Maurice Richard turned up at the Montreal Forum on December 28, 1944 having spent the whole day carrying his life from one Montreal address to another. The Canadiens were hosting Boston that evening. Richard asked coach Dick Irvin to leave him out of it.
Irvin wasn’t having that. He told his exhausted right winger to put his skates on and simply do what he could.
Richard scored five goals and set up three more in a 9-1 win.
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The campaign that produced that evening was 1944-45, and it had a good deal more in it. That was the year the Rocket became the first player in NHL history to score 50 goals in 50 games, a mark nobody matched for 36 years, while playing on the Punch Line alongside center Elmer Lach and left winger Toe Blake.
Richard spent most of his career being physically dismantled by opponents who had no other way of handling him, which is partly what makes an eight-point night after a day of lifting furniture so absurd. Canadian novelist Hugh MacLennan described the treatment in a 1955 profile.
“Richard can stand any amount of roughness that comes naturally with the game, but after a night in which he has been cynically tripped, slashed, held, boarded and verbally insulted by lesser men, he is apt to go wild,” MacLennan wrote. “His rage is curiously impersonal, an explosion against frustration itself.”
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Glenn Hall, who spent plenty of evenings looking at him from the other end, remembered something else.
“What I remember most about the Rocket were his eyes,” the Hall of Fame goaltender said. “When he came flying toward you with the puck on his stick, his eyes were all lit up, flashing and gleaming like a pinball machine.”
Richard finished with 544 goals and 965 points in 978 games, won eight Stanley Cups including five in a row, and retired in 1960 as captain of the Canadiens.
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