By Elyssa Emond, Staff Writer, All Habs Hockey Magazine
As most fans, I grew up loving the Montreal Canadiens from day one (or at least that’s what I’d like to think). As far back as I can remember, I have always had a passion and a love for the Bleu, blanc, et rouge! Whether I was just born that way, or maybe it was my father’s slight brainwashing, it was needless to say that I was going to be a Habs fan for life.
Unlike most people, there was never one player that I would watch that I admired or called my favourite. It wasn’t until Carey Price came along that I finally found a player that was worth following and calling my favourite player.
Before Price, I considered myself a fan of a man I never saw play the game, or lace up a pair of skates. From a young age, and still to this day, I consider Maurice Richard to be not only my favorite player, but also the best player to have ever played for the Montreal Canadiens.
I know, you are probably wondering, how in the world does a 22-year-old even have a recollection of who Maurice Richard was? I truly owe it to the people that I had around me who told me stories about The Rocket. Hockey has always been a part of my family, and to this day there are not many family get-togethers that go by where we don’t end up in conversations about hockey.
I would hear stories about Richard and his time with the Habs, and would be completely taken aback by his talent. As a kid, whenever you are told about a man who did these amazing things when he played, you can’t help but become star-struck. As a little girl whose biggest dream was (and still is) to see the Habs win the Cup, it was unimaginable that a man with as much talent as Richard ever played for the Canadiens. It was simply thrilling.
Even though my family (mostly grandparents) were the first people to tell me stories about Maurice Richard, a lot to do with me becoming a fan was all thanks to how much I wanted to learn about him. In elementary school, any oral presentation I was asked to do whether it was in English or French, I would write about The Rocket. Anytime someone wanted to discuss who the best player to ever play was, I would pull out my facts and fight for Richard until I was blue in the face.
With countless research, there was a time that I knew everything you could know about the man. Anything hockey related anyways. In my mind, there was not a player to have ever played for the NHL that compared to Maurice Richard.
For 18 amazing seasons, Maurice Richard wore the red, white, and blue. During this time, he changed the Montreal Canadiens and its fans forever. How I desperately wish I could have been alive to see it! He played during a time where players played for the colours they wore and not which team would pay them the biggest salary. A quality that we see so rarely in players today.
Everyone’s argument when I say Richard was the best player to ever play the game is, well you couldn’t put the man in the NHL today, he would be destroyed. Which is a completely understandable point.
Players today are bigger, faster, and they have more money and training put into them. That said, just imagine if Richard, with the passion he had for the game, was given the same opportunities that Sidney Crosby or Wayne Gretzky were. I personally have a hard time believing that he would not be able to give those men a run for their money if he played for the NHL as we know it today.
As a fan of Maurice Richard, I admired him not only for his talent when it came to scoring goals, but also his overall passion for the game that he dedicated his life to. It was his drive to get on the ice no matter the circumstance or injury and still drive pucks into the back of the net that made him a star in my eyes.
While I never had the opportunity to see him play as he retired long before myself or even my parents were born, I have been able to see the passion in his eyes through pictures. A passion that is still remembered today by all who were lucky enough to see the unstoppable Rocket.
Maurice Richard, and I am old enough to remember him playing as a kid his last few seasons, was not just talent, but attitude – he had an incandescent desire to win. That is the passion you see in his eyes, and I’m not so sure he would do that badly in today’s game for that reason alone.
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