Open Net by George Plimpton

Open Net by George Plimpton

Author:George Plimpton [Plimpton, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-04-26T00:00:00+00:00


The standby of hockey violence was the figure Seaweed called the “goon”—a player of limited abilities in most departments except the ability to fight. These people were once called “ice thugs,” “enforcers,” or “policemen.” Boston has had its number. Among the famous names out of the Bruins’ past was Ted Green, who went on to become an assistant coach at Edmonton, who wears a plate in his head from a stick fight. One night Green had three minor penalties, two majors, and two misconducts.

The function of the goon has always been very well defined… to cruise the ice outfitted with the instincts and inclination of the back-alley mugger. Very little else about the game seemed to be of much concern. In sixty-four games Bob “Hound Dog” Kelly of the Flyers scored only four times though he got involved in fifteen major fights. His comment on the discrepancy was, “They don’t pay me to score goals.” In 1972, in the Canada-Russia series, Bobby Clarke trailed the great Soviet star Valery Kharlamov and, convincing himself that something had to be done about this guy who was “killing” us, he slashed the Russian and broke an ankle to get him off the ice. Team Canada went on to win the next three games and the series. “It’s not something I’m really proud of,” Clarke said afterward, “but I can’t say that I was ashamed to do it.”

Fred Shero, his coach at the time with the Flyers, said, “If you keep the opposition on their butts, they don’t score goals. If it’s pretty skating they want, let them go to the Ice Capades!” He had a famous policy which applied to his teams: “Arrive at the net with the puck and in ill humor.”

Sometimes a goon was sent out to entice a particular star into a fight—to get the better man (if he retaliated, which was for sure) off the ice for fighting. Often, when the team’s goon was sent out, the opposition countered with its goon. Once, Hilliard Graves was hounding Bobby Orr and took what the Boston bench considered a cheap shot at their great star. Hank Nowak was quickly dispatched for revenge. “Get him, Hank. Cream that son of a bitch.”

Nowak went out full of determination, set to flail around, but apparently he had not been paying attention to the game because after a while he came sailing by the bench calling out, “Get who? Which one’s the son of a bitch?”

The epitome of the goon seemed to be Keith Magnuson of the Chicago Black Hawks. He had two rules—don’t hit the goalie, and don’t hit a guy with a wired jaw. Everything else was okay. After practice he would work at his fighting—shadowboxing, feinting, and jabbing at his image in the reflection off the glass barriers around the rink. Before a game he imagined himself descending into a kind of jungle mentality, in which even his stature changed—so his teammates reported—to a kind of apish posture and his voice lowered, all aspects of his civilized behavior slackening.



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