Courage and Fear in a Vortex of Violence

He needs the glove of an all-star shortstop, the agility of a gold-medal gymnast, the reflexes of a championship racing-car driver, the eye of a .400 hitter and the mind of a geometrician. Even then he is nothing if he has not conquered fear, for he lives in a vortex of violence in the world’s fastest team sport. He is the hockey goalie, the masked man, the magnet for action in a war on ice.

As in no other sport, the essence of his game is violence —bodies hurtling, players smashing each other into the boards, sticks slashing, fists always at the ready. Even when the skating and body checking are clean—and they often are not—the play is fierce and frightening. And it is all directed at one target—the man in the reinforced fiber-glass mask.

Alone or in clusters, attackers bear down on him at breakneck speed, their razor-sharp blades ripping into the white ice. From any angle, in the open or from behind a screen of players, a shooter fires and the rock-hard puck hums toward the goalie at more than 100 m.p.h. He has less than a second to react. If he fails, there is no reprieve: the goalie is the last line of defense, the difference between winning and losing.

Though he rarely strays far from the net, and does not have the flashy moves of a high-scoring center, it is the goalie in his lonely vigil who embodies the savage, bruising and ultimately mesmerizing nature of his sport. He is an imposing knight in polyurethane padding as he crouches before the goal, ready to strike out in any direction with glove, skates or oversized stick. But behind his ghostly synthetic face, he is still vulnerable. No padding or mask that leaves him free to move can fully shield him from the potentially lethal blow of a slap shot or misguided stick. Danger is his way of life.

No one knows the goalie’s risks better than the Philadelphia Flyers’ Bernie Parent. “You don’t have to be crazy to be a goalie,” says Parent, “but it helps.” If so, Parent must be crazier than most. For the past two years, he has been the best goal tender in hockey. Last year Parent all but carried the Flyers to the playoffs. He appeared in 73 of their 78 games, led the league in shutouts (twelve), and had the lowest goals-against average per game (1.89). In the playoffs he shut down the high-scoring offenses of New York and Boston, and helped the Flyers to make hockey history by becoming the first expansion team to win the Stanley Cup. For his extraordinary performance, Parent was named playoff Most Valuable Player. This year, with the season two-thirds completed, Parent is once again setting the pace for goalies with nine shutouts and a goals-against average of 2.01. Even after a recent letdown, the Flyers own first place in their division of the National Hockey League. Says Flyer Captain Bobby Clarke: “Bernie makes you feel like you can walk on water.”

The arrival of Parent and his bruising teammates as the most potent force in hockey has added immeasurably to a growing interest in the sport. For better or worse the Flyers have brought new muscle into the game. Fans cannot resist their intimidating play and all-too-eager fights. In Philadelphia, 17,007 pack the Spectrum for every game to cheer on the “Broad Street Bullies”; on the road, S.R.O. crowds come to boo the tempestuous enemy. The cry for blood explodes whenever Flyer Enforcer Dave Schultz (6 ft. 1 in., 190 lbs.) starts swinging for the nearest hostile jaw. Inevitably, other teams have been infected by the mugging malaise.

Says N.H.L. President Clarence Campbell, who suspended Schultz for a game last week because of his violent behavior: “Without doubt, this has been our worst year ever for sheer violence on the ice.”

Partially in response to the Flyers’ fireworks, kids from Florida to California are taking to the ice by the thousands (see box page 52). Though the money-hungry businessmen of the N.H.L. initially hurt their sport by expanding from six to 18 teams in just seven years — there simply have not been enough quality players to staff all the teams — the newcomers are already reaching for the top of the league. In fact, three of the four divisions are presently being led by expansion teams: Philadelphia, Vancouver and Buffalo, with pushy Los Angeles giving Montreal a scare in the fourth.

Off the ice, Bernard Marcel Parent, six weeks short of 30, hardly looks like the kind of man around whom such an up heaval could swirl, let alone the kind who would voluntarily face up to a smashing slap shot. He sports a closely trimmed mustache, graying hair and just the hint of a paunch on his 5-ft. 10-in., 195-lb. frame. He has a smooth, unscarred face despite his 18 warring years in the net. (The masks he has worn for the past 14 years have absorbed 30 direct hits.) And he has none of the swagger that might be expected from a fearless goalie. He got cold feet on the eve of his wedding and went hunting in the Canadian Rockies (the wedding was postponed three months). He is scared by flying or even riding a bus.

Game after game, though, this unlikely lion takes on what former Chicago Black Hawk Goalie Glenn Hall once called “sixty minutes of hell.” Says Parent in his clipped French Canadian accent: “I like playing in that place. I always have.” He is superbly suited for his work. A hockey goal, 6 ft. wide and 4 ft. high, provides a 24-sq.-ft. opening. Since the average goal tender — Parent included — fills a space of about 8 sq. ft. in his 35 lbs. of padding, his job boils down to protecting the remaining area with stick, glove or body.

Parent puts them all to work with a “stand-up” system. Many goalies use a flop-and-stop technique, dropping to their knees or falling all the way into a split to block the puck with their heavy leg pads. The maneuver has two drawbacks: the 6-oz. vulcanized rubber disk can slip between his legs as the goalie flops; and once he is on the ice, he is helpless against rebound shots. Parent’s approach, copied from his idol and teacher, Stand-Up Master Jacques Plante, requires more finesse but provides far tighter defense against rebounds. When attackers start to charge his net at speeds revving up to 30 m.p.h., Parent begins a familiar ritual: he knocks his stick on his skates, moves a few feet up ice to the edge of the “goal crease,” reaches back to tap the top of his stick and the end of his glove against the steel goalposts to get his bearings, drops to a crouch, and challenges the shooter to make the first move. He also flips to the right page in his mental book on players and recalls data on their habitual skating patterns. In the second or two that all this is going on, Parent begins to adjust his position to cut down the angle attackers have to shoot for open space in the net. Part geometry, part instinct, the tactic of “playing the angles” is Parent’s greatest talent on the ice. “When he’s doing it right,” says Flyer Coach Fred Shero, “Bernie won’t have to move his glove or his foot an inch either way to make a save.”

There is risk in skating out to trim the angle. If the goalie only deflects the puck, an opponent may slip behind him to flip a rebound into the open net. Should he glide beyond the crease, the goalie is subject to the bone-rattling body checks that players use to knock opponents out of the play. Parent usually manages to avoid these griefs by trapping the puck cleanly or deflecting it toward the corner with his stick.

All this deliberate movement can break down. When attackers put together complex plays and flick the puck over the blue line to home in on Parent, he is lucky if he sees some shots as they leave a stick from behind a blur of battling skaters. Worse, many shots carom off players or their sticks in front of the goal; coming off curved sticks, slap shots spin so hard that they often drop like sinkers crossing home plate. None of these difficulties seem to trouble Parent: “If I see the puck leave the stick, I know exactly where it is going.”

If he is unable to place his entire body in the way of a shot, his glove or stick will flick out like a lizard’s tongue. He works hard at keeping all his puck-stopping tools well honed to assure quicker, more precise movements. Recently when he missed two high slap shots, Parent dissected his mistake and remembered that during pregame practices, Coach Shero had asked shooters to concentrate on low shots at the goal. The next day Parent asked them to fire 50 high blasts to help him get his rhythm back.

In action, he concentrates so hard on anticipation and execution that he rarely knows who scores Flyer goals. That is part of his competitiveness: to blot out all else and focus on the assailant. “It’s me against him,” he explains. “It proves something when you make a save.” Winning is something he is addicted to. “I hate losing,” he says. “A good broad I don’t mind. A good win I don’t mind either.”

Some goalies steep themselves in humiliation for hours when they miss a shot. Glenn Hall once said: “Having a goal scored against you is like getting your pants taken down in front of 15,000 people.” Though Parent is not exactly light-hearted about giving up goals, he can take some with a grin. In a game against Buffalo last year, Sabre Left Winger Rick Martin sent a hard shot screaming over Parent’s shoulder into the net. When Bobby Clarke skated by the Flyer goalie to encourage him, he heard Parent laughing and saying behind his mask, “Gee that kid can shoot.” Another time when reporters in the dressing room spotted an ugly bruise on Parent’s thigh and asked if a slap shot had caused it, he replied: “Nah, my wife bit me in a wild fit of passion.”

Despite his confidence, success, and luck—the only major damage he has suffered was a broken bone in his right foot and a severe skate cut to his left hand two seasons ago—Bernie Parent is ridden by repressed fear on the ice. Like a soldier under fire, he finds fear real and physical, and he has to fight it off. “It’s like a dream,” he told TIME Correspondent Robert Lewis last week. “It comes and goes. When I’m tired, I might start thinking about getting injured and about my family and kids. Thank God it does not happen all the time because it affects your play.” Worry can be touched off by nothing more than innocent joshing on the bus about an opposition player who has a reputation for firing at goalies’ heads.

Fear stalks Parent most often during preparation. “In practice, I’m very scared,” he says. “It’s no fun at all.” Sometimes in a workout, Parent cannot overcome the natural life-preserving urge to flinch when the puck comes at him. “I try to keep my head down and get the shot,” he says. “Sometimes I just can’t do it.” When that happens, Parent insists that his teammates fire a barrage of shots at him until he beats down his fear.

Before every period, Parent crosses himself with his stick. “I ask God to protect me and help the team,” he says, adding with a grin, “but I never ask him to win a game.” On the ice, Parent seeks security in other ways. Unlike some goalies who roam out in front of the net or behind it to feed the puck to teammates, Parent sticks close and admits his sense of security increases as he moves back toward the goal. “It’s like a kid who goes to the woods with his father,” he says. “As long as I’m close to the net, I figure I’m all right.” He knows, though, that he is more effective when he moves out front. “It’s wrong” to stay close, he admits.

His mask is a security blanket. “That mask,” he says as though he were speaking of an old friend, “that mask is security.” It not only protects Parent from injury, but it hides him from the prying eyes of fans and opponents. On nights when he plays, Parent never appears in an arena without his mask on, even while going to and from the dressing room.

He prepares carefully for every game with a psyching-up ritual that begins on the eve of the game. Before home games he sits alone in the family room for more than an hour under a miniature replica of the Stanley Cup, thinking about opposition players and the moves he may have to make to block their shots. Then after half a dozen or so beers, he retires for eight hours of sleep. On the day of the game, he enjoys a steak for lunch and then returns to sleep. He likes the family German shepherd Tinker Bell to nap with him.

If some of Parent’s preparations for battle strike his teammates as slightly odd, no one complains. The reason: except for Parent and superstar Center Bobby Clarke, the Flyers are not a team of champions. Parent’s contribution is to keep the Flyers in the game and give them the confidence that their defense is puckproof. Says Coach Shero: “When Parent is out there, we know we can win games we have no business winning.” For the offense, Shero counts on Clarke, one of the best playmakers in the league and, according to the coach, “the greatest leader I’ve seen in any sport.”

It is hard to argue the point once Aggressor Clarke goes into action. With his long curly hair and toothless smile (his four front upper teeth have been knocked out), “Clarkie” out-hustles everyone on the ice, even though he is a diabetic. When teammates do not put out, he blasts them; when he makes a bad pass himself he jams his stick against the boards and curses. One measure of his play can be found in the assist column: Clarke has scored only 15 goals this season, but he has made 53 assists.

For the rest of the Flyers, who are an unusually tight-knit and gentle group off the ice, the overwhelming statistic is penalty minutes. Two years ago, the team smashed the N.H.L. record for penalties, collecting 1,756 minutes. Last year they fell just short of matching that mark, and this season they have fought their way ahead of the record pace. The reason for all this violence is Shero’s strategy of victory through fear power. Freely admitting that Philadelphia lacks the quality players of other leading teams, Shero tries to make up for it with position play and intimidation. He teaches his men that the quickest way to the puck and on to the goal is often through or over an opponent. Prostrate guys finish last. “Some teams don’t seem to realize there are corners and pits in front of the net,” says Shero. “We have guys who are willing to go into those zones, to take and give punishment. If they don’t hang tough, they’re not going to play for me.”

Unquestionably, muscle has won games for the Flyers. Opposition players often give Dave Schultz, who has more strength than skill, a wide berth wherever he skates. More often than not, it is a Flyer who comes out of a corner melee with the puck. But do the Flyers dish out cheap shots and unnecessary brutality? In the final playoff game against the New York Rangers last spring, the Flyers helped themselves to victory when Schultz sent Ranger Defenseman Dale Rolfe to the dressing room with two gashes in the forehead. Toward the end of a recent road game against the Minnesota North Stars, which the Flyers lost badly, repeated fights broke out on the ice. When one Flyer shot a puck in the direction of the referee, his teammates on the bench roared: “Good shot, good shot.”

Parent himself is not sure he likes that kind of play. “To be aggressive is the kind of game I like,” he says, picking his words carefully, “but cheap shots, they’re not good. They break down our system and concentration.” Rivals are contemptuous. Ranger Coach Emile Francis says: “I appreciate great players like Gordie Howe who play you tough.” Then referring to the Flyers, he adds: “But this other kind of baloney, that’s Eastern League hockey.”

The virus of violence has spread far beyond the player. The most chilling recent display was Boston Bruin Dave Forbes’ attack on Minnesota North Star Henry Boucha. In that incident, Forbes jammed the end of his stick into Boucha’s right eye, leaving Boucha, after surgery, with impaired vision. In an unprecedented criminal action against an N.H.L. player, Forbes was charged with aggravated assault with a dangerous weapon. His trial, now scheduled for May, could remove punishment for sport violence from the arena to the police and the courts.

Among the people most concerned over unfettered violence are the officials of junior-level competition. Because the Flyers’ buccaneering play attracts fans—most critics suggest that is precisely why the pros fight—the ethic of war has seeped down to younger players. The trend has become so disturbing in Canada that the Ontario government recently conducted an inquiry into violence in the region’s amateur hockey programs and, soon after, the Ontario Hockey Association set up new rules to halt brutality on the ice.

Parent understands the concern; he once played in similar amateur programs in his native Montreal. His introduction to hockey came with a tennis ball as a puck and galoshes for skates. The pick-up games were played on neighborhood streets and young Bernie, always a loner, wanted to play goalie from the start. “I stopped the first shot and that settled it,” he recalls. “The challenge to make a save was always there. It was just in me.” The son of a factory foreman, Parent did not start skating until he was 11, and then his debut in the goal was not promising: he missed 21 shots. Nevertheless, Parent was hooked. “For Bernard, hockey is an obsession,” says his older brother Yvan, a Montreal psychologist. “All he ever wanted to do was to be a professional hockey player. He didn’t study, he didn’t go out with girls. He played hockey.”

By 1965 Parent, playing for a Boston Bruin farm team, was the best goalie in the Ontario Hockey Association and the Bruins brought him up. He bombed for two seasons. On the ice, Parent let in an average of 3.67 goals per game in 57 appearances; off the ice, he ravaged his $7,500 annual salary with a spree of high living. In 1967 the embryonic Flyers claimed him.

At Philadelphia, Parent found a wife and contentment as the Flyers won their divisional championship the first year. But Parent’s wanderings had only begun. In 1971 the Flyers traded him to the Toronto Maple Leafs, where he became a protégé of Plante, then the Toronto goalie. That stint ended 18 months later when Parent bolted the Leafs to sign with the World Hockey Association’s Miami Screaming Eagles. The only trouble was that Miami had no rink. “The only ice,” recalls Parent, “was in a glass.”

From the stillborn Eagles, Parent found his way to the W.H.A.’s Philadelphia Blazers, signing a fat five-year $750,000 contract. That adventure too ended in disaster when Parent quit the team midway through the 1973 playoffs, claiming he had not been paid. Angry Blazer teammates called him a “hockey Benedict Arnold.” “I knew how the guys felt,” says Parent, “but there are times in your life when you have to look after yourself.” With that, Parent and his wife Carol took off for a cruise. In Martinique, he got a call informing him the Flyers had taken him back. His career had come full circle and Parent celebrated in style. “I was drunk for six days,” he says. “The ocean was calm but the boat kept rocking.”

Parent has been taking good care of himself ever since. His lawyer is presently renegotiating his current $ 150,000-a-year, five-year contract with the Flyers for a deal that could provide financial security for life. Meanwhile Parent, Carol and their three young children are already living well with a five-bedroom $95,000 colonial house in suburban Cherry Hill, N.J., and a comfortable four-bedroom rented house on the Atlantic shore at Wildwood, N.J., where the Parents keep a 33-ft. Egg Harbor boat that he uses for deep-sea fishing. When he is not angling, Parent is passionately hunting with rifle and bow and arrow. Tracking mule deer at 10,000 ft. in the Colorado Rockies, Archer Parent bagged a deer the first time out.

Around Philadelphia, Parent enjoys the perquisites that go with being a superstar. Industrial Valley Bank pays him generously to advertise: “Bernie Saves . . . at I.V.B.,” and a popular local bumper sticker declares: ONLY THE LORD SAVES MORE THAN BERNIE PARENT. Bernie receives so much fan mail he has been forced to hire a secretary. Despite all the attention, he prefers quiet evenings at home with the family. “I’ve been trying to get Bernie to take me to a country and western show for years,” says Carol. “He hates to get dressed up to go out any place.”

If Parent has any regrets about his life, it is that he has not read more. Although he finished high school, he speaks wistfully about missed opportunities in the library. “I used to love hearing my mother talk,” he says. “She could get on with all kinds of people because she read so much.” With Parent not planning to retire until he is at least 37, the league is full of shooters who wish he would start reading War and Peace tomorrow, and not stop until this season’s hockey war is over.