Bill Masterton stole the puck at center ice and headed for the Oakland goal. It was nearly 7:45 p.m. on Jan. 13, 1968, and in just a few seconds the dream would end.
Frustrated in his quest to secure a berth in the six-team National Hockey League, Masterton had retired from minor-league hockey six years earlier at 23, earned a master`s degree in finance and taken a management job with Honeywell Corp. in Denver.
But the NHL`s decision to expand to 12 teams in 1967 had rekindled the dream, and soon it came true. He was the first player signed by the new Minnesota North Stars.
Now, living the dream, playing before thousands in the new Met Center in Bloomington, Minn., he flicked a backhand pass to right winger Wayne Connelly. As he turned to charge the goal, Masterton skated into onrushing Oakland Seals defenseman Ron Harris.
”It was the strangest thing,” said Wren Blair, the North Stars` coach at the time. ”After getting hit, he stood there motionless with an eerie look on his face for a second or two before falling.”
The back of his helmetless head thudded against the unyielding ice. Left wing Davey Balon was the first to reach his fallen teammate. What he saw and Masterton`s cryptic last words haunt him still.
”He looked at me,” Balon recalled, ”and he started to turn pale. But before he fell into unconsciousness, he looked up at me and said: `Never again. Never again.` ”
That was more than 20 years ago.
Masterton`s brain was damaged so severely that he never regained consciousness. He died on Jan. 15 in a Minneapolis hospital, the last game-related fatality in a major professional sport.
A little more than one month short of the 20th anniversary of Masterton`s death, Brad Marsh was much luckier.
The Philadelphia Flyers` defenseman, one of just a dozen or so NHL players who still did not wear a helmet, was checked into a metal board support during a game with the Boston Bruins on Dec. 8 at the Spectrum. In the subsequent fall, his head hit the ice.
Marsh escaped with a severe concussion, and after an absence of a few games, he returned to the ice-with a helmet. But as he lay there unconscious, Marsh was reviving one of the most controversial issues in hockey: the use of helmets.
”As soon as I saw him (Marsh), I said to myself, `You have to put on the helmet,` ” said Boston`s Willi Plett, who until Marsh`s injury was among the league`s dwindling corps of unhelmeted. ”I mean, he could have died right there.”
Helmets and controversy over their use have been a part of NHL hockey for more than 50 years. From time to time-when Toronto`s Ace Bailey nearly succumbed to head injuries after a fight with Boston`s Eddie Shore in 1934, and after Masterton died-the issue bubbled to the surface.
Although those incidents tended to create an immediate upsurge in the use of helmets, players gradually discarded them. And the NHL stood pat.
In fact, while the NHL ignored the issue, most minor leagues and the governing bodies for intercollegiate and international hockey mandated the use of helmets.
Finally, in 1979, more than a decade after a death that a helmet almost certainly would have prevented, the NHL made them mandatory. But the league equivocated even then, ruling that any player who had signed a professional contract before June 1 of that year had the option of refusing to wear one.
Had it been so inclined, the NHL could have required helmets immediately in the wake of the Masterton incident. The players, stunned by their colleague`s death, seemed to be leaning in that direction.
On Jan. 17, 1968, the NHL Players Association issued a statement urging the league to adopt mandatory helmet legislation.
The NHL, though, remained unmoved.
Clarence Campbell, the imperious commissioner who refused to lend league sanction to a benefit game for Masterton`s family, went so far as to suggest that the death was just one of those things.
”It was a routine accident that could have happened in any hockey game . . . a normal hazard of the occupation,” Campbell said. ”(Helmets) are optional now, and we think that is the best method of dealing with it.”
Blair, the North Stars` coach, seemed to be attempting to deflect attention from the issue when, a few days after his player`s death, he suggested that an earlier injury might have been a contributing factor.
”Bill was hit in the head in the last few minutes of the Boston game on Dec. 30,” Blair said at the time. ”The players told me he was complaining for several days afterward of headaches.”
An autopsy report issued on Jan. 27, however, quickly squelched that possibility.
”There is no doubt that death was caused by the fall,” said Hennepin County Medical Examiner John Coe in the report. ”There was no evidence of prior injury as a contributing cause. . . . Of that there is no doubt.”
Callous as it sounded, Campbell`s attitude on helmets was merely reflective of a firmly held belief among league owners that their use was bad for the game.
”You wouldn`t believe the paranoia among the owners at the time,” said Alan Eagleson, then, as now, head of the NHLPA. ”They felt helmets would create a deep recession in interest in the game, that fans wouldn`t be able to recognize the players.
”To realize how much logic was implicit in that argument, all you have to do is realize that Wayne Gretzky is probably the best-known player in the history of the sport, and he has never stepped on the ice without a helmet.” An NHL spokesman said the league never had a stated policy against helmets but simply felt it was best to leave their use up to individual players.
Eagleson acknowledges, however, that even though the NHLPA publicly urged mandatory helmet use, there were many players within the organization who were as adamant as Campbell in their opposition.
”For whatever stupid reason, I simply refused to wear one,” said Bill Goldsworthy, a teammate of Masterton`s. ”Even Bill`s death didn`t do it. But finally, after my fifth concussion, I woke up in the hospital and said, `I`m wearing a helmet from here on.` ”
With its roots in the rugged, isolated towns of frigid Canada, hockey has always maintained a macho image. Violence was, and in many ways is, tolerated to a degree unmatched in any other sport.
Masterton`s death and Marsh`s injury, though, were the results of clean checks. And helmets don`t seem to detract from the personality and
individuality of a Gretzky, or even of a Jim McMahon or a Lawrence Taylor in the National Football League.
As is the case in the NFL, there soon will be no helmetless players in the NHL. Once and for all, the controversy will be put to rest.
But it will have gone to its death kicking and screaming all the way.
