THE DAY CHARLIE CONACHER ALMOST KILLED A GOALIE

Upper Deck’s new NHL alumni-themed Chronology release offers plenty of faces familiar to the casual collector like Wayne Gretzky, Steve Yzerman and Patrick Roy. But the checklist also features stars from the league’s Original Six days, and even earlier, whose names might not pop... but whose legacies make them every bit as collectible.

Case in point, the legendary Charlie Conacher, who appears on card #100 in the base set. Conacher, who skated on Toronto’s legendary Kid Line in the 1930s, was a gifted athlete who played the game with reckless abandon. He was the second captain of the Leafs, succeeding Hap Day, and was an integral part of the team’s 1932 Stanley Cup championship.

But the man they called “The Big Bomber” was best remembered for his cannon of a shot. Even before the slapper was made famous by Bobby Hull and Bernie Geoffrion, Conacher terrorized goalies with the game’s most dangerous weapon, a nasty wrister that he delivered with fearsome force. Once, his shot almost proved lethal. Midway through the second period in the clinching game of the 1932 final, Conacher unloaded a stinger on Rangers goalie John Ross Roach. Sportswriter Lou Marsh described the chaos in the April 10 edition of the Toronto Star:

“It was a period that almost ended in tragedy. Young Chuck Conacher, 205 pounds of TNT, let one of his smoking shots go from away over the fence just inside the blue line.

“Roach, as game as a badger, threw himself in front of the sizzler and it hit him under the heart. The terrific impact drove him back into the nets, but he straightened up again and the puck was cleared.

“Then he slowly dropped his stick, struggled a second with his gloved hands at his throat, and silently folded up and dropped to the ice. He looked like a man shot through the heart.

“There was a moment’s awed silence and then a rippling groan as Roach stiffened out on the ice. It looked as if the popular Port Perry netman had been killed for he lay without a move. It was a solar plexus blow a shock to the big motor center of the body. It took Roach five minutes to recover.”

Fortunately for the barely protected – and bare faced – netminders of the day, Conacher was extremely proficient at pinpointing corners to put pucks by them, instead of through them. Five times he either led or co-led the league in goals scored, and twice he was the NHL’s top point getter.

That success, along with his induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1961, has kept Conacher front of mind for vintage collectors. His first collectible, a 1932-33 O’Keefe Coaster, preceeded by a year his four Rookie Cards: 1933-34 O-Pee-Chee V304A #34, V129 #5, V288 Hamilton Gum #49 and V252 Canadian Gum #12. He appeared on more than a dozen cards and collectibles before his retirement in 1941 and his been a fairly consistent presence in retro-themed sets over the past 20 years, totaling more than 400 cards, including parallels. With a legacy like that, Conacher should be a part of every collection.