Canadians (16 page)

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 up 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 rare 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.

No one wanted to see the Rocket go down; not ever.

BUT NOW, OF COURSE, he was down, and for good. The fire out of the famous coal-black eyes that every goaltender who ever faced the Rocket seemed to remember most about him.

There was no counting the tens of thousands of fans and mourners those two little girls saw as the funeral cortège made its way to Notre Dame Basilica in the heart of Old Montreal. They would have seen old men openly weeping. They would have seen fifteen daycare children lined up in front of Place des Arts, each wearing a special red bib to mark the occasion, all fifteen instinctively waving as if the parade involved a celebration—which, in a way, it did. At one corner, an elderly woman proudly wearing the old red uniform of the Forum ushers stood at attention, tears dropping from her cheeks as she formed a singular honour guard for the Rocket.

Some walked along behind the slow-moving funeral cortège, falling in behind as it passed and finding they could keep up with the limousines, so slowly were the black cars able to move through the gathering throngs. Guy Gagné pulled an old black-and-white photograph of him with the Rocket out of his wallet and showed it to fellow walkers, saying he himself
had dropped in on Richard only a few weeks ago to see how he was doing. Not well. He was thinning and very weak. But, Gagné smiled, “I checked the eyes—he was still the Rocket.”

Denis Joinville walked along with a Montreal Canadiens flag draped over his shoulders. He counted himself among the luckiest hockey fans of all time in that he'd seen the Rocket play his final game forty years earlier. He'd been only a child and his strict parents had insisted he be in bed by eight o'clock, even on Saturday nights, but on the night of the Rocket's last game he'd snuck out of his room and crawled along the floor to the hallway, where he'd stuck his head around the corner just far enough to see the flickering black-and-white television set and hear the call of René Lecavalier, the voice of
La Soirée du Hockey
.

“I was so afraid my father would catch me,” Joinville said as he hurried toward the church steps. “I knew I would get the strap. He finally saw me—and he waved to me to come and crawl into his lap and we watched the Rocket's final game together.

“It is my best memory. I count myself lucky to have lived then.”

The hearse pulled up outside the Basilica, pushing its way through what had become a rolling, lolling sea of people pressed into the open plaza in front and along the side streets. The flags that had been flying at half staff fell suddenly limp as the pallbearers pulled out the coffin and lifted it high enough for many to see. The effect was as if all available wind for the flags had suddenly been sucked away by lungs catching their breath.

And then someone began to clap, slowly. Others joined in, clapping faster, louder. Someone whistled. Others cheered.

The Rocket was taking his final shift.

MANY OF THOSE who came to bury Maurice Rocket Richard walked the entire journey from the Molson Centre to the Basilica, a long trek in seasonable weather that took them down the very street that, forty-five years earlier, had burned with rioters who'd gone on a wild rampage simply because the NHL had ruled that their great hero would not be allowed to dress for the next game.