JACQUES PLANTE
The goalie mask was introduced 60 years ago this month on November 1, 1959 by Jacques Plante who proudly sported one from 1959 through 1975.
“If I’ve got to use my head, I might as well wear the mask.”
— -Jacques Plante, aka “Jake the Snake”
Jacques Plante saw thousands of pucks careening toward him over the course of a two-decade NHL career that began in the 1950s. Donning the pads and pulling on the sweater for 949 games (837 regular season and 112 postseason appearances; 437 career wins — ninth all-time) meant sniffing plenty of rubber. And for more than one-third of those games Plante wore no protection for his face. No goaltender did back then.
“In those days you had Bobby Hull in the league and [Tim] Horton and [Andy] Bathgate and all those big shots,” Plante recalled. “And they’re coming at you, from five, ten feet in front and wind up, they don’t know where it was going, you had to stop it. You had no mask and the coach kept telling you: ‘Use your head.’ And I did.”
After “a few broken bones in the face,” Plante, neither a real egomaniac nor a hockey masochist, decided that wearing a mask might be the most prudent course. That night — November 1,1959 — when Bathgate unloaded a rocket during a game in New York hitting Plante square in the smoosh, sealed the deal. The tough-as-nails Montreal goaltender left the ice to be treated for his injury and somehow returned, wearing a mask that he had been using occasionally in practice.
That was it. From then on his face would never again be unadorned as he set up between the pipes. He knew it was the right thing for him and those who might follow in his footsteps or aspire to be like him.
“Hockey is an art. It requires speed, precision, and strength like other sports, but it also demands an extraordinary intelligence to develop a logical sequence of movements, a technique which is smooth, graceful and in rhythm with the rest of the game.”
— -Jacques Plante
Never one to underestimate his intelligence or anything else about himself, it was fitting that Plante would describe his life’s passion this way because his “logical sequence of movements” and understanding of the game’s “rhythm” allowed him to introduce a number of plays from the crease that made him one of hockey’s great innovators and also gave his coaches ulcers and premature gray hair if not balding pates. He regularly ventured outside the crease to thwart opponents or to gather loose pucks behind the net, attempting to assist his defensemen. He was a pioneer of stickhandling the puck; before Plante goaltenders stayed in net and simply deflected pucks to their defensemen and backchecking forwards.
His tendency to roam was carefully plotted by Plante and borne of necessity by his reckoning. “I was with the Citadels [the Quebec Citadelle of the Quebec Junior Hockey League],” he explained. “We had four defensemen. One couldn’t skate backwards. Another couldn’t turn to his left. The others were slow. It was a case of me having to go and get the puck when it was shot into our end because our defense couldn’t get there fast enough. The more I did it, the farther I went. It seemed to be the best thing to do, so I did it and it worked. Possession of the puck is number one. That’s all I’m doing — getting control until one of my teammates comes along.”
Montreal coach Toe Blake for one — among many if not all — would agree about puck possession but that didn’t stop him and Plante’s other coaches through the years from openly cringing and bellowing. To Jacques Plante it made perfect sense; just as wearing the mask did.
It seems on that fateful evening of November 1 against the Rangers at Madison Square Garden Plante tripped Bathgate and the latter wasn’t happy about it. To express his displeasure Bathgate fired his next shot — a missile — directly at Plante’s face. “The shot by Bathgate nearly ripped my nose off,” the goaltender fumed at the time.
Blake was sure that Plante would be unable to return so he asked the Rangers about a replacement netminder. At that time, NHL teams didn’t dress a back-up goalie; the home team supplied an emergency replacement as needed. For the Rangers this was a fellow named Joe Schaefer, a thirty-five-year-old handyman at the Garden who had yet to play in an NHL game. To suggest that Blake took a dim view would be putting it mildly. He also didn’t want to forfeit the contest.
“I told Toe,” remarked Plante, “I would only return if I could wear the mask, so there was no choice.” Blake demurred. He was in a bind. Ultimately he acceded to Plante’s demand. “He never wanted me to wear the mask because he thought it would make me too complacent,” Plante recalled. Blake also felt that wearing a mask would be a distraction and inhibit his vision.
Didn’t happen. Montreal won that game and reeled off an eighteen-game unbeaten streak which continued through the month of November. For the fifth consecutive season Jacques Plante won the Vezina Trophy (NHL’s Goaltenders’ lowest GAA) and in the Spring of the 1959-’60 campaign the Canadiens won their fifth straight Stanley Cup.
Old habits, rituals and traditions die hard. In preparation for the playoffs that season Blake asked Plante to play without the mask in a game against Detroit on March 8. He did and the Canadiens lost 3–0. The next night and for the rest of his Hall-of-Fame career Plante wore the mask. He took plenty of grief about it too; many questioned his dedication and courage quotient. Plante didn’t care. He likened not wearing the mask to a skydiver going without a parachute. Supremely self-confident and somewhat aloof, the laughter and snide remarks were like water off a duck’s back to him. And by late 1969 only a few NHL goaltenders eschewed the mask.
Andy Brown was the last NHL goalie to play without a mask on April 7, 1974 as a Pittsburgh Penguin and continued to do so throughout his three seasons with the WHA’s Indianapolis Racers before retiring in 1977. His insistence on playing barefaced earned him the nickname “Fearless.”
Jacques Plante — the only NHL goalie to win five Stanley Cups in a row (6 in all); a 7-time Vezina Trophy winner; a Hart Trophy (MVP) recipient; a Hockey Hall of Famer; and one of the “100 Greatest NHL Players” in history — would have called Brown a dope.
