The Goal of My Life (14 page)

“We had to watch it,” he told me. “There was no way we were going to miss it.”

It took them several hours to come down from the high after Canada’s victory – but they managed finally to hit the books. They studied all night and passed their exams the next day. I hope that Team Canada’s win inspired them.

I tell the story of how I called Peter Mahovlich off the ice moments before I scored the game-winning goal in game eight. I somehow had the feeling I would score that goal if I got the chance – and apparently I was not alone in my belief.

A doctor from Oakville, Ontario, told me his story. He was working at a clinic in Mississauga the day of the final game and was giving the patients he saw that day some really fast medical care – because he was running next door to catch some of the game on a small black-and-white
TV
in a pharmacy in between patients! When there was about five minutes to play and the score was tied 5–5, he’d had enough of the running back and forth. He told his receptionist, “I’m not seeing anybody else until the game’s over. You’ll have to tell them to wait.”

He rushed back to the pharmacy, where a crowd had now gathered for the last moments of the series. Throughout the country, just about everything came to a stop at that point. He told me that the crowd in the pharmacy started to chant, “We want Henderson! We want Henderson!”

When I jumped onto the ice and scored the goal in the final minute, they yelled, “We told you! We told you!”

Looks like I wasn’t the only person with a premonition about The Goal.

As I have said in this book, I did not become a Christian until a few years after the 1972 series. However, there were apparently some good Christians out there praying for me on that Thursday afternoon.

I’ve had maybe five different women tell me they actually prayed that I would score the winning goal – and strangely enough, no man has ever told me that. I appreciate the kind thought, and I guess they were praying it would be me because I had already scored the game winners in games six and seven.

I wouldn’t pray for something like that now that I am a Christian. I only ask the Lord to help me give it my best, and that His will is done, but the fact that people cared enough to try to get some divine help is touching.

One Catholic lady told me she promised the Lord she would go to church every day for a month if I scored. She tried to live up to the promise but admitted she couldn’t and hoped that the Lord would understand. Another woman told me she wasn’t really a hockey fan, but she was completely riveted to the last three games in Moscow. She told me she also found herself praying for me in the final game, which was unusual for her, and thanking God when I scored.

All kids like to pretend they are big
NHL
stars when they are playing road hockey. Before September 28, 1972, I don’t imagine too many kids were calling dibs on being Paul Henderson. But one mother told me a story about her son playing road hockey just after I scored the goal. The neighbourhood kids were so excited they just had to get out on the road and play some ball hockey. She told me that all the boys wanted to be Paul Henderson.

“I’m Paul Henderson! I’m Paul Henderson!” they cried. The mother of this little hockey player had to go out and try to settle the dispute. Later on, this same young fellow made his mom get him a Paul Henderson helmet, as no other helmet would do.

The Goal certainly did a lot for my being “drafted” in road hockey games, and it certainly didn’t hurt the endorsement deal I had for
CCM
helmets at the time either!

That story of a marriage saved by The Goal brings to mind another story about a family reunited on the afternoon of game eight of the series.

A woman told me about the troubles her family was having around that time. Her husband and son had a terrible relationship, and the son, who was then fourteen, had stopped talking to his father several months prior.

The final game was on, and mostly by accident the father and son wound up watching the game together. When the goal went in, they jumped to their feet and cheered and, in their exuberance, hugged each other. That simple contact in a moment of joy seemed to break down the walls they had built around each other.

Their excitement continued, and they sat down to dinner together and discussed everything with an open mind. It was the beginning of the healing process for them.

“You absolutely changed the whole atmosphere in my family,” the woman told me. “I was caught in the middle between those two. I’ll be eternally grateful.”

As I will be, for having been the guy who scored the goal that could do that for them.

W
E CAME BACK FROM THE
S
UMMIT
S
ERIES TO A
tremendous countrywide reaction. We knew the series had captured the imagination of hockey fans across Canada, but we still had no idea how much.

Team Canada first landed in Montreal, where Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau were among the fans to greet us. The crowd on hand was massive, and they went crazy when we circled the tarmac in fire engines to give them all a closer look. Talk about a terrific homecoming!

From there we went to Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto, where a crowd of maybe fifty thousand fans or so greeted us. It was totally amazing the way the crowds saluted and cheered us, and their outpouring of emotion for the team during a driving fall rain was spine-tingling. As I was introduced, Alan Eagleson and Tony Esposito lifted me onto their shoulders, and it was a moment I will never forget.

It had been an exhausting, exhilarating, and frustrating month all at the same time. We had been booed and vilified at times, but at the end of the day we were treated like heroes wherever we went because we had managed to win the last three games of the series.

I had never experienced anything like that reaction. Playing for the Maple Leafs, I was used to getting a fair amount of fan mail and public recognition, but I was now bombarded with both. I had to hire a secretary to help me with the mail, and I did countless media interviews and appearances, along with being besieged by autograph seekers wherever I went.

I got a lot of promotional offers to capitalize on this sudden fame, and I took advantage of some of them, but frankly some of them were just crazy. I hired Sports Management Inc., a company run by former Maple Leafs trainer Bob Haggert, to look after all my promotional deals. I did a few commercials and some sponsorships, and made some speeches and appearances that were lucrative. I did some work for companies like
CCM
, Rivera Sports, Granada
TV
, and Shoppers Drug Mart, but I didn’t go overboard – I had seen what excessive greed had done to people in the past, so I was quite content to only do the things I was comfortable in doing.

This was when I first started hearing the stories of how much The Goal meant to other people, of course, and where people were when it was scored. It became one of those “where were you when” kind of moments, and it was quite a thrill to realize that something you had done had turned out to be such an important moment in so many people’s lives. And forty years later, it hasn’t stopped.

It was a crazy time for me, of course, but my family helped me stay grounded. Eleanor was very happy with my success
and new-found fame, and my daughters were mostly good about it too. Our eldest girl, Heather, who was nine at the time, even revelled in our fame! She would line up her friends to meet me and hand out pictures, saying, “Paul Henderson is my dad” to everyone waiting. Jennifer was seven and she was quieter and didn’t take kindly to our family life being trampled. She even told a reporter, “I wish my dad was a garbage collector.” Jill was just two, so she was oblivious to everything that was going on, except that even she realized her dad was getting a lot of attention suddenly.

Everyone in Canada has a story about where they were when I scored The Goal in Moscow, but the one that is the closest to me involves Heather and Jennifer. Like many children who were in school that day, they watched the final game with their classmates. They both went to the same school, and when the goal was scored, Heather was sitting on a table, watching. Her overexcited classmates charged at her and knocked her to the floor, mobbing her until a friend was able to rescue her. The entire school was dismissed early because the celebration had gotten so out of control.

Heather then went to find Jennifer so that she could take her home, where our third daughter, Jill, was. As I mentioned, Wendy and Darryl Sittler had moved into our house while we were in Moscow to look after the girls, and eventually Heather and Jennifer made it home, trailed by a pack of celebrating classmates.

People started coming to the house to look for autographs and to congratulate the family, and so many of them came that the kids finally had to put up a sign that said, “
WE HAVE NO AUTOGRAPHS LEFT
” and take the phone off the hook! I can tell you that somebody who was really happy
when we got home from Moscow was Wendy Sittler, because she was running our household for us until we returned.

My family was very happy for me, obviously, especially my mother. But her love for me and my siblings didn’t have anything to do with how successful we were. She loved all five of her children equally and was always there for us no matter what we did.

My immediate family was then, and still is today, my rock. Without them I couldn’t have handled all the demands and pressures associated with having scored such a momentous goal in Canadian hockey history.

I really was sitting on top of the world, but there was still a sense that something was missing in my life, and it wasn’t until I examined the spiritual dimension of my life and became a Christian in 1975 that I truly found some peace in my life.

Meanwhile, there was still an
NHL
career to deal with and to get back to. Somehow I had to put all the distractions that were coming at me behind me and concentrate on returning to the Toronto Maple Leafs for another season, and once again having to play against the great teammates I’d had on Team Canada. The letdown was tremendous.

That next season, 1972–73, was probably the worst of my
NHL
career for a lot of reasons. First, I played in just forty games because of the groin injury I sustained during the Summit Series, though when I was in the lineup I was productive, scoring eighteen goals and assisting on sixteen more. What made things doubly frustrating was that the Leafs clearly were going nowhere. By 1972, the World Hockey Association had come along, attracting stars and role players alike with some incredible contract offers. Toronto lost Rick Ley, Brad Selwood, Guy Trottier, and Jim Harrison, as
well as goaltender Bernie Parent. No coincidence, then, that we went from sixth in the league in goals against to thirteenth. We finished fifth in the East Division that year with just sixty-four points, out of the playoffs and ahead of only the Vancouver Canucks and the New York Islanders, who had only recently come into the league. It wasn’t a very good time for me personally or for the Maple Leafs, especially after such an incredible high.

When we returned from Moscow, my agent, Alan Eagleson, thought it would be a good time to negotiate a new contract with owner Harold Ballard. I had scored thirty-eight goals in 1971–72, was coming off the Summit Series performance, and still had a lot of good years left in me as a player. Meanwhile, the
WHA
was still aggressively chasing
NHL
players. The league’s Toronto franchise, the Toros, had obtained my
WHA
rights, and owner John F. Bassett called me one day and asked me what I was making, in hopes of luring me to the
WHA
fold. So I told him: I was making $75,000 a season, which was a decent salary, but there were players in the
WHA
who couldn’t even make it in the
NHL
who were making more than that.

“I’ll double it and give you a five-year, no-trade contract,” he told me. “I’ll throw in a signing bonus too.” He even guaranteed I would be paid no matter what happened to the team or the league.

This was an offer that, at the time, was a very good one.

“Are you serious?” I asked.

“Yes, I’m serious,” he replied.

I so desperately wanted my name on the Stanley Cup that I hadn’t really been interested in going to the
WHA
. But when Bassett extended this offer, well, I had to look at it.
I sought advice from several people, and one person gave me plenty to think about. His name was Frank Mahovlich.

Mahovlich had been a Team Canada teammate, and, more importantly, he had played for the Maple Leafs – remember, he’d been involved in the trade that brought me to Toronto – so he knew the organization very well. When I asked him what he thought about me signing with the Toros, I also told him I was hesitant on account of my desire to one day win a Stanley Cup. He told me in no uncertain terms what he thought about that.

“You’ll never win a Stanley Cup in Toronto as long as Harold Ballard is the owner,” Mahovlich said. “The Leafs will never win with him, so you better get out of Toronto if you want to win a Stanley Cup one day, because it won’t happen there.”