It is often said that “you never forget your first.” That is certainly true of the first National Hockey League game I saw in person at Madison Square Garden on April 8, 1971. The New York Rangers hosted the Toronto Maple Leafs in an ill-tempered affair that featured no fewer than 34 penalties, a record for a Stanley Cup playoff game at the time.
Tim Horton, whose name lives on in a chain of cafes more than 50 years after he died in a car accident, scored the only goal for the Rangers in a 4-1 loss that tied the series at one game apiece. What I remember most about the game, however, was the hostility between the teams.
Shortly before the game ended, during a brawl in which both team benches and penalty boxes emptied, Rangers captain Vic Hadfield tossed Maple Leafs goaltender Bernie Parent’s mask into the crowd. Jacques Plante (the first player to wear a mask in an NHL game a dozen years earlier) came in to finish the game for Parent, who didn’t see that mask again for 41 years.
I’ve attended about a dozen more NHL games in New York and New Jersey since then, but none as memorable as that first one. I was lucky to get tickets for that Stanley Cup quarterfinal game (the Rangers came back to win the series, four games to two) from the Star-Ledger hockey beat reporter, Walt MacPeek, who happened to be friends with a teacher who was impressed with the NHL newsletter I wrote and printed as a junior high school club project that year.
I’ll always remember sitting right next to Jim Bouton, the former New York Yankees pitcher turned author and newscaster who autographed the Rangers yearbook I purchased at Madison Square Garden that night. Five years later, when the Herald-News softball team I played for faced the Star-Ledger team, I thanked Walt again for getting those tickets for me.
My wife and I won’t soon forget the most recent Rangers game we saw at Madison Square this past Thursday night. The crowd roared as the Rangers bounced back from letting up a goal 85 seconds into the game to score six times in a row to beat the Philadelphia Flyers on a night in which only five penalties were called. It was our first hockey game at Madison Square Garden in 13 years. We hope it’s not that long before we return!
