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Thursday, June 1, 2000 'He was everything to us'Thousands pay tribute at funeral for Canadiens hockey legendHe ain't heavy, he's my brother MONTREAL -- Here, yesterday, in the great vastness that is the Notre Dame Basilica, the French people of Quebec said au revoir to a god who gave them their heart, soul, and respect; and as his casket was carried up the front steps and down the centre aisle, all eyes were on the short man with the white hair whose shoulder held up the left front corner. What could he have been thinking, Henri Richard, whose older brother lay in death in that mahogany casket gleaming beneath the cathedral lights; the Pocket Rocket who worshipped the soil his brother once walked on and whose own nobility on the ice, as transcending as it was, would always be filtered through the impossible majesty of The Rocket. The road is long, with many a winding turn That leads us to who knows where But, I'm strong, strong enough to carry him He ain't heavy, he's my brother. Henri Richard saw, as all of us did yesterday, that brother went far beyond blood. All of the people in the basilica, all the people in the streets outside, all the people watching on television across the province of Quebec, and so many more across Canada, felt the kinship with a simple, gifted man known as Maurice "The Rocket" Richard whose unsurpassable greatness on the ice was of his own creation, but whose evolutionary cultural myth born of that greatness was imposed upon him for reasons true and sound. 'LOVED BY ALL' It is late at night, 12 hours before The Rocket will make his last journey through the streets of Montreal, and I push open a side door of the Notre Dame Basilica, and enter. The pews are empty, but standing at the altar before a microphone is a woman in a black and white polka dot dress. She is singing a song in French, and I sit in one of the pews and listen to her wonderful voice soaring up into the highest reaches of the cathedral. "That was beautiful,'' I tell her when she finishes. "Thank you,'' she says. "A songwriter from France once wrote that in honour of my father after he died.'' "You'll have to pardon my poor French,'' I say. "What is it about?" "It is about a very much loved man, a man loved by all the people, who died and goes to paradise. I will be singing it here tomorrow for Maurice Richard. "He was everything to us.'' Ginette Reno is Quebec's most famous chanteusse, a much beloved legend in her own right, but The Rocket is dead and she has come to sing his soul to heaven. As I leave the basilica, an elderly man with a silver cross attached to a button on his shirt stops me in the alley to ask who I'm looking for. He is Father Gilles Lapointe who, until his retirement three years ago, preached at the basilica. He will take part in the funeral mass. "This is the biggest funeral that has ever been here,'' he says. "It is bigger than the funerals for Rene Levesque, Camille Laurin, and Jean Drapeau. And Gratien Gelinas, a very famous Quebec comedian. I am not a separatist; I am Canadian, a Quebecois, French, Catholic, and Maurice Richard was all of that, too. No one was more famous to us that Maurice Richard. Not even Celine Dion. He was higher than the prime minister. He wasn't God, but maybe just below it.'' The morning of the funeral, and the man in the black suit standing alone in the lobby of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel looks familiar. "Was he like God in this province?'' he says, pondering my question. "I don't know about God, but I do understand all of the emotion of this for him. This is right. It is how it should be for him. For him yes, for politicians no.'' "Maybe,'' I say, "you'll have this happen to you one day.'' He laughs. "No, no, no,'' says Guy Lafleur, regarded by many as second only to The Rocket in Canadiens' greatness and affection. "Never for me. He was The Rocket. After The Rocket, nobody for this.'' I am in the cathedral now, staring down from an upper gallery at the altar where Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte, archbishop of Montreal, has started the service, and my mind drifts back to a night in 1957 when I lived in Montreal and the father of my friend Ron Pattison had tickets to The Forum to see the Canadiens play the Leafs. I had never been to The Forum. I had never seen The Rocket Play. In the hockey scrapbook that I still have is the ticket stub from that game: Section 66, Row G, Seat 12. GREATEST PLAYER The Rocket was only three seasons away from retirement then after a career that began in 1942, but he was still on any given night the greatest player on hockey's greatest team, and not only did I get to see him play, I saw him score the 499th goal of his career against Toronto's Ed Chadwick. Two games later against Chicago, he would become the first player in NHL history to score what had been deemed impossible, a career high 500, and you never witnessed such celebrations in the world of hockey, the province of Quebec. But, in that 9-1 victory against Toronto, The Rocket got four points, Henri six points, and in my scrapbook there is a picture of the two brothers sitting side by side in the dressing room, Henri's arm draped around his big brother's shoulder and his finger's touching the C on The Rocket's jersey. Cardinal Turcotte is speaking now below me; he says: "On the 11th of March 1996 at the closing of The Forum, everybody applauded him, and he was so shy and felt he didn't deserve the applause. The people applauded to show their love and respect for him. Now, he is dead, and it is the same love and respect, only now it is the silence that is showing the emotion and friendship.'' When I went to The Forum that night so long ago, it was only to see The Rocket, whose legend I'd heard so much about from my father and grandfather since I was a small child. He was everything they said he was. Even when he didn't have the puck, he reeked malevolence; lurking, circling, preying, and then -- his black eyes beneath the black eyebrows beneath the black slash of hair -- suddenly wild-eyed maniacal, his mouth twisted open as if a deformity, and pouncing on the puck like some Hannibal Lecter of the ice, personally insulted that the puck was defying him by being on the ice and not where he'd damn well knew it belonged -- in the back of the net; and he'd attack that puck, and the crowd would gasp in electric anticipation, and he'd hurl it ferociously to its rightful place, the crowd on its feet raping him with the cheers he'd heard so many times. INTENSE FOCUS "On the ice,'' says the archbishop, "he was a man, a complete man, and off the ice, he stayed faithful to his values and convictions, and he was real. He didn't have to talk much, his life talked for him. His focus was so intense on the ice. A poet once said the eyes are the mirror of the soul, and in Maurice Richard, we could see the whole man.'' It is true what they are now saying about this whole man. At a time when his people were subjugated by the Catholic church and the Anglo socio/economic fact and still feeling the hot Anglo labelling of their French souls as genetic "Zombies'' and "pacifists'' and "cowards'' from anti-conscription sentiment in the province during World War II, he was -- not through any personal politics for he knew not politics, but simply his gift of play and passion -- their deliverance from a false infamy. Rocket Richard, to his people, was the true highest priest of the true highest church of the truest high religion in the province -- The Forum and the Montreal Canadiens -- and they'd go to the lesser church on Sundays with their beads, and prayers spoken and prayers silent, those being, "Dear God, please let The Rocket score Saturday night ... dear God, please forgive The Rocket of any sins he might commit against those Toronto Maple Leafs next week.'' He was fiery, The Rocket, he was passionate, he was tough, he could fight, he backed down to no man, he could score at will, and Maurice Richard, who made the Montreal Canadiens the greatest team in the world because he was the greatest player in the world, was not Anglo, he was French, a son of the sweet, rich provincial soil, the living embodiment of the fleur-de-lis. But, as he once said when asked if he felt he was the symbol of Quebecois nationalism: "No. I was just a hockey player. I have as many English fans as French fans across Canada. They write me letters, too.'' HUMBLE HERO His fans, French and English, are in the basilica today, and the archbishop says to them: "We chose the most prestigious church in Montreal, but it's not the one he would have chosen because he was too humble. But, we chose it to justify what he was to us. Maurice Richard was a fighter on the ice with all the passion we know of him. Today, we are asking him to rest alongside God in peace and joy.'' Now Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte moves to a position in front of The Rocket's flower-bedecked casket and says: "Maurice Richard enjoyed fishing. So I think he won't be bored very long in heaven because Jesus' disciples were also fishermen. I can imagine Maurice fishing with them, and having lots to talk about." Raising his arms, he says, "Good fishing, Maurice," and the congregation rises and applauds in the basilica of Notre Dame. Shortly thereafter, Henri Richard's shoulder once again helps bear his brother's casket and, as it is carried out of the basilica, in the streets and windows and on the rooftops, thousands and thousands of those who remembered and those who only heard, give Maurice "Rocket" Richard his last applause of a long and glorious career and lifetime. More on Rocket Richard
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