LEIGH MONTVILLE; A ROOM THAT STILL BELONGS TO NO. 4
Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext) - Boston, Mass.
Author: Montville, Leigh
Date: Feb 4, 1983
Start Page: 1
Section: SPORTS
The room is his again. The faces mostly are different; and the music from the speakers at the far wall is different, some group from Australia singing about coming from the land down under, but the room is the same. His room. The Boston Bruins' dressing room.
"Is it OK if I dress here for the game?" he asks, sitting at the locker spot of 20-year-old Tom Fergus, a center on the present Bruins team.
"I thought you were going to dress over there," Fergus says. "That's what I thought."
"Well, I thought maybe I'd dress here," he says, sitting on the long bench along the pine-paneled wall. "It's where I've dressed the last two days."
"Well . . . yeh," Fergus says. "Yeh. Sure!"
His room. Always his room. He could be gone forever, held hostage for a couple of thousand light years in Timbuktu, stuffed inside a Nabisco box and shipped around the world, and if he reappeared on a given day the room would be his room again. The Boston Bruins' dressing room.
He still would be Bobby Orr.
"How do you feel?" he is asked. "How are the legs?"
"The legs are fine," he says. "I ride a bicycle a lot. I do some exercises. Play a little tennis. It's the arms that are beginning to hurt. Right here at the top. The old, old story. The head says, Go, go,' the body says, No, no.' "
He had skated for an hour and a half on the Garden ice yesterday morning for the second straight day, swoops and swirls and slappers from the blue line. There is a game at 7:30 tonight at the Garden, a not-so-fast exhibition wrist shot down Memory Lane that will match a team called " The Masters of Hockey" against a Bruins alumni team from the Stanley Cup years of 1970 and 1972. Gordie Howe is coming. Bobby Hull. Stan Mikita. Yvan Cournoyer. Not a night to look bad. Not with Phil Esposito and Ken Hodge and Derek Sanderson and John McKenzie and all the rest of the old Bruins looking for that familiar No. 4. Not with the sellout crowd.
"I'll tell you how the tickets sold," Bruins publicist Nate Greenberg says. "They went as soon as it was announced that Bobby Orr was going to play. Simple as that."
"Friends of mine have been telling me to work out so I won't embarrass them," Bobby Orr says. "How do you like that? So I won't embarrass them. Not worrying about whether I might embarrass myself, but whether I'll embarrass them."
He has not played a game of hockey since a year ago in New York, when he played in another one of these affairs at Madison Square Garden. He has not played a competitive game of hockey since 1978, when his ground-down knees finally sent him into retirement. Doesn't matter. A sellout crowd always will gather in this city to watch Ted Williams swing a baseball bat, even if he has to do it from a wheelchair. The same sellout will gather to watch Bobby Orr skate with a puck. Just one more time.
"He suddenly was out there yesterday," 18-year-old Gord Kluzak, the youngest Bruin, said. "I was startled. He was just . . . there. I wasn't ready for it. I was young when he was playing, but I remember. Do I remember? I always wore his number when I was a kid. He was the guy who changed the game for a defenseman. Forever."
He has worked mostly this time with some Bruins old-timers. Little pass plays with McKenzie. Feeds to John Bucyk in that familiar position to the left of the net. Fakes on Gary Doak. Shots on Cheevers, who is padded and dressed for goaltending work, wearing that familiar white mask with all the Magic- marker stitches drawn on the face. The kids of the present Bruins' juggernaut have overlapped only at the end, an optional skate on the day of a game with the Quebec Nordiques.
Old and new. Together. Pete Peeters and Cheevers. Kluzak and Orr. Milbury and Doak. Fergus and McKenzie. Luc Dufour and Bucyk. Together. Time disappeared. Together.
"How'd your streak end?" Cheevers is asked because his unbeaten streak of 32 games is a record Peeters is approaching at 27.
"We're playing Toronto, near the end of the season," Cheevers says. "We're going out to the ice and I look around. Where's Bobby and Phil?' I ask. I gave 'em the night off,' Tom Johnson, who's the coach, says. Gave 'em the night off?' I say. Resting,' Tom says. The score was 4-0, Toronto, after the first 10 minutes."
Where's Bobby and Phil? No problem now. Phil is on the way. Bobby is in the room already. The Bruins' dressing room. His room.
"It's good to get back to this," he says. "This will be fun. Seeing the guys. Being together. Just being here. There are a lot of memories in this room. It was heaven."
He is dressed in a blue pin-striped suit, the 34-year-old businessman going back to work. The kids are getting ready for the Nordiques. He watches them for a half-minute with a quick heartbeat of envy for their size, their condition, their youth.
"Kluzak," he says.
"Yes?" the 18-year-old defenseman answers.
"Get a body, kid," Bobby Orr says with mock seriousness as he leaves the room. The Bruins' dressing room. His room.