When the Final Buzzer Sounds: NHL Greats Share Their Stories of Hardship and Triumph
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When the Final Buzzer Sounds: NHL Greats Share Their Stories of Hardship and Triumph
224eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781623684853 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Triumph Books |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2000 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
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When the Final Buzzer Sounds
NHL Greats Share their Stories of Hardship and Triumph
By Collen Howe, Gordie Howe
Triumph Books
Copyright © 2000 Triumph BooksAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62368-485-3
CHAPTER 1
Yvan Cournoyer: A Simple Man at Heart
When eight-year-old Kurtis Cournoyer asks his dad for a bedtime story, he knows pretty much what to expect. "Yvan sits down beside him," says Evelyn Cournoyer, "and, without exception, the first words out of Yvan's mouth are, 'Once upon a time, there was a little boy who had a dream.' ... And Kurtis and I say to ourselves, Oh, no, not the Dream again!"
The little boy, according to the tale, lived in a small town in rural Quebec and wanted nothing more in life than to play hockey for the Montreal Canadiens.
Because he was smaller than most boys his age, he was prepared to work extremely hard to make his dream come true. And every day, all winter, he spent every possible moment either on the town rink or on the tiny sheet of ice in his backyard. In summer, he fired hundreds of shots a day against the wall of his parents' garage.
Eventually, he moved with his family to Montreal, where, as a teenager, he continued to pour every ounce of his energy into improving his hockey skills.
And, sure enough, one day when he was nineteen years old, his hard work bore fruit, and he was summoned by the great coach Toe Blake to suit up with Les Glorieux, the Canadiens, the mythic standard bearers of the pride of French Canada.
He could not have been prouder as he pulled on the Canadiens sweater for his first game. And he could not have been more excited as he lined up for his first shift beside two of the heroes of his boyhood, Henri Richard and Jean Beliveau.
And he could not have been more daunted as he glanced across the face-off circle at perhaps the greatest hockey player of all time, Gordie Howe.
The Little Dreamer scored his first NHL goal that night, and the following season had his name inscribed on the glistening flanks of the Stanley Cup.
"That's where the story always ends," smiles Evelyn, "with the boy winning the Stanley Cup. Then it's lights out."
Were it not for Kurtis's sleep requirements, Yvan could easily extend the triumphal little roman à clef into the wee hours of the morning. He certainly has a storyteller's capital in his nearly five hundred big-time goals, his four All-Star team selections, and his ten Stanley Cups. He could add heroic subplots from the most remarkable hockey series ever, between the Canadians and Soviets, in 1972, or from the 1973 playoffs, when he led all combatants with fifteen goals and won the Conn Smythe Trophy as that year's premier playoff performer.
If he decided to darken the narrative, or take it into the shadows of the campfire, he could introduce his numerous debilitating injuries: to knees, back, head, shoulder, Achilles tendon, ankle; or his thirteen trips to the operating room; or the intense psychological pressures of being a marquee player in one of the fastest and most dangerous sports on earth.
He could bring in the goblins he encountered in the early autumn of 1979 when it struck him with the finality of a death sentence that the resonant dream of his boyhood was over. "I'd missed most of the previous season with a back injury," he explains, "but I'd come to training camp in September and had scored a few goals, and I thought I was going to be okay. If everything went well, I hoped to play another couple of years."
But when he awoke the morning after a preseason game against the Philadelphia Flyers, he was unable to walk, let alone skate, "and I knew that was it," he says.
The intervening years have brought Yvan enviable domestic and professional success. But any discussion of the eighteen months that followed his retirement from the Canadiens still brings a perceptible strain to his normally beatific face.
"It took me five years to accept that I was really retired!" he exclaims. "You play hockey all winter from the time you're five years old; you have the excitement, the camaraderie, the schedule to follow, and then, boom, it's over, and there's a very large hole in your life. In order to fill it, you do this, you do that, you go to work, probably at a job you don't understand, and every time you see a game, you have to convince yourself again that you're no longer a part of what's happening on the ice. Although deep down you still believe you are. You still think maybe you could play."
"Even now, looking at pictures from back then, I can see how drawn he was with the stress," says his wife, Evelyn. "We've been together more than twenty years, and in all that time, it's the only rough period he's had."
Evelyn submits that part of Yvan's postretirement agony was his lack of any choice concerning the termination of his career. "If he'd been able to say to himself, okay, I'll play this season, or the next one, and that'll be it, he'd have had at least some sense of control, as well as the time to prepare himself mentally."
What made the separation even harder for Yvan was his extraordinary emotional attachment to the Canadiens franchise, to its personnel and players, and even to its historic building. "You've got to remember," he says, "I played my entire career, from bantam to the end, in Montreal, and that from the time I started with the Junior Canadiens, at seventeen, I played at the Forum."
Not surprisingly, his evocations of those years are liberally sprinkled with the vocabulary of blood connection. Toe Blake, he says, was "like a father," his teammates "like brothers," the whole organization "one grande famille." To the players, the Forum was known affectionately as "la maison." "It wasn't my second home," says Yvan, "it was my first."
In the months that followed his abrupt departure from the game, he and Evelyn cast about futilely for a manageable approach to the future. As a distraction and a means of staying fit, they took up skiing, one of the few sports Yvan could handle with a bad back and reconstructed knees.
"One day," brightens Evelyn, "Yvan hit on the idea of a brasserie. He and I had always enjoyed restaurants, and with his popularity — well?"
A short time later, as they drove along Thirty-second Avenue in Lachine, a working-class suburb in west Montreal, where Yvan had lived as a boy, Yvan noticed a large open lot near the busy intersection of highways 13 and 20, not far from Dorval Airport. "It was a perfect spot for a restaurant," he says, and within days he was negotiating its purchase from Canadian National Railways. Within weeks, he was dickering with architects over plans for the capacious restaurant and bar that would eventually stand on the site. "Yvan always thinks big — no half measures," says Evelyn. Indeed, Brasserie 12 — so named for Yvan's sweater number — was to be a six-hundred-seat showplace, a monument not just to eating and drinking but to the life and accomplishments of its famous founder. (Coincidentally, it would stand directly across the street from La Bibliotheque Municipale Saul Bellow, a monument to Lachine's other widely celebrated son, who was born in the town in 1915 and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976.) Moreover, the brasserie was to be a model of proprietary accountability. "I didn't just want to own it, I wanted to run it," declares Yvan, "to be there, to meet the people, sign autographs — if they were coming to my brasserie, they weren't going to go away disappointed."
So concerned was Yvan about his personal role in the development of the place that, before construction began, he took the unusual step of naming himself official project contractor, defying local building ordinances to a degree that cost him thousands of dollars in fines. But the price of his misdemeanors was insignificant compared to the value and satisfaction he got from unfettered management of everything from the pouring of the concrete foundations to the erection of the walls and the installation of the plumbing and wiring.
The fascination with trades and with manual productivity was by no means new for the novice restaurateur. As a teenager in Lachine, he had spent countless hours in his father's machine shop on Remembrance Street and had taken four years of machine-shop training at technical school. "If I hadn't been a hockey player," he says, "I'd have been a machinist like my dad." In fact, he once wedded his passions for hockey and for machining by cutting a dozen solid steel pucks on the lathe in his father's shop. "They weighed two or three pounds each," he smiles. "I'd go downstairs at home and shoot them at the basement wall, to build up my strength." When the foundations of the house began disintegrating from the pounding, Yvan's parents ordered him outside, where he fired his pucks into bales of hay against the family garage.
When Brasserie 12 opened to the public in late 1981, the food was as good as promised — the house specialty was what Evelyn refers to as "top-quality roast beef" — and a veritable rapides of beer flowed out through the taps, across the bar, and down the patrons' throats. In no time, the place was one of Molson Brewery's largest accounts in the province. And for the next dozen years, Yvan and Evelyn poured as much energy and time into the ambitious watering hole as Yvan had ever poured into hockey. The two routinely showed up three hours before the restaurant's 11:00 a.m. opening time to receive deliveries of meat and vegetables, to work with the chef, and generally to prepare for the day. "Yvan was always up to his elbows in something," says Evelyn. "He'd help in the kitchen or deal with the suppliers or staff. At the noon hour, of course, he'd be behind the taps, right there in the middle of things, where the people could see him."
More importantly, he was positioned where the brasserie's thousands of patrons could approach him, greet him, make the (albeit fleeting) acquaintance of the five-feet-seven-inch bullet who was at one time the fastest man on skates. Hour after hour, day after day, Yvan smiled his wide, unassuming smile for the customers' cameras, and dispensed autographs on four-by-eight-inch postcards bearing effulgent likenesses of himself, plus the logos of the brasserie and of its preferred intoxicant, Molson Export Ale. "Yvan is really very shy," says Evelyn. "He's not one to initiate any sort of social interaction, so the set-up was perfect. He'd just be there, and the customers would come up to him, or he'd walk among the tables and people would stop him as he passed. If, say, a ball team or a hockey team was coming in late, they'd phone ahead, and Yvan would wait and meet them. In the beginning, we were both there all the time, twelve hours a day, easy. Kurt spent the first few years of his life there! He'd be under the tables, or, when he got a little older, helping stack glasses or doing other little jobs."
Evelyn makes it clear that she and Yvan did not merely serve their customers but entertained them, provided a sybaritic parade of Christmas parties, Halloween parties, Western parties, lobster parties, and oyster parties. She produces a stack of corroborative photos, showing revelers in various states of merriment, wearing cowboy outfits, goblin suits, softball uniforms, invariably snuggled up to her and Yvan — or just to Yvan — and, for the most part, to one or more pitchers of freshly tapped suds. "We knew these people!" she enthuses. "That's what made it fun! The place would be packed to the doors every Thursday, Friday, Saturday night. If you were a nonsmoker, forget it."
Fast-forward a decade to a recent Sunday afternoon in June, a day on which most of Quebec is celebrating the first long weekend of the summer. But the celebrations have by no means penetrated Brasserie 12, which, although open, is as silent as the Pharaoh's tomb. In a corner of the glass-enclosed terrace, three rather wide-angled men, the only occupants of the cavernous establishment, are loading up noiselessly on omelettes and Texas-style fries. They are sharing a pitcher of draft beer which, for all the pleasure it is giving them, might just as well be vinegar.
More than a year has passed since Yvan and Evelyn relinquished ownership of their once-cherished brasserie. And yet even in his absence, Yvan's spirit pervades the place in much the way a vapor extends to every nook and niche of its container. It's in the panoply of Habs memorabilia on the walls, in the framed photos and the ubiquitous numeral 12 that appears on the menu and placemats and outdoor signs; it's in the phone number: 637-1212.
Perhaps most poignantly, it resides in the memories of the customers — a significantly reduced crowd these days — for whom the place will never be anything less than the house that Yvan built. "I ate a lot of meals in there over the years," says Lachine resident Guy Sabourin. "I never knew Yvan well, but I used to like to see him behind the bar. It was nice to go in there and see him."
"He still comes in once in a while," says a brasserie waitress. "But not very much anymore."
* * *
On a morning in late August, Evelyn Cournoyer sits in the living room of their home on the northern outskirts of Montreal, speaking circumspectly about their departure from the restaurant trade, which had apparently supported them well for nearly a dozen years. While she is reluctant to say much, she makes it clear that their move was influenced both by economics and demographics. "A lot of things changed between 1981 when we opened and the mid-nineties when we sold," she says. "Certainly the recession made things harder for us. I mean, it was hard everywhere, but Lachine, in particular, tends to be industrial, and during the late eighties and early nineties a lot of local factories and warehouses went out of business. There just wasn't as much money around, or as many people."
In addition, by 1990 customers had a far broader choice of local bars and restaurants in which to spend their money than a decade earlier. Barbecue St. Hubert, the corporate chicken shack that has become Quebec's preeminent chain of restaurants, capitalized directly on the locus of activity created by the brasserie by putting up a large outlet immediately next door.
"People were also drinking less by the early nineties," observes one brasserie bartender. "And the laws against drinking and driving had gotten stricter. Today's average drinker has two or three beers and says, 'That's enough,' whereas in the old days a table of guys would come in and plough through five or six pitchers!" He points unenthusiastically at the self-operated breathalyzer machine, the Alcotest, that stands just outside the brasserie's washrooms. "Until recently," he says, "you didn't see many of those."
In addition to the economic and sociological pressures that were impinging on their operation, Evelyn and Yvan had quite simply grown tired of the quotidian demands of food ordering, menu preparation, staff scheduling, the endless cash-outs, the payroll, and accounting responsibilities, not to mention the necessity of being on the premises day in, day out, month after month, year after year. "You don't notice your weariness as much when things are going well," says Evelyn, "but with the recession we had to work harder and harder, and of course we weren't getting the same rewards."
During the couple's last year at the brasserie, they found themselves attempting daily miracles both in the kitchen and on the balance sheet. "We were determined not to compromise our standards," says Evelyn. "We always used the best meat and vegetables, for example. But at the same time, we were cutting our prices to the point where we were putting out daily specials, full-course meals, for under three dollars. The long and short of it is, we'd given all we could to the restaurant business. We miss the customers and staff — we had a lot of friends at the brasserie — but we were ready to do something else."
Part of the something else that followed the sale of the brasserie was a move from urban Laval to the semideveloped farmlands around Blainville, a saturnine village off Route 640, some twenty-five kilometers north of Montreal. The elegant grey-brick home into which the Cournoyers moved is part of an upscale subdivision built by Yvan's friend Mario Grilli, a Montreal developer for whom Yvan was doing publicity work when he first laid eyes on the place. "Yvan called me and said, 'You've gotta come see this house,' and as soon as I saw it I knew we were destined to live here," says Evelyn, who was attracted not only by the structure but by its seductive view across field and forest to the distant skyscrapers of downtown Montreal. In the months since taking possession, she and Yvan have turned the surrounding acreage into an arboretum of conifers and hardwoods scattered with birdbaths and feeders that attract a summer population of finches, warblers, and hummingbirds.
Inside, despite its rather lean decor and lines, the place invites both relaxation and play. Indeed, just to the left of the front door, where a visitor might expect to see a dining or sitting room, stands a full-sized billiard table, surrounded by choice remnants of Yvan's career in hockey. Draped casually on a chair are three hockey sweaters of different vintages and repair. The oldest, Yvan's first as a Canadien, is of knitted wool, decidedly faded, and suggests an era far dimmer to the memory than the early sixties, when it was worn. By comparison, the newest of the three sweaters, Yvan's last as a Hab, seems, in its shapeless dimensions and bright, uninspired acrylics, to embody some zipless season inhospitable both to comfort and to the spirit of the man who wore it. The two sweaters are fitting symbolic parentheses to a career that began in a parochial six-team league whose teams traveled by train (and whose players began their careers at $10,000 a season), and ended in a financially free-wheeling twenty-one-team league that spanned four time zones and included teams in subtropical climates.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from When the Final Buzzer Sounds by Collen Howe, Gordie Howe. Copyright © 2000 Triumph Books. Excerpted by permission of Triumph Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction by Charles Wilkins,1. Yvan Cournoyer: A Simple Man at Heart,
2. Phil Esposito: In the Capital of the World,
3. John Ferguson: Ballet and Murder,
4. Gordie and Colleen Howe: The Flower and the Gardener,
5. Bobby Hull: A Kind of Dream,
6. Reggie Leach: In the Wilds of New Jersey,
7. Stan and Jill Mikita: Stops along the Way,
8. Eric Nesterenko: Free of the Burden of Gravity,
9. Maurice Richard: In the Mood,
Photo Gallery,