Posted yesterday at 10:00 a.m.
Joé Juneau knew the hero…
Guy Lafleur was my first lifelong idol. I remember him and I dating every Saturday night in the 1970s. He was the fastest player, with the best throw, the one who flashed the most with his blond hair. A star. Not only was he the best, but he was also a winner with all that that means, the one who helped win five Stanley Cups.
One evening, I must have been 7 or 8 years old, my father said that number 10 was better than the others because of its speed. I understood that my skating would be important for the pursuit of my dream, a dream inspired by my idol. I was Guy Lafleur in the street, Guy Lafleur on the ice rink with the other ti-culs in my village.
At the shop pro shop in our arena, there was a poster of Guy Lafleur, who was the spokesperson for Sherwood brand hockey sticks. On the poster, however, there was no hockey stick. Number 10 was more of a deer hunter. I think that’s also why, as Quebecers often from small villages, we recognized ourselves in Guy Lafleur.
I had the chance to play against him once. It was in 1986. He had just retired, his first. I was part of the Faucons team at Cégep de Lévis-Lauzon, college AAA. A match had been organized between our team and former National Hockey League professionals. Guy Lafleur was one of them. I was 18 and playing against the Blond Demon, impressed for all three periods of the game. Flower was still by far the fastest, so we don’t understand why he wasn’t playing in the National League anymore. Then he came back to the Rangers, and finally to the Nordiques, to us. He made us proud.
Guy Lafleur wanted to be, beyond hockey, human. He said what he had to say, faced difficult realities and obstacles as best he could, like the rest of us. He was our friend, even to those who never met him.
Before being someone else, we were all Guy Lafleur.
Isabelle Picard knew the legend…
I was very young when Guy Lafleur was still playing with the Canadiens. To be honest, I don’t remember. On the other hand, I remember watching it a few times on my grandfather’s old TV in hockey night when I was 4 or 5 years old, the first period only. My grandfather didn’t like the Canadiens, but he knew how to recognize great players, great human beings, like Jean Béliveau and Guy Lafleur. It is by him that I heard this name for the first time, it seems to me.
Then, when I was 9 or 10, a friend and her family took me to a minor hockey event. Guy Lafleur was there. He shook hands with everyone in our little group, including the embarrassed skinny girl in the back. Then, I met him again in a restaurant in Quebec as part of a fundraiser. He shook my hand again. I must have been 13 years old. Then, again, at 35. There he was, in his outdoor tent, signing autographs in -25°C, somewhere in West Montreal. He signed a poster for my son.
His gift, the reason why Friday everything stopped collectively for long hours, the reason why he made us feel united, one last time, is that with each contact with him, Guy Lafleur made us feel as if we counted, as someone he saw, someone he really saw.
I’m not a hockey specialist, but life has meant that my boyfriend is a former NHL player and my two boys have been playing hockey for 10 years. Arenas, hockey dreams, I know. If you ask kids for the names of former NHL hockey players, they’ll say Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux and Guy Lafleur. It’s unmissable. It is part of this collective Quebec memory, and beyond that.
The legend transcends eras and is created by the sum of all these small actions that we do and that we sow. It is part of a mixture of the real and the marvellous. The marvelous thing about Guy Lafleur is to have made us dream, to have made us feel like someone and to have united us, once again.
Guy Lafleur was an ambassador, of course, but beyond hockey, perhaps even stronger, an ambassador of human beings.