Sport: Attaboy, Andy Baby

True to professional hockey’s lusty tradition, loyal fans of the New York Rangers boo the visiting team, jeer at the referee and greet home-team blunders with showers of eggs and cries of “Ya jerk, ya”—a provincialism once reserved for the bumbling baseball players who inhabited Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field. Last week, when the New Yorkers blew a 2-1 lead to the Toronto Maple Leafs, a sullen crowd clustered outside the Ranger dressing room to taunt their tarnished heroes. “Aw, go back to Montreal!” one fan yelled at Player-Coach Doug Harvey. “Whatsamatter, Gump, no guts?” somebody asked Goalie Lome Worsley, who answered with a brisk curse. But then Center Andy Bathgate stepped quietly onto the sidewalk, and the fans’ mood changed abruptly. “Attaboy, Andy,” they murmured. “Attaboy, Andy baby.”

Deeking & Slapping. At 29, Andrew James Bathgate is not only the favorite of New York fans; he is the most exciting player in the National Hockey League. Although he is burdened with 23 Ibs. of protective padding and wears braces on both knees (he suffers from slipping kneecaps), Bathgate glides across a rink with the classic grace of an Olympic figure skater. He has exceptional peripheral vision, is an expert at “decking” (feinting) defensemen and goalies out of position. A cat-quick opportunist, he is the best playmaker in the game. And his longdistance “slapshot” is pro hockey’s most effective offensive weapon: the rock-hard puck streaks toward the nets at 100 m.p.h. Twice in one season, Bathgate scored on 80-ft. slap-shots. One ripped the glove off the right hand of Boston Goalie Harry Lumley; the other left Montreal’s Goalie Jacques Plante with a bruised leg. Last week against Toronto, Bathgate rammed in one goal and set up another, ran his season’s scoring total to 54 points—tops in the league. Says Ranger Coach Harvey: “Weaknesses? The main weakness Andy has is that he doesn’t shoot enough.”

“As long as I can remember,” Andy Bathgate says, “I’ve been on skates.” He grew up in Manitoba, turned down scholarship feelers from two U.S. universities (Denver and Colorado) to play “amateur” hockey (for $40 a week) for the Guelph, Ont., Biltmores. Recalls ex-Ranger Coach Frank Boucher: “Andy seemed to have everything. He had a burst of speed, and he was a very tricky stick handler.” When he joined the Rangers in 1954, Bathgate was an instant success: he scored 20 goals in his first season, was voted the N.H.L.’s Most Valuable Player four years later.

Battle Scars. In the rough, tough National Hockey League, where anything short of outright mayhem is considered a fair way to stop a man from scoring, Andy Bathgate has earned his share of scars from slashing sticks and skates. He has the face of a Western movie hero who has just lost a saloon brawl. His upper teeth are the best that money can buy; he deposits them carefully in a paper cup before he goes out to play. “In Canada,” he says, “you’re not a hockey player until you’ve lost some teeth.” In the rugged give-and-take of bigtime hockey, Bathgate has learned to give with the best of them: he once got so infuriated that he beat up Boston’s Vic Stasiuk twice in a single night.

On and off the ice, Andy Bathgate seems almost too good to be true. He neither smokes nor drinks; he is scrupulously polite to fans and sportswriters, banks much of his $20,000 salary, drove the same car for nine years before he finally traded it in on a new model (a 1962 Pontiac). “Andy is simply never moody,” says his pretty wife Merle, “even after the team loses. Sometimes I’ll criticize him for not having back-checked or not having made the right sort of pass.” Adds the fortunate Mrs. Bathgate: “He’ll listen.”