Jean Béliveau, the legendary, brilliant Montreal Canadiens centreman whose grace and leadership on and off the ice transcended hockey for more than six decades, died Tuesday night the Montreal Canadiens announced on Twitter.
He was 83 years old.
Béliveau leaves his wife and soulmate of 61 years, Élise; the couple’s daughter, Hélène; and granddaughters Mylène and Magalie.
They are joined in mourning by the hockey universe and countless people around the world whose lives have been indelibly touched and profoundly enriched by the man who affectionately was nicknamed Gros Bill.
Béliveau had been in delicate health in recent months, having fought pneumonia from August into September not long after having fractured a hip in a fall at home.
He had suffered strokes in 2010 and 2012, a decade after having waged a difficult battle with cancer in 2000.
“I knocked on the door,” Béliveau philosophically said two years ago, in conversation while recovering at home from his second stroke. “But it seems they weren’t ready for me.”
The richly decorated Hall of Famer compiled athletic achievements that were the gold standard, matched only by his elegance and his lifelong charity and humanitarian work off the ice.
Beliveau’s dazzling statistics installed him in the hockey shrine in 1972 alongside his great friend and rival Gordie Howe of the Detroit Red Wings, with the customary three-year post-retirement period to induct players being waived.
Béliveau won 10 Stanley Cups during his 18 seasons with the Canadiens, having arrived from Quebec City in 1953 from the semi-professional senior-league Quebec Aces as a long-courted superstar-in-the-making.
He was signed on Oct. 3, 1953 to a five-year, $105,000 contract, at the time the most generous pact in the National Hockey League.
“It was simple, really,” Canadiens general manager Frank Selke said that day. “All I did was open the Forum vault and say, ‘Jean, take what you think is right.’ ”
Given what the Canadiens would get in return, Béliveau was an absolute steal.
The world welcomed Jean Béliveau on Aug. 31, 1931 in Trois-Rivières, the first of eight children born to his parents, Arthur and Laurette.
He was an altar boy and sang in the choir at the family church, growing to be a fine teenage pitcher in the summer — at 16, he was offered a minor-league contract to play in Alabama, which his mother declined on his behalf — and an enthusiastic hockey player in the winter.
The family had moved to Plessisville when Béliveau was 3, then settled in Victoriaville when he was 6.
The young centreman would leave home in 1949 at the age of 18 to play for the junior-league Quebec Citadels, having started in organized hockey as a 12-year-old before moving up at age 15 to the intermediate Victoriaville Panthers.
Béliveau would graduate to play for the senior Quebec Aces from 1951-53 before Canadiens GM Frank Selke finally convinced him, after much negotiation and a couple of impressive call-ups, that his place was in Montreal.
“He’s great,” Canadiens superstar Maurice (Rocket) Richard said in lavish praise of Béliveau following the latter’s second call-up. “He’s got the greatest shot I’ve ever seen in hockey and he’s a fine man. He could help this team plenty and I wish he would change his mind.”
And so Béliveau did, finally, moving to the big city down the St. Lawrence River in October 1953. He then was four months the husband of Élise Couture, a young woman from Quebec City whom he’d met at a social event in Lac Beauport two years earlier.
By then, his nickname Gros Bill had taken hold. Many believed that Béliveau bore a strong resemblance to actor Yves Henry, the title character in the 1949 film Le Gros Bill, shot on Île-d’Orléans.
It is from that, Béliveau has said of movie’s big Texan named Bill who came to Quebec to claim an inherited farm, that the nickname emerged. It stuck forever.
It’s no wonder that it took much work for the stubborn Selke to lure his gilt-edged prospect to Montreal. Earning in Quebec a wage that would have been princely in the National Hockey League, adored by the provincial capital which lay at his feet, Béliveau was also heeding the advice of his father.
“Loyalty is another form of responsibility,” Arthur Béliveau had often told his son, related in the superstar’s 1994 autobiography, My Life In Hockey.
“If you feel that you owe something to someone, no matter what the debt, it behooves you to pay it. Sometimes, those very people will do or say something to indicate that they are discharging the debt, but only you will know what the best policy will be. Your good name is your greatest asset.”
Finally arriving with the Canadiens in 1953-54, coach Dick Irvin put Béliveau under the wing of Hall of Fame-bound Elmer Lach for mentoring in faceoffs and passing, elements of the game that would become Béliveau hallmarks.
It was a passing of the torch with Lach, a star centreman in his final NHL season, handing the flame to the youngster of unlimited promise. Coincidentally, Lach’s signature was the first Canadiens autograph the newcomer had collected as a boy, Lach paying a visit with the Habs to Victoriaville when Béliveau was 14.
“That night in Victoriaville, I had no idea that my life would be in hockey,” Béliveau said during a 2006 conversation.
Indeed, he would dominate the sport, so much so that by his third season, he was being lauded by praise-stingy Toronto Maple Leafs boss Conn Smythe.
“Béliveau is the greatest thing that could have happened to the modern game,” Smythe said in a 1956 Maclean’s magazine profile. “They say there’s no room left for stickhandling and brains and technique. When has there ever been a better stickhandler? Who has ever shown more savvy? Who ever got a shot away faster?
“And where did this kid come from? He came from the helter-skelter modern game! Helter-skelter, my eye!”
Asked whether there was any way to stop Béliveau, Maple Leafs GM Hap Day didn’t hesitate.
“Of course there is. But it isn’t legal.”
Said Canadiens defenceman Dollard St. Laurent, a five-season Béliveau teammate in the 1950s: “There ought to be two leagues: one for the pros and one for Jean.”
Marvelled early linemate Bert Olmstead: “It’s something new every game. Jean has such remarkable reflexes, can so quickly take a pass in front of the net and fire the puck hard and accurately. He has the same sense of direction as the Rocket and he’s big and strong in front of that net, hard for the defencemen to knock down.”
Béliveau won the Hart Trophy that season and in 1964 as the NHL’s most valuable player. In 1956, he captured the Art Ross Trophy as the league’s top points-getter, and in 1965 he was awarded the inaugural Conn Smythe Trophy, presented to the MVP of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
His offence: 586 goals and 809 assists in 1,287 regular-season and playoff games, every one for the Canadiens, most played during the NHL’s undiluted pre-expansion era.
The 6-foot-3, 205-pound centreman missed the playoffs just once in his 18 seasons, his second-last year in the NHL, and appeared in 13 All-Star Games. His name appears on the Stanley Cup a record 17 times, having won seven championships during 22 post-playing years as the Canadiens’ senior vice-president of corporate affairs.
Béliveau stepped down from his Habs family for a second time on Aug. 31, 1993, leaving the front office on his 62nd birthday.
He’d been as graceful in management as he’d been on the ice. And anyone who ever saw this man play hockey never forgot his magic.
Jean Béliveau captained the Canadiens from 1961 until his retirement in 1971, making him the longest-serving captain in franchise history.
Henri Richard, the younger brother of the Rocket, followed Béliveau as captain, yielding the C upon retirement in 1975 to Yvan Cournoyer.
“I had a chance to room a lot on the road with Jean,” said Cournoyer, who like Béliveau won 10 Stanley Cups, one fewer than the record 11 of Henri Richard.
“I learned a lot from him on and off the ice. Jean was a guy who was glad when I arrived (in the mid-1960s) because I had young legs. He was a little bit later in his career.
“He always said, ‘Come from behind, Yvan, come from behind.’ Sometimes after warm-up I’d tell him, ‘Jean, I think tonight to come from behind, I’m going to need a parachute. I feel very good, I have my tailwind tonight,’ ” Cournoyer added, laughing. “I just had to put my stick on the ice and the puck arrived right on it from Jean. It was very easy for me.
“I’ll always remember this: we were in Chicago one time and Jean was in front of goalie Glenn Hall. Jean had a long reach and he was very smart with the puck in front of the net. He took Glenn out of the play and he put it in.
“I just stood up on the bench and I applauded Jean for what he had done. I remember that like it was yesterday. He was so nice to watch on the ice. He was such a gentleman.”
Cournoyer wasn’t the only one impressed by his fine-mannered captain.
Three years ago, on a visit to Glenn Hall’s farm outside of Edmonton, the Hall of Fame goaler shook his head at the memory of the towering Canadien in front of him, the red goal light soon to glow, and considered with a chuckle a little disloyalty at home.
“Pauline loved Jean Béliveau, no matter how I tried to discourage her,” Hall told me of his late wife. “She’d stutter just when she mentioned his name.”
Pauline Hall would not be alone, Béliveau’s matinee-idol good looks swoon-worthy for more than one generation of female fans.
The magnificent Gordie Howe, now in his own battle with dementia at age 86, was in Montreal in 2007 for a Bell Centre fundraiser in Béliveau’s honour, a black-tie evening that raised more than $1 million for children’s hospitals and charities in Quebec.
“I had the good fortune to first meet John in Quebec City,” Howe recalled of their first encounter, a 1950 exhibition game at Le Colisée between Howe’s Red Wings and Béliveau’s Quebec Aces. “We talked a little bit. I looked at him, saw some of the moves he made in practice.
“We went into the room between periods and somebody said, ‘Someone stay close to that guy, he’ll kill us.’ Later I said, ‘John’s going to be unbelievable.’ I’d have been a heck of a scout. We were all in agreement in the bus that night — that kid’s going to be a star, and he didn’t disappoint any of us.”
Howe’s one question had been about the boiling point of the young man’s blood, Béliveau’s reputation painting him as a bit of a gentle giant.
“I wondered, ‘Is John mean enough to be a hockey player? What if I run him?’ ” Howe said. “Well, I gave him a little run and he just smiled. I said, ‘Yeah, he’s OK,’ and that’s the only time I ever tested him.
“I admire John not just because of his great, great ability as a hockey player, but for his demeanour in public. He’s a complete gentleman. He came out to Saskatoon for a parade long ago, and four of my sisters came home 15 minutes after meeting him and said, ‘We used to be Detroit fans.’
“The respect I have for this man is unreal, and it started the first time I ever saw him up in Quebec City. If you think he’s a good hockey player, as a gentleman he’s even better.
“John was an entertaining, unselfish, tremendous player with the ability to set up goals at will,” Howe said.
“As much as I’ve talked about him through the years, I’ve never had anyone say a darned thing bad about him. We didn’t play on the same team but I consider John my friend. And that makes me a better man.”
In a 2007 interview, Toronto Maple Leafs goaltender Johnny Bower said that Béliveau “was the greatest centreman I ever played against,” describing him then, and often, as a supreme gentleman.
“I can always remember that when John got the puck in the middle there, he’d pull me way over. I had to follow the puck and that would leave the Rocket open,” Bower said. “If I didn’t move, and I tried to guess the pass, I’d give him too much room to shoot.
“I had to move to follow the puck and he’d pass it nice and easy the way the puck should be passed, not slapped, to the Rocket and boom! the red light would go on.
“And then I’d hear the Rocket say, ‘Thank you, Johnny.’ ”
Leadership, said Dickie Moore, was a perfectly natural thing for Béliveau.
“Jean led our team with his presence. That’s all he needed,” said Moore, a Hall of Famer and one of Béliveau’s closest friends both during their years as teammates and until the very end.
In his book, Béliveau described Moore as the most ferocious competitor with whom he played on the brilliant Canadiens teams of the 1950s.
They skated against each other as juniors “and we hated each other with a passion and proved it night after night, because Dickie wouldn’t have had it any other way,” Béliveau wrote.
Moore was crushed by his friend’s cancer and then his two strokes. He is devastated by Béliveau’s passing.
“And I’m heartbroken for Élise,” he said. “She’s such a great lady. They were together in every way.
“Jean was a great, great leader.”
Béliveau’s qualities of leadership and diplomacy extended well beyond the arena. He was asked in 1994 by then Prime Minister Jean Chrétien to consider putting his name in candidacy to become Canada’s Governor-General, a job that assuredly would have been his. But Béliveau graciously declined, citing a need to finally, a year after his retirement from the Canadiens front office, spend some time at home and to be a strong presence for the two young girls of his widowed daughter, Hélène.
(In 2010, after his first stroke, Mylène and Magalie took turns sleeping overnight at their grandfather’s hospital bedside.)
In the early 1990s, Béliveau twice declined PM Brian Mulroney’s offer of a Senate post, believing that a representative of Canadians should be elected.
Over the years, he has been presented with the Order of Canada — fiercely proud of his country, he wore the Order’s pin on his lapel every day — and the National Order of Quebec.
Béliveau also has been decorated with honorary doctorates by several universities, including McGill, been added to Canada’s Walk of Fame, and been honoured by civic and charitable groups at every turn.
Only Jean Béliveau’s tenure as captain of the Canadiens exceeded that of Saku Koivu, the inspirational Finn who wore the C from the autumn of 1999 until his departure to the Anaheim Ducks as free agent in the summer of 2009.
The two men had more in common than the captaincy — they battled cancer just one year apart, Koivu diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in September 2001.
He and Béliveau spoke more than once of their health challenges, as they spoke of leading the club.
And for Koivu, just 24 when he was elected the 27th captain of the Canadiens, the first European so named, the support of Béliveau was immeasurable.
“Early in my captaincy, Mr. Béliveau took me aside a few times and gave me the confidence and the ability to lead the team just with a little advice,” said Koivu, who retired from the NHL before the current season.
“He’d say to me, ‘Hey, you’ll be OK.’ For a young player at that time, and a new captain, that meant the world to me. I really appreciated that.”
Koivu’s dressing room stall directly faced the steely eyed portrait of Maurice (Rocket) Richard, the legendary captain from 1956-60. Koivu once said that, no matter where he went in the room, the famous, unblinking eyes of the Rocket followed him.
“The Rocket and Mr. Béliveau come to my mind as the faces of the Canadiens and their Stanley Cups,” Koivu said. “Mr. Béliveau was a legend as a player and he was such a class act as a human being, an ambassador for the game and the Canadiens.
“The players felt, and I know the fans felt the same way, that when he walked in the room or into the building, the whole place went quiet just because of his presence.
“Obviously, Mr. Béliveau went through many tough times and adversity in his life with his cancer and illness. I can relate to him with those things. He was such a tremendous, class human being that you so rarely find.”
When people speak of Jean Béliveau, his glorious statistics and on-ice achievements often are discussed almost parenthetically. For he brought much more to the game than an effortless, smooth stride that devoured the ice, crafty stickhandling that bamboozled opponents and butter-soft hands around the net that ventilated goalies.
“Rarely has the career of an athlete been so exemplary,” Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau said on the occasion of Jean Béliveau Night at the Forum on March 24, 1971, the Canadiens paying on-ice pregame tribute to their captain a few months before his retirement.
“By his courage, his sense of discipline and honour, his lively intelligence and finesse, his magnificent team spirit, Béliveau has given new prestige to hockey.”
Béliveau accepted an oversized cheque that night for $155,855, giving birth to his foundation that in the decades ahead would distribute nearly $2 million to organizations helping sick, underprivileged and physically challenged children.
There is no sum totalled for what has been raised by countless jerseys, sticks and items of memorabilia he signed for raffles and auctions benefiting other worthy causes both national in scope and as small as house-league teams.
For every publicized visit Béliveau made for charity, during his playing days and for decades after it, there were scores more off the radar — bologna-on-rye banquets and grade-school assemblies and year-end awards nights at which he’d appear to present peewees with their prizes, often in front of their thunderstruck parents.
In 2003, the Canadiens created the Jean Béliveau Trophy, to be awarded annually to the player on the club who best exemplifies leadership qualities in his community.
And that is wholly appropriate, for one of hockey’s great treasures was a gentleman of grace and dignity who placed more importance on his contribution to the community and his family than the athletic achievements that long ago elevated him to another plane.
Béliveau is commonly regarded as the greatest ambassador hockey has ever known. He lived every day of his adult life in the public eye without even once putting a foot out of place; he made countless personal appearances, and for more than half a century he answered by hand each of the thousands of pieces of fan mail that came his way.
Every single one.
If incandescent Canadiens forward Maurice Richard, who died of cancer in 2000, was often viewed as the intense, fire-belching furnace of the Canadiens, then surely Béliveau was the conscience, even the soul of the franchise, a steady compass who unfailingly led by his sterling reputation and the example he set.
On the ice and in the dressing room, Béliveau fully filled the huge skates of the Rocket, something that seemed unthinkable when Richard retired in 1960.
“The Rocket was the heart and soul of the Canadiens, an inspiration to us all, especially to younger French-Canadians who were rising through the ranks,” Béliveau wrote.
“He was man and myth, larger than life in some ways, yet most ordinarily human in others. …
“He embodies something which would rub off on many of his teammates. … Quite simply, Maurice Richard hated to lose with every fibre of his being.”
Béliveau was no different, even if his leadership usually took a less intense form.
Countless fans have their own Béliveau stories, of chance or long-queue meetings with this hockey icon. In a sports world of athletes too good to be true and others who take ugly falls from their pedestals, Béliveau was as good and better than he seemed.
A handshake or a photo or an autograph was a breathtaking experience for worshippers who were privileged to have seen him play or simply knew of his legend.
Béliveau’s No. 4 jersey was retired on Oct. 9, 1971, his banner raised to the rafters of the Forum; the No. 9 he wore with the Quebec Aces was worn in Montreal by the Rocket. Both numbers hang today at the Bell Centre, in view of the regular seat Béliveau no longer will take on the aisle, three rows behind the Canadiens bench.
“It is hard, but I will play no more,” he said on April 9, 1971, announcing his retirement after having led his team to the Stanley Cup. “I only hope I have made a contribution to a great game.”
It wasn’t an easy life for Jean Béliveau; the cuts, bruises and broken bones merely were flesh wounds. He had battled health issues almost from the day he joined the Canadiens from Quebec City, doctors soon discovering that his puzzling fatigue and sluggishness were the result of his having a heart that was inefficient for his enormous body.
“An Austin’s motor in a Cadillac chassis,” was how an examining physician described his “cardiac anomaly,” comparing an underpowered 1950s British auto to the robust American luxury car. He played through the problem, brilliantly, and in 1996 had a pacemaker installed.
In December 2008, Béliveau was admitted to hospital for treatment and observation after his blood pressure dropped precipitously while attending a funeral.
Three years later, he underwent surgery to repair abdominal aneurysms; in 2000, he was diagnosed with a malignant tumour in his neck which required 36 sessions of chemotherapy.
Béliveau’s two strokes would hit him like sledgehammers and it was only flagging energy that slowed his relentless pace, one he had set personally and as a team ambassador, his appointments carefully penned into a pocket agenda.
This downshift did nothing, of course, to stem the flow of invitations and requests and fan mail that unceasingly arrived on his doorstep.
“I ran around for 60 years, and more,” Béliveau joked to me last October as we spoke about the diamond anniversary of his having signed his first contract with the Canadiens.
“I liked all of it, but I had to slow down. I’m not 60 any more. It’s about time.”
So it took the hand of ill health to finally slow him down in his alleged retirement, Élise often telling me that it was only with mixed success that she put her foot down or tried to get her husband to say no.
For more than six decades, Élise shared Jean with the public. She wasn’t going to change that, nor did she try.
In recent years, Béliveau expressed regret that he no longer was able to answer every piece of fan mail he received.
“I just don’t have the strength,” he said apologetically at Christmas in 2012, recovering at home following his second stroke.
“I’ve always thought, if somebody takes the time to get in touch, to try to reach me with a card, then I should at least thank them, acknowledge that I received their good wishes. …
“I read every one that comes to me. I only wish that I could let these people know that I’ve received their cards and wishes.”
Dramatically slowed by the challenges he was facing, Jean Béliveau never publicly dwelled on his health. Instead, he chose to count his blessings of being wrapped by the love of family and friends, gazing out from his South Shore highrise condo windows at the city that was his adopted home for more than 60 years.
Two years ago, after he was stricken by his second stroke, I was invited by Élise to join herself and her husband for a visit in the Montreal General, a uniformed guard at the door to keep well-wishers at bay.
I asked Béliveau that day whether the guard was posted to keep him from bolting for the exit, his patience wearing thin.
“No, no,” he joked. “I’m in no hurry.”
Five months later, back home on his 81st birthday, he considered everything and came up with only the positives.
“I have no complaints, even if I’ve had a few too many battles in recent years,” Béliveau said. “I’m a very fortunate guy, blessed with my health. Because I should be gone.”
In his autobiography published 20 years ago, the radiant star of hockey’s golden era wrote of how he wished to be remembered:
“Everything I achieved throughout my career, and all the rewards that followed, came as the results of team effort. If they say anything about me when I’m gone, let them say that I was a team man. To me, there is no higher compliment.”
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