Wayne Gretzky's Ghost by Roy Macgregor Page B

even before the 1971–72 season began. Ken Dryden remembers an exhibition game against the Boston Bruins when he overheard Phil Esposito growl to his linemates, “Which one is Lafleur?” The season before, Esposito had scored a record seventy-six goals, but there was obvious concern in his voice. So much was Guy Lafleur on people’s minds—despite never having played asingle professional game—that a manufacturer was rushing production to get a Lafleur-endorsed table-hockey game out in time for Christmas. Its main competition, naturally, would be the Phil Esposito game.
    By the third winter, however, the Lafleur game was off the market. Not only had the rookie award gone to his teammate Ken Dryden, but the word around the league was that Lafleur was “yellow.” The junior promise had become a professional deceit. “He’d been somewhat of a bust, you might say,” says Steve Shutt.
    â€œMy legs were in Montreal,” Lafleur says, “but my heart was in Quebec City. My mind wasn’t on hockey.” With the press constantly demanding what was wrong, Lafleur took to hiding in his Montreal apartment and writing depressing poetry about the meaninglessness of life and unfairness of death—a melancholia that still surfaces from time to time—and his game deteriorated even further. To give him confidence the Canadiens countered a $465,000 (over three years) lure from the Quebec Nordiques of the WHA with a new contract for Lafleur—$1 million over ten years, fully guaranteed. He responded with his worst season of all: twenty-one goals.
    The unhappy sessions in Jean Béliveau’s office weren’t providing a solution either. It took a gamble by Béliveau in the spring of 1974 to provide the remedy. Béliveau let it be known that he was less than pleased with the performance of his heir, and he castigated Lafleur for not working hard enough. The effect, at first devastating, became “a wake-up” for Lafleur, and he emerged from his sulk by announcing, “I’ll show the bastards.”
    When training camp opened, he discarded his “yellow” stigma with his helmet and the new Guy Lafleur suddenly and aggressively emerged as Béliveau reincarnate. A broken finger probably cost him the scoring championship that year, but he has held the title for the three years since.
    The legendary team that in the past revered such names as “Battleship,” “Boom Boom” and “Rocket” found itself followingthe “Flower,” but as Pierre Larouche says, “He’s as gentle as a flower, but plays like Superman. In Quebec, hockey is a religion, and Lafleur is the new god.”
    In the four years since the rebirth, there have been times when Lafleur has found himself in his office in Pointe-Claire looking at the tiny skates with the red laces that now keep the door open, the same skates he began on, and poring over the two massive albums, one a foot thick, that are offered to his glory. “It is like a dream to me,” he says at these times. “Even now it is like a dream.”
    There have, however, been darker sides that are not pasted in any album but linger anyway. And this has led him to wonder rather than gloat. In April of 1976, the Montreal police were investigating the holdup of a Brinks truck when they stumbled on a plot to kidnap Lafleur before the playoffs began and hold him for a rumored $250,000 ransom. He will never forget what it was like when Jean Béliveau told him.
    â€œI was at home and the phone rang,” Lafleur recalls, the memory sending his fingers searching for cigarettes. “It was Jean and he said he wanted to see me. I said okay, tomorrow. He said no, right now, and he’d come over because we couldn’t talk about it over the phone. I hung up and my wife said ‘What was that?’ I didn’t know what to say—I thought I’d been traded. Then Jean