Sport: Endangered Dynasty

The Montreal Canadiens, like the New York Yankees, spoil their fans rotten. In the last six years the hard-skating Canadiens have brought home five National Hockey League championships and five Stanley Cups. But last month, when the Canadiens hobbled into the 1961-62 season minus two top scorers and three of their ablest defensemen, the fans were dismayed. The dynasty seemed to be crumbling, and it was predicted that the long-dominant Canadiens would topple as low as fourth place in the six-team league.

Despite the predictions, the Canadiens last week were in a grim three-way battle for first place. Both the Toronto Maple Leafs and the resurgent New York Rangers were eager to reduce it to a two-way fight, but the Canadiens were reluctant to oblige them. Most reluctant of all was Goalie Jacques Plante.

Knit One, Stitch Two. Shipped off to a minor league team for part of last season, the worst of his nine-year National Hockey League career, Plante showed up at training camp determined to make a comeback at age 32. In exhibition play he gave up an average of one goal per game, looked so good that Managing Director Frank Selke said: “Don’t be surprised if Plante has his best season ever.”

That would take some doing. A solid, 175-lb. six-footer, Plante is the only goalie in the League’s history to win the Vezina Trophy for the best goal tending five years running. He began playing hockey at ten in Shawinigan Falls, Que., with a pair of hand-me-down skates padded out with bulky socks that he knitted himself. Plante still knits for relaxation and occasionally paints a landscape in oils, unlikely diversions for a man who has suffered a broken nose, two cracked cheekbones and a hairline skull fracture in the pursuit of his brutal profession.

Plante still wears his controversial trademark: a fiber-glass mask that gives him the eerie and ferocious look of an executioner or a character in a Greek drama. Two seasons back, Plante, bedeviled by nightmares of a puck slamming him in the face with hammer force, began experimenting with the mask in practice workouts. His nightmares were grounded in terrifying reality: like every other goalie, Plante was muffled from shoulders to shins in 40 Ibs. of padding, but his unprotected face was a latticework of 150 stitches. First used in a 1959 game—and kept on in every game since—Plante’s mask won only grudging acceptance from the Canadien management. But, says Coach Hector (“Toe”) Blake, “he can play with a tub over his head for all I care, just so long as he stops the puck.”

This season Plante has been doing that with his old flair, yielding only 2.8 goals a game, rushing far out onto the ice to retrieve a loose puck and staying there to slow down an onrushing forward with a jarring body check. “I feel good,” says Plante. “No problems at all.”

Sound Investment. What makes the Canadiens’ bid for first place more impressive is the fact that high-scoring Center Jean Beliveau and scrappy Left Wing Dickie Moore have been laid up with injuries. One reason for the Canadiens’ success is a far-flung farm system that costs them nearly $250,000 a year to maintain, but pays off with a steady supply of agile skaters. Even more important is the team’s mystique, a sense of obligation to a tradition of winning. If the team ever seems to forget that tradition, their vociferously rabid fans, who have bought up every available season ticket at the Montreal Forum since the end of World War II, will see to it that they start remembering.