Wayne Gretzky's Ghost (16 page)

In fact, he is late to meet me on this cold April morning not because of rain falling in needles, but because of fans stopping
him as he enters the hockey rink where his retired Montreal Canadiens No. 4 hangs proudly from the rafters. Even Canadien Chris Higgins—born long after Mr. Béliveau raised a tenth Stanley Cup over his head—wants visiting family members to meet his childhood hero.

No matter where this tall, white-haired seventy-five-year-old goes, there are well-wishers. His wife, Elise, has driven him to the interview, waiting patiently, as she has since they married in 1953, while he wades through those who want to touch the hem of the hockey legend whose most lasting legacy may well be class. “I don't mind the wait,” she says.

“I'm very fortunate,” he adds. “Just signing my name makes people happy.”

Just being Jean Béliveau seems to have the same effect. Last week, he let his name stand for a dinner that brought out a thousand of Montreal's business elite—as well as Guy Lafleur, Gordie Howe, Jean Chrétien and Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The event raised more than a million dollars for children's hospitals in the province.

All the money, he had instructed, had to go to children, just as he had insisted thirty-six years earlier when the Canadiens decided to give him a special “night” in what would be his final season. “If there's money involved,” he told them, “I don't want a penny of it for myself.”

That exceptional night in 1971 saw the Jean Béliveau Foundation launched with a cheque for $155,855. And every post-retirement dollar Béliveau has made from appearances and golf tournaments has gone into the fund, raising millions for a camp for disabled children near Joliette.

That summer, when he took his family to Europe, he wrote ahead and asked if they might attend the weekly public audience of Pope Paul VI. When they arrived, they were told it would be a private audience. The Pope, it turned out, wanted to meet the athlete who gave everything to needy children.

When Béliveau finally retired completely from the Canadiens in 1993, he also received an invitation to 24 Sussex Drive. The new prime minister Jean Chrétien wished to see him. Jean and Elise Béliveau drove to Ottawa knowing what was likely to happen. There had been rumours about him serving as governor general. It seemed a perfect fit. Béliveau had already led an impeccable life in the spotlight. Elise—with her French and Irish background and what granddaughter Mylène calls “an explosive personality”—would make an ideal partner. And the two were sociable, energetic and fluently bilingual. But they could not take it.

The reason was simple, but private—and it involved children.

Less than five years earlier, Jean Béliveau had arrived for work at the old Montreal Forum to find two police officers and a chaplain waiting. Montreal police officer Serge Roy—husband to the Béliveaus' daughter, Hélène, and father to their two girls, then five and three—had taken his own life at nearby Station 25. The marriage had been going through a rough stretch, but there had been no indication of the depths of the policeman's despair.

Nearly twenty years later, Elise Béliveau still has trouble speaking of that time. She waits for Jean to leave the room to accept a telephone call before even attempting. “I couldn't talk about it for a long time,” she says. “I couldn't talk about it all in front of Jean. I couldn't talk about it in front of Hélène.”

She had been close to her son-in-law. He had, she says, such a “beautiful smile” and always seemed happy. Jean believes it was the stress of police work that was a contributing factor, but Elise says they did not know then and do not know today why he committed suicide.

“I was mad,” she says. “It never dawned on me that he would do a thing like that, and when it happened, oh my goodness … Nobody knows why. And you blame yourself, you say, ‘How come I didn't see it?' But when you think of it, it's nobody's fault. Because the one who does it, that's what he wants. And that's it.”

Serge's death also left the Béliveaus with a tough decision to make about the governor general's post. “Under normal circumstances,” Jean says, “we probably would have accepted. It would have been a great honour.” Instead, he could not sleep when he returned from Ottawa. He found himself sitting up Saturday morning at six o'clock, still pondering.

“What are we going to do with this?” he asked Elise when she came downstairs. She didn't know. If he wanted it, she told him, she would go. If she wanted it, he told her, he would make it happen. They did want it, but they wanted more to be there for the girls.

“You don't replace a father or a mother,” Jean says. “But there are a lot of things grandparents can do. I couldn't leave them behind.”

They decided they would just say they were retiring and leave it at that. If he made too much of the grandchildren and word got out, he worried it would draw attention to them they did not need. So he placed the call to say no. “He would have been fantastic,” says Chrétien, who then offered the prestigious appointment to Roméo LeBlanc.

“He's always been there for us,” says granddaughter Mylène Roy, now twenty-three and finishing up her fine arts degree at the University of Quebec. “He's always the same with us, no matter if we were six or seven or twenty-one, twenty-two. Always the same. Never changed. He's always so attentive in his own way. Always so patient. He's always asking this, even now: ‘Is everything fine? Is there anything we can do?' ”

They lived nearby, close enough that the older Béliveaus could visit regularly, be there for sports, special school events and the invariable crises of the teenage years. They established rituals such as daily telephone checks, birthdays, anniversaries and Sunday get-togethers, usually swimming in the Béliveaus' pool in good weather.

Even on the day I meet the couple, Elise Béliveau had risen early to pick up Mylène's younger sister, twenty-one-year-old
Magalie, as she came off her night shift as a nurse at a Montreal hospital. Both Mylène and Magalie are deeply appreciative for what their grandparents did. In many ways, Jean Béliveau became both father and grandfather, a rock to hold on to in a time of turbulent waters.

“He's not so much of a talker,” Mylène says. “He's always there, but more in a silent way. The way people see him in public is just the way he is with his family. It's more of a … a presence …”

Whatever Jean Béliveau became in life, it began in little Victoriaville. “My childhood was in no ways remarkable,” he wrote in his 1994 memoirs. “It was a typical French-Canadian Catholic upbringing, one hinged on family values, strict religious observance, hard work, conservatism, and self-discipline.”

Laurette Béliveau, who died young at forty-nine, installed industrial-strength linoleum on the kitchen floor so Jean and his younger brother, Guy, could leave their skates on when they came in from the backyard rink for lunch. He still lists vegetable soup with a slice of crusty bread as a favourite meal. Arthur Béliveau drove for Shawinigan Water and Power. “A wonderful man,” Elise says of him. And one with his own ideas. When scouts came calling on his talented son, he turned them away. When teams tried to sign him to contracts covering more than a season, he would tell them, “In the spring, he belongs to me.”

When the budding young hockey star left for Quebec City at seventeen, Arthur drove him to the bus stop in the company truck and said, simply, “Do your best, Jean—it will be enough.” It is but one of many Arthur Béliveau maxims that Jean carries to this day. Loyalty is important. You and only you will know when you have paid a debt. Your name is your greatest asset.

It was in Quebec City that young Jean developed a love for children. He was such a star, even in junior, that he was given a 1951 Nash and a $60-a-week summer job driving about as the Laval Ice Cream Man handing out ice cream bars. Elise, whom he
had met on a blind date, had to drive at first and, for months after he finally got his licence, had to do the backing up for him.

Montreal was desperate for the tall youngster to come to the Canadiens, but he was not keen to leave Quebec City and Elise. When he graduated from junior hockey, he said he would thank the fans of the city by staying around another year to play for the semi-professional Aces, but ended up staying on a second season as well.

Montreal finally signed him in 1953 for the unheard-of sum of $110,000 over five years. He was twenty-two and knew it was time to move on. In retrospect, however, he believes that delaying his National Hockey League career so long is what gave him a “maturity” other young stars may have lacked. “You're eighteen years old,” he says, “and you come from a small town, from a quiet but strong family. For me, Quebec was the foundation. If I was ever to build on something, it would serve me.”

He came out of Quebec City a hockey star, but also committed to children's charity. His popularity had allowed the city to build a new, larger Colisée—jokingly referred to as “Chateau Béliveau”—but it also showed him another power. He had been helping a local priest, Father Bernier, by coming to an old stone shed the priest had set up as a sort of club for young people and was there the morning the floor partly caved in.

“We better do something about this,” the young hockey player told the priest. And he has never looked back.

It has been a life in the spotlight, one that is usually spoken of in terms of Stanley Cups and the Hall of Fame and the many awards he won for his skill on the ice. But that is only part of it. Jean Béliveau has also served as a father figure for his granddaughters. And for young players—Guy Lafleur first and foremost among them.

There were times when he needed his own rock. Nearly seven years ago, he discovered an odd lump on his neck while shaving and underwent a gruelling radiation round that has, fortunately,
left him cancer-free today. But it was tough. “If you don't have faith,” Elise says, “you don't have much.”

On the verge of celebrating their fifty-third wedding anniversary this June, the Béliveaus are moving out of the house in Longueuil they purchased in 1955 for $18,000. In May, they will move “down the street” to a condominium with a “fabulous” night view of Montreal—the city where, for more than half a century, his own light has shone brightest.

There are no regrets, he says. When the chance to be governor general came up, he says, they did what any grandparents would do under similar circumstances.

“But it would have been great,” he says, smiling shyly. “From that little ice surface behind the house in Victoriaville to make it all the way to governor general, it would have made my life full.”

“You've had a full life,” Elise corrects.

“Yes,” he says. “I know.”

Jean Béliveau was named a Companion in the Order of Canada as well as honorary captain of the 2010 men's Olympic hockey team that went on to win the gold medal in the Vancouver Winter Games. He has had further health issues, including a small stroke in 2010 that briefly hospitalized him, but early 2011 found the Béliveaus happily living in their new apartment and enjoying his eightieth year
.

I
n hockey it is called a “rep,” short, of course, for “reputation.” Mine grew out of North Bay: one game, one moment, the clock stopped, the game in suspension—and yet it was this, nothing to do with what took place while clocks ran in sixty-eight
other games, that put me on the all-star team with more votes than Torchy. Half as many, however, as Bobby Orr. But still, it was Orr and Batterinski, the two defensemen, whom they talked most about in Ontario junior.

Bobby Orr would get the cover of
Maclean's
. I almost got the cover of
Police Gazette
after the Billings incident. My rep was made. The
North Bay Nugget's
nickname for me, Frankenstein, spread throughout the league. I had my own posters in Kitchener; there were threats in Kingston and spray-paint messages on our bus in Sault Ste. Marie; late, frantic calls at the Demers house from squeaky young things wanting to speak to the “monster!”

They didn't know me. I didn't know myself. But I loved being talked about in the same conversations as the white brushcut from Parry Sound. Orr they spoke of as if he was the Second Coming—they sounded like Poppa praising the Madonna on the church in Warsaw; for me it was the same feeling for both Orr and the Madonna—I couldn't personally see it.

Orr had grown since I'd seen him first in Vernon, but he was still only sixteen in 1964 and seemed much too short to be compared to Harvey and Howe, as everyone was doing. He'd gone straight from bantam to junior, but Gus Demers still said he was just another in a long list of junior hockey's flashes-in-the-pan. Another Nesterenko, another Cullen.

We met Oshawa Generals in that year's playoffs, and the papers in Oshawa and Sudbury played up the Batterinski–Orr side of it. “Beauty and the Beast,” the
Oshawa Times
had it. The
Star
countered with “Batterinski's Blockade,” pointing out that the Hardrocks' strategy was to have Batterinski make sure Orr never got near the net, though no one ever spoke to me about it. I presume it was understood.

On March 28 we met on their home ice, the advantage going to them by virtue of a better record throughout the season. I said not a single word on the bus ride down, refusing to join Torchy in his dumb-ass Beatles songs, refusing even to get up and wade
back to the can, though I'd had to go since Orillia. My purpose was to exhibit strength and I could not afford the slightest opening. I had to appear superhuman to the rest of the team: not needing words, nor food, nor bodily functions.

If I could have ridden down in the equipment box I would have, letting the trainer unfold me and tighten my skates just before the warm-up, sitting silent as a puck, resilient as my shin pads, dangerous as the blades. The ultimate equipment: me.