Calgary Herald du lieu suivant : Calgary, Alberta, Canada • 86

continued i i 1 i ri ii 1 1 1 1 1 1 i TWT Plante hates eating in festau-j 1 i iSfiSY rants, he prefejst cook his own jj r'tXO meals at home: For young fans I Vt ii -JL I A who write him for tips on goal- If II I My tending, he has prepared a list of 1 fV tv'liS" 15 pointer, which he has had )il VO' printed French and English, 1 Jil mYmm financial problems, my wife would have always said to herself, 'Well, this is my fault." Also, hockey was becoming too much like work. Plante's philosophy is that "the day you don't like hockey, you leave the game." but he did not care for the straight world's idea of work either. He was a partner in a beauty salon, "and I sat at the cash register and said hello to people, but I could only take it for an hour with all those women talking." He did promotion work for Molson's Brewery, though he doesn't like the taste of beer, and his most memorable moment on that job occurred when he was leading a sing-song in Sturgeon Falls, Ont. and a drunk chipped two of Plante's front teeth with a microphone. Plante also once had a run at sports writing.

"It looks easy," he said, and he sat down to compose post-game impressions for Montreal's Metro Express and La Derniere Heure. But he was upset to discover that writers cannot please all of the people all of the time. When he wrote a column about what a prince of a fellow Detroit's Gordie Howe was, Montreal readers complained that he should have praised Rocket Richard instead. When he wrote about Toronto's Frank Mahovlich, Montreal readers suggested he turn his attentions to Phil Goyette. Finally Plante gave up.

Eventually, Plante decided hockey hadn't been so bad after all. "Hockey players make good money for six months' work, and you can do what you want all summer," he explained. "I wouldn't mind being a slave like that for the rest of my life." In 1968, he descreetly spread word that he would like to be back in the NHL, and St. Louis Blues signed him up. Plante gives little thought to final retirement.

"I'm playing one year at a time," he says, "and I'll play until I can't play anymore, or until I stop enjoying it." When he does go, he says, he might like to be a scout or coach working with youngsters. In a sense, he has already begun. After a practice, when all the other players have left the dressing room, Plante sits alone, using the blue, padded examination table in the dispensary as a desk. He reads his fan letters, sends an autographed picture to those who ask for one, writes a personal note to boys (and sometimes girls) who have special questions. For young people who ask how to tend goal, Plante mails an English- or French-language sheet of 1 5 pointers: "On a breakaway, do not rush toward your opponent.

Wait for him at the edge of your goal crease." Or, "Sur un echappe, ne fonce pas vers ton adversaire And above all, "Watch the other goalies. You will learn a lot from them -1 still do after 30 years. "GOOD LUCK! "Jacques Plante." would boo Plante because they feared his antics would cost Canadiens a goal (in fact, Plante has only been caught outside his crease six times since 1943). Manager Irvin repeatedly objected to Plante's quaint habit of wearing a red, white and blue tuque (knitted by Plante, of course). "Where's the sleigh ride?" Irvin would taunt, until one grim game when his goaltender's tuque slipped off.

and Plante grabbed for the tuque instead of the puck. Irvin's reaction is unprintable. Coach Toe Blake objected to Plante's mask because, Blake said, it interfered with the goalie's vision. And one memorable night, Plante infuriated Blake by declining, on grounds of asthma. the rigors of the pre-game warm-up.

"In the warm-up, the goalie has to stop about 85 shots in 10 minutes," Plante complained. "That's a lot of rubber. If a goaltender has 50 shots in a whole game, he thinks, 'Jesus Murphy, what happened? What bothered Montreal management most about Plante was his unpredictable health. Privately, they called him a hypochondriac, and noted that he didn't suffer from asthma from the time he was 14 until he joined the Canadiens at 24. Even when Plante suffered injuries that were visible on x-ray photographs, coach Blake still managed to suspect that it was all in the goaltender's mind.

"How can you run a team if you're never sure your goalie is going to play?" asked Blake. And vice-president Reardon described what he considered Plante's psychological fifth-column warfare: "Plante's asthma was bothering him, and in the dressing room before the game he would be breathing hard, sometimes gasping, and using a nasal spray. That's not the way to make other players confident that you're going to stop the puck." So it was that irritations grew, and Plante was dispatched to New York Rangers in 1963. He couldn't stand 'jeauty salons Plante played poorly during an unhappy season and a half with New York, then was sent down to Baltimore of the AHL, where he suddenly announced his retirement. For the record, he said he wanted to stay home with his sons "because they are at an age when they need a father around." What he did not say was that his wife had suffered a nervous breakdown because of the pressure on Plante.

"She was alone in Montreal because I was travelling with the team, and she wouldn't fly." he says today. "The team was going bad. I had a knee injury, and she knew it, but the team wouldn't believe me. And the day came when it was all too much." Jacqueline's weight dropped to 98 pounds from 125, her blood pressure to 85 from 1 20. "Her doctor said I had to quit hockey for her sake, so I quit," Plante says.

"I didn't tell anyone why not even her, because if there had been HIS FACE HAS 200 STITCHES tions himself so that his broadest expanse is toward the direction of the shot. He will do anything to save time; he wears purposely dull skates so he can slither sideways faster, without having to turn his foot. "My job is to save split seconds," he says. "One bad move, and you're beat." He is methodical, studious and severe about his skill: one question about methods and he will whip out his ballpoint pen and draw complex patterns on the back of an envelope. The puck, as he will ex plain, can move faster than an eye can blink.

And yet he can make things sound easy: "You just remember who is on the ice, and what he will likely do. and then you watch the puck and though the players become blurs of color around you, you know who is who." Leaf captain Dave Keon attributes Plante's solitary solemnity to the extra pressures of being a goalie. "The men out in front can make a mistake, and maybe nothing will go wrong," Keon says, "but the goalkeeper makes the final mistake." Some of Plante's younger teammates find his age and aloofness forbidding, and French-speaking players address hiin with the formal "vous" for "you," instead of the familiar "tu." But on the ice. Leaf defencemen take full and friendly advantage of the instructions he shouts, and the whole team admires his extraordinary dedication. When he injured his knee, he desperately wanted to play on.

"I was all warmed up physically, and prepared mentally," he explained later. "When I fell, and it hurt like hell, the first thing that crossed my mind was that it wouldn't be fair for me to leave the game. I skated over to the bench for a minute, to let the pain go away, but it didn't. Finally I decided to stay off, because if I made the same move again, I might really damage the leg, and that might do the team more harm than my just missing part of a game." When in Toronto, Plante spends nearly all cf his out-of-uniform time in his furnished fifth-floor apartment, with its red floral living room walls and mauve bedroom. He likes tocook, and nevereats in Toronto restaurants.

His daily routine could hardly be less complicated or less varied. He is up at 7 a.m. for a breakfast of corn flakes, grapefruit, cheese on toast (he dislikes eggs), a French-Canadian relative of head cheese called creton (which he makes himself), and coffee with sugar and cream. Then he drives his 1957 yellow Chevrolet down to Maple Leaf Gardens for the morning practice. game.

When you get on the ice, it will go away." Plante fretted through the opening moments of the game until he deflected the first Black Hawk shot off a skate blade. Then he relaxed and he did get a shutout. Montreal won the series, and later the Stanley Cup. Next season, Plante was back in the AHL until one February night when Canadiens vice-president Kenny Reardon intercepted him at the Buffalo railway station and said: "Jacques, you'd better go home, because you're coming with the big team tonight. Bring enough clothes for a week, because you're going to be with us for a while." Plante was with the Habitants for 10 years.

He won the Vezina Trophy for a record five consecutive years, starting in 1 956. and, in 1 962, he won his sixth, as well as the Hart Trophy for being the league's most valuable player. In 1969, playingwith St. Louis, he shared the Vezina with Glenn Hall. Plante's ten years with Montreal did not end happily.

Although he was playing brilliantly, his Montreal bosses had never really become accustomed to his idiosyncrasies. His habit of skating far away from his net to stop shots worried them, and newspaper writers sarcastically anticipated the day when Plante would score a goal (he never did). Sometimes devout Montreal fans at Magog. managed by his older son.Michele, 19, turns out 1,000 of them every week. The mask Plante wears is made of fibreglass, and has ridges and a pointed nose piece which deflect the puck and prevent a solid impact.

It also has protrusions that protect hisears. In tests, engineers shot pucks out of an aircannon at 140 m.p.h. (the NIIL's fastest clocked shot is Bobby Hull's, which travels at 118). They not only failed to dent the mask, one puck split in half on impact. Four of Plante's masks, including the one Stanfield hit, are in the Hockey Hall of Fame.

Plante theorizes that goalies are born, not made, but a definite external influence on his position was his asthma, which developed when he was about 3 years old in his home town of Shawinigan Falls, Que. "When I tried to skate hard in cold weather, I found I couldn't breathe," he recalls, "so I played goal because I didn't have to move around much." When he was 7, his father Xavier gave Jacques a goalie stick for Christmas, and made him pads out of boards and potato sacks. Plante was playing senior hockey by the time he was 1 4, and was so enthusiastic that he once played in three different leagues simultaneously as a midget in one, an intermediate in another, and a senior in until the Quebec Amateur Hockey Association caught up to him. Hockey was not his only sport; he also played soccer for Montreal Concordia and lacrosse for Montreal National, both as a goalie. For years, Plante played successful goal under a considerable handicap: when he was 5 he broke his left wrist in a playground accident, and it was set so crookedly that he couldn't catch a puck.

Belatedly, in decided to have an operation, and wascuriousenough about surgery to ask for a local anesthetic. "I want to see what's going on," he told the surgeon. Plante watched until he got sick and had to be given a general anesthetic. In thespringof 1953, when Plante was playing for Buffalo in the American Hockey League, Canadiens called him up as a standby goalie for the NHL playoffs. Chicago was leading the semi-final series 3 to 2 and, as Plante walked to the dressing room 15 minutes before the sixth game, manager Dick Irvin stopped him and said quietly: "Jacques, you're going to play tonight." And then he added, with the air of a man who had no doubt: "And you're going to get a shutout." "I started to shake so hard I couldn't lace up my skates," Plante says.

Then Mauiice "Rocket" Richard walked over and held up his hand. "Look, Jacques," the Rocket said, indicating his trembling hand, "I'm the same way before a big Back at home later, he will have a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch and, if there is a game that night, will sleep for two hours, soothed by a stack of long-playing Doris Day or Duke Lllington records. For dinner he will have V-8 juice, a steak, potatoes, salad, cookies and milk. After the game he will drive home to a bedtime snack of lasagna, large amounts of which he cooks in advance and freezes in meal-size portions. He telephones his wife and his second, and youngest, son Richard, 15, in Montreal every Sunday.

(Richard watcheshis father play on television; Jacqueline is too nervous to look. Plante still has a habit which obsessed sports writers and brought snickers from fans earlier in his career. Jacques Plante knits, which strikes city slickers as odd, but which was routine in the Quebec of his childhood, particularly in his not-so-well-off family of 13 (he is the oldest of six brothers and five sisters). Plante will tell you how his parents would issue needles to the children and say, "You want a pair of socks? Knit them." Then he'll tell you the domestic details of how he knits his undershirts (he says he can't buy the kind he likes): "I use four-ply wool. It has to be knitted so it isn't too warm.

If you use small needles, it produces a thicker weaving and the holes are too small. I have bigger holes for summer shirts, and the neck is lower, and there is a half sleeve." It lakes him two days to run up an undershirt. Goalies know well the special sensation of being hit in the face with a frozen disc of vulcanized rubber, three inches across and an inch thick, weighing six ounces and moving at more than 100 miles an hour. After Plante, over several years, had been cut for 200 stitches, had his nose broken four times, and had both cheekbones and his skull fractured, he ordered a custom-made mask. Other goalies laughed, but now every goalie in the NHL except Gump Worsley wears one.

And Plante doesn't mind telling you that his mask saved his life in last year's Stanley Cup final when Boston's Fred Stanfield fired a blazing slapshot that struck Plante's mask just above his left eye. The shock knocked Plante out cold, but as the doctor put it later: "Without that mask, Jacques, you wouldn't be here." His first pads were made of boards That smack on the forehead prompted Plante to go into partnership last summer with a plastics expert and some engineers from the University of Sherbrooke. The result of their collaboration is a mass-produced mask with a suggested retail price of $32.50 for the small size and $50 for the medium and large sizes, all in a colorful choice of grey. PJante's factory 1 10 I.