Stan Mikita arrived in the NHL with a chip on his shoulder, partly because teammates and opponents mocked his English after his family left Czechoslovakia when he was eight. He was 5-foot-9 and 159 pounds, and he answered everything with his stick.
In 1963-64 he led the entire league in scoring and in penalty minutes, the first player ever to do both in the same season. The following year he won the scoring title again and spent 154 minutes in the box.
Then his daughter Meg watched a game.
She was up for the first period of a Chicago game in New York before bedtime, with her mother Jill, when the camera found her father sitting on his own again. NHL.com’s account has what she said next.
“Why does Daddy always sit by himself?” Meg asked. “Why doesn’t he sit with Uncle Bobby and Uncle Kenny?”
Uncle Bobby was Bobby Hull. Uncle Kenny was Kenny Wharram. They were his linemates, and they were on the bench where he was supposed to be.
Mikita’s penalty minutes:
| 1964-65 | 1965-66 | 1966-67 | 1967-68 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 154 | 58 | 12 | 14 |
Has anyone won the Hart, Art Ross and Lady Byng in one season?
The 1966-67 season brought him the scoring title, the most valuable player award and the sportsmanship trophy, with twelve minutes of penalties to his name. He then went out and did all of it again the following year. Nobody else in the history of the league has managed the combination once.
The change wasn’t only about his daughter. Mikita went back through his own penalties and concluded that most of them were for holding, hooking and tripping, which he later described to author Chris McDonnell as lazy penalties. He also found he was enjoying himself considerably more on the ice than he had been in the box.
What he didn’t do was become a different player. He stayed edgy, kept absorbing hits and kept scoring, finishing with 541 goals and 1,467 points across 1,394 games, all of them for Chicago.
He won the Stanley Cup in 1961, was named to six First All-Star Teams, and entered the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1983.
Meg later said the thing that struck her most about her father was his ability to simply stop doing things that weren’t good for him. He quit smoking the same way.
Mikita died in August 2018, aged 78, after several years with Lewy body dementia. His family said he was surrounded by the people he fiercely loved.
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