7/3/93

Live From the Forum: Memories of Fire on Ice

By: SAM ORBAUM

It was 7 p.m. on a freezing Montreal winter night, a Saturday in 1965. For an eight-year-old boy, the clock never ticked so slowly as during those few hours between the end of Shabbat and the moment we turned on the TV to hear Dick Irvin say: "This is Hockey Night in Canada, live from the Montreal Forum." And that icy night he would add: "Tonight: the Montreal Canadiens versus the New York Rangers."
    My father interrupted the agonizing wait to say he needed my help on an errand. I caught the twinkle in his eye, but didn't catch on. We got into our old green '57 Chevy and drove. Where, he didn't say. I began to worry and finally I asked him: "Dad, will we be back home in time for the game?"

    "Don't worry," he said, "I promise you won't miss it."

    But he drove for a long time, from our suburb Chomedey to a part of the big city I had never seen.
    Finally he parked the car. It was nearly 8 p.m., and I was near tears: we couldn't hope to get back in time. We walked, my father high-spirited, I, silent. We walked for a few blocks, through a long tunnel, up a lot of steps. I began to invent, in my mind, the game I was going to miss. I put Gump Worsley in the nets, J.C. Tremblay and Jacques Laperriere on the blue line, Dick Duff and Bobby Rousseau up front, and between them, of course, big, wonderful Jean Beliveau, Number 4, the captain, my idol. I conjured up the honeyed voice of Danny Gallivan describing my make-believe action.
    Suddenly, we stepped out of the grey walkways into the most breathtaking moment of my young life: I was in the Montreal Forum!
    It is so many years ago, but I cannot forget the feelings: awe, at the enormity of the place, a fantastically big oval with people packed in from the ceiling down to the floodlit white ice surface; bedazzlement, at the brilliant colors (I had only ever seen the Forum in black and white - on TV and in newspaper photos); apprehension, from the tension rubbing off 18,000 hockey fans; joy, at my father's joy, from giving his son the thrill of his life; surprise, that normal people like ourselves could just walk right in.
    The Canadiens won 7-2.
    Perhaps I'm the only person in that building that night who still remembers that game 28 years later. Probably even Gump has forgotten it.
    But every Montrealer keeps his own memories. The older ones will recall Howie Morenz, the first hockey superstar. Some can even say they were among the 12,000 at the Forum that night in 1937 for his funeral, his body lying still at center ice. He died of an embolism after breaking his leg in a game against Chicago.
    They will remember The Rocket, Maurice Richard, the most explosively passionate player ever. One goaltender recalls this about raging Richard on attack: "His eyes were terrifying. They would sparkle, crackle like a pinball machine." Richard hated any player who didn't wear the Canadien uniform. He fired such feelings in the fans, too: when he was suspended for attacking a linesman, the fans went berserk at the next Forum game, which had to be abandoned. They charged out of the arena, a frenzied mob on St. Patrick's Day 1955, and pillaged much of downtown in what became known as the Richard Riot.
    They will remember the "Chicoutimi Cucumber," Georges Vezina, the stoic, fearless goalie who played like he lived. He once faced a record 79 shots in a playoff game - and stopped 78 of them; and once, in 1925, he fell unconscious during a game, spitting blood. He was dying of tuberculosis, but he wouldn't surrender. He was revived, and returned to the nets to face the mortal enemy, but collapsed again. He died four months later, 39 years old, father of 22.
    They will remember the special tribute the Forum denizens used to have for a Canadien hat-trick, a three-goal game: all the men would toss their fedoras onto the ice, frisbee-style, thousands of black hats floating down to the white ice amid a massive, primal roar.
    I remember Jean Beliveau, the elegant giant who scored some of the most purely perfect goals ever; tiny Yvan Cournoyer, a bullet on skates; Ken Dryden, a towering blond law student-goaltender who was a complete unknown when he joined the team in an emergency just before the playoffs, and became the hero of the Miracle Stanley Cup of 1971; Guy Lafleur, who took the torch from Beliveau and became the most exciting player on the most talent-loaded hockey club of all time, the Canadiens of the mid-1970s.
    We remember, from every era, the fanciest, fastest, most fiery players ripping across the Forum ice in teamwork tandem, playing the most spectacular style of hockey ever seen. Hanging from the Montreal Forum's rafters are 23 Stanley Cup banners; no other team in North American sports history has won that many championships.

THE NEWS this month that "Les Habitants" will be leaving the Forum, after 70 glorious years there, shouldn't sadden me much, really, because as distant as Chomedey was, Jerusalem is even farther. One of the conditions of aliya is that you stop aching to see a game at the Forum.
    Yet the news is stunning. It is final confirmation that the island we called "Ourtown" is not mine anymore. I loved Montreal, never thought I could leave it. But steadily over most of the last two decades, it has been slipping away. The Montreal Star folded, Sun Life moved to Toronto, Simpson's closed, Steinberg's closed, the football Alouettes died, Wilensky died, the English language was killed, Schwartz no longer owns Schwartz's and even my school, Chomedey Talmud Torah, has closed because there aren't enough Jews left there anymore.
    Montreal is not what my Montreal was. It is now a spiteful, ungracious, unfriendly, depressed city knee-deep in slushy bigotry.
    The Forum was the place where the French stood shoulder to shoulder with the English, where Quebecois blue and Canadian red together sang "Les Canadiens sont la!" for our cherished bleu, blanc et rouge.
    The team I no longer know, moving to a new-age arena, in a hometown where I don't feel at home anymore: the sorrow of the Canadiens leaving the Forum is the sorrow of Montreal leaving me.