Ovide Park was never “my” rink; Cedar Park Heights was the outdoor sheet of my late 1960s house-league youth. But there is something about Ovide, just below Highway 20, a slap shot up from Bord-du-Lac, that forever will have a very special place in my heart.
It was on the rink at Ovide on January 19, 2010, that my late friend Elmer Lach and I shuffled in our boots across the quiet, snow-dusted ice toward a net at the north end.
I’d be writing a Montreal Gazette feature on “Elegant Elmer,” the Montreal Canadiens legend who would turn 92 in three days, and I couldn’t think of a better place for the accompanying images that would be taken that morning by award-winning photographer Allen McInnis.
Elmer famously centred the Canadiens’ iconic 1940s “Punch Line,” with Maurice “Rocket” Richard on right wing and future brilliant Canadiens coach Toe Blake on the left.
“As a group, we were good,” Elmer had said of the most feared line of the decade. “Individually, we were just average hockey players.”
Of course they were.
Elmer won the Hart Trophy in 1944-45 as the NHL’s most valuable player; in 1947-48, he was awarded the Art Ross Trophy as the league’s leading point-scorer, also having topped that list in ’44-45 before the Ross trophy existed.
In 1944-45, Elmer, Rocket and Toe went 1-2-3 in NHL scoring, not bad for “just average hockey players.”
But for all that I knew of the Rocket and Toe, and I had written extensively about them, Elmer had been a bit of a mystery, the most modest superstar I would come to know.
I phoned him often, asking to chat for a profile story, and he politely replied, always, “My life isn’t worth talking about.”
I knew better and pretty much staked him out, telling him that one day he’d open his Bayview Avenue front door and I’d be sitting on the step.
That day came. Elmer laughed and had me in, and a wonderful, cherished friendship was almost instantly born.
In the years that followed I’d often take him to lunch, calling ahead to have his Molson brought to room temperature.
“You can drink more that way,” he’d joke to the waiter with a mischievous grin.
We’d sit at his kitchen table over coffee, Elmer humbly spinning his tales like fine yarn. The stories from hockey’s golden era wrote themselves, his details flowing with richness and warmth, stories so incredible that I couldn’t have written them as fiction.
In 2006, Elmer joined me at Indigo in Pointe-Claire for the launch of my young reader’s book on the history of hockey in Canada. The lineup for photos and autographs snaked through the store for hours, and I was as much a fan of this wonderful gentleman as the hundreds who came out that day.
Elmer had never set foot on the rink at Ovide, a few blocks east of his home, until we headed over just before his 92nd birthday.
It was a slow shuffle to the net, my friend wearing the Canadiens jersey the team had given him a few weeks earlier when his No. 16 had been retired to the rafters of the Bell Centre.
Leaning on the crossbar, Allen setting up for his photos, Elmer looked behind the net and the great many black smudges on the boards.
“It seems,” he said playfully, “that kids miss the net a lot.”
On the blade of Elmer’s stick, pushing a small drift, was a puck I’d found nosing out of a snowbank just over the boards, the one I brought still in my pocket.
So how could he resist? Elmer jabbed it into the mesh for the 235th goal of his career, coming 55 seasons after the last of 234 he scored in the NHL.
We left the rink about 20 minutes after we’d arrived, but not before I observed my personal outdoor rink policy of leaving at the net what had been discovered in the snowbank – unless I’ve lost one of my own, I always bequeath a found puck to the rink.
There was no way the after-school skater who discovered it later that day could know that it was most recently on the blade of Elmer Lach’s stick. Or that a legend’s single shot went dead-centre into the net, not adding to the black smudges on the boards.
Back at his kitchen table, still wearing his Canadiens jersey, Elmer handed me a mint-condition 70-year-old puck that had never been touched by a stick.
Arriving in Montreal from his native Nokomis, Saskatchewan, in the fall of 1940, about to begin his 14-season, Hall of Fame-bound Canadiens career, Elmer saw this puck on the floor of the team’s Montreal Forum dressing room and, as a rookie, took it as a souvenir.
“I’ve had a guilty conscience ever since,” he told me with a laugh. “I want you to have it so I can sleep nights.”
I had the puck nearby on April 4, 2015, when news reached me that Elmer, age 97, had died peacefully at the Teresa Dellar Palliative Care Residence in Kirkland, where he’d been since he’d suffered a stroke some days earlier. He spent his final days in Room 9, the sweater number of his dear friend the Rocket.
I’d visited him at the residence, as I’d sat with him in the emergency room of the Lakeshore General Hospital, holding his hand, relating to him the stories he’d told me, no matter that he was no longer responsive.
Among the many things I remembered during those final visits, as I do to this day, was our magical morning on the rink at Ovide Park and Elmer’s final goal pushed through the snow of an outdoor rink.
Dave Stubbs is a Pointe-Claire native who, since 2016, has been a columnist and historian for the National Hockey League at NHL.com. He began his journalism career with the weekly News & Chronicle in 1976, and during three decades at the Montreal Gazette, worked as a columnist, feature writer, and sports editor.