March 17, 1955: The Rocket Richard Riot

The Forum, the next morning

March 17, 1955, 70 years ago: A riot breaks out on the streets of Montreal -- not due to anything the government has done, or the police, but in support of a hockey player.

Four days earlier, on March 13, the Boston Bruins beat the Montreal Canadiens, 4-2 at the Boston Garden. The Bruins' Hay Laycoe hit the Canadiens' Maurice Richard in the head with his stick. In retaliation, Richard, known as the Rocket, did the same.

No member of the officiating crew saw Laycoe hit Richard -- or so they said. Linesman Cliff Thompson saw Richard hit Laycoe, and tried to intervene. Thinking he was another Bruin player, Richard punched him.

That's one thing you can never do, in any sport: Hit an official. Boston police tried to arrest Richard, but Bruins general manager Lynn Patrick -- son of former New York Rangers head coach and GM Lester Patrick, and himself a Hall of Fame player -- tells the cops to let the Rocket go, because the NHL office will handle the situation.

On March 15, with 3 games left in the regular season, NHL President Clarence Campbell announced that Richard was suspended, for the remainder of the regular season, 3 games -- 2 against the Detroit Red Wings, home and away, and 1 at home to the Rangers -- and for the entirety of the Playoffs.

This decision would cost Richard the Art Ross Trophy as the NHL's leading scorer, as his teammate, Bernie "Boom-Boom" Geoffrion, would finish with 37 assists to Richard's 36, and both had 38 goals, so Boom-Boom finished with 75 points to the Rocket's 74.

But there was a far bigger effect than that. Richard was considered the league's best player at the time. At the least, he was considered 2nd behind the Red Wings' Gordie Howe, also a right wing. (In each case, that's by position on the ice, not by politics.)

The most familiar photograph of Richard.
The eyes make him look a little crazy.

So the team known as Les Habitantes, or "The Habs," would be losing him when they were in a dogfight with the Wings for 1st place overall in the League, knowing full well that, a year earlier, the Wings had beaten them in the Finals, with Game 7 being at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit, won by an overtime goal by Tony Leswick. They did not want to cede home-ice advantage, especially in a potential Game 7, again.

This wasn't the first time that Campbell had sanctioned Richard. There was a great bias against French-Canadian players -- because they were both French-speaking and Catholic -- among the League's Anglophone and Protestant base in the rest of Canada, including the League office in Toronto, home of the Habs' greatest rivals, the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Leafs boss Conn Smythe, of English descent, a veteran of both World Wars, and an intense Canadian nationalist, despised Richard, whose broken ankle kept him out of the Canadian Army in World War II. And Campbell was often seen as Smythe's puppet.

And so, opposing players would go after Richard, knowing that the threat came not from what referees or Campbell would do to them, but what Richard would do to them. Like Howe, and later like Bobby Orr -- but not Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux or Sidney Crosby -- Richard didn't need goons to protect him. He did his own fighting, and usually won, and relished beating the thugs at their own game. So they had reason to be afraid of Richard. They frequently fought that fear, and went after him anyway.

Campbell had fined Richard many times, for fighting back. At one point, Richard, like many other great athletes of the pre-television era, had a ghostwritten column in a local newspaper, in this case a French-language publication, Samedi-Dimanche (Saturday-Sunday). One time, he used the column to criticize Campbell's treatment, not just of himself, but of French players in general, giving them bigger fines and longer suspensions than their Anglophone counterparts. For this, Campbell forced Richard to post a $1,000 "good-behaviour bond."

Cartoon in a French-language newspaper:

Richard writes, "I will not call Mr. Campbell a dictator again."

This was the Original Six Era. Six teams, and six bosses: Smythe in Toronto, general manager Frank Selke in Montreal, team president William M. Jennings in New York, owner Weston Adams in Boston, James D. Norris in Detroit, and team president Bill Tobin of the Chicago Black Hawks. (The spelling was changed to one word, "Blackhawks," in 1986.) Actually, it was 5 bosses: Norris owned the Hawks' arena, the Chicago Stadium, and Tobin was essentially his puppet. So, he was the 2nd-most powerful man in the League, behind Smythe, the power behind Campbell's throne.

The thing was, the American teams' bosses knew that their cities had heavy Catholic populations, if not heavy French populations. And they knew that, at the time, Richard was the biggest drawing card in the sport. And so, while Selke may not have held much sway with Campbell, the others -- Jennings, Adams and Norris -- had, combined, every bit as much over him as Smythe did. And so, Campbell may have held back a bit on punishing Richard on previous occasions.

This time, he couldn't: Richard hadn't just hit another player over the head with his stick, in self-defense from having the same thing done to him. That was understandable, if wrong. He had hit an official. That was inexcusable, even if he thought he was defending himself against another opposing player. Richard was lucky this wasn't a time when ESPN would have shown the incident over and over again, many times a day: He might have gotten suspended for all of the next season, too.

The media in English Canada, from St. John's to Vancouver, almost unanimously praised Campbell for suspending Richard for the rest of the season. French Canada was furious: They considered it not merely a personal insult, to Richard and his fellow Québécois, but also an attempt by Campbell to fix the chase for the Stanley Cup.

This is actually an American paper, the Providence Journal,

for whom the Bruins were "the home team."

Not an English Canadian paper.

The Rangers and Black Hawks were deep in 5th and 6th place, respectively, and weren't going to make the Playoffs. The Maple Leafs and Bruins were likely to finish 3rd and 4th (though not necessarily in that order), and one was going to play the Canadiens in the Semifinals, and the other was going to play the Red Wings. Neither Toronto nor Boston was considered likely to win.

So a Finals rematch of 1954 -- and 1952, when the Wings swept the Habs in 4 straight -- was considered likely. And whoever had home ice for Games 1, 2, 5 and 7 was likelier to win. And now, especially with Richard out for 2 games between the Habs and Wings, the Wings were likelier to get that home ice.

Letters and telegrams came in to Campbell's Toronto office. Angry ones. Including death threats. So Campbell made a terrible decision: He decided to attend the next Canadiens game, against the Wings at the Montreal Forum.

(In Campbell's defense: He was not a mere puppet of Smythe. He was a man of substance. He was a former NHL referee, and a lawyer. In World War II, he rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Canadian Army. He served with the No. 1 Canadian War Graves Investigation Unit, helping to get his country's war dead home. He was awarded the Order of the British Empire. And he was a prosecutor at the trials of some Nazi war criminals, although not the most famous ones, at Nuremberg.)

March 17, 1955: Tensions are high on this Thursday night. The French people of Montreal are angry. It's St. Patrick's Day, and the Irish people of the city, who also see the English establishment as their traditional enemies, are standing with their French brethren against Campbell. The Irish may not speak French, but they are fellow Catholics, and also full of revolutionary fervor.

Nevertheless, Campbell attends. So does Richard, in a suit and coat, behind his team's bench. Campbell didn't own the Forum, so he couldn't ban Richard from the building.

Canadien fans saw Campbell in his seat --with his wife, Phyllis, no less -- and threw things at him, including vegetables and eggs. At the end of the 1st period, with the Wings leading 4-1, someone threw a tear gas bomb. It missed Campbell, but landed on the ice. The building was evacuated. Campbell declared the game conditions to be unplayable, and, since it was the Canadiens' responsibility to make the conditions playable, he declared the game forfeited to the Red Wings.

A mob of over 20,000 people were outside, on Rue Sainte-Catherine. They rioted, smashing in windows at the Forum and nearby businesses. Nobody died, but 37 people were hospitalized, 70 were arrested, and damage was estimated at $100,000 Canadian -- about $1 million U.S. in today's money.

The next day, Richard spoke (in French) on the radio, and asked the people to stop: "Do no more harm. Get behind the team in the Playoffs. I will take my punishment, and come back next year, and help the club and the younger players to win the Cup." They heeded his call, and the night of March 18 was quiet.

CKVL 690, CKAC 730 and CHLP 1410 (now defunct) were French.

CJAD 800 and CFCF 940 (now CINW) were English.

The night after that, the suspended game was replayed from the beginning, and the Canadiens beat the Rangers, 4-2 at the Forum. But the following night, in Detroit, they lost to the Wings, 6-0. While it is not surprising that, without Richard, they only scored 2 goals against the Wings -- who did have Hall-of-Fame defensemen Red Kelly and Marcel Pronovost -- it is shocking that they would allow 10 goals.

It was true that Richard was not regarded as a great defensive player, but that shouldn't have made it easier for the Wings' "Production Line" of Alex Delvecchio centering Howe and left wing Ted Lindsay to score so much.

But it could be that the Canadiens were simply disheartened by the whole process. They beat the Bruins 4 games to 1 in the Semifinals. But, sure enough, the home team won every game in the Finals: Detroit won 4-2 in Game 1 and 7-1 in Game 2; Montreal won 6-2 in Game 3 and 5-3 in Game 4; Detroit won 5-1 in Game 5; Montreal won 6-3 in Game 6; and, in Game 7 at the Olympia, the Wings won 3-1.

In 1954, with Richard, the Canadiens scored 12 goals in the 7 games, and won Games 2 and 5 in Detroit; but lost Games 3 and 4 in Montreal, before losing Game 7 in Detroit. In 1955, without Richard, the Canadiens scored more goals: 22, including 6 each in Games 3 and 6, and 5 in Game 4. But they only scored 1 in the key Game 7.

The following off-season, Selke fired head coach Dick Irvin Sr., a once-great player, whose son Dick Jr. would become a great broadcaster for the Canadiens. Selke hired Hector "Toe" Blake, who, with Richard and Elmer Lach, formed the Punch Line, winning the Cup in 1944 and 1946.

Selke brought up several young stars, including left wing Dickie Moore, and a promising center, Richard's much younger brother Henri, known due to his short stature as "the Pocket Rocket." The Rocket and Boom-Boom continued their assaults on NHL nets. Doug Harvey remained the greatest defenseman in the game, a two-way threat, Orr before there was Orr. Center Jean Béliveau and goaltender Jacques Plante came into their own.

The Canadiens won the next 5 Cups, something not done before or since. They avenged their defeat to the Wings in the 1956 Finals, and the Wings didn't win another cup until 1997. They beat Boston in the Finals in '57 and '58, and Toronto in '59 and '60.

Having won 8 Cups, including the last 5 in a row with his brother Henri, become the 1st player with 500 goals in NHL regular-season play, and not causing any more incidents to get him fined or suspended, Maurice Richard then retired. Until Orr and then Wayne Gretzky came along, he was the most popular player in hockey history.

By his own admission -- "I wasn't a great player. I was a great scorer." -- Howe was a better all-around player, but the Rocket was more popular. Even English Canada accepted his greatness.

Near the end of his life, the Richard Trophy was created.

While the Ross Trophy goes to the NHL's leading scorer,

goals and assists combined, this one goes to the leading goalscorer.

Campbell, who had been named President of the NHL in 1946, remained in that office until 1977, following legal and health setbacks. Instances of his being unfair to French-Canadian players seemed to happen less often after 1955. Perhaps he and Richard both learned lessons from the whole sordid thing.

Clarence Campbell died on June 24, 1984. He was a few days short of his 79th birthday. Hardly anybody noticed.

Maurice Richard died on May 27, 2000. He was the same age, 78 going on 79. Former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau died later that same year. He and the Rocket were the 2 most popular people in Quebec. Their funerals were held at the same cathedral. The Rocket's drew more people.