cross posted from eastmeetswest.krung.net
I find it ironic that I became a Habs fan in 1984 because of a goaltender who only played 91 games in his career. After all there were better reasons.
I moved to Montreal in 1973 at the age of one.
That year there was a Stanley Cup parade. And there were four more by the end of the decade..
Starting in 1974 my mom worked at the Montreal Children’s Hospital. She had a long term parking contract at a lot that was across the street from the forum.
My mother and I must have walked by the forum dozens of times. And not once did it register to either of us that this was the Mecca of Hockey.
My elementary school gym teacher was Bruce Blake,
the son of Hector ‘Toe’ Blake. I mean, I was doing push ups, playing floor hockey, running with the son of a coaching legend, and I had no idea who he was. He was just the guy who made this slow, fat kid work out.
I started playing hockey at the age of 7. I mean sucked, but I still played. All my teammates imagined being
Guy Lafleur or Larry Robinson. All I wanted was to get off the ice and read a book.
My earliest memory related to hockey isn’t about a
Stanley Cup. It’s a front page article covering a car accident involving the great Guy Lafleur. I remember people being very anxious. I had no idea why. I thought he was a famous actor or a politician or someone important.
Neither the proximity to the forum, the Stanley Cup parades or the Great Guy Lafleur broke through my shell.
It was, of all people,
Steve Penny.
In 1984, the Habs sucked. Not sucked like they did in the late nineties or early part of the 2000’s. But they did suck relatively speaking. That was the first seasons since before my parents were born that they had had a losing season.
Late in that season, Jacques Lemaire became the head coach. It was an odd choice. Jacques had quit on Montreal to go become a coach in Switzerland. Apparently he wanted to be free of the Montreal press. While in Europe he learned of the neutral zone trap. A deadly, soul destroying defensive scheme that sucked the fun out of hockey. In 1983, no one knew what it was. And in fact, no one knew how to play the damned scheme.
But Jacques taught his team how to play this new style.
And by the time the playoffs rolled around, the team was executing the trap perfectly.
The Boston Bruins, who were at the time a great team, with players like Rick Middleton and Terry O’Reilly and
Pete Peeters were swept by the Habs. And after that all of Montreal had only one name on their lips: Steve Penny. And somehow that registered with me.
Before the playoffs he was a punch-line to a joke. Whose going to lead the Habs to the Stanley Cup? Steve Penny!
The improbability of a nobody playing that well was surreal. For a geeky kid, who sucked in sports, there was something almost mythic about that story line.
And then we beat the Quebec Nordiques in seven games. It’s funny now, but those were bitter rivalries. No, bitter is an understatement. Montrealers hated the Nordiques. We loathed their very existence. They had no right to claim any loyalties of any Quebecer. And yet they did. And so the series wasn’t just a series, it was a minor war.
And by then I was in love with this sport. A sport where some nobody could become mythic. It was like a fairy tale come true. The farm boy pressed into service by the king, saves the day and gets the girl. That was Steve Penny. That was hockey.
And by the time we met the Islanders I was hooked. At the age of 12 I had a 10ish pm bedtime. And now I was demanding that I be allowed to stay up until the game was over. My parents were suddenly very worried. I, who had never shown any interest in any sport of any kind, was demanding he be allowed to stay up until the late hours of the night to watch the Montreal Canadiens play the New York Islander. They had no idea why I would care.
But we had a basement, so they allowed me this indulgence.
And we won the first two in New York. And by then, my dad was kinda curious to see what I was watching. But unfortunately midnite struck. And the magical run was over.
The Islanders figured out the lethal trap or maybe we stopped playing it, who knows.
But I was hooked.
