Once upon a time in the National Hockey League, there were twelve teams. There were six teams in the East Division and six in the West Division. The East Division was made up of the Original Six NHL teams.
The West Division consisted of all the 1967 expansion teams. In the East, the Montreal Canadiens finished at the top of the table. The Boston Bruins came second. In third place were the New York Rangers and in the last playoff spot was the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Back then, for whatever reason, they didn’t give the first-place team the reward of playing the fourth-place team.
Noooooooo. Back then the first place team played the third-place team and the second-place team got to play the weakest playoff team. How was that ever right? So, then, in the spring of 1969, the first place Canadiens played the third-place Rangers and the second-place Bruins took on the fourth place Leafs.
Please Note – This article was originally posted at FiredUp Network, a sports website out of Toronto. It is republished on the Sports History Network with permission from FiredUP to provide you with added sports history. Check out FiredUP today.
The Fateful Night
The night of April 2, 1969, was the opening night of the postseason in the NHL. The Rangers were in Montreal and the Habs won a very tight 3-1 game.
Meanwhile, in Boston, the fireworks were about to ignite and it would not be pretty.
The Bruins jumped out to a 3-0 lead in the first period and never looked back, really. Phil Esposito had a night! Seriously.
In that first period, the big centre had two goals and an assist. Boston would add three more goals by the 15-minute mark of the second period and the elder Esposito brother would have added one of those goals to complete the hat trick.
So it was 6-0 for the Bruins late in the second period and they didn’t seem to be letting up at any point in the contest.
Bobby Orr picked up the puck behind his own goal and began getting revved up. Pat Quinn was a 26-year-old rookie defenseman for the Toronto Maple Leafs and he was also a fairly large man. Leafs’ forward Brit Selby was skating with Orr and implicitly steering the star blueliner toward the right boards in the Boston zone.
Quinn Hits Orr
Pat Quinn was 6-3 and 205 pounds and as Orr was carrying the puck with Selby beside him. They were heading toward Quinn. Orr’s head happened to be down. Quinn stepped into Orr’s chin. If you see the video, it’s difficult to discern whether Quinn used his elbow or his shoulder. Quinn insisted years later that he had followed through with his shoulder.
Quinn described how the play unfolded to the Toronto Sun in 1999. “Brit Selby did a good job for us angling Orr to the right side. I saw he had his head down and took a run at him. You expect an athlete of that caliber to be able to get out of the way. Maybe he didn’t see me, maybe it was because he had no room. I got him with my shoulder and followed through.”
Orr’s hip and his head – very few players wore helmets back then – hit the ice hard. Orr was knocked out – unconscious – for the first time in his career.
There were some in the rink who feared that Orr had broken his neck the way he collapsed to the ice. “It was deathly quiet,” Quinn told the Sun.
“Then, as soon as they got him up and off the ice, it was bedlam.”
In The Box
Quinn was assessed an elbowing major for the hit and had to sit in the penalty box. Orr was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital and was diagnosed with his only documented concussion. Quinn was immediately set upon by the Boston Garden fans while he sat in the box. The glass around the sin bin was short in those days and the angry Boston supporters had relatively easy access to the Leafs’ defenseman.
They rushed toward Quinn as he sat in his confined space. Angry men threw punches toward him. Angry women swung their purses at him. There was a police officer in the box with him, but, rather than try to protect the offending Leaf, the cop admonished him for having knocked Orr out. Quinn related the tension of the situation.
“He wrapped his arms around my neck trying to separate me from the crowd. I struggled to get free and that’s when my stick shattered a pane of glass.”
According to the Toronto Sun, a second policeman was cut from flying shards of glass, and an elderly woman was hit by Quinn’s stick. Quinn was evacuated from the penalty box and sent to the sanctuary of his team’s dressing room. When he came out for the third period, he was greeted with a few beer showers and various and sundry objects that were tossed his way as well.
“Something hard hit me and I looked down to see one of those metal change holders that bus drivers carried,” Quinn said.
“Unfortunately, there wasn’t any money in it.”
Avenging Orr
Having lost their star player, the Bruins became determined to put a hurting on the Leafs on the scoreboard. While Quinn was serving his penalty, as the second period was winding down, Phil Esposito scored at the 19:53 mark. As the third period got going, Boston would score three more to put the score into double figures.
Quinn’s teammate, former Bruin Forbes Kennedy, was seething. With just less than four minutes remaining in the third, Kennedy took a slash from Boston goalie Gerry Cheevers and he went at his former teammate. Johnny Bucyk tried to keep the two apart but he was unsuccessful. Kennedy and Cheevers were going at it.
As they exchanged punches, they drifted along the boards. While the linesmen and other players were trying to separate them, members of the crowd were reaching over the short glass and raining blows upon the Leafs’ player.
At one point, one of the linesmen, George Ashley, took a Kennedy punch to the face and went down. Everyone was out on the ice by this point. Leafs’ goalie Terry Sawchuk and backup goalie Bruce Gamble were in the middle of things trying to calm everything down.
Eventually, it looked as though the situation was coming under control. Even Ashley came over to talk to Kennedy and as he was being led away from where the fight had taken place, Boston’s Johnny McKenzie came over and said something to the Leaf. That ignited a second fight at the Bruins’ blue line between those two men. It was an absolute donnybrook.
The game ended in a 10-0 win for the Bruins.
They would take the second game by a 7-0 score. When the series went back to Maple Leaf Gardens for Games 3 and 4, Boston would win the series in a sweep. The games in Toronto were both decided by a single goal, but it was a sweep nonetheless.
Forbes Kennedy was suspended for four games by the league for the punch that landed on Ashley’s face. He would undergo knee surgery that summer and never play another game in the league again. Quinn’s night, though, didn’t end when he left the rink.
As the players loaded on to their team bus to go back to their hotel, they elected the rookie defenseman to go into a bar near the Garden and get beers for the team. He wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to do or not, but he was expected to get his team refreshments and he went in to do that.
As he entered the establishment, he was filled with trepidation. He just wanted to get in and get out. The place wasn’t far from the arena and there were an awful lot of hard-nosed Bruin fans in there. Quinn moved slowly through the throng of people and made his way to the bar. He heard a voice shout his name. “It’s Quinn! It’s Quinn!”
He froze. He imagined that he would have to fight his way out of there. He was trying to formulate some kind of exit strategy.
The crowd around him was thick with people a half-dozen deep. He wondered if it would be a fist that hit him first. Or would it be a bottle?
As the Vancouver Sun put it, “A hand came at him, but instead of going for Quinn’s granite jaw, it landed squarely on his back. Then another.
‘Nice hit, Patty boy! Nice hit.’ The men around him smiled, and Quinn felt blessed to be Irish Catholic in an Irish Catholic town. ‘On the house,’ the bartender said.” Quinn walked out of the bar and onto the bus.
Orr was released from the hospital that night and made his way to the Bruins’ hotel where they were staying during the playoffs. As he was approaching the front door, he saw a ‘sketchy-looking’ man waiting there for him.
Orr looked at the man and wasn’t sure what to think of him. In his 2013 book, My Story, he wrote about the very quick meeting.
“I don’t know who he was or what his affiliations were, but he asked in a very low voice, ‘Do you want me to take care of Pat Quinn?’ It was kind of scary. The look in his eye and his general demeanor made me think he meant to do some serious damage. I looked back at him and said, ‘No thanks. I’ll take care of it myself’. He walked away and that was the end of it.”
It took a few years, but eventually, Quinn and Orr made amends. Both men served on the Hockey Hall of Fame selection committee for a time before Quinn’s death. But Quinn talked about that process to a Vancouver television station in 2009.
“We’ve buried the hatchet many times. We weren’t friends for a while. We had a series of skirmishes after that, but he, in my mind, was the nest ever. I saw Gordie Howe at the end and he was clearly great, and Rocket Richard on TV, I saw Bure and Gretzky, but to me, he (Orr) lit it up.”
That year, the Bruins would later lose in six games to the eventual Stanley Cup champion Montreal Canadiens.
But Boston would win the next Cup and then another two seasons after that. They would make it to five Cup Finals over the next nine years. What became of the Leafs? Well, more than five decades after their last Cup win in 1967, they and their fans are still waiting to get to another final series.
Sorry, Leaf fans.
Author - Howie Mooney
When he lived in Ottawa, Canada, Howie was a fixture in sports media. He covered the CFL’s Ottawa Rough Riders, the NHL’s Ottawa Senators, and the OHL’s Ottawa 67s for local television. He also did color commentary for Ottawa Lynx games. The Lynx were the Triple-A affiliates of the Montreal Expos and Baltimore Orioles.
He also spent time as co-host on the morning show for Ottawa Sports Radio. He was co-author of Third & Long – A Proud History of Football in Ottawa and is currently the co-host of The Sports Lunatics Show, a sports history podcast.
He is also a feature writer for the FiredUp Network, a sports website out of Toronto.
