Richard was more than Hall of Fame player to people of Quebec

MONTREAL -- Quebec’s hockey and political landscape would forever be changed 70 years ago Monday by a spewing tear gas canister in the Montreal Forum.

The choking, acrid smoke that filled the arena was the flashpoint for what would be known as the "Richard Riot," an infamous uprising that was about much more than hockey.

The suspension of Montreal Canadiens legend Maurice “Rocket” Richard for the final three games of the 1954-55 regular season and the entire Stanley Cup Playoffs, punishment meted out by NHL President Clarence Campbell after a tumultuous game in Boston, would ignite a powder keg, violence spilling out of the Forum that St. Patrick’s night to trash much of downtown.

The Rocket’s disciples would be founding members of the so-called "Quiet Revolution" in Quebec, a cultural and linguistic shift forever reshaping provincial politics.

Maurice Richard’s 100 Greatest NHL Players video biography, released as part of the League’s Centennial-year celebration in 2017. The Richard Riot is discussed two minutes into the video.

In a politically volatile time in Quebec, with French-Canadians tired of being held down and marginalized by the English, the Rocket was made a figurehead, even a pawn, against his wishes, forever claiming, “I’m just a hockey player.”

But to francophones who craved a standard-bearer, Richard was much more than that. To them, he was necessary.

A population claimed him as their own, using him as a rallying cry during a time of sociopolitical need, Richard becoming more just a gifted goal-scorer and the locomotive that pulled his team. As such, he also became a lightning rod, a target for foes on and off the ice.

Richard played 978 NHL games, all with the Canadiens, from 1942 through his retirement in 1960, scoring 544 goals -- still atop Montreal's all-time list -- with 422 assists. His 966 points rank fourth on the Canadiens, and he leads the team in 20-goal seasons (14), 30-goal seasons (nine) and hat tricks (26).

Maurice Richard’s single-minded drive to the net, here on one skate against Toronto Maple Leafs goalie Harry Lumley, made him the most feared goal-scorer of his day and a favorite target of opponents, within or outside the rules.

The Rocket's 82 career playoff goals, eighth all-time in the NHL, lead that Canadiens list, too, three better than Jean Beliveau, while his seven playoff hat tricks are second in the NHL, trailing only the 10 of Wayne Gretzky. He won the Stanley Cup eight times -- in 1944, 1946, 1953 and 1956 and then, as captain, four times consecutively from 1957-60 – and won the Hart Trophy in 1946-47, voted the most valuable player to his team.

Though Richard never won the Art Ross Trophy as the NHL’s leader in points, he was the first to score 50 goals in a single season, that coming in the 50-game 1944-45 schedule, and the first to score 500 career goals, reaching that milestone in 1957. He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1961, the customary three-year waiting period waived to induct him immediately following his 18-year career.

Since 1999, the "Rocket" Richard Trophy has been awarded annually to the NHL’s leading goal-scorer during the regular season.

The start to Richard's career was inauspicious; he broke an ankle and a wrist in consecutive seasons before joining the NHL, then fractured his other ankle the next season, his 1942-43 rookie year with the Canadiens. He was tagged with the label of fragile, thought by some to be too brittle to survive the NHL's trenches.

Maurice Richard, in a 1940s dressing room photo, examines his stick before a Montreal Canadiens game.

But Richard would not just survive, he would dominate as the preeminent scoring machine of his generation. A left-handed shot playing right wing on Montreal's explosive 1940s “Punch Line,” centered by Elmer Lach with Toe Blake on left side, Richard was an intense competitor.

“As a player, no one could compare to the Rocket,” said Scotty Bowman, the NHL’s all-time winningest coach who as a fan and junior player fell in love with hockey as a young Montrealer during the 1950s, Richard’s prime. "He was such a great scorer. The big thing he had as a player was the unexpected way he could score goals. He had a terrific backhand and was such an impulsive player, that’s how I regarded him.”

Bowman would watch Canadiens practices in the Forum, the team coached by Dick Irvin Sr., then Toe Blake, and he marveled at every part of Richard's game.

“The Rocket was so strong; average size but not average strength,” Bowman said of the 5-foot-10, 170-pound forward. “He could literally push players off him. He took an awful lot of abuse. Teams did everything they could to try to stop him. He had quite a temper, there was no doubt about that. He was provoked a lot into a lot of his mischievous times in the League.”

The March 17, 1955 Montreal Gazette reports news of Maurice Richard’s three-game suspension and ban from the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

“Mischief” would be to understate Richard’s actions at Boston Garden on March 13, 1955, setting the stage for the riot to follow four nights later.

The late Bernie “Boom-Boom” Geoffrion, a top star of that era, remembered his teammate’s very short fuse being lit against the Boston Bruins at 15:11 of the third period.

“It started with a typical Richard rush,” Geoffrion told authors Chrys Goyens and Frank Orr for their 2000 book “Maurice Richard: Reluctant Hero.”

“He barreled down the right side with the puck and was preparing for his patented left-turn swerve toward the Boston net. There was only one player in his way. Boston defenseman Hal Laycoe (Richard’s summertime tennis partner) was tall, wore glasses and had once played with us in Montreal.

“As Rocket went around him, Laycoe grabbed him by the waist and held on. Rocket carried him all the way to the corner where Laycoe gave him an elbow to the back of the neck and threw him into the chicken wire (before protective glass) at the end of the rink.

Maurice Richard watches the first period of the Canadiens’ March 17, 1955 game from the end of his team’s bench before trouble erupts, and Boston Bruins defenseman Hal Laycoe, with whom he was involved four nights earlier, leading to Richard’s suspension.

“Rocket was fuming. He turned around and swung his stick, just missing Laycoe. A second later, Laycoe swung his stick and hit Rocket for eight stitches in his scalp. Rocket swung again and suddenly both benches emptied and every player from both teams was on the ice.”

Richard was restrained by rookie linesman Cliff Thompson, a former Boston defenseman, but several times broke free of the official’s grasp. Thompson finally wrestled Richard to the ice, but the Rocket broke free one last time and twice slugged the linesman in the face.

Richard was given a match penalty by referee Frank Udvari, Laycoe assessed a major and a misconduct.

All of hockey, especially Boston, was in an uproar, the matter arriving on Campbell's desk, fueled by the fury of Lynn Patrick, the Bruins general manager.

On March 16, Campbell summoned all parties involved to his office and rendered his verdict -- 18 paragraphs assembled the rumble’s details as had been reported to him by officials and witnesses, with a final paragraph reading: “In the result, Richard will be suspended from all games, both league and playoff, for the balance of the current season.”

Maurice Richard celebrates the Canadiens’ 1956 Stanley Cup victory, the team’s first of five straight, and placard-waving fans gather outside the Montreal Forum before the game on March 17, 1955.

At the time, Richard led the NHL with 74 points (38 goals, 36 assists), on pace with three games remaining to win his first scoring championship. He would lose the title to Geoffrion by a single point, the latter vilified by Montreal fans for it.

The emotional Geoffrion was crushed by the reaction, Forum ice littered with rubbish, boos cascading down as he was presented the Art Ross Trophy before the Canadiens’ first semifinal playoff game on March 22 against the Bruins. The ovation for Richard, meanwhile, shook the building.

Even without the Rocket, second-seeded Montreal breezed by No. 4 Boston in the best-of-7 series, winning in five games; the regular-season champion Detroit Red Wings, who would sweep the Toronto Maple Leafs in their semifinal, would defeat the Canadiens in a Final that went the 7-game limit.

In Montreal, the playoffs were almost an anticlimax following the March 17 Forum game against the Red Wings, the now-suspended Richard sitting rinkside.

A fan takes a swing at NHL President Clarence Campbell during the first period of the March 17, 1955 game at the Montreal Forum. A tear gas bomb would be set off at the end of the period, precipitating the Richard Riot.

President Campbell was a regular spectator at the Forum, and he paid no heed to Montreal Mayor Jean Drapeau’s strong suggestion that he skip this one, his attendance to be seen by many, according to the mayor, as “a provocation.”

Campbell sniffed at the idea.

“Does the Mayor suggest I should have yielded to the intimidation of a few hoodlums?” he said. “What a strange and sorry commentary from the chief magistrate of our city who has sworn to uphold the law and as senior officer of the civic administration is responsible for the protection of the persons and property of the citizens through our police force.”

Campbell said no formal request was made to him to stay away, so he took his seat, as usual, midway through the first period.

Maurice Richard, a shiner under his left eye, shoulder pads sewn onto his long underwear, in the Canadiens’ Montreal Forum dressing room during the 1955-56 season.

Referee Red Storey had arrived at the Forum about an hour before face-off and was chilled by the chanting mob outside the arena, a growing crowd waving placards and showering the building with bottles.

“I didn’t get the feeling we might be in a bad situation until I went out on the ice,” Storey said. “It was like being in a vacuum that was going to blow apart. It was so quiet, it was scary.”

Campbell’s arrival in the stands was met with a rain of tomatoes and other projectiles, the heat sharply turned up when a fan strode up the cement steps to the NHL boss and threw a couple of punches at him, vainly restrained by an usher.

Tension crackled at the end of the first period, Detroit leading 4-1, when a tear-gas canister exploded not far from where Campbell was seated.

The next day’s Montreal Star reported that the canister was of wartime vintage, purchased in 1941 from a military and police supply store in the city by a law-enforcement organization. How it wound up 14 years later in the hands of its detonator, a decade beyond its best-before date, is unknown.

Maurice Richard makes a radio and television address from the Montreal Forum dressing room on March 18, 1955, and coach Dick Irvin Sr. examines the spent tear gas canister that filled the arena with smoke and ultimately caused the March 17 forfeit by the Canadiens of their game against the Detroit Red Wings.

The bomb packed a punch. With a key pulled from it, the mechanism would start in less than two seconds and in half a minute would fill 40,000 cubic feet of still air with a thick cloud of smoke.

Choking, gasping fans poured toward the Forum exits, surging out onto Ste. Catherine Street, where the worst of the lot, and opportunistic vandals joining the mob, shattered storefronts, looted stores, overturned police cars and set fires.

The arena was cleared by a fire marshal, the Red Wings declared a 4-1 winner by forfeit.

In the Forum that night were Dick Irvin Jr., the son of the Montreal coach, and Scotty Bowman, his soon-to-be dear friend.

Bowman remembers the tear gas and the ensuing mayhem in the billowing smoke, his struggle to get down the steps from the Forum's standing-room area to the apparent safety of the auxiliary dressing rooms.

Montreal’s Ste. Catherine Street, outside the Montreal Forum, is littered with winter footwear and rubbish, windows broken by the Richard Riot that moved east.

Working for a paint company by day, Bowman was coaching Junior B hockey in Montreal in March 1955, a 21-year-old hustling up to prime south-end Forum standing room for Canadiens games that cost him 50 cents with his arena pass.

The 23-year-old Irvin was an oil-company clerk who in the press box was keeping game statistics for his father, the latter in his last of 15 seasons as Canadiens coach. Bowman had been attending Canadiens practices, absorbing Irvin Sr.'s drills for use with his junior team.

The coach's son pulled Bowman into the Montreal dressing room through a haze of tear-gas smoke and the confusion of an arena being evacuated by police, Irvin also fighting for breath on his way down from the building’s upper reaches.

The bond of the two men remains strong seven decades after that eventful night.

“I was chicken,” Irvin said. “I wanted to get in the car and go straight home, but Dad wanted to drive around town and see what was going on.”

The front page of the March 18, 1955 Montreal Gazette reports on the riot of the night before, and an advertisement in that day’s paper offering Maurice Richard a job with a butchers’ supply company to make ends meet during his suspension.

The March 18 afternoon-edition Montreal Star reported that 37 adults and four juveniles were arrested, 50 stores damaged in the riot with damages initially estimated to be in the tens of thousands of dollars. The morning Montreal Gazette claimed 65 to 70 had been jailed.

“With order restored but a backwash of bitterness to keep the issue aflame, this city could count the damage in more than a material sense,” the newspaper reported. “And physically, things were bad enough.

“The front of the Forum today was scarred and open to the raw wind as bottles, chunks of ice and stones had rattled off its brick surface and smashed through its windows during the outbreak of fury. It got underway, almost in a good-natured form, at 6 p.m. and then, like a destructive tornado, wore itself out early this morning.

“There is today even a bullet hole bored neatly in the glass over the Forum main entrance, a sinister memento of the vicious thug who climbed a tree in the park across the street to fire a revolver.”

Broken windows are seen in the Montreal Forum on March 18, 1955, the morning after the Richard Riot.

The event wasn’t without its unintentionally humorous moments. In the March 18 morning-edition Montreal Gazette, a butchers’ supply company took out an ad offering Richard a “bona fide position with our firm, selling wrapping papers, twines, refrigeration, and allied lines” to make ends meet during his suspension.

The Rocket volunteered to speak to the city in a radio and television broadcast the afternoon following the riot, which he did from the Canadiens dressing room. He appealed for calm and asked fans to rally behind the team as it headed into the postseason.

There was some discussion that Richard would retire out of anger for having been suspended, fed up with being a target on and off the ice.

Instead, he returned for another five seasons, his younger brother, Henri, arriving in the fall of 1955, and in large part the Rocket led Montreal to their historic run of five consecutive Stanley Cup championships.

A man tries to find matching footwear among those that were shoveled off Ste. Catherine Street in front of the Montreal Forum.

Until his death to cancer on May 27, 2000, and to this day, Richard remains a towering figure for his life that has inspired authors, singers, filmmakers, poets and academics.

The phenomenon of the Rocket has been the work of sociologists and political scientists, tavern fodder for more than a generation of Quebecers.

When he died, tears were shed well beyond the political borders that could not contain his immense talent, no matter that this province had tried to claim Richard as its exclusive property.

It was an entire country that mourned during his nationally televised funeral at Montreal’s Notre Dame Basilica.

The front page of the March 19, 1955 Montreal Gazette, Maurice Richard and Mayor Jean Drapeau asking for calm for that night’s Forum game against the New York Rangers.

Hockey historian Stan Fischler’s 1971 book “The Flying Frenchmen: Hockey's Greatest Dynasty,” co-authored with Richard, naturally touched upon the fracas in Boston and the ensuing riot in Montreal.

“It would be foolish for me to go on record that I wasn't at fault,” Richard said of the melee. “There's no doubt that I hit Laycoe and had also hit Thompson. The point is that there was a great deal of provocation in both instances. …

“I probably deserved to be suspended for the final three games of the season or possibly 10 or 15 games in the following season but not for the playoffs. I could see no justification for Campbell punishing my teammates or me by docking me from the Stanley Cup round. I still say that if justice was truly done, I wouldn't have been kept out of any of the Stanley Cup games.

“I’ve never been so shocked in my life. I felt numb from head to toe. By the time I arrived home the news had spread all over the city. As soon as I walked into the house, I knew there would be big trouble. One after another, people phoned me. ‘Rocket,’ they would say, ‘we’re going to get even with Campbell. There’s going to be a lot of trouble (before the game with Detroit) at the Forum.’ ”

Maurice Richard in the Montreal Forum dressing room with the 1960 Stanley Cup, the Rocket’s last of the eight he would win, and Richard’s statue outside Montreal’s Bell Centre.

Upon witnessing his first NHL game at New York's Madison Square Garden in 1955, the Canadiens against the Rangers, Nobel Prize-winning novelist William Faulkner wrote in Sports Illustrated that Richard had “something of the passionate glittering fatal alien quality of snakes.”

And in a late 1950s profile for Maclean's magazine, Trent Frayne wrote of Richard on the rink, “Sometimes he scored them while lying flat on his back, with at least one defender clutching his stick, another hacking at his ankles and a third plucking thoughtfully at his sweater. … Modern hockey has produced many teams which stand out above their rivals but few individual players who stand out above the other individuals. For almost a decade, Richard has towered over them all, both as a goal-scorer and as a piece of property.”

The Richard Riot shook a province and a game to its very foundation. But sweep away the broken glass and clear the smoky air of 70 years ago and you’ll realize that one monumental night barely scratches the surface of one of the NHL’s greatest legends.

Five years ago, on the 20th anniversary of his father’s death, Maurice Richard Jr. considered an icon’s place in hockey history, and beyond.

“I don't think my father ever fully realized how important he was to Quebecers,” he said. “He was always surprised when he had a great round of applause or people were talking about him as if he were God. He wasn’t expecting that. He certainly didn’t play hockey to get that from the people. I’ve learned during my life that he had a very large family, one that was much bigger than just his children.”

Top photo: front page of the March 18, 1955 edition of The Montreal Star, reporting on the violent chaos of the previous night at the Montreal Forum and in the streets of the city.