Sport: Masked Marvel

The creature crouched in the net at the Montreal Canadiens’ end of the ice looked like nothing ever seen before in the National Hockey League. His face was covered by a flesh-colored, fiber-glass mask slashed by two dark ovals for eyes and a hole for a mouth that looked from a distance like a gush of black blood. But Jacques Plante, 30, the brooding, acrobatic French Canadian who is hockey’s finest goalie, was oblivious to the shocked cries from the stands. Said he: “I don’t give a damn how it looks.”

Plante had good reason to violate the code of his craft, which allows goalies mattresses of protection around their body and legs, but nothing over their faces to protect them from a hard-rubber puck driven at speeds up to 100 m.p.h. Result: pro goalies regularly contract what the trade calls “rubber shock” (defined by one player as “first cousin to shell shock”), have even skated off the ice bewildered during championship games. Over the years, Plante had faced up to the attack without flinching, and paid the price: broken nose, hairline fracture of the skull, cracks in both cheekbones, some 150 stitches for assorted gashes, from sticks and skates as well as pucks.

Two weeks ago Plante caught a shot from the New York Rangers’ Andy Bathgate full in his face. The game was delayed 25 minutes while a doctor put seven stitches in the cut on the left side of his nose. But when he skated back to his place in front of the net, Plante was wearing the mask he had previously used only in practice. Rival goalies lifted scarred eyebrows and wondered whether the mask would slow Plante’s split-second performance.

Last week they had their answer, were talking about getting masks of their own. Plante fashioned his first shutout of the season by blanking the Toronto Maple Leafs, 3-0, had allowed only five goals in five games (v. 28 in twelve pre-mask games), was a major reason for the Canadiens’ long lead in the N.H.L. Said Plante: “When I first put on the mask, the boys all told me I would scare the women. They wouldn’t come to see the games any more. I’ll tell you something: if I went on the way I was going, pretty soon my face would look worse than the mask.”