Canadiens refused to be stopped by Montreal blizzard 50 years ago

It was the perfect storm 50 years ago Saturday, in every way, but the Montreal Canadiens made it to the Forum -- by snowmobile, tow truck, foot, train and subway.

The Canadiens' 3-1 victory against the visiting Philadelphia Flyers on Feb. 19, 1972 is merely an asterisk today, the real story being that the game was played at all.
The city's forecast for that Saturday called for 3-4 inches of snow, beginning Friday night. At midnight, as the flurries began, the city's 8,000 public works employees went on strike, plows locked up, all street-clearing operations suspended.

Montreal's Peel Street, clogged with snow and abandoned cars, on Feb. 20, 1972, with the lineups for the previous night's game between the Canadiens and Flyers.
The Flyers, winless in five games (0-2, three ties), had arrived Friday, settling into their hotel near the Forum. The defending Stanley Cup champion Canadiens, unbeaten in nine (5-0, four ties), were home, prepared to face Philadelphia on Saturday and then travel to face the Buffalo Sabres on Sunday.
But the predicted modest snowfall became a crushing foot or so that would be heavily drifted by winds gusting to 60 miles per hour, not a flake of it cleared. The city was shin-deep in snow by dawn Saturday, the blizzard intensifying through the morning, howling winds creating blinding conditions and leaving impassable drifts in driveways and on sidewalks and roads.

Yvan Cournoyer, here in a team portrait and in 1970s action, scored what would be the game-winning goal on Feb. 19, 1972.
Canadiens forwards Yvan Cournoyer and Jacques Lemaire, who posed for photos on Feb. 9 at home north of Montreal with a shovel and in Florida with a golf club, lived in neighboring suburbs about 18 miles west of the Forum. Cournoyer, who had a four-wheel drive truck, didn't see the snow as much more than an inconvenience.
And then early in the afternoon, he took a call from Canadiens trainer Eddy Palchak, who was phoning everyone on the team to advise them to get to the arena early because of worsening conditions.
Cournoyer, a few miles west of Lemaire, called his teammate and told him he'd pick him up for the drive into town. With suitcases for their overnight trip to Buffalo, they loaded up and set off down the highway toward the Forum. It didn't go well.

Jacques Lemaire, here in a team portrait and in 1970s action, scored the game's first goal on Feb. 19, 1972, having arrived at the Forum less than an hour earlier driving a snowmobile.
Not quite halfway into the trip they hit gridlock, the highway totally blocked by stranded cars littering the route. So like any Quebec driver worth his salt, Cournoyer pulled a U-turn in the middle of the highway, bounced across the median and headed back west, a plan hatched for both men to pull on their snowmobile suits, mount the machines in their garages and resume their commute.
With overnight bags strapped aboard, they set off again, roaring toward the city past too many abandoned cars to count.
A perfect plan -- until Cournoyer's snowmobile expired at almost the same place they'd stopped the first time. The jet-propelled wing known as the "Roadrunner" ditched his ride in a ditch on the highway's shoulder, climbed on behind Lemaire and they completed the journey.
Churning the final blocks down Ste. Catherine Street toward the Forum, almost frostbitten, they passed hardy pedestrians and cross-country skiers who were delighted to have the city's famous boulevard to themselves.

Montreal's snow-choked Peel Street, looking north toward Mount Royal, on Feb. 20, 1972. On the right is the Sheraton Mt. Royal Hotel, where most NHL teams stayed during 1970s trips to play the Canadiens.
"When we arrived at the Forum's garage door, most of the other players were already dressed for the game," Cournoyer recalled. "In our snowmobile suits, we looked like we were from outer space."
From his home in Florida today, Lemaire laughs at the memory, saying he thoroughly enjoyed the adventure, more than an hour on snowmobiles for a trip that would usually take 25 minutes.
"To me, it was a ball," Lemaire said. "Every chance I had to get on my snowmobile, I took it. When we realized that Yvan's four-wheel drive wasn't going to get us to the Forum, the solution was simple.
"I remember putting on my snowmobile suit. It was really a trip in the sense that it was very unusual, on the highway on a snowmobile, passing all the stranded cars.
"The Forum workers inside the garage didn't even recognize us when we pulled my snowmobile inside. They just looked at us. When they realized it was Yvan and me, they started to laugh. They couldn't believe we'd come that far."
Most of their teammates already dressed, headed onto the rink for warmups, Cournoyer and Lemaire hustled into uniform, exhausted by the obstacle course they'd just completed.

Doug Favell (left) and Ken Dryden played goal for the Flyers and Canadiens, respectively. Dryden hiked through the snow to get to the Forum.
"On a normal game day at home, you'd take an afternoon nap, get in the car, drive to the building and play," Lemaire said. "A snowmobile is a lot different. There's the stress of trying to control the vehicle, make sure you don't hit anything. Yvan and I no idea how we'd play."
So naturally, Lemaire opened the scoring at 3:09 of the first period, an assist to Cournoyer, with the Roadrunner scoring his 30th of the season, ultimately the game-winner, at 18:21 of the first.
The puck was dropped by referee Bryan Lewis at 8:14 p.m., a little late to accommodate tardy players, the game played in a tidy two hours and nine minutes. The Canadiens outshot the Flyers 43-24, each team perhaps too worn out to get feisty; six penalty minutes were called, all to the Flyers, two of them to goalie Doug Favell for delay of game at 7:39 of the second.
Canadiens goalie Ken Dryden, his glasses caked with snow during the trudge of a few miles on foot from home with his wife, Lynda, recalls the action beginning with roughly 4,000 fans in the 18,200-capacity Forum. Just over 8,000 unofficially were reported to have attended, some passers-by simply straggling in.

Canadiens coach Scotty Bowman took nearly an hour to make what normally was a 12-minute walk to a suburban train. At right, a view of Ste. Catherine Street on Feb. 20, 1972, the Montreal Forum a mile and a half from this downtown vantage point.
It was an adventure for many of the Canadiens just to get to the arena.
Coach Scotty Bowman, who lived 12 miles west of the building, knew he had no chance to make the trip by car. So carrying an overnight bag, he trudged to a suburban train through knee-high snow, a 12-minute walk in normal conditions taking him nearly an hour.
"The NHL was very reluctant to postpone a game in those days," Bowman says today. "A team would have to not be in town, and the Flyers were already in Montreal."
The NHL officially lists 63 weather-related postponements since March 4, 1971, when a game in Montreal between the Canadiens and Vancouver Canucks was pushed back five days. Each team was in town but the game was rescheduled at the request of the city, which had been paralyzed by a 20-inch snowfall.
There had been other postponements previously; the Feb. 20, 1924 train of the Montreal-bound Ottawa Senators was blocked by snow, with attempts by players to shovel out the locomotive proving futile. The game was played the next night, a 3-0 Canadiens victory.

The 1971-72 Montreal Canadiens, which featured nine future Hall of Fame players. Two of them - snowmobilers Yvan Cournoyer and Jacques Lemaire - are in the second row, first two from the far left.
On that snowy night in 1972, Montreal forward Marc Tardif arrived at the end of the first period, having had to ditch his car downtown and walk 90 minutes to the arena. Sam Maislin, a Canadiens shareholder, dispatched a tow truck from his transportation company to fetch defenseman Guy Lapointe and backup goalie Denis DeJordy, who lived about 25 miles away.
Broadcaster Gilles Tremblay, a former Montreal forward, hitched rides for more than four hours from his home 25 miles east of the arena -- only to be on the air for five minutes when a strike by CBC technicians pulled the plug on the game, snowed-in Canadiens fans instead offered the Boston Bruins' 6-4 road victory against the Minnesota North Stars.
Philadelphia forward Jean-Guy Gendron, visiting his wife 6 miles out of town, found a snowmobile for his trip to the Forum, but arrived too late to dress.
The highlight of the game might have come after the final siren, when a Flyers fan jumped onto the ice, dancing as the Forum organist played the Dean Martin standard "Volare."

Montreal's snow-clogged Dorchester Street (now Rene-Levesque Boulevard), on Feb. 20, 1972. The Montreal Forum is about a mile from this site.
With the Montreal airport shut down, the Flyers boarded the subway for the two-line, three-stop trip to a train to Toronto then back to Philadelphia. But even that was a disaster; they mistakenly went to historic Windsor Station, not Central Station, where their train was idling.
That prompted displeased coach Fred Shero to march his team a half-hour through snowbanks to get to where they should have been. When they arrived, they found the Canadiens, who had walked a mile and a half from the Forum through the snow to get to the same train, bound for Buffalo.
"There was no food on the train," Dryden recalled, disputing a report that suggested the meals for the Flyers had been sent to the Canadiens rail car.
A little hunger proved no problem for the goalie who would win the 1971-72 Calder Trophy as the NHL's best rookie. On Sunday, Dryden shut out the Sabres 4-0 for his sixth of eight shutouts that season.
And Cournoyer's snowmobile was back in his garage when he returned home from Buffalo, Maislin's towing company having hauled it out of the highway ditch.
Photos: Evelyn Cournoyer (Yvan shoveling), Jimmy Cosby (Lemaire golfing); all Montreal 1972 images courtesy Sandra Cohen-Rose and Colin Rose, Hockey Hall of Fame, Getty Images