On This Date: Jacques Plante Puts On a Mask (Nov. 1, 1959)

Every goaltender in hockey wears a mask now, from the NHL down to 6-year-olds. It’s hard to picture the sport without one.

But until Nov. 1, 1959, NHL goalies played with their faces bare, and the man who changed that had spent years arguing about it with his own coach.

The Shot

Jacques Plante was the best goaltender in the world. He had won 4 straight Vezina Trophies and 4 straight Stanley Cups with the Montreal Canadiens. He was also an odd duck by hockey standards: he knitted his own toques, wandered out of his net to play the puck, and for a few years he had been wearing a mask in practice. His coach, Toe Blake, wouldn’t let him wear it in games. Blake thought a mask would make a goalie lose sight of the puck.

Plante had his reasons. “I had my nose broken four times and my jaw fractured five,” he said. “I had two cheekbones broken.”

On a Sunday night at Madison Square Garden, in front of a sellout crowd of 15,925, the Canadiens played the Rangers. Early on, by Bathgate’s account, Plante tripped the Rangers’ star, Andy Bathgate, and sent him into the boards. At 3:06 of the 1st period, Bathgate came in at a sharp angle and flicked a backhand at Plante’s head.

“It was deliberate on my part because of what he did to me,” Bathgate told Plante’s biographer years later.

The puck hit Plante in the face and opened a cut through his left nostril into his upper lip. He fell face-first onto the ice and lay there for about 30 seconds. Someone handed him a towel, and 2 teammates guided him off while a Garden worker scraped his blood off the ice with a shovel.

In the first-aid room, Plante wouldn’t lie down until he’d seen it in a mirror. “Before you do anything,” he told the doctor, “I want to see what it looks like.” It took 7 stitches.

The Mask Goes On

Teams didn’t carry backup goalies in 1959. “We only carried one goalie at the time,” defenseman Doug Harvey said years later. If Plante didn’t come back, the Canadiens would have to use whatever spare goalie the arena had on hand.

About 20 minutes after he was hit, Plante came back to the dressing room, and Blake was waiting. “Why don’t you wear your mask for the rest of the game?” Blake said, according to Red Fisher of the Montreal Star.

“I don’t think I can go back in without it,” Plante answered.

Blake didn’t have much choice, but he added a condition: “The first time he cracks wearing the mask, he takes it off.”

When the game resumed, Plante skated out in a flesh-colored fiberglass shell molded to his face, with holes for his eyes and mouth. It had been made for him by Bill Burchmore, a salesman at Fiberglas Canada, from a mold of Plante’s own face. Plante allowed 1 goal the rest of the night, and Montreal won 3-1.

The Streak

Plante didn’t crack. The Canadiens went 11 games without a loss after that night, 10 wins and a tie. Blake wasn’t going to argue with that.

He did try once more. On March 8, 1960, in Detroit, Blake asked Plante to take the mask off so he’d be used to playing without it in the playoffs. The Red Wings won 3-0. The mask went back on, and Plante never played barefaced again.

Montreal won the Stanley Cup that spring for the 5th year in a row, a record that still stands, and Plante won his 5th straight Vezina.

He wasn’t the first goalie to try a mask. Clint Benedict of the Montreal Maroons had worn a leather one for a few games in 1930 after a shot broke his nose, then gave it up. Plante was the one who kept it on.

What Came After

Other goalies followed slowly. By that March, Boston’s Don Simmons was the only other NHL goalie wearing one. By the end of the 1960s most of them were masked, and the last NHL goalie to play without one, Pittsburgh’s Andy Brown, did it in 1974.

Plante played until 1975, won 7 Vezinas and 6 Stanley Cups, and kept designing masks the whole time. He and Bathgate went into the Hockey Hall of Fame in the same class, in 1978. He died in 1986.