Parent’s time at 2012 Winter Classic Alumni Game lasting memory for Flyers greats

Eric Lindros has several memories of the 2012 NHL Winter Classic Alumni Game between the Philadelphia Flyers and New York Rangers.

But one that stands out is how Bernie Parent's smile lit up Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia.

"He went out there and threw the pads on and was just enjoying every moment of it," Lindros, the Hall of Fame forward who played for the Flyers that day, said Monday. "You could see his grin from New Jersey. He was loving it."

Parent, the Hall of Fame goalie and backbone of Flyers Stanley Cup championships in 1974 and 1975, died Sunday at age 80. He was an icon to hockey fans across the region, more than 45,000 of whom rewarded him with an ovation not to be forgotten on the day of alumni game.

"Ask anybody who got the loudest ovation and it wasn't even close," former Flyers defenseman Mark Howe said. "It was Bernie. It was Bernie by far."

Among those fans was Franny Drummond, who grew up in the Philadelphia suburb of Langhorne, Pennsylvania.

"Who didn't think that they were Bernie Parent, Game 7, Stanley Cup Final?" Drummond said. "In school my number was No. 1 for high school, when I played goalie. So he was an idol of mine, a true hero to the fans. Just an all-around inspiration to even play the game."

Drummond, now 52, is an artist who specializes in painting goalie masks. He's done them for several current and former NHL goalies, among them Brian Elliott, Dan Vladar and Jacob Markstrom, and also famously created Steve Mason's zombie masks.

But there was nothing like creating a mask for Parent.

It featured a Flyers logo, the Winter Classic logo and Parent's retired No. 1 jersey banner on the front, with images of Parent and the trophies he's won on the sides, the Stanley Cup (twice), the Vezina Trophy (twice), and the Conn Smythe Trophy (twice). There's also a picture of Parent's classic Time Magazine cover from 1975.

"Everyone wanted to be Bernie Parent," Drummond said. "Me wearing the Mylec pads in the street, the No. 1 on the back of your jersey, I'm Bernie. For that split second you thought you were Bernie Parent. So to have him actually wear something that we had painted is like history for me. It's something that a legend is wearing, that we created."

Drummond made three of them, one for Parent to wear, one that Parent donated to charity and a third that was given to Flyers owner Ed Snider.

"It has everything that I've always dreamed of as an actual goalie mask painter, hockey fan," Drummond said. "It's like a dream come true."

The dream almost didn't happen, with Parent opting for an ambassador role when the rosters initially were announced. But fan and alumni outcry convinced Parent, who was 66 at the time and six months removed from shoulder replacement surgery, to put on his pads for the first time since sustaining a career-ending eye injury Feb. 17, 1979, coincidentally against the Rangers.

The game already featured the reunion of the Flyers' famed "LCB Line" of Bobby Clarke, Bill Barber and Reggie Leach, which led Philadelphia to the 1975 Stanley Cup, as well as Lindros -- who also played for the Rangers in his NHL career -- wearing a Flyers jersey for the first time since 2000. But Parent's active participation in the game pushed the emotions to a whole different level.

"Over the course of my career, when I got to play with Team Canada and some All-Star games, sit in the locker rooms with some of the greats of the greats, it's such a wonderful feeling," said Howe, one of seven members of the Hockey Hall of Fame in the Flyers dressing room that day. "And that game, I think I either played against or played with everybody that was in that locker room, except for one guy. I go, 'This is going to be so cool.' I finally got to play like five minutes with Bernie Parent. So it was pretty awesome."

Technically it was 5:32 that Parent played to start the game. And he made one memorable save, of sorts, stopping the Rangers' Ron Duguay on a breakaway.

"Ron came down and basically kind of shot the puck into Bernie's pads," Howe said. "And the place erupted. It was a classy thing, what Duguay did, but he did it for the right reasons."

While Duguay made it easy for Parent, "Something tells me Bernie would have stopped it anyway," Lindros said.

And then, like the star he was, Parent knew not to stay in the spotlight too long, leaving for the dressing room to another thunderous roar while Mark Laforest and Neil Little completed the game for the Flyers.

"That was his call," Flyers alumni coach Keith Primeau said that day. "He made sure we knew before we started that he was coming out five minutes in."

Parent said the love shown to him by Flyers fans was priceless.

"The feeling you get when people chant your name like this, money cannot buy," he said that day. "Any amount of money cannot buy that. You look at this as like one big family who got together tonight. Not a team with people from Philly, it's one big family and we enjoyed the whole thing as a family."

And on one very special day, that family got to say thank you.

"I didn't get a chance to play with him, but just his presence," Lindros said. "You just felt good being around him. It felt good being around him."