The Boston Bruins led the St. Louis Blues 3-0 in the 1970 Stanley Cup Final and Derek Sanderson saw no reason to pretend otherwise. He arrived at the Garden for Game 4 wearing a tuxedo.
“St. Louis, they’re not gonna beat us, so I wore a tuxedo to the Garden,” Sanderson recalled. “The guys said, ‘Oh, what are you doing?’ They had the Stanley Cup there and everything. Nobody expected it to be that close.”
Defenseman Ted Green had the obvious question.
“Teddy Green said to me, ‘What are you gonna do if we lose this?'” Sanderson said. “I said, ‘I never thought of that. I’ll wear a sweatshirt home.'”
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It got closer than the tuxedo allowed for. The game was 3-3 after 60 minutes, and coach Harry Sinden pulled Sanderson aside before overtime with a plan to end it quickly. Phil Esposito, who expected to start, was less than delighted about it.
“Phil was on my right and he goes, ‘I can’t believe that,'” Sanderson said. “I said, ‘Well, what are you gonna do?'”
Forty seconds in, Sanderson took the puck behind the St. Louis net. Blues defenseman Jean-Guy Talbot made the decision that defined the rest of hockey history.
“Jean-Guy Talbot should never have come to me. If you’re the defenseman, you’re not gonna go behind the net. And he did,” Sanderson said. “When he reached, that was it. That was all I needed, just a little opening.”
He slid it out front to Bobby Orr, who redirected it in without breaking stride.
Why is Bobby Orr’s goal so famous?
As the puck crossed the line, Blues defenseman Noel Picard caught Orr’s skates and sent him into the air, arms already raised, body parallel to the ice. A photographer got him at the exact moment he was flying. That image was later voted the finest sports picture of the century, and it is how most people who weren’t alive in 1970 know the goal at all.
Sanderson, who has watched it a few thousand times since, has a view on the timing.
“Bobby scored the goal a good second before Noel Picard lifted his feet up,” he said. “I always think of Picard tripping him. It would have been a ho hum goal if Picard didn’t trip him.”
READ MORE: Derek Sanderson won the Cup and celebrated by knocking his dad out
He was glad it fell to Orr regardless.
“Bobby Orr had a Cinderella year. Not that it was a fluke, but he did everything right, took it to another planet,” Sanderson said. “He did everything for everybody and it came to him.”
The tuxedo, as it turned out, was entirely appropriate. Boston’s first championship in 29 years ended with Sanderson dressed for it, and his No. 16 now hangs in the rafters at TD Garden.
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