Béliveau!

   For the better part of the last fifty years, I have hated the Montreal Canadiens.
   I have admired them for the wonderful teams they produced and I have envied them for all the records they hold. At the same time, though, I have hated them for the roadblock they always presented to just about any and every team I had pledged my allegiance to.

Béliveau and his favourite accessory.

   For the first decade or so of that fifty years, the player that personified the Canadiens mystique was Jean Béliveau, a center and captain of the team. Both in stature and playing ability, he stood the tallest among a team of very talented and driven players. In this way, he could and should have been the lightning rod for all my distaste and anger. It was, however, impossible to hate the man.
   I, begrudgingly, adored Jean Béliveau. He was the epitome of grace, style, ability and quiet leadership both on the ice and off. It was hard to see him almost perennially lifting the Stanley Cup and not think to yourself that this was simply the way it was meant to be.

Two of my faves--Béliveau and Sawchuk, the goalie!

   As Canadian hockey legends go, none stood much taller than Jean Béliveau. On December 2, however, Le Gros Bill, as he was known in Quebec, passed away. Most Canadian hockey fans went into a variety of forms of mourning with his passing and nowhere was there heard a negative word, indicative of our admiration for both the hockey player and the man. Such was his stature that a state funeral was held for him in Montreal. The city was in the middle of a blizzard the day of the funeral and yet there was still an overflow crowd. Many dignitaries attended, including the Prime Minister of Canada, the premier of Quebec and the mayor of Montreal along with many former and current players.

Béliveau---at center one final time.

   The pallbearers were all former Canadiens players and I was reminded of the Crash Test Dummies video for "Superman's Song", wherein all of Superman's pallbearers were aging super heroes. Beliveau was as close to a super hero as you might come in the real world.
   I am one of the fortunate ones who are able to say that they saw Jean Béliveau play. A younger generation than mine might compare him to Mario Lemieux---the size, the reach and the stick-handling ability were similar. Béliveau also had the ability to take younger players under his wing.
   Part of his mystique was that he was revered by anglophone and francophone alike and, in the dressing room, he could get his message across well in both languages. Invariably, his message centered around the players' duty to themselves but, much more importantly, also their duty to the Montreal Canadiens and all the former greats who'd played before them.
   Béliveau was worth buying a whole league to the Canadiens. In the fifties, he played in the Quebec Senior Hockey League, an amateur league, and was quite content to do so, having no great interest in playing in the NHL. The Canadiens had tried to sign him to a pro contract as a teenager but his family balked at this idea. Instead, they signed him to a a contract stating that, should he ever turn professional, he would then be the property of the Montreal Canadiens. Montreal then bought the Quebec Senior league and turned it and all of its players into professionals! At this point, they were then able to sign the young Béliveau.
   In his professional career, Jean Béliveau won the Hart Trophy (MVP) twice and the Art Ross Trophy (scoring leader) once. Along the way, he won the Stanley Cup (league champions) 10 times. As an executive with the team, his name was engraved on the Cup another 7 seven times for an astonishing total of 17 times, a record. He played on the All Star team 10 times and was the first recipient of the Conn Smythe Trophy for MVP in the playoffs. The year after he retired in 1971 he was inducted into the NHL Hall of Fame.
   An ardent family man, Beliveau graciously turned down offers to sit in the Senate and be considered for Governor-General of Canada after his playing days, so that he could be with his family.
   It is sometimes hard to explain to non-Canadians the hold that hockey seems to have on us. America has its football, basketball and baseball and much of the rest of the world has its soccer and I suppose those sports are held in a similar regard. The thing those other sports have in common, though, is that they involve having their players firmly grounded, on grass or a court somewhere. Hockey is played on ice, for goodness'sake, and its players are only connected to this ice by narrow, almost razor-sharp strips of steel. We are the best in the world at this sport and Jean Béliveau was one of our best, both as a man and a hockey player. There will almost certainly never be another one like him.