice, to higher and louder levels as the entire building stood as one and, it seemed, had no intention of ever stopping the cheering and clapping.

  For fifteen long minutes they stood and cheered, an embarrassed and evidently surprised Richard standing at centre ice, sometimes holding his arms up to call an end to the cheering, sometimes raising them to wipe away the tears.