A FAN’S NOTES

Henri Richard 1936-2020

Canada’s most famous leap year baby has died at age 84, just days following his 21^st birthday. He did seem ageless through 20 seasons with the Montreal Canadiens. His personal statistics are remarkably consistent, a tick or two under a point a game through 1259 regular season tilts and 180 crucial playoff matches. What staggers are the 11 Stanley Cups he won as a player between 1955 and 1975. Eleven. A champion more than half his time wearing the CH sweater over flimsy felt shoulder pads. An impossible dream for every other little local boy - and any other player, past, present or future, who laces up his skates in the National Hockey League.

Henri Richard’s father worked for the Canadian Pacific Railway and had spent his career toiling in Montreal’s Angus shops. Maybe that’s where Richard’s heart was forged. He was okay with being overshadowed by his much older brother Maurice the ‘Rocket’ and later Jean Beliveau because they played the game with the same commitment he did. Anecdotal tales told outside the dressing room suggest Richard could not abide fools either as teammates or coaches. He is the sole uniformed link between the glory of the Rocket’s era and the annunciation and anointment of Guy Lafleur. Twenty winters. Perhaps the ultimate grace of Richard’s career was a twist of fate, another instance of impeccable timing: Richard retired before the front offices of pro sports teams transformed into analytical entities who viewed their scarred legends as diminished assets. He was not cast aside to play out his final winters in exile – or worse, Oakland.

In Richard’s day hockey was truly a seasonal sport. Paycheques covered the schedule. Players were no different than teenagers, they needed summer jobs. Because les Canadiens were owned by Montreal beer blue bloods, some players elected to open taverns with a corporate, silent partner leg-up. Richard’s brasserie was situated on Park Avenue a few strides north of Sherbrooke Street. Across the street was a very hip record store called Phantasmagoria.

There, near the corner, myth and my memory intersected. I had a fish hook-shaped LP record hunting route that commenced at the A&A store at Ste-Catherine and Guy beside the Toronto-Dominion Bank branch and stretched east to Sam the Record Man near The Main and then looped up and back west to Phantasmagoria. Brasserie Henri Richard was where I’d strip the cellophane off my new albums and examine their inner sleeves. Read the liner notes with a cigarette and a bock of Molson ale.

The exposed side wall of the greystone establishment featured a gigantic mural of Richard, wearing number 16, and his big brother the Rocket, wearing number 9, swooping in on Toronto’s Johnny Bower. I liked to think the scene was from 1960, the year I was born and the Rocket’s final season. It was possible because that was the year Bower also established himself as the Leaf’s number one goaltender.

I attended my first Canadiens game at the Forum in 1968. My French-Canadian Nana (nee Leblanc) brought me (we took the bus downtown); I was eight; she worshipped Beliveau and the brothers Richard. I saw one or two other live games between then and 1975, when Richard, hobbled by a broken ankle, finally succumbed to the toll of a fast and violent game. Hockey tickets in Montreal were like an aisle seat near the toilet for the Second Coming – impossible to get. He’d be on television of course, every Saturday night in black and white. On the radio, skating left to right on the dial. And who could forget his pair of decisive coffin nails against the Chicago Black Hawks in the 1971 Cup final? Richard was omnipresent yet remote.

But he hadn’t just lent his name and personal memorabilia to his beer parlour. Richard was always there holding court in his bleu, blanc et rouge rocking chair set by the taps and the fridges, more often than not shrouded in cigar smoke. A close up view I’d no wish to be obvious about taking, a warrior at rest. Periodically he’d circulate; work the room, greet his regulars. I was surprised that we were about the same height even if the rest of me couldn’t possibly measure up.

Once he stopped by my table and asked me how I was enjoying my club sandwich, French fries and gravy on the side. Me!? Well, what do you say to a god when your jaw’s on your chest and your mouth is packed full of toast, bacon, lettuce, tomato, cheese and chicken (possibly turkey)? I wagged my head, shaking it because in that instant I forgot how to nod up and down even as I prayed I wouldn’t spit chewed food all over the alligator logo on his golf shirt.                    

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of sports and musical musings since 2013. Sign up for e-mail alerts from the Crooked 9.