Hall earned his well-deserved legacy as 'Mr. Goalie'

The deep, yawning fireplace in Glenn Hall's Stony Plain, Alberta farmhouse was roaring on this October evening in 2015, fed and stoked by some of the dozen people who had gathered in his spacious living room.

My friendship with this NHL legend had begun casually with conversations for a few newspaper stories not quite a decade earlier. But it found a new level on this visit, a bond I cherished over countless calls and a handful of subsequent visits to Mr. Goalie’s 155-acre farm, 25 miles west of Edmonton.

On Monday, Pat Hall messaged to tell me the health of his 94-year-old father, now residing in an assisted-living home in Stony Plain, had grown very fragile in the hospital, having taken ill shortly before Christmas.

“We’re taking it one day at a time and hoping for the best,” he said.

Chicago Black Hawks goalie Glenn Hall redirects the puck while making a save during a 1964-65 game at Madison Square Garden in New York.

Hospital staff having seen to his comfort, the oldest living member of the Hockey Hall of Fame died peacefully on Wednesday afternoon, sons Pat and Lindsay at his side.

A native of Humboldt, Saskatchewan, Glenn played 906 regular-season and 115 Stanley Cup Playoff games from 1952-71 for the Detroit Red Wings, Chicago Black Hawks – with whom he won the 1961 Stanley Cup – and St. Louis Blues.

He won the Calder Trophy in 1955-56 as the NHL's best rookie, the Vezina Trophy three times (1962-63, 1966-67, 1968-69) when it was awarded to the goaltender(s) on the team allowing the fewest regular-season goals, and the Conn Smythe Trophy in 1968 as the most valuable player in the playoffs.

Goalie Glenn Hall with Chicago Black Hawks teammate Dollard St. Laurent during a 1959 game at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto.

Glenn was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1975 and elected among the 100 Greatest NHL Players in 2017 for the League’s Centennial year. His 502 consecutive complete games played (from Oct. 6, 1955 to Nov. 4, 1962, all without a mask), a record for an NHL goalie, is a mark that surely is out of reach forever. That total is 552 games including the playoffs, 1,026 by his own arithmetic when he factored in junior and minor-pro hockey.

Mr. Goalie, as Glenn had forever been known, didn’t need the crackling logs for warmth on this crisp October evening. Not with family and friends having assembled, not with three generations of Halls laughing and telling stories and grazing on snacks, a fourth-generation newborn dozing, under a beamed roof that soon would have been over this hockey legend’s head for 50 years.

Practically swallowed by a comfortable sofa, Glenn Hall, then 83, was wearing a grin that was equal parts joy and mischief. In a golf shirt, khakis, blue plaid house slippers and a salt-and-pepper handlebar mustache, he wore an expression that told you so very much was right in his world.

Glenn Hall in a Montreal Forum pose as a member of the Chicago Black Hawks during the mid-1960s, and a quiz he completed at the February 2020 Kinsmen Sports Celebrity Dinner in Saskatoon, his last major public appearance.

I had come west from Montreal a day early while covering the Canadiens’ annual three-stop trip to Alberta and British Columbia, accepting Glenn’s invitation to spend a nice part of the day at his home with family and friends.

I’d visited him once before almost four years earlier one winter’s day, dropping in for an hour. But on this autumn day, picked up at my Edmonton hotel and driven out to Stony Plain by Pat Hall, I would come for the afternoon and stay for dinner.

I would leave many hours later nourished by prime rib and having feasted on Glenn’s hockey prime, and with bruises that came from pinching myself as he dug deep into his bottomless trunk of stories, tales more fantastic than fiction of his career that would make him a hockey immortal.

With a can of beer in a big paw – he would sip more than one on this day while making sure that my hand was never empty – and with family buzzing all around him, this icon spoke of where he had been, where he was now and where he was going.

Glenn talked of the wonderful friends he’d made in the game, too many of them now gone, and he reserved a thought for the “cement-headed players” whom he joked would have known how good they were “if only they had used their brains.”

Glenn Hall with the Detroit Red Wings during 1956-57, and with the St. Louis Blues in 1967-68.

He spoke reverentially of three NHL giants – Gordie Howe and Ted Lindsay, teammates in Detroit when Glenn debuted in the NHL with a brief 1952 call-up, and Canadiens center Jean Beliveau.

He had rich, sepia-toned memories of each, spinning one yarn after another, each better than the one before it.

“I retired in 1971 because goalkeeping was dangerous work,” Glenn said. “Gordie and Jean retired the same year because it wasn’t going to be any fun for them with me out of the game.”

I told him that I wished I’d been born 10 years earlier, since I never saw Lindsay play and only saw Beliveau and Howe, before Mr. Hockey’s comeback, on the back nine of their careers.

He arched an eyebrow. Then: “You wouldn’t have wished that if you were playing goal against Jean.”

Glenn Hall at home in 2019 with friendly advice for visitors, and with a favorite photo of himself with 1968-69 Vezina Trophy-winning partner Jacques Plante of the St. Louis Blues.

We talked about the NHL All-Star Game, Glenn having ruled this mostly annual contest; he still holds All-Star Game goaltending records for games (13), consecutive games (nine) and minutes played (540).

Give or take a few percentage points, his save percentage in 13 shooting-gallery appearances is an absurdly good .923.

We had spoken many times by phone over the years, sometimes as a goaltending milestone was approaching or a record was falling, other times for no reason at all. Our talks had always been much more friendly conversations than interviews.

It wasn’t until March 2011 that I finally could take Glenn up on his open invitation to drop out to the farm, an hour’s visit that flew by. But thankfully, the October 2015 visit to a hero of my youth was as unhurried as my genial, slow-motion host.

Glenn Hall at home in Stony Plain, Alberta during the 2019 Stanley Cup Final between the St. Louis Blues, for whom he played his final NHL games, and the Boston Bruins.

Pat Hall drove us up his father’s long, winding driveway past a few red barns and tool-storage sheds, one or more of them the structures that Glenn famously, even mythically was said to be painting in the late summer of 1965, Pauline Hall telling a reporter that her husband couldn’t come to the phone to explain why he was late for Black Hawks training camp.

We had stopped first at Stony Plain’s Glenn Hall Centennial Arena, an impeccably maintained small-town community rink that opened in 1967 featuring a huge outdoor mural of Glenn, Pauline, their four children and many of his career highlights.

With a banner the size of a spinnaker overlooking one net, there were dozens of photos, alongside memorabilia, framed on the walls, charting Glenn’s days from minor hockey in his native Humboldt to his 1975 enshrinement in the Hall of Fame.

He and Pauline had bought this land in the summer of 1965, a decade after they were married, building the house with St. Louis Blues earnings from his final contract. It was a rural escape from the wintertime grind, even torture of goaltending and never had he sought to live anywhere else until his declining health took him to a nearby assisted-living home where gentle, constant care was provided.

Glenn Hall poses for a portrait as a member of the OHA major-junior Windsor Spitfires, between 1949-51, and with the Chicago Black Hawks in April 1961.

The sprawling farm is magnificent for its vast rolling hills, towering pines, the barns and the wood wagons parked on the spread. The ashes of Pauline, who died in June 2009, are buried beneath a tree on the property that was planted by the Hall family in the autumn of 2010.

On my first visit, I pocketed one of the thousands of fallen pine cones as a souvenir; on a later trip, to clear my conscience, I confessed the theft to Glenn.

He studied me, eyes narrowing, then said, “So that’s where it went.”

I had gone for a walk on his land this October 2015 afternoon when I saw a goal net laying beneath some bushes, almost hidden. Its plastic frame was coming apart at its joints, the mesh fully off one post and half off the crossbar, beaten into submission by Glenn’s grandchildren.

Wearing his favorite bedroom slippers and a handlebar mustache, holding his 1962-63 NHL All-Star Game stick, Glenn Hall tends the plastic net used by his grandchildren on his farm in Stony Plain, Alberta in 2015.

I dragged it to the middle of the lawn, pressed the frame back into a semblance of shape, and went inside to fetch Glenn.

“Please bring a stick?” I asked him, a modern goalie stick that awaited his autograph for a charity auction dismissed for a vintage wood Northland Pro that has stood for decades against a wall in his basement.

Glenn came outside with the heavy lumber he had used in the All-Star Game on Oct. 6, 1962 at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens, so labelled on the blade whose tape had carefully been cut away. For the record, he allowed no goals on 10 second-period shots that night in the All-Stars’ 4-1 loss to the defending Stanley Cup-champion Maple Leafs.

In a zippered jacket and still in his house slippers, Glenn stood in front of this broken plastic net, with a garden swing, pond and his vast acreage behind him, and he smiled broadly for a photo.

He joked that it might have been the first time he’d ever smiled standing in a net, where during his playing days he was the dour, maskless target of flying pucks and slashing sticks, cut for countless stitches and relieved of many teeth.

Glenn Hall pokes the puck away from Canadiens’ Ralph Backstrom, helped by defenseman Al MacNeil, during a game at the Montreal Forum.

Indeed, Black Hawks teammate Ed Litzenberger had nicknamed Glenn “Ghoulie” for his ghostly complexion before a game.

“Pressure,” Glenn said, “is the greatest asset in the world. When I was whistling and humming, I was horse (manure). And I wasn’t whistling and humming very often.”

We took the stick back downstairs and its owner offered a tour of this room which over time had become, simply by the accumulation of things, a personal hall of fame. There were photos and jackets and crested wool sweaters on the walls, sticks and thread-bare scraps of so-called protective equipment in corners and a small trophy case displaying priceless pieces of his illustrious career.

Of course, among the treasures was the iconic photo of Boston defenseman Bobby Orr flying through the Blues goal crease on May 10, 1970. Orr’s Game 4 Stanley Cup overtime goal had just given the Bruins their first championship since 1941, a beaten Glenn pulling himself up, left hand hooked over the crossbar.

Glenn Hall at home on his farm in Stony Plain, Alberta, in September 2018, his last game-worn skates hanging on a fence post.

“Don’t know how many times I’ve signed it,” he said of the photo. “I’ve asked Bobby if that was the only goal he ever scored and I’ve told him, ‘I had showered before you even hit the ice.’”

Glenn was grinning when he dug out a 1957-58 Black Hawks pay stub; his two-week take-home pay was $842.10, a $25.90 NHL fine deducted pre-tax for a misconduct he’d been assessed.

He related going into management offices 13 times one season to negotiate his contract “and they offered nickels and dimes each time.”

“I always wanted to be underpaid, not overpaid,” Glenn said, grinning again. “And (GM) Tommy Ivan helped me to achieve my goal.”

If he wasn’t now finely tuned to televised games every night, he admired the modern NHL product.

Glenn Hall sits outside the Stony Plain, Alberta arena that bears his name during a September 2018 visit.

“What these kids are doing today is unbelievable,” he said. “They’re throwing it with backhand, forehand. Certainly the game has evolved, it’s better than it ever was. The players are so good, the game is so fast.”

The stories were as delicious as the second and third helpings of dinner, Glenn raising a robust glass of red wine to toast his family and friends who had overflowed the dining room.

He laughed as he proposed a toast, winking at his son, Pat: “To the father, the son and the goalie host!”

With a sip, he said, “When I get old, I’m going to quit drinking. Really, I am. So many of my teammates and friends, they quit drinking when they got old. But they were old when they were 50. (Heck), I’m not old yet.”

He needled old pal Lew Ramstead, who had dropped by.

St. Louis Blues’ Glenn Hall makes a save off of a shot by Toronto’s David Keon during a 1968 game at Maple Leaf Gardens.

“You’ve got to speak slow to Lew,” Glenn said with loud mischief. “He was a defenseman.”

Talk of defense turned Glenn to thoughts of late teammate Elmer (Moose) Vasko, the hulking rearguard who was always in trouble with Black Hawks management over his weight.

“Moose weighed 222 pounds only once, and that was on the way up,” he said. “He’d get his hair and fingernails cut before his weigh-in, and he’d only step on the scale after a deep exhale.”

Glenn recalled with relish the 1965-66 season, with Al MacNeil on his blue line.

“I had two assists and Al had none, and I reminded him of this often during the season,” he said, giggling. “Al said, ‘I’ll catch you if I have a good second half and stay healthy.’ At the end of the year, I have two assists and he has one. So Al announces, ‘I know how that happened. Hall played all the power-plays.’”

In the den of his Stony Plain, Alberta farmhouse, Glenn Hall studies the mask he wore near the end of his Hall of Fame-bound career.

By now Glenn’s family was drifting out into the night, grandchildren and a great-grandchild having faded in the warm house after a huge meal.

Mr. Goalie would fall under the weather two months later, nothing that an emergency appendectomy couldn’t fix. He promptly was in fine health again, and he’d tell you that, in his full, hockey-scarred life, he had suffered worse than a rotten appendix.

I would travel back to Stony Plain on a few occasions, many phone calls the thread between the visits.

In June 2019, his St. Louis Blues on their way to their historic first Stanley Cup championship, Glenn invited me to come out to watch a game. I agreed on the condition he would live-tweet the match.

“I’m not sure about this internet thing,” he replied. “I’ve just mastered the doorbell.”

I handled the technical end that night, typing Mr. Goalie’s stream of consciousness onto my Twitter/X account in his voice. The reaction was astonishing, hundreds of comments flooding us, even former NHL players throwing questions at Glenn throughout the process.

A huge mural on the side of Glenn Hall Centennial Arena in Stony Plain, Alberta, celebrating Mr. Goalie’s Hall of Fame career and his family life.

Nine months earlier, I’d paid a visit bearing a modest gift – three portraits in a single frame, the span of Glenn’s NHL career represented with photos of him in the uniform of the Red Wings, Black Hawks and Blues.

“I’m looking at those photos now and something occurs to me,” he told me. “Those are the three best-looking fellows in my house.”

Our last time together was in February 2020, a month before the COVID-19 pandemic, at a sports celebrity dinner in Saskatoon, 75 miles west of his Humboldt birthplace. It was magical to see the love and affection showered on him by fellow Hall of Fame goaltending legends Martin Brodeur, Grant Fuhr, Bernie Parent and Ed Belfour, Mr. Goalie an idol of them all.

Since last September, we have said goodbye to Hall of Fame goalies Ken Dryden, Ed Giacomin, Parent and now Mr. Goalie.

It was as Pat Hall’s car pulled down the long driveway onto a dark rural road in October 2015, his happy, carefree father waving farewell from the porch, that I scribbled the last words Glenn had for me that day:

“I do nothing better than anybody you ever knew,” he’d said with enormous pride. “I can go out and do nothing all day. And it takes me a long time to do it.”

Top photo: Glenn Hall sits for a September 2018 portrait in front of one of the barns on his sprawling farm in Stony Plain, Alberta, his last game-worn skates slung over his shoulder.