Kevin Mitchell
Saskatoon StarPhoenix
Humboldt’s Glenn Hall plays a small, sad part in hockey’s most famous photo.
Bobby Orr dominates the iconic image. He’s flying through the air, looking like Superman, after scoring the Stanley Cup-winning goal in 1970.
Hall is the man in the bottom left corner, regaining his feet, a very secondary character.
Hall, who spent much of his life getting struck by pucks, wears his customary goalie gear in this photo, and a St. Louis Blues uniform. Few men in hockey history have been better at blocking black discs than Hall, but the occasional one slipped through.
This photo illustrates the truth of NHL goaltending: Even the best get beaten sometimes. It’s the life of a goalie, and it sometimes haunted him.
Hall, a Humboldt-bred prodigy, died Tuesday at age 94 after a Hockey Hall of Fame career that earned him the nickname “Mr. Goalie.”
He was an ironman goalkeeper who won three Vezina Trophies and seven first-team all-star selections — the latter still a record.
Hall developed and perfected the butterfly style of puck-stopping, and his reflexes were otherworldly.
But perhaps the most notable thing about Hall’s career is his ability to play through pain. His 502 consecutive starts (between 1955 and 1962) is an NHL record, and he did it during hockey’s maskless era.
Every game night, he’d expose that bare, puck-cratered face to wood sticks and rubber shrapnel. Hall absorbed 250 to 300 facial stitches (at some point he stopped counting), many of them administered between periods.
He lost teeth and played through colds. And there were always those infernal pucks, blasted from all corners of the ice, both in games and during practice, thousands of shots, almost all of them stopped — one way or the other — by this wonderfully adept goaltender.
“I often look at those guys who can whistle and laugh before a game,” Hall told the Toronto Star’s Milt Dunnell in 1966. “I never have been one of them. You’d think they didn’t have a care in the world. Me? I’m plain miserable.”
It was a bloody, painful way to earn a paycheque, and he dealt with frayed nerves and roiling guts by vomiting before games. The Detroit Red Wings, the story went, kept an empty bucket on the bench in case he needed it mid-game.
“I’m aways known for the streak and for throwing up,” Hall told Canwest’s Pat Doyle in 2005. “Nobody would say ‘Hey, he’s a great goaltender.’ They just talked about me throwing up.”
In his 1975 book ‘They call me Gump’, NHL goalie Gump Worsley wrote that Hall, his longtime rival, was “one of my favourite goaltenders”, adding: “Old Glenn is a cinch to make it to the Hall of Fame one of these days. And when he does, they ought to put his bucket on exhibit too.”
Teammates also got a kick out of watching Hall sleep on airplanes. His legs would lash out during nightmarish dreams, trying to stop pucks heading into open parts of a net only he could see.
“I can’t sleep and I can’t eat,” he once told sports writer Jim Proudfoot. “Being a goalie is torture. But tell me one thing: how else can I make this kind of money?”
And that, he added, was why he tried so hard to slumber well during the summers — “to keep the vision and the reflexes. Without them, I’m dead.”
Hall’s 502-game streak will never be broken; it’s his record forever.
He built that toughness, that reliability, that hockey knack, on rinks in Humboldt and later across Saskatchewan. His youthful exploits between the pipes drew regular press mentions — his first name was usually misspelled as “Glen” — and years later, in 1961, Humboldt held a special day in his honour.
At that point Hall was 29 years old, six NHL years already on his resume.
Dignitaries, players, old friends, fans congregated for the tribute. He signed scores of autographs, and ate a feast at a head table adorned with serviettes bearing the town crest and the words “Congratulations Glenn!”
“Each year when the hockey season ends, I look forward to returning home,” he told the crowd. “After all, I had my start in hockey here.”
Hall began his youth career as a defenceman, but at some point, somebody suggested he try playing goal because of his weak ankles. He put on the pads for intermediate hockey, and quickly discovered that this was where he belonged.
He began flashing NHL-calibre talent while playing junior hockey with the Humboldt Indians, and followed the bounding puck to Windsor, where he played for the Spitfires.
In 1955-56, Hall was NHL rookie of the year after playing every game that season with the Detroit Red Wings. That’s when the legend really took off, during a career that spanned nearly two decades with stops in Detroit, Chicago and St. Louis.
Hall wore a mask for the first time in 1968, at age 37, thanks to the prompting of teammate Red Berenson who told him he’d be stupid not to wear one. It stayed right through his last game in 1971.
Hockey Hall of Fame goaltender Glenn Hall, a star with the Detroit Red Wings, Chicago Blackhawks and finally St. Louis Blues, poses with the mask he wore the final three seasons of his 18-year NHL career, which spanned from 1952 to 1971. Hall was photographed by his son, Pat, in the basement of Hall’s home in Stony Plain, Alta.
Gordie Howe is “Mr. Hockey” and Glenn Hall is “Mr. Goalie”, and the two Saskatchewan players have those particular markets very well-cornered indeed.
Today in Humboldt, you can stroll through Glenn Hall Park, or steer your car down Glenn Hall Drive. In Toronto, you can view his exploits at the Hockey Hall of Fame; he’s also inducted into provincial sports halls in Saskatchewan and Alberta.
Hall spent several decades living the farm life in Stony Plain, Alta., where the local rink bears his name. When the Chicago Blackhawks tried to talk him out of a temporary retirement in 1966, he told them he was “painting the barn” and didn’t have time for much else, something hockey scribes across the continent had a great deal of fun with.
But once that was done, he strapped the pads up again.
In 2011, the Calgary Herald’s George Johnson visited Hall at the same farm, and discovered, in a spare bedroom, the photo of Bobby Orr flying through the air, a beaten Hall off to the side. It was autographed by both players.
“Oh yeah … THAT,” Hall said. “I was showered, changed and on the bus before he hit the ice. Told Bobby that, too.”
Hall was funny, blunt, honest, self-effacing — sometimes beaten, usually not. He shed bits of facial tissue across creases from Humboldt to St. Louis to Chicago, vomited his way to stardom, gave much of his life to a game that both hurt him and gave him a solid living.
He was a goaltender, and a man, for the ages.
kemitchell@postmedia.com
