SHAKE ON IT
Brutal '52 clash is height of hockey's show of sportmanship
NOT THAT anyone asked me, but they never do. Thus, the one sport I most miss this time of year is ice hockey, specifically the NHL Stanley Cup playoffs.
I’ve never seen a player not hustle or play hard during the playoffs. Even throughout the rare blowout, the action is intense. As a TV show, in for a minute, in for the game.
And no player places himself above the team. He wouldn’t dare betray the code. No muscle-flexing, chest banging, any acts of check-me-out immodesty.
And at the end of every series, the ritual center-ice handshake lines form, a show of respect for the game and one another.
For my two cents, the best sports photo ever taken came during a handshake line, April 8, 1952, in the Montreal Forum. The photographer, according to the late John Halligan, the Rangers’ then NHL go-to answer man, 16 years ago concluded that it was shot by Jacques Lemercier or Roger St. Jean, both with the Montreal daily “La Presse.”
That was after Game 7 of the Bruins-Canadiens semifinals. Bruins goalie “Sugar” Jim Henry’s eyes had been blackened by a broken nose suffered in Game 6. Habs star Maurice “Rocket” Richard had been knocked out, cold, in the second period of Game 7, but returned to score the winner.
Yet in an exchange of hands and direct eye contact, Henry appears to have bowed from the waist in unabashed regard, while Richard, his head bandaged and dried blood dripped from his left eye, gives Henry a stare of equal regard. It’s beyond special.
I first saw this photo — and stared at it — when I was about 10. And I know, as the sport continues to be removed from our sports — and for no good reasons — that photo continues to serve my sensibilities, 57 years later.
By the way, where did that hockey handshake tradition begin?
Figuring he had little else to do, we assigned that research to NBC’s Doc Emrick, who then passed it to Denis Gibbons, a hockey historian and member of the Society for International Hockey Research. Gibbons then passed it to Liam Maguire in Ottawa, according to Gibbons, “one of SIHR’s best historians.”
So score it Maguire from Gibbons and Emrick.
Maguire’s research shows the tradition to be more than 100 years old, starting with a charity game played in Montreal between the Cup champion Montreal Wanderers and a team of Eastern Canada Amateur Association standouts — perhaps, notes Maguire, the first All-Star game played in any sport.
The game was to benefit the widow of Wanderers star Hod Stuart, who had been killed in a swimming accident.
A newspaper clipping from that game shows players from opposing teams shaking hands — an oddity for the time, a time when hockey was under steady attack as far too violent.
Still, Maguire doesn’t know for sure, though he believes the post-series handshake became custom within 10 years of that 1908 charity match. He spoke with Hall of Famer and Canadiens star Aurèle Joliat who played in the 1920s and recalled “the handshake” as already a custom.
Not that anyone asked me.