Jack Todd: The ghosts remained when the Forum closed 25 years ago
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The Forum was mostly empty that March afternoon in 1996. I had just wrapped up a long interview with Maurice “Rocket” Richard, the most legendary of all the legends to play on this sacred ice, and our photographer was setting up a photo session with him.
Richard was 74 then, so he posed on a chair atop the CH logo at centre ice. He sat patiently until the session was finished — and then, slowly at first and then faster and faster, the Rocket began to spin his chair around and around, like a 6-year-old visiting his dad’s office.
Of all the events surrounding the closing of the Forum 25 years ago, that’s the one I remember most. This almost mythical man, in the most sacred temple in the history of the game, lightheartedly spinning around and around.
A few nights later, it would be a very different scene during the formal ceremony to close the old building as Richard basked in a standing ovation that shook the Forum to its foundations.
Of all those in the press box that night, Red Fisher wrote it best: “Richard stood in this hockey cathedral, tears streaming down his face as the noise grew and grew, minute after minute for 10, 11 minutes, until there was no longer just noise in the Montreal Forum, but thunder engulfing it.”
As the ovation went on and on, Fisher wrote, Richard raised his arms again and again, pleading with his people, seeming to say “enough — I was only a hockey player.”
But Richard was never “only a player,” any more than the Forum was only a building. The 20th century history of Montreal is so intertwined with that of the Forum, it’s sometimes difficult to separate one from the other.
Originally built for the Montreal Maroons, the Forum was constructed by the Canadian Arena Company in 1924 in an astonishing 159 days. It would host 24 Stanley Cups (two for the Maroons and 22 of the 24 the Canadiens have won) and play host to the 3-3 New Year’s Eve tie between the Canadiens and Soviet Red Army in 1979 that is considered the greatest hockey game ever played.
But the significance of the Forum goes far beyond the hockey games played there. It includes the Rolling Stones, the boxing events at the 1976 Olympics and the beginning of one of the most pivotal events in Quebec history — the Richard Riot on St. Patrick’s Day, 1955.
Given all that history, it was singularly odd that the NHL scheduled a visit from the Dallas Stars for the final night at the Forum. The Canadiens won the game 4-1, but the honour of that game should have gone to the Boston Bruins, Montreal’s greatest rival during the years when the Habs were riding high.
There was a great deal of ceremonial torch-passing that final night — but in truth, the torch was never passed and the flame went out with the Forum.
To the company’s credit, Molson put up the Bell Centre (originally the Molson Centre) without playing the usual sports franchise blackmail game with the city and province in order to finance the mammoth project. The glitzy new hockey palace does what it was built to do, which is to extract the maximum number of dollars from the maximum number of fans in a minimum amount of time — but 25 years after it opened, the Bell Centre remains as soulless and generic as it was in 1996.
The new building had played host to exactly as many Stanley Cup champions the night it opened as it has now — none. In a quarter-century, the Canadiens haven’t even made it back to the final, nor have they come close to triggering what was once an almost annual ritual, the parade along the usual route.
It was once believed (especially in Boston) that when things got sticky for the Canadiens, the ghosts of the Forum would intervene. The opponents would be called for too many men on the ice or an illegal stick. The bleu-blanc-rouge would rally and not long after there would be the usual tumultuous scene as the club celebrated with the Stanley Cup at centre ice.
But when the Canadiens moved to the big barn at the corner of Mountain and St-Antoine, the ghosts refused to leave the Forum.
The legendary spirits of Howie Morenz and Newsy Lalonde, Doug Harvey and Georges Vézina (now joined by Jean Béliveau and the Rocket) the ghosts that once descended from the rafters when the Canadiens needed a scintillating save or a timely penalty to keep a streak of Stanley Cups alive have remained at the Forum.
Waiting for the theatres to reopen, maybe.
The closing of the Forum in 1996 meant a great deal more than a sports franchise moving from one venue to another. It was the end of an era, a time when the Canadiens were indisputably the greatest team in the sport, the Forum was the greatest hockey arena and Montreal was both the financial and the sporting centre of Canada.
Montreal lost part of its soul when the Forum closed. And no matter how many nostalgic ceremonies they stage at the Bell Centre, there’s no way to get it back.
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