All in the Mind

ICE HOCKEY

"I'm feeling lousy," grumbled Coach Hector ("Toe") Blake, as his Montreal Canadiens were preparing for a Stanley Cup playoff game against the Detroit Red Wings. "I get these chest pains right here," he said, stabbing his chest with a finger. "But I've been to a doctor, and he says it's not physical. So I guess it must be mental."

Fair guess--considering that Blake's favored Canadiens trailed the ragtag Red Wings 2-0 after the first two games of the best-of-seven playoffs. The Canadiens were the defending Stanley Cup champions. They had won the regular-season National Hockey League championship (Detroit finished fourth), and they had wiped up the ice with the Toronto Maple Leafs 4-0 in the playoff semifinals. By comparison, the main thing the Red Wings had going for them was Gordie Howe, the alltime scoring champion (with 624 goals) of the N.H.L. But Gordie was 37 and slowing down; eleven other Red Wings were 30 or older, and the long season was taking its toll.

Detroit Defenseman Bill Gadsby was sporting a bruise on his arm the size of a grapefruit. Goalie Roger Crozier had a twisted ankle and a sprained knee. Forward Norm Ullman, the team's top scorer (with 31 goals) during the regular season, was nursing a bruised back. Still, the Red Wings were ahead --and Montreal's Coach Blake was baffled. "We played like amateurs," he moaned. "I just can't understand it."

By last week, three games and three Canadiens victories later, Blake was beginning to feel better. "We're skating now," he said, "and nobody beats this club when it's skating." There was still that one last victory to go, though, and it turned out to be tough. Playing at Detroit, the Canadiens jumped into a 2-0 lead when Jean Beliveau tapped in a rebound and Leon Rochefort slipped a 15-footer past crippled Goalie Crozier. Disgusted Detroit fans littered the ice with rubber balls and garbage--and the Red Wings got the message. Checking brutally, they fought back: Norm Ullman scored late in the second period, and Floyd Smith tapped in a third-period goal to tie the game at 2-2 and send it into sudden-death overtime.

Death, when it came, was dramatic. With 2 min. 20 sec. gone in the overtime period, Montreal's Dave Balon tried to pass out from behind the Detroit goal. The pass was wild, but in one of those incredible caroms that makes hockey wildly exciting, the loose puck bounced off Henri Richard's shoulder, hit the ice and trickled into the nets. The Red Wings bitterly protested that Richard had illegally slapped the puck --to no avail. By a score of 3-2, the Canadiens had won the Stanley Cup for the 13th time and the second year in a row. His chest pains long forgotten, Coach Blake surveyed the huge silver trophy. "Take it to the train," he ordered, "and fill it with champagne."

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