MEMORIES OF A GIANT
Our writers on Red Fisher
A good man dies, the years fall away like snow. You are left with this:
It’s 1994, the defending Stanley Cup champion Canadiens are about to take on the Bruins in Boston in the first round of the playoffs. Red Fisher and I meet in the hotel lobby and he leads the way to funky Boston Garden.
We are making our way up the steps from ice level when a Bruins employee hurries down to escort us up to the press workroom. There he takes Red’s coat and hat, hangs them up, and returns with a bottle of Chivas Regal and a glass with some ice. He pours a couple of fingers of scotch for Red, then sets the bottle down next to the glass. There is a strip of tape around the bottle about a third of the way down, with this note: “Red — Don’t drink below here — Harry.”
There it was, a gesture of respect from the cantankerous Harry Sinden to Red Fisher. I was in the presence of royalty.
To be very good at anything he does, a man has to be many things. To be great, to have influence that radiates in all directions, a man has to fit with his time and place. Red meshed with his time and in many ways defined it, to an extraordinary degree — an era, for the most part, when the game was run from Montreal, not New York, when the NHL had not yet lost its integrity (in part because he was watching), when a fine journalist who believed in the sport and who believed in fairness and honesty and plain speaking could still make a vast difference.
From 1955 until he stepped away from the game Red was, as Michael Farber noted, the conscience of hockey. He was a thoroughly cranky curmudgeon with a heart of pure gold. If you didn’t earn his respect, he would cut you with a two-word dismissal. If you earned his respect (through criteria that were not always apparent to mere mortals) he would give you the shirt off his back.
No one touched the pure gold inside more than Tillie Singer, his true love, his wife of almost 70 years. Red’s loyalty to Tillie (who passed 10 days before he did) was absolute, his affection for her without limit. If you were close enough to the man to catch a glimpse of it, it was enough to inspire awe. When a man in his 80s learns to make spaghetti sauce for the woman he has loved since they were teenagers, that’s real. The seasons might change; Red’s love for Tillie never altered.
That was the private Red Fisher. It is, of course, the public journalist who meant so much to the game of hockey. Red was wonderfully witty and scrupulous to a fault. Mention to him that someone in Toronto or Quebec City had said there was a rumour that so-and-so would be traded, Red would growl: “I don’t deal in rumours.”
But if something was really afoot, if Guy Lafleur was about to shock the hockey world with his retirement, Red would be the man with the scoop. With his great and good friend Dick Irvin he was one of the last links to hockey’s golden era, a man who had known and interviewed Rocket Richard, Jean Béliveau, Doug Harvey and Jacques Plante; Frank Selke Jr., Toe Blake, Sam Pollock and Scotty Bowman; Gordie Howe, Bobby Hull and Bobby Orr, Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Larry Robinson and Ken Dryden.
Alone among us, Red could say he had covered the Richard Riot, the Summit Series and Gary Bettman’s lockouts — and understood all these very disparate events.
Red had an influence over his sport that was unique in hockey and may have been unique in any of the sports they play on this continent. It helped Red had known many of them since they were fresh-faced rookies. Glen Sather, Bob Gainey, Doug Risebrough, Jacques Lemaire, Serge Savard, John Ferguson. All of them and countless others.
Only Red could be famous for not talking — not talking to rookies in particular, in the press box or in the room.
When Lafleur was training for his comeback with the New York Rangers, I was sent out to do a feature on the player who had lit up this town in the 1970s. I watched Lafleur train at George Cherry’s boxing gym in the east end and then we went to a coffee shop across the street to talk. When I finished asking him questions, Lafleur had a question for me.
“How is Red Fisher?” he asked. “Oh, you know,” I said. “Red is Red.”
Lafleur laughed. “You know, my first year with the Canadiens, Red Fisher don’t talk to me. The second year, Red talked to me a couple of times. The third year, the first day of camp, I’m the first guy Red wants to talk to. I said to myself: ‘Guy Lafleur, you’re gonna be a superstar in the NHL!’ ”
That’s influence. That was Red Fisher.
Montreal has become synonymous with some of the giants of the game of hockey, men with names like Richard and Béliveau and Lafleur. But this city also produced a giant who simply wrote about the game, as no one else has written about it before or since.
Here’s to you, Red. And tell Harry to take the tape off the damned bottle.
In the days since his death, Red Fisher has been lionized as a great hockey writer and, over a career that spanned even decades, he was among the giants who wrote about grown men playing a child’s game.
He was the definition of an insider, someone who shared the confidences of players, owners and executives.
He changed the business of hockey and raised players’ salaries with a series on the game’s finances in 1970. That earned him the first of three National Newspaper Awards for sports writing. He broke the story of Guy Lafleur’s premature retirement from the Canadiens in 1984. He was there when the Canadiens won 17 of their 24 Stanley Cups.
But the one quality that impressed me the most was his humanity. He was often described as a curmudgeon, but his body of work is filled with stories that reflect his concern for people.
I first noticed this trait in 1972 when Red called me back from a holiday in Nova Scotia to run the Montreal Star sports department. This was in the days when newspapers had money and the Star decided to send him to Moscow in advance of the 1972 Summit Series. The idea was to gauge Russian interest in the hockey series, but the result was an insightful look into the lives of ordinary Muscovites under Soviet rule.
One of my favourite columns described a bus from the Nassau Coliseum to the airport after a Canadiens loss to the Islanders. The bus slowed to a crawl as it approached a multi-car accident. While the players complained about the inconvenience of being delayed, Red’s concern was for the victims who were being loaded into ambulances.
There were numerous other examples. He wrote with compassion when Bob Gainey’s daughter, Laura, was lost at sea, when Doug Wickenheiser lost his battle with cancer and when Alzheimer’s made it impossible to communicate with another legend, Toe Blake, who was alternately his friend and sparring partner.
If you spent any time with Red, you knew how much importance he placed on family. He looked forward to his summer adventures with his wife, Tillie, and was devastated when she became ill and refused to leave their home.
His son, Ian, was one of the top high school students in Quebec and went on to MIT. There were regular updates on his career and they were followed by tales of his grandson, Ryan, and his exploits in the classroom and on the basketball court.
Through Tillie’s illness and Red’s health problems after he broke both hips in 2016, it was his daughter, Cheryl, who emerged as the rock in the family. She and her husband, Lawrence, put their own lives on hold to care for her parents.
“They’re saints,” Red said when I visited him during his rehab from the first break.
My relationship with Red began when I was hired by the Montreal Star in 1965. Red and Ian MacDonald served as my mentors. Two years later, I sought advice when The Gazette offered me more money and a chance to cover the Alouettes.
“You can’t pass that up,” Red said. “But just remember I’m going to be the sports editor some day and you have to come back to the Star.”
The call came two years later and I didn’t hesitate giving my notice to The Gazette. When my first paycheque arrived, I learned I had taken a $10 haircut, but Red soon rectified that.
When The Newspaper Guild arrived a few years later, Red was given a choice — be the editor or cover the Canadiens. He opted for the latter and I became his boss in name only.
“You have to let everyone know you’re the boss, but just remember who hired you,” he said.
I left a year later to cover the Montreal Olympics for the Toronto Sun but, after stops in Toronto, Windsor and Vancouver, I came back to The Gazette as the sports editor in 1987.
The publisher was Clark Davey, one of the top journalists in the country who had a unorthodox management style. In 1984, Davey had suggested Red had lost his fastball, a notion that was dismissed after Red broke the Lafleur story.
Davey, who had previously hired me as a consultant at the Globe and Mail and as the sports editor of the Vancouver Sun, again suggested Red’s best days were behind him. I told him I had a long history with Red and I thought he was doing fine.
The guy who had lost his fastball went on to win two more National Newspaper Awards and retired on his own terms in 2012.
Rest in peace, old friend.