National Hockey League - Scotty: a hockey life like no other

Robbie Irons was one of more than a thousand players Scotty Bowman coached during his career. He played three minutes and one second of one game for the St. Louis Blues during the 196869 NHL season.

I had played with Robbie for the Junior B Etobicoke Indians four years earlier. He was the teams backup goalie. Later, I went to Cornell University, while Robbie played one more year with Etobicoke, then one season with the Kitchener Rangers in the Ontario Hockey Association (later the Ontario Hockey League).

It was a Saturday night in Ithaca, New York, when I sat down to watch the Rangers play the Blues on WPIX. The NHL had expanded from six teams to twelve the year before, and the Original Six franchises had made few NHL-calibre players available in the expansion draft. The new teamsSt. Louis includedhad needed to be creative. Players that were dismissed in earlier years as too old or too small or too soft, or even as college guys, or Americans, had to be given another look.

Jacques Plante, at age 39, had last played in the NHL three years earlier, having retired after two disastrous seasons with the Rangers. Glenn Hall was 37. The Blues decided that even if Hall and Plante were too old to be the dominant goalies they had once been when playing nearly all of their teams games, they might have enough left as a tandem, each playing about half the time. To save them from any unnecessary wear and tear, St. Louis decided to keep a third goalkeeper on their roster as wellto dress as the backup so Plante or Hall got the night off when the other one played. The Blues rotated three young goalies in this role, and one was Robbie Irons.

Hall was in net that night in New York. The Rangers scored almost right away. Hall, believing that the goal should have been disallowed, argued with the referee and was given a misconduct penalty. Now even angrier, he kept arguing and was thrown out of the game. Immediately, Scotty and Robbie realized the same thing. Robbie was going to need to play.

This much of the story I knew: that Robbie did play, and that a few minutes later he was replaced by Plante. I remember thinking that here was Robbie Irons, my backup with the Etobicoke Indians, playing in a real-life NHL game. But the rest of the story, I didnt know until not long ago.

Robbie, stunned and still disbelieving when Hall was ejected, stayed seated on the players bench. Scotty, not quite willing to accept his predicament, finally got word to Plante to get down from the press box and dress as fast as he could. Scotty then nodded to Robbie, who skated slowly to the Blues net. At this moment, Doug Harvey, on the ice, sauntered over to the boards and stood next to Scotty. Harvey was 43 years old and had played only 16 NHL regular-season games in the previous five seasons. The most dominant defenceman of the 1950s, unconquerably hardened and tough, he mumbled to Scotty, We dont want him to play, do we?