During his lifetime, Guy Lafleur used to make crowds run wild. Now that he is among the stars, Guy Lafleur has the crowds running, again.
Posted at 5:30 p.m.
No, it wasn’t a typical Monday at the Bell Centre. There were no games on the schedule, no ice on the ice, no spectators in the stands. But there was a coffin, and numbers 10s all over the place. There, on a sweater hung in the distance, and then farther away, on a table amid flowers and greeting cards left for family members, seated just to the right.
You had to pass the trophies, the Stanley Cup, the vestiges of a glorious time, before passing in front of the coffin, and then in front of them, the Lafleurs, whom we contented ourselves with discreetly nodding.
Around the Bell Center, fans, often dressed in the red jersey of their idol, continued to enter by the dozen, to see the one everyone simply called Guy. Because there are these legends that we recognize by their first name alone.
“We said Mr. Béliveau, and we said Guy, summed up the announcer Michel Lacroix. I remember the tributes to Mr. Béliveau following his death, but that’s different… Me, as an advertiser, I couldn’t announce Guy Lafleur as Jean Béliveau. Guy, it was a different dimension…”
PHOTO HUGO-SÉBASTIEN AUBERT, THE PRESS
Canadian announcer Michel Lacroix
Indeed, and for several days, just about everyone has had their little Guy story, about this other dimension, which we could only access in his presence.
This is what Michel Lacroix often did. Before becoming an announcer at the Forum in the late 1970s, and then at the Bell Centre, he was a young member of the media who often followed Guy on the road. He remembers the player who used to pass by the shops of the hotels, “to buy stacks of magazines on boats and cars”.
He also remembers goals.
“Of course the most extraordinary goal, that of May 1979 at the Forum, during the series against the Boston Bruins… When Guy went like that on the ice, we knew, no matter what he was going to do, that something was going to happen…”
On this sad Monday, it was first and foremost the emotion that passed through the Bell Centre. Outside too, and in particular around the statue of Guy, unveiled in 2008 and created by the artist Marc-André J Fortier.
PHOTO HUGO-SÉBASTIEN AUBERT, THE PRESS
“We see that the fans seem to like this statue a lot, I saw people arriving this morning to put things, flowers there, he said. It’s funny, because the Canadian had ordered me these statues in 2008, but in the case of Guy, it was a secret, nobody knew that I was preparing something in his likeness. We unveiled the statue and he immediately asked to have a bronze model as a souvenir… I ran into him again afterwards, he was always humble, not at all pretentious. »
Then, the doors of the Bell Center closed, in a silence that Guy had never been used to. Tuesday will be the day of the national funeral. Another day of mourning, and another day without Guy. We’ll have to get used to it… but it won’t be so easy.