Hockey legends enjoy legendary night

A shy man in public but one who will stitch together a quilt of fantastic stories when among friends, Hall was just warming up.”No, I never fished the puck out of my net when someone scored,” he said in his slow, worth-the-wait drawl. “Why would I? I didn’t put it there. …”In Detroit, if we’d had a bad period, Alex Delvecchio would race into the dressing room and eat a bunch of oranges and throw the peels in the doorway,” he said. “When [general manager] Jack Adams would come in to give us hell, he’d hit the peels and go flying. …”It’s such a thrill to be in this room with so many of my friends.” Then, with a smile: “And it’s amazing that I’m the only one who hasn’t changed. The rest of them have gone downhill quite severely. …”My first year in St. Louis [in 1967-68], I always sat in the last row of the bus, on the window, opposite the driver’s side. One day, I get on the bus and there’s [rookie] Tim Ecclestone, sitting in my seat. I walked back slowly and said to him, ‘Rook, there are only two seats reserved on this bus: the driver’s, and this one. You can take any one of the others.’ “And then Hall laughed.”But in my last season [1970-71], I bequeathed that seat to Tim.”It didn’t much matter. Ecclestone was traded in February 1971, before Hall retired at season’s end.\*There are very few stories Maurice Richard Jr. has not heard about his firebreathing father. The mighty Rocket’s coal-black eyes and his single-minded propulsion from the blue line to the net terrorized goaltenders from the early 1940s until his retirement in 1960.”My father would be honored to be on this list,” said Maurice Jr., the Rocket’s 1945 Stanley Cup ring – won the year of his son’s birth – on his right hand. “He never thought he was so good, so great. He was very humble, he played hockey because he loved the game. He wasn’t looking to be a big star.”Maurice Jr. attended the dinner with his sister, Huguette. It was the latter’s birthweight of nine pounds that prompted Richard to ask his coach, Dick Irvin, to switch from the No. 15 he had been wearing to No. 9 for the 1943-44 season, a sweater he would make legendary in Montreal.The Rocket died in 2000 after a battle with cancer, and his death brought all of Quebec to its knees to mourn the heart and soul of some of the Canadiens greatest teams, a man who unwillingly was a figurehead during an explosive time in the politics of the province.”It took a lot of time for me to put my father’s life in perspective,” Maurice Jr. said. “With the years, I’ve read a lot of things about his career, I’ve met a lot of people and been told a lot of things. I’m 71 so I saw him play the last five, six years of his career, his last Stanley Cups.”I remember my father when I was young. Every practice at the Montreal Forum, I was there with him, in the room with the players.”A lot of excuse notes written for teachers, surely?”No, no, I didn’t skip class that many days,” Maurice Jr. said. “My father would not have liked that.”