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  Very few guys used an aluminum two-piece at the time, so when I started using the Easton it kind of changed hockey for a while, because everybody followed. I never used the composite one-piece, but players today swear by it. These days if you showed them an aluminum two-piece, they would look at you and say, “What the heck is that?” And I don’t blame them because that’s the way I felt back when I was looking at Howie Morenz’s sticks when I was a kid.

  • • •

  Obviously, Howie Morenz was before my time. He was before Gordie Howe’s time. In fact, when Maurice Richard started tearing up the league, Morenz was the guy fans compared him to. But while I had never seen him play, looking at his stick, I had some sense of what the game would have been like when he played. I could easily imagine how the puck would feel on the blade of a heavy stick like that. The sticks guys used back then were a lot shorter, so I could see that they would have had to play with their hands closer together. You would have the puck on a string with a short stick like that, and a wrist shot would be tough for a goalie to read coming off the blade. But you would really have to keep your head up.

  You can see how just looking at those old sticks would fire up a kid’s imagination. Peering through the glass of the Hall of Fame, I could see how the game was played. It would have been incredibly tough, but it would also have been an elegant game built around puck control and shrewdly and spontaneously exploiting opportunities. That’s how Howie Morenz played the game anyway.

  In 1950, the Canadian Press polled sportswriters across the country. They named Morenz the greatest hockey player of the first half of the century. Because so few of us have seen him play, it’s not easy to understand what an achievement that is. But put it this way—look at the guys who would top anyone’s list of the best players of the second half of the century. Howe, Richard, Hull, Orr, Lafleur, Lemieux. To be the best of the second half of the century, you would have to be better than all of them. Anyone who was the best of the first half is in that league.

  Morenz was certainly the NHL’s first superstar. Games were sold out wherever he played. For many American fans new to hockey, Morenz was the face of the game. His speed and grace defined hockey for its newest fans, and redefined it for those who loved the game. More than any who had come before him, Morenz showed that while hockey would always be a team game, true greatness could lift people out of their seats.

  • • •

  Howie Morenz was the youngest of six kids. He grew up playing hockey on Mill Pond, which was part of the Thames River, just a few blocks from his home in Mitchell, Ontario. After school, he’d grab a pair of old two-dollar tube skates that had already been through his two older brothers and the new stick he got for Christmas. The most popular stick at the time was a Draper and Maynard Sporting Goods stick with the tip painted red. It was made of ash and just about as strong as steel. A stick like that would last years.

  Morenz played shinny with his brothers. His friends and family have said that you could always find him on the ice with a stick in his hand. He would carry a chunk of coal in his pocket to shoot on the pond. Over and over again, he’d whack it down the ice. But sometimes it would jump the tree trunk he used as a goalie, so he had to skate as fast as he could to try to catch it before it went too far. If you’ve ever skated on a frozen pond, you know it’s full of rocks and frozen twigs and branches. Perth County is also a migratory path for diver birds. That meant more than a million ducks flew overhead during peak migration. Morenz had to learn to pivot fast or he’d trip over the frozen duck droppings on the ice.

  I know kids don’t play outdoors as much as they used to. But for me it has always been part of the game. I first skated on the Nith River, which ran behind my grandparents’ backyard, so I know a little what it must have felt like for Morenz. My father used to take me to the park in Brantford before he built our first backyard rink. Even when I was with the Oilers, if we had some time off between a Saturday night and a midweek game, Kevin Lowe, Marty McSorley, Paul Coffey, and I would sometimes grab our sticks and gloves and head down to the pond to play with the kids who would be shooting a tennis ball around. I remember that our skates didn’t have to be as sharp as they would be on indoor ice, as they didn’t have to bite as deep. Like Morenz, we had to watch out for cracks in the ice—and make sure our shots were on net. Otherwise we would be hunting for the ball or puck in the snow.

  Morenz got better and better, working his way up to junior in the OHA. He was fast, but he didn’t think he was good enough to play professionally. He had a temper on the ice and got into a few fights, but off the ice he was an easygoing guy. The family then moved to Stratford. He loved living there and hanging out with his buddies. When he was done school, he played amateur hockey with the Grand Trunk Railway team.

  In 1923, when Morenz was twenty, Léo Dandurand was the managing partner of the Montreal Canadiens. Dandurand and his friends, one of the Canadiens’ first goaltenders, Joe Cattarinich, along with businessman Louis Letourneau, had owned the team since 1921.

  They bought it at auction. Dandurand called his friend Cecil Hart to represent them. They were competing against the Mount Royal Arena Company and NHL president Frank Calder. The bid was up to $10,000 when Hart called Dandurand and asked him what to do. Dandurand said to go to the limit. Hart came back into the room and offered $11,000 and won the bid. That was a lot of money back then. A labor job paid about fifty-five cents per hour. Less than four dollars a day. It would have taken most guys ten years to earn $11,000. But the investment was worth it. The Canadiens made $20,000 net that first year.

  Dandurand, Cattarinich, and Hart wanted Morenz to join the Canadiens. But Morenz’s parents, William and his wife, Rosina, were born in Germany, which was suffering from the terrible after-effects of the First World War. Their families back in the old country were in bad financial trouble and needed help. The German mark was basically worthless, reduced to one-trillionth of its value. It took a wheelbarrow of them to buy a loaf of bread. Morenz had only two more years of apprenticeship for his machinist ticket so his father wanted him to stay and complete it.

  Dandurand wasn’t taking no for an answer. He called Cecil Hart again and gave him two signed blank checks. He told him to meet with Morenz and his dad and to get the kid to come to Montreal. Hart signed Morenz on July 7, 1923. The contract was for three years at $2,500 per year, with an $850 signing bonus.

  Both Morenz and his father had second thoughts immediately. Morenz’s mother had just died and he felt bad about leaving home. He sent the check back to the Canadiens and said he’d decided to play in the OHA instead.

  Léo Dandurand sent Morenz a train ticket and told the press he knew amateurs got paid under the table and he was going to blackball Howie if he backed out of his contract. Morenz came to see him. He was upset. He had tears in his eyes when he told Dandurand he wasn’t big enough or strong enough to play pro hockey and that moving to Montreal would ruin his life. But Dandurand wouldn’t budge. Finally, reluctantly, the league’s first star committed to the Canadiens.

  Georges Vezina was the goalie. Vezina had signed with the team thirteen years earlier. He had the best goals-against average in the league, 1.97. He allowed just 48 goals in 24 games that season. To give you an idea of just how good that is, Henrik Lundqvist from the Rangers has a 2.28 career GAA, Jonathan Quick from the Kings has a career 2.27 GAA and Canadiens’ Carey Price, who might be the best in the world right now, has a career 2.43. In others words, Montreal had one of the best goalies of all time in net.

  On March 22, 1924, the Canadiens played the Calgary Tigers of the Western Canada Hockey League in the first game of a best-of-three Stanley Cup final that began at Montreal’s Mount Royal Arena.

  The Mount Royal Arena was four years old and it used natural ice. The problem with natural ice is you’re at the mercy of the weather. And the weather in Montreal that March was so warm the ice was melting. In 1990, when I was with the
Kings, we played exhibition games in Miami and St. Petersburg in slush and it is really tough. Your leg muscles ache from trying to push through it. The puck won’t lie flat. Of course, both teams have to play on the same bad ice, so it’s no use complaining about it. Still, you never want to see a game decided by the ice conditions.

  Bad ice definitely works against a guy like Morenz, whose game was speed and puck control. He was a rookie and had defenses looking for him, the same way Connor McDavid does today. And yet somehow he still managed to make the end-to-end rushes he’d become famous for. The series was so exciting that Charles Adams, a Boston hockey fan who owned a chain of grocery stores, was inspired to buy the city’s first NHL franchise, the Boston Bruins. More about that later.

  In the first game, Calgary lost 6–1. The ice had become unplayable so Game Two was moved to the Ottawa Auditorium, which had artificial ice.

  It was a rough game. Any team handed a lopsided loss is going to respond with a new level of intensity, and that often means a very physical game. True champions are the teams that have an answer for that. Morenz kept the first-period shots on goal even and scored one for the Canadiens. The Tigers stormed back. Calgary’s captain, Herb Gardiner, who had thirty pounds on Howie, caught him in the middle of the ice with an elbows-up check. I saw Marty McSorley do the same thing to Doug Gilmour sixty-nine years later when we played in the 1993 Cup semifinal against the Leafs, and it turned the series around.

  Morenz came off with his arm dangling at his side and a cut on the head. He was on his way to the hospital by the start of the third period. On the other side of the ledger, Montreal enforcer Sprague Cleghorn got a stick up on Calgary’s Bernie Morris in the first period and sent him to the dressing room. Morris played the rest of the game with his head wrapped in bandages. During his career, Cleghorn sent fifty “stretcher jobs” to the hospital. Two years later, Cleghorn was traded to the newly formed Boston Bruins, where he’d end up mentoring a young defenseman named Eddie Shore.

  In the last four minutes, the Tigers pulled their goalie to go with six attackers. But Vezina had a hot hand. The final score was 3–0 Canadiens.

  By 1932–33, Morenz had won the Cup three times. He had also won three Hart trophies as the league’s most valuable player. The New York Americans’ goaltender, Roy Worters, called him “that s.o.b. seven seventy-seven” because when Howie started down for the rush, he moved so fast it looked like he had three sevens instead of just one on his sweater.

  The NHL is unique among the major sports in that players shake hands after a hard-fought playoff series, but Morenz took sportsmanship even further. After a loss, he would go into the winning dressing room to shake hands. He was a great sportsman, but inside, he took losses hard. Sometimes he’d walk the streets all night just to cool off. He might end up at a teammate’s door before the sun came up to talk about what went wrong in the game.

  Everywhere he played, he became a marked man. That’s the way it works with every superstar. He was sticked and hacked and whacked every time he stepped on the ice. He would pick himself up and come back just as hard. That’s the other part of being a star. Think of Paul Kariya scraping himself off the ice after getting run over by Scott Stevens in 2003, then coming back to put an absolute laser over Martin Brodeur’s shoulder. If a guy like Morenz was going to play in the NHL, that was the way he would have to play.

  His whole line played that way. His left-winger, Aurel “Little Giant” Joliat, was only 5’7” and 136 pounds, but he didn’t back down from anyone. Joliat played in the Habs’ very first game in the Forum when it opened in 1924, scoring twice in a 7–1 win over Toronto. And he delighted the crowd one last time in 1984 when he did a couple of laps and scored a goal on Jacques Plante. He was eighty-three years old. He had played sixteen seasons with the Canadiens and is still the second-highest scoring left-winger in Montreal history, behind Steve Shutt.

  Joliat would often tell a story about Morenz. In a game against the Montreal Maroons, he was rushing in on goal when two defensemen locked their sticks in front of him. Going full tilt, he ran into the sticks, did a somersault up in the air, and landed on his head. After the game, his teammates asked him, “You okay, kid?” Morenz answered, “Never felt better in my life.”

  In 1937, when Morenz was only thirty-four years old, he was ready to retire. He decided he would finish the season and then that was it. The Canadiens were at the top of their division by the end of January when last-place Chicago came into the Forum. It was supposed to be an easy win.

  Howie wore a small skate. A lot of guys do. Paul Coffey was the best skater in the league in our era. He wore a customized skate two sizes smaller than his shoe. He took his skates to a leather-worker to have extra stitching put into the ankles to make them stiffer. The stiffer a skate is, the more power is transferred to the blade. Soon a lot of guys were doing it. Paul and I also used to wear new skates into the hot tub to break them down and mold them to our feet. I would then take the extra step of shipping the skates to my best friend, John Mowat, who was playing NCAA hockey at Ohio State at the time. His feet were the same size as mine, and college players practice a lot compared to players in major junior. So John would wear my skates in practice for six to eight weeks, then ship them back. Still, they were really tight. Watch footage of Paul Coffey and me in Edmonton going down the tunnel before warm-up—we can hardly walk.

  Joliat thought Howie’s small skates had something to do with what happened next. Howie was speeding around the net when he tripped and slid into the boards with his feet in the air. Clarence Campbell, who became the president of the NHL from 1946 to 1977, was refereeing that game. He said that when Morenz kicked out to stop himself, the force of his weight made his blades stick into the boards, like knives thrown against wood.

  The Hawks defenseman Earl Seibert was following Morenz into the corner. Seibert was built the way coaches like defensemen—6’2”, 200 pounds. He fell over Howie’s left leg and fractured it in four places. Even though it was an accident, Siebert was booed whenever he went into Montreal for the rest of his career.

  While Morenz was in the hospital with his leg packed in ice and up in traction, his team and most of the guys on the other teams would visit. They would bring whiskey and beer and the boys would sit around and play cards for hours.

  At first Morenz would smoke his pipe and talk about his comeback, but after more than a month in bed, he became depressed. Even though it looked like his leg was healing nicely, he told his linemate Joliat that he would be watching him in the playoffs from “up there,” and pointed to heaven.

  He started to get sicker and sicker and spent more and more time in bed. Lying down for long periods of time can cause blood clots. On the morning of Monday, March 8, 1937, the team doctor found some in Howie’s legs and set up surgery to remove them the next morning. Morenz had chest pains all that day. After a light supper and a nap, he got out of bed, fell down, and died.

  The next night, before opening faceoff between the Canadiens and the Maroons, the Forum was quiet while a bugler played that lonely solo that they play for fallen soldiers. It’s called the Last Post. You could hear it echo off the ice. The only other sound you could hear was people crying.

  On Thursday Howie’s body was taken to the Montreal Forum and placed at center ice. Fifty thousand people filed past his open casket prior to the service. Joliat told the press, “Hockey was Howie’s life. When he realized he would never play again, he couldn’t live with it. I think Howie died of a broken heart.”

  The Canadiens lost in the first round of the playoffs that year. Morenz’s rookie teammate Toe Blake said, “We didn’t have much heart for hockey after he died.”

  But of course, that was not entirely the case. As much as Morenz meant to the Habs, a team is more than a group of individual players. Though Morenz was never forgotten, the Montreal Canadiens certainly regained their heart for hockey. In fact, they went on to become by
far the most successful team in the league over its ninety-nine years and far and away its most storied. The Habs have more than their fair share of legends in Hockey Hall of Fame, Toe Blake among them. That was the case when I was a kid, and many have followed since then. The league would not be the same without the Habs, and the Habs would not be the same without Howie Morenz.

  Two

  IN THE BEGINNING

  The Montreal Canadiens are the only NHL team that existed before the league itself. They started up in 1909–10 with the new National Hockey Association (NHA), an elite professional hockey league in Eastern Canada. The old prejudice against professional sports still existed. People thought of amateurs as gentlemen and pros as thugs. The NHA wanted to do two things: change the perception and make money.

  The original teams were the Renfrew Creamery Kings, Cobalt Silver Kings, Haileybury Comets, and Montreal Wanderers. The Ottawa Senators and Montreal Shamrocks joined the league later, in mid-January 1910. Obviously, Montreal was a hotbed of hockey even before the NHL arrived, with three teams in the new league.

  Interestingly, Montreal’s Jubilee Arena was home to two rival teams—the Wanderers, who represented the city’s English-speakers, and the Canadiens, who appealed to the francophones. Montreal businessman J. Ambrose O’Brien formed the Montreal Canadiens and hired a great defensive playmaker, Jack “Speed Merchant” Laviolette, as the team’s first player captain and coach and general manager. Jack liked to drive fast and in 1918, just two years after he led the Canadiens to their first Stanley Cup, his car struck a pole and his right leg was crushed so badly, he had to have it amputated below the knee. He loved the game so much, he had an artificial foot designed for a skate and stayed with the league as a referee.