Chapter
2: The Rookie
Goaltending coach, Francois Allaire,
liked what he had seen of Patrick’s play in his short stint with the Canadiens
so he took it upon himself to mentor the youth. He worked upon encouraging his
strengths and adjusting his bad habits.
Allaire’s work paid off quite
quickly. Patrick joined the minor league Sherbrooke Canadiens for their
playoffs. The team, in need of good goaltending sped to the AHL championships
and won the Calder Cup. Patrick’s GAA had been a regular season 5.55 and
amazingly for the playoffs he had whittled it to a 2.89.
This feat did not escape the eyes of
Patrick’s goaltending style was also
weird and unconventional as well. Not since Glenn Hall had the butterfly really
been attempted and the popular conviction was that a goalie needed to play
stand-up to make the best quality saves. Acrobatic, reflexive saves were
considered graceful and pleasing, the falling to the ice, awkward butterfly
position was considered, unseemly, awkward and ineffective. Patrick was
determined to remain with the position he felt comfortable with.
“Do you want a pillow?” Coach
Jacques Lemaire snapped at Patrick tired of watching each drop to the ice as he
made a save.
The goaltending standard of the day
was that of late Philadelphia Flyers goalie Pelle Lindbergh who was a
consummate stand-up goaltender. The coaching staff wanted the
19-year-old to begin adopting that style to perfect as he got older.
“The way the game is played now,”
Patrick says of that time, “I think it makes sense to play (Butterfly). There
are a lot of screened shots and traffic going around the net. I think the
Butterfly style is the style that works very well for today’s game and I was
ready to live and die with it. I wanted to stick to my own style.
And that wasn’t the only snag in his
game in the eyes of the staff. The legendary Jacques Plante, a goaltending
coach at that time, noticed Patrick’s habit of running out to the corners of
the ice to fetch pucks for defensemen. It was a habit that Plante himself had
made famous in his younger days. Plante often would wander to all corners of
the ice to snatch pucks, abandoning the net and horrifying the
Seeing Patrick doing it sparked
anger in Plante whether it be a perception that the
boy was mocking or copy-catting him or he wanted to spare him future abuse from
fans. Plante tried to tell Patrick how to do it, when the boy refused to change
his puck chasing style Plante told him to just abandon it. Patrick became irate
and a heated argument developed with the youth yelling at Plante, “I don’t care
what your name is, this is how I do it!”
Insulted, flustered, and perplexed,
Plante marched to the coach and snapped, “Use the other goalie, this one will
never amount to anything!”
Patrick’s raw talent showed through,
however and he won the starting position on the team. This was almost too much
for the team to accept. Not only had this nineteen-year-old essentially pushed
Doug Soetaert off the roster, he had usurped their close friend and respected
veteran Steve Penney into the role of back-up. On top of that, the boy was just
weird!
He bobbed his head like a chicken,
he religiously scraped his goal stick across his crease, constantly slapped his
pads. Daniel Bouchard noticed this as he sat on his couch watching a Canadiens
game. “...like that thing where he twitches his neck... I said, ‘Honey look at
that kid, the way he is twitching and all that.’ My wife said, ‘You do the same
thing.’ I said, ‘I do?!’”
Junk food was also the staple diet
of the young goalie. Perhaps his rearing in a family that was strictly sports
and fitness oriented created in him a bratty craving for french
fries. Either way, Patrick was constantly at the McDonald’s consuming bags of
fries that never seemed to show on his 6’1” 165 pound frame. It affected his
play in a huge way. Patrick was often dazzling in the first two periods of
games, but by the third he was often too exhausted to make even the most
routine save.
The team was quick to dub him with
nicknames, alternately calling him “Goose” because of his head bob, and
“Casseau” which was the French word for the box that fries came in.
Still, life was far from easy for
him.
Loneliness is quite common for a
rookie hockey player, especially one who is deeply family-oriented as Patrick
was. It didn’t help him that most of the team resented his toppling of Steve
Penney and with Patrick’s seeming inability to string two decently played games
together, the team was often asking the staff for a
replacement. It was no doubt impossible for Patrick to ignore the whispering
and looks that can go on in a locker room, especially when they were directed
at him.
On top of that, Patrick’s roadtrip
roommate was Mario Tremblay, a man not sympathetic to any rookie’s plight. Tremblay
constantly teased and harassed Patrick’s inability to speak English and he kept
the young goalie on pins and needles. A hearty dislike for each other was born
between them, and being at odds with two veterans in a locker room could hardly
help his case.
Some relief came in veteran teammate
Lucien DeBlois. DeBlois felt for the lonely Patrick and he offered his basement
to him. DeBlois had a wife and small children and Patrick says now that that
was the best thing that could have happened for him. He says that at his
loneliest points during that season, he could always go upstairs and rough
house with the kids.
As the season progressed more
eccentricities began to become evident. For one, he would skate to center ice
before the start of each game, hunch over staring at his goalposts and then
skate to them at full speed doing a figure eight around the net. Patrick’s
explanation for it is that as he stares at them, they begin to look smaller and
he begins to feel bigger and it was a great confidence booster. That wouldn’t
be the only quirk his relationship with his goalposts would reveal.
At that time, his father was also
living close by in Cap Rouge. Whenever he could Patrick would visit him or talk
with him on the phone.
“One of the people who helped him a
lot,” Canadiens GM Serge Savard said, “is his father. He comes from a very good
family, and that always helps... What a lot of people don’t realize is how
important family can be for a young player.”
Around this time, Patrick met
nineteen year old Michele Piuze at a softball game. The couple fell into a fast
relationship and Michele remembers that the first thing that attracted her to
him was his competitive spirit.
“His gaffs are so extraordinary,”
Rod McCloud of the Toronto Star wrote of Patrick’s play, “and so obvious, that
he cannot glare at his defensemen, an old goalie’s ruse to shift the blame.”
The season was a rough one for
Patrick. The fans of Montreal are demanding of nothing less than perfection and
they could see Patrick potential. With a sub-par 3.89 GAA they wanted to know
if he could deliver for the playoffs. In fact they doubted that he could. The
team was more than ready to go with Steve Penney as a starter and with only 82
points scraped in the standings, and the loss of Tremblay to injury, the team
seemed built to lose.
Patrick remembers worrying about
this at the season’s end and one day as he and close friend Larry Robinson were
relaxing in a sauna, taking a rest before the playoffs started, he remembers
how Robinson calmly told him. “You know, Pat, there’s one thing you’ve got to
do. You’ve got to cut down that one bad goal per game and we’ll be OK.”
The way Larry had put is seemed so
simplistic and it struck Patrick deeply. One bad goal, those were the stoppable
ones, the ones that haunted him in the vivid dreams he has every night. Could
it be as simple as just stopping a bad goal?
When Patrick brought up the idea to
his father that he and the Canadiens could be a serious playoff threat, Michel
laughed.