Home : The First Twenty Years :Glenn Hall
He Has Been Called Unbelievable,The Greatest Goalie In Hockey.But to Glenn Hall, tense, sleepless and scarred, every game is an hour or so of hell. The night before their All-Star Game in Toronto, the world's best hockey players were assaulting Canadian beef and listening to speeches that all seemed to begin: "Hockey benefits a man mentally, physically and spiritually." Then, in a ballroom of the Royal York Hotel, a comedian rose and the mood brightened. The Toronto Maple Leafs had gotten so old, said Johnny Wayne, the comic, that their team physician was a prostate specialist. One goalie Wayne knew was so erratic that he made a great save on television, but missed the same shot on an instant replay. People wanted to get rich in hockey, but the only way to make a small fortune was to begin with a large fortune and buy a team. The big room rang with laughter, but directly under Wayne's gesticulating left hand, Glenn Hall, the All-Star goaltender, sat dourly. "Didn't you like the jokes?" someone asked. "Ooh, yes," Hall said, in the brogue of Midwest Canada. "Wayne is one of our best comedians." "You weren't laughing." "Ooh, I chuckled once or twice," Hall said, "but you want to be careful. Mind you, you don't want to give too much away."
His chubby face appeared merry, but Hall was serious. At 36, Glenn Henry Hall of the National Hockey League All-Star Team and the St. Louis Blues, is a complex athlete, fond of poetry and farm journals, solitude and manly companionship. But through all his moods, there runs a theme of thrift. It is an asset for a goalie to give nothing away, and Hall comes by his penury naturally. He grew up in a cold country during the Depression. "The truth is I don't like to play hockey anymore. Aiyee," he says, making the pronoun a sound of pain, "don't like it, but it is a marvelous sport. I like the people, the talk, even the dinners. I love everything about hockey except the games." His distaste for play is overwhelming. Invariably, as Hall is about to leave the clubhouse to guard the six-by-four foot entrance to the goal, nausea seizes him. Often he loses the lunch he unhappily devoured six hours earlier. "Hall's bucket," one of his old teammates suggests, "belongs in the Hockey Hall of Fame." Still, Hall cannot retire. He has tried, but reality brings him back. In Edmonton, Alberta, where Hall lives, he has never been able to find a job that pays as much as $100 a week. For goaltending in St. Louis this season, Glenn Hall, the man of thrift, is earning $47,500. It is an odd story, really, and touching. Here is a man whose boyhood was filled with a dream. He wanted to be a hockey player. By 10 or 12 his dream became specific. He would become one of the six men who played goal in the National Hockey League. With manhood, his wildest hope came true; Hall became not just a goalie. He became the best of goalies: Mister Goalie, sportswriters called him. But under the whistling pucks, the hurtling bodies, the beating sticks, the slashing skates, the thousand natural shocks that he fell heir to, Hall came to hate and fear his work. The process was inexorable and irreversible. Now being a goaltender disturbs his sleep, upsets his stomach, and lays him low. "Every game I have to play these days," says Glenn Hall, "is an hour or so of hell." As a result of goaltending injuries, Hall has endured 250 to 300 stitches, 75 of them around the mouth, almost all in emergencies when there was no time for Novocain. "I don't like needles," Hall says, "and I don't like pain."
Techniques of scoring goals have been evolving with a terrifying swiftness. Once most of the scoring came on short accurate wrist shots. That was before hockey discovered its home run. The slap shot, a full prodigious, ferocious swipe, propels the puck, a six-ounce disc of hard frozen rubber, at incredible speed, as fast as 120 miles an hour. Still, goaltenders, with their instant reflexes and Martian padding, can handle pucks moving at two miles a minute except under certain handicaps. These handicaps are critical to the modern goalie. When a fine marksman; Bobby Hull, Gordie Howe, Rod Gilbert, winds up to shoot, his teammates promptly scramble toward the goal. One tries to block the goalie's vision. Another may extend his stick to deflect the speeding puck, to alter the angle of its flight at the last millisecond. The crouching goalie becomes both blind and helpless.
In self-defense, many goalies have started wearing masks, and every NHL team now uses two goalies, to spread the shell shock, so to speak. Hall is happy that a 34-year-old named Seth Martin frequently relieves him, but he cannot bring himself to wear a mask. "What worries you most is the eyes," he says, "and a mask may not help there. You wouldn't want to go stopping a puck with an eye, even if you were wearing the mask. But there's something else. A mask might throw me off. You don't want to look the fool out there, in front of all these people." Hockey men agree that goaltenders are a species apart, difficult and ultimately unfathomable. They are not even precisely sure what makes some great. After listing a variety of attributes: reflexes, hands, vision, ability to anticipate, Hector (Toe) Blake, who coaches the Montreal Canadiens, shakes his head and says, "With great ones, like Hall, it's something else. You get four goals off them or five, but the goal you've got to have to win, somehow the great ones don't let you get it." The sense of thrift is always recurring. Hall was in his team's training room when I met him. He lay on a table, wearing a towel and a frown. One of his knees ached: it bore a circular purple scar. "Cartilage?" I asked. "Noo. A skate. The cut is from a long time ago." It was the day of a game, when Hall is most tense. "You have to respect those feelings," his wife Pauline had said. "But don't be afraid of Glenn. He's not an ogre." He knew what I wanted and got up from the table and asked if William (Scotty) Bowman, the Blues' astute young coach, was using the dressing room, a windowless, sealed cubicle. "It should be quiet here," Hall said, and it was, except when other players beat hockey sticks on the steel doors in high good humor. "What can you do about slap shots?" I asked. "Well, you don't want to get hit with one," Hall said. "You watch the puck. You never let the puck out of your sight. But your eyes take in other things. You notice where the forwards are stationing themselves. You calculate the caroms." "Sheer speed, then, is not a problem?"
Hall blinked. "Huh?" he said. "Speed ought to bother you. Bobby Hull, he has by far the hardest shot I've ever seen, can hit you in the chest and knock you over. You've made the save, but I guarantee you don't feel good about it." "Do you do anything special for your reflexes?" "I like Ping-Pong. I like to get up very close and have a big fellow slam at me harder and harder. I know the Ping-Pong ball won't hurt me, and I'm trying to make a habit of moving in." He seemed intense but poised. No, he had not slept well the night before. He never slept much the night before a game. The New York Rangers, whom he would play, were a good, hard-working team. He was going to eat soft food at 2 o'clock, and then try to sleep. As Hall left, he even managed a wry joke. "If you don't think I'm familiar with that puck," he said, "let me tell you exactly what's written on it. Art Ross, patent number 2226516." He half smiled and was gone.
That night, at 7:30, the last of the Blues on the ice was a transmogrified Hall. Under his 40 pounds of equipment, he skated without effort. That was his body. His face was something else. The lips were tightly pressed and very pale. At the corners, the rigid mouth turned down. The brown eyes were furtive. They gazed downward and darted. Hall looked frightened, unhappy and nauseated. The game began at 8. Hall bent in the net nervously scraping invisible ice shavings with his stick. On his left hand he wore a huge mitt, something like a first baseman's glove. It is called a trapper. The right hand, also gloved, held the thick stick. On the back of the right glove was a large, flat leather pad, to deflect shots up and away. The Rangers won the face-off and soon Phil Goyette, their center, was digging hard toward Hall. Al Arbour, a bespectacled St. Louis defenseman, moved with Goyette, but the Ranger slammed a swift low slap shot from 40 feet away. Hall lowered his stick, but a speeding puck, like a speeding baseball, curves or dips or sails. At the last instant, Goyette's low shot dipped still lower. It slipped under Hall's stick, and at 8:29 Hall found himself beaten. He grimaced. He was embarrassed. Then he told himself there was no going back. He still had plenty to worry about.
The Blues are not a strong shooting team, and they have trouble coming from behind. Hall played superbly for the balance of the period, making a lunging save and blocking two successive rebounds. Under pressure, he dropped both knees to the ice, his lower legs fanning wide. That way he was covered on low shots: for high ones he dug his skate toes into the ice and bounced to his full height. Hall is the inventor of this technique, which young goalies everywhere copy. Still, at the end of the period the Rangers led 1 to 0. They were not going to be caught. A defenseman's mistake hung Hall in the second period, and he was screened on a slap shot in the third. The final score was 3 to 1, but he was still bothered by the opening goal. "A knuckle ball," he said. "He beat me with a flicking knuckle ball. It dipped."
We were riding out to the airport in Al Arbour's car for a midnight flight to Chicago, where Hall had once played for the Blackhawks. It was snowing very hard. "Wonder if they'll be flying?" Arbour said. "A knuckle ball," Hall said. "Look at this snow," Arbour said. "When I came here, they promised me golf every day, all winter." In the airplane Hall at last began to relax. "Did it drop straight down?" I said. "Straight down." He did not play in Chicago. Considering his knee and his general tension, Scotty Bowman decided to rest him. Hall spent 10 years with the Blackhawks and I asked if he was going to give pointers to Seth Martin. "Ooh, you tell him to watch Ken Wharram on breakaways," he said. "One or two things, but not too much. You want to be careful. It may not come out the way you say."
The Chicago fans applauded when Hall skated onto the rink, but he responded with a look of deep discomfort. Even before a game in which he would not have to play, he looked miserable. The game ended in a tie, and I asked him afterward how he could get himself so worked up for an evening on the bench. "You have to be nervous," Hall insisted, "if you consider all the possibilities; Seth could be hurt. Then I'd have to play, wouldn't I?" We flew to Toronto the next morning, where Hall was the only St. Louis player among the All-Stars. Hall was going to work the third and final period against Toronto, which last year won the Stanley Cup. Ed Giacomin of the Rangers, a Hall disciple, would play goalie first. Terry Sawchuk of Los Angeles would follow. "Aren't you fellows nervous?" Hall asked in the dressing room. "It's just an All-Star game," Sawchuk said. "I never get that tense," Giacomin said. Still, the Rangers rarely play him against Chicago because Hull's slap shot seems to paralyze him. While the All-Stars warmed up, driving shots at Giacomin in practiced patterns, anyone behind the goal could witness hockey's strongest shots in safety. The boards in Maple Leaf Gardens are topped with high panels of a transparent plastic called Herculite. According to its manufacturer, Herculite is bulletproof. On the ice, Detroit's Howe, balding, muscular and fierce, was slashing a shot with his great wrists. The puck flew past the cage, a few inches off the ice, and boomed into the boards. Next Hull, broad and powerful, unloaded. Giacomin caught the puck but looked awkward, as he kept his body out of the way. Norm Ullman of Detroit shot - "not a hard shooter," Hall was to insist - and the puck sailed over the goal and slammed into the Herculite directly before my face.
What happens with these shots is that they leap. Americans, used to catching baseballs, or bullet passes, or returning tennis serves, have never seen anything like the approach of a well-stroked hockey shot. The puck starts small, and then seems to gain momentum, and in the last few feet of flight the thing explodes. A hard crack against the Herculite. That was all there was. One routine shot. One brief encounter. Facing a firing squad is a brief encounter, too. Although some All-Star Games are passionless, this one was close and included a fight (Howe vs. Mike Walton of Toronto to no decision). The Stars were beaten 4 to 3, but the game provided an all but perfect sample of Hall's skill. Midway through the final period Toronto's center, a swift and wily veteran named Dave Keon, stole the puck and broke alone toward Hall. Keon skated toward the right corner of the net, moving his stick from side to side, shifting the puck. Hall crouched low, considering skater and puck, approaching him at 25 miles an hour. Abruptly, through instinct or memory of other situations, or both, Hall charged. That is, he started to skate directly at Dave Keon. Keon stopped dead. Ice sprayed as he dug in his skate blades. At once he hooked left in a swift semicircle. Hall dropped back and covered the new move. Keon faked at the left corner of the goal but Hall read the fake. When Keon drilled a hard, low shot diagonally to the right, Hall was there. He caught it in his trapper. "Nice," I said afterward in the dressing room. "I was jerky," Hall said. "Not fluid enough." "That guy," Ed Giacomin said, pointing at Hall, "is unbelievable. It's his hands. It's his reactions. He's the greatest." Hall still was tense. With the dressing room emptying, he bent toward his bag, packed with 40 pounds of gear. We each grabbed a strap and made our way by a subway to a downtown restaurant. Hall ate lightly, with Lou Angotti, an All-Star from Philadelphia who played two seasons with Hall at Chicago. "They tell you," Angotti said, "no one can say a word to the man here before a game. Even a sneeze, and he has to use the bucket. But I'd talk to him. I'd walk right up and tell him, 'You'd better be sick, Hall. They're gonna take sixty shots at you tonight.'" Hall almost laughed. "Whenever you were in there, Louie, they would." I said I'd see them in Philadelphia where that weekend the Blues would play the Flyers, who were leading the Western division of the League. St. Louis was moving up. "That looks like a big game," I said. "They're all big games," Hall said. "Either you need it for a spot in the playoffs, or when you've clinched a spot you need it to maintain momentum, or you need it to improve or keep sharp. In the 15 years I've been in this League, I've never played a game that wasn't big." Hall comes out of Humboldt, Saskatchewan, the son of a prairie railroad man, who died of cancer last Christmas Day. Glenn was born in 1931 and remembers that there were always groceries for the table. "Maybe there wasn't much beyond that, but Dad always made sure we had groceries." Glenn could do well at schoolwork any time he tried, but he felt that his life, his real life, began in the outdoors, on biting winter afternoons. The game was shinny. It is an informal game, with varying rules, as akin to hockey as stickball is to baseball. In Humboldt 30 years ago, the schoolboys tramped down the snow and formed two goals and raced up and down in Street shoes. They played for hours, chasing a rolling puck, perhaps frozen horse dung, and batted it toward their handmade goals. Hall could ice-skate soon after he learned to walk. He liked playing wing, but after assessing his own ability, he decided that if he had any chance at all of cracking the National Hockey League, he would have to make it as a goalie. He worked his way up slowly, through juvenile leagues, until he was old enough for amateur leagues. (Canadian amateurs. unlike American amateurs, are paid by daylight.) "What first attracted me to him," says Pauline Patrick Hall, the nurse Glenn married in 1949, "was not Glenn so much as his car. Not many had cars around Humboldt in those days. We girls knew that a young fellow with his own car was someone substantial." Hall signed with the Detroit farm system and in 1956, his first full season with the Red Wings, he turned in 12 shutouts, one shy of the modern record. He allowed only 2.11 goals a game (any average under three is very good) and was the National League's Rookie of the Year. For this, the Red Wings paid him $6,000. At the end of Hall's second season (2.24 average), the Red Wings opened the playoffs against Boston. Late in the game, Vic Stasiuk of the Bruins slammed a hard shot at Hall, and as he did another Bruin skated across the goalmouth. Hall's vision was blocked. He had lost the puck. "When that happens," Hall says, "you make yourself as big as possible, trying to cover the greatest area." He was making himself big when he saw the puck again. It was five feet in front of him; mouth high, traveling at 90 miles an hour. Hall regained consciousness in the Detroit dressing room with a physician bending over him. His eyes were going black and his mouth was messy. "How many will it take?" he mumbled. "A few," the surgeon said. "You really caught one this time." "Well, let's get it over with," Hall said. Half an hour later he skated back on the ice. Twenty-three stitches held his mouth together. He finished the game. Boston won, 3 to 1. He was not outstanding thereafter, and when the Red Wings lost the series to the Bruins, Detroit decided to dump Hall, although he had played in 70 consecutive complete games. He lacked courage, someone suggested. That July he was traded to Chicago, where he ran his streak to 502 games. This season, the National Hockey League, traditionally a profitable monopoly, has submitted to a semi revolution. As if to make up for years of lost expansion, the League doubled in size, going from six teams to a dozen. A complex draft helped stock the new franchises, and each of the old clubs was required to relinquish two goalies. The Blackhawks let Hall go because he was over 35. The splendid veteran found himself suddenly assigned to a new city and an unknown club. He would have to leave his old Chicago friends, find a winter house in St. Louis, place his four children in new schools, and, most important, play goal for a team whose ability to provide even minimal protection was questionable. Uncertain and unhappy, he was considering retirement when two Blues executives, Lynn Patrick and Sid Salomon III, took a private jet to Edmonton to make an intensive pitch. They offered him $47,500, by far the highest salary paid any goalie since the dawn of ice, and Hall nodded with joyless resignation. He would play. He now owns 475 acres, 20 miles from Edmonton, on which he grows barley. He has put in 250 pine, spruce and poplar trees near the site where he intends to build a house. "A huge fireplace is what we want most," Pauline Hall says, "where we can sit and enjoy its warmth with friends." "But I couldn't keep everybody eating on what I've got," Hall says. Each save, then, is helping to buy the farm. In Philadelphia on the weekend, the hockey game was rough and ragged. Hall played well, and with eight minutes to play, he was clinging to a 2 to 1 lead. Then Forbes Kennedy of the Flyers skated into the Blues zone. He drove for the goal, was blocked and had to go behind the right side of the cage. He passed, fell and lay prone. The puck moved to the left side, and Hall followed it. Philadelphia forwards were scrimmaging dangerously close. As he shifted to the left, Hall surveyed the right side with a swift peripheral glance. The right was clear. He saw no trouble. He had missed Kennedy, still prone. Then Kennedy scrambled up, dashed in front of the net, took a quick pass and tipped it toward the goal. Hall's left skate was a blur. But the puck was faster. The point-blank shot tied the game, which stayed that way. Afterward, Hall was furious. He wants to win, not tie. The tying goal scored not only because Kennedy lay prone at a key instant, but also because a St. Louis defenseman neglected to cover him when he got up. But Hall would not share the blame. He simply shook his head, cursed vaguely and took a little longer to unbend. "You know," he said, as we sat in a little restaurant over coffee, "I used to live for the winter. Now I never get to spend a winter at home." "How many games do you have left?" I said. "Thirty-one," he said glumly. "Did you ever think of trying tranquilizers?" "I did," he said. "I got relaxed, and I played relaxed, too. T.V. announcers always talk about the pro football teams fighting nervousness by praying. In times like these," Hall said, "I'd think God would have something more important to worry about than football or a hockey game." "Well it isn't all bad, and you'll miss a lot of it when you're through." "Oooh, I know that," Hall said. "The fellowship. Where can you find fellowship like in hockey? But I like my land and the way the hills roll and the fields and the space and all that privacy all day and every day." Then he recited: West wind blow from your prairie nest.
This story first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1968, and was selected Best Sports Story of the Year. | ||||||||||
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"You're a country man," I said. "You're trying to tell me I'm a farmer." He seemed as relaxed as I had ever seen him. "The team's picking up, and you're going well," I said. "There's no reason why you can't keep on making the money and playing five more years." He looked at me, hurt, and then he looked away. He was contemplating five more years of slap shots. The color slipped from his face and his lips pressed tight together, and right before my eyes, Glenn Hall, the greatest of modern goalies, thought about his work and turned pale green.
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