Canadians (17 page)

The Rocket always insisted he was “just a hockey player,” but on St. Patrick's Day, 1955, he would become far more than that. He would become, despite his refusal to accept this, refusal even to discuss it ever, one of the pivotal figures in Canadian history.

The Richard Riot was, historians now agree, a significant step in Quebec culture toward the Quiet Revolution that would turn Quebeckers from workers to managers, from second-class Canadians to first-class, and that would sow the seeds of “Maîtres chez nous” (“Masters of our own house”) and, ultimately, the sovereignty movement that remains, today, at the very heart of both Quebec and Canadian politics.

It was the final week of the 1954–55 hockey season. Richard was at the peak of his abilities then, a decade after hockey's first fifty-goals-in-fifty-games had elevated him to the level of national sports hero. His thirty-eight goals and thirty-six assists by St. Patrick's Day 1955 were leading that year's scoring race. The Art Ross Trophy, awarded to the NHL's leading scorer, was the one honour that had so far eluded Richard in his fabulous career, and the Montreal fans were looking forward to seeing their hero first win the scoring race and then, in the coming playoffs, lead the team to one more Stanley Cup.

But then everything suddenly went wrong.

There had been an incident in a game played the previous Sunday in Boston. Richard, who had a wild temper, had been in a stick-swinging battle with the Bruins' Hal Laycoe, one of the toughest defencemen in the league. Laycoe had started the duel by cuffing Richard in the head with his stick and Richard, following the frontier code of the game, had struck back with his own stick.

The battle had left both men bloodied, the photograph of a seething Richard, black eyes burning and blood rolling down off his face, today one of the game's most familiar, if slightly sickening, memories. Richard, in his fury to get at Laycoe, had tried to go through the officials. When linesman Cliff Thompson grabbed hold of him, enabling Laycoe to continue his attack on the Montreal star, Richard had slugged Thompson in an effort to get free to continue with Laycoe.

There was no doubt Richard was in trouble, but no one in Montreal imagined how much.

On March 17, with the Detroit Red Wings in town to take on the hometown favourites, the NHL office, then situated in downtown Montreal, announced that Richard was being suspended for the remainder of the season, which amounted to only three games—but also the entire playoffs. It threw the city into an instant panic over Richard's scoring title and, of course, the chances of regaining the Stanley Cup from Detroit, which had taken it away from the Canadiens the year before.

Richard's suspension had been handed down by NHL president Clarence Campbell, a famous lawyer and patrician leader of the Quebec establishment. Tall, slim, pale, very anglophone, rich, and connected, the older Campbell was a sharp and unmistakable contrast to the younger, darker, thicker Richard, hero of the francophone working class. It was well known that the two didn't like each other. Earlier in the season, according to
Montreal Gazette
sportswriter Red Fisher, whose first assignment covering the Canadiens took place that very night, Richard had allowed his name to stand on a ghosted column in one of the French newspapers in which he referred to Campbell as a “dictator.” It was the considered opinion of most Montrealers, especially at this pivotal moment.

“Clarence Campbell was trying to crush a little French-Canadian with wings,” Roch Carrier wrote in
Our Life with the Rocket: The Maurice Richard Story
.

That's what people are saying. Anger is rumbling in the province of Quebec like the water held captive in the rivers by the winter ice.… From everywhere, insults are flying towards Clarence Campbell. Everyone has his own story of indignity to tell…. They mention a cousin who used to work for somebody like Clarence Campbell….

Maurice Richard has never accepted humiliation. Humiliating the Rocket means humiliating the entire people. This time we won't bow our heads.…

The police knew the situation was explosive. Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau pleaded with Campbell not to take his usual seat among the fans at that night's
game. Campbell, a stern man who'd served as Canada's prosecution lawyer at the Nuremberg Trials, said he had no fear and fully intended to take his ususal seat. He arrived late, the first period already on, but the crowd was watching for him. Detroit was up 2–0 and the Canadiens seemed lost without their leader.

The crowd erupted as Campbell made his way in and sat down, pretending not to notice. They booed. Men yelled out threats. Someone threw an egg. Then a tomato. Then more eggs and tomatoes. Campbell sat there stoically, not even blinking. At the end of the period, a smiling man walked toward Campbell with his hand outstretched. Campbell instinctively reached for it and the man brought his hand up and slapped Campbell hard across the face. Another man spun the first man around and smashed his fist into his face.

The Richard Riot was on.

A tear gas bomb exploded in the arena, sending yellow smoke into the air and fans screaming and streaming for the exits. Someone yelled
“Fire!”
More panic.

Officials ordered the building cleared and decided the game would have to be forfeited to the Red Wings, but no one else was thinking hockey any more. The crowd flowed like hot lava out into the streets surrounding the Forum, only to be joined by thousands of others who were already outside protesting Campbell's decision. Some carried homemade placards, one reading
“Injustice au Canada français.”

Someone fired a shot through one of the Forum windows.

Several men gathered around a car, rocked it, and then turned it completely upside down. They went on to do the same to a police car. Others began overturning more vehicles as the seething rioters moved down Ste-Catherine Street, breaking windows, looting stores, and setting cars on fire. The rioting continued for most of the night. Vehicles were destroyed, storefronts ruined, windows shattered—but miraculously no one was killed. Police arrested more than forty rioters, four of them mere youngsters, and the following day a badly shaken Richard went before the news microphones and pleaded for calm.

Campbell refused to lift the suspension. Richard's teammate Bernard

“Boom Boom” Geoffrion—Howie Morenz's son-in-law—would use those final three days to slip past Richard in the scoring race by a single point. Geoffrion, not Richard, would be awarded the Art Ross Trophy— a triumph that became a burden Geoffrion would carry the remainder of his life as the man who had denied the Rocket the one championship, scoring, that his name was most often associated with. In the Stanley Cup playoffs that followed, Montreal won its first round against the Bruins, but without Richard in the lineup it lost in the final, once again, to the despised Red Wings.

And yet in other, more significant ways, the province of the Montreal Canadiens didn't lose at all.

The anger continued to simmer after that St. Patrick's Day of 1955 and the province of Quebec would change in the days and weeks and months that followed. Something had happened that night in the Forum that had nothing to do with hockey, nothing to do with suspensions. It was a revolution, at first noisy, then quiet, but a revolution all the same.

Twenty years after that pivotal night, Toronto playwright Rick Salutin was writing a commissioned play on the famous hockey team. A genuine fan of the game and a renowned observer of Canadian culture, Salutin was trying to come to grips with the hold this team and its stars had on a people who, even if they didn't know it then, considered themselves a nation. Salutin spoke to players, to fans, to sportswriters, to academics, to people sitting in bars around the province. In one encounter in Quebec City he watched the game on television and asked the woman having a drink next to him, “How come?” How come the fans were so frenetic, so involved? How come it meant so much?

Her answer said it all: “The Canadiens—they're us. Every winter they go south and in the spring they come home conquerors.”

Red Fisher had said much the same thing to Salutin—that when you're up against the seemingly impossible, the too powerful, you may not win the real battles against the perceived rulers, but you can win elsewhere, in another forum. For Quebeckers, it was on the ice.

Four decades after the Richard Riot, the Rocket told Jack Todd of the
Montreal Gazette
that he believed it wasn't only Campbell who wished to
see him punished, but other owners as well. That could mean only, Todd presumed, Conn Smythe of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Both Smythe and Campbell were military men, proud soldiers who, like many of their anglophone ilk, harboured a deep resentment toward Quebeckers for failing to embrace conscription in the Second World War.

It had long been said in certain quarters that Richard's legendary fifty-goals-in-fifty-games feat during the 1944–45 season was suspect in that Richard had stayed to play rather than sign up to fight. He was, went the whispers, competing in a watered-down league, given the number of good hockey players who'd temporarily left their teams for their country. Richard had attempted to enlist, apparently, but his numerous early hockey injuries—he was once thought too frail for the professional game—meant he couldn't get past the physical.

No matter; he hadn't enlisted and was French Canadian. For some, that alone was enough to condemn him.

The Richard Riot stands today as a significant benchmark in the evolution of Quebec. Some writers even compared his treatment by the Anglo authorities to that of Louis Riel, who had been hanged seventy years earlier. Richard had taken on authority, authority had tried to break him, and the fans themselves had rebelled against the establishment. No matter that the whole thing had started with a stick-swinging incident. No matter, even, that Richard himself felt that a suspension was his due—though not one that would include the playoffs.

The point was that the people had risen up, and that Rocket Richard had led them, and from this point on the sleepy Quebec world of parish priests and Premier Maurice Duplessis was awakened and on the way to massive social and political change.

Rocket Richard can hardly take credit for all this. He even campaigned for Duplessis, though he didn't consider himself political. It took the death of Duplessis and a few more years for the Quiet Revolution to begin. But Richard had, even if inadvertently, served as a flashpoint for a very different sort of resistance. French-Canadian players were routinely called “frogs” on the ice by other players. Officials deemed tripping and cross-checking worthy of penalties while racial insults went unpunished.
The bigotry was so widespread it was even considered acceptable in certain parts of Canadian society. Toronto Maple Leafs owner Conn Smythe had once opened a Montreal speech with “Ladies and gentlemen—and Frenchmen,” as if the vast majority of Quebeckers were a simplistic, insignificant people apart. What Rocket Richard was doing for his fellow Quebeckers, even if metaphorically, was standing up against the schoolyard bully.

“Richard, at least, could retaliate,”
Gazette
political analyst Don Macpherson wrote a half century after the riot.

Most French Canadians could only seethe in silence at the indignities to which they were subjected by English bosses and English shop clerks who would not speak their language and English business owners who put up signs in English only along Ste-Catherine St., all the way to the Forum.

When their champion scored against the English, he scored for them. And when he commanded respect from his English adversaries on the ice, with his fists or his stick, he was retaliating for them.

But when he did retaliate, not only to the verbal taunts but also to the physical fouls, it often seemed to them and to him that he was punished more severely than his English tormentors.

The riot certainly wasn't the only impetus—bitter strikes in the asbestos industry and by Radio-Canada producers had also pitted French workers against English bosses—but it stands as the most significant and easily recalled of the many steps toward a modern Quebec. A Liberal provincial government under Jean Lesage arrived in 1960, the Rocket's last year of hockey, and its first act was to nationalize the hydroelectric industry, which meant taking it from the hands of the English—
les maudits anglais
—and making Hydro-Québec the sole provider of power. A key minister in the Lesage government was a young former broadcaster, René Lévesque, who would later leave the Liberals and bring the sovereignty movement its first great victory when his Parti Québécois won the November 15, 1976, provincial election.

“
In rather short order,” Concordia University history professor Ronald Rudin has written, “the Quebec government was transformed into a powerful agent to advance the interests of its predominantly French-speaking population.”

And, many believe, this transformation had its genesis in a hockey rink in another country, when a player with coal-black eyes took the first swing at authority.

“Merci, Maurice.

“Merci bien.

“Merci … merci … merci …”

ON SEPTEMBER 28, 1972, I was on a bus headed for the very first assignment of what was to become my career. Red Fisher's first assignment—the Montreal–Detroit game that became the Richard Riot—had been far more glamorous. I was headed for a marina on Lake Simcoe to do a story for a Maclean-Hunter business magazine—still some months away from being rescued by my first real job offer, from Peter Newman at
Maclean's
. I had no car so took the bus up the milk run along Highway 11 heading north of Toronto. The bus stopped at a tiny store in a village so small it wasn't even on the map. Someone from the marina would drive up from the lake to pick me up. It was a hard day to do any kind of work, as it also marked the final game of the Canada–Soviet series of 1972. Esposito's impassioned speech had rallied his team, and his team's victories in Moscow had rallied the Canadian fans. This was the afternoon of Game 8, the deciding game.