Bobby Orr

Orr started his professional hockey career young. The Boston Bruins first took notice of him when he was

Bobby Orr

twelve and playing in a bantam-league hockey All-Star game, to which the Bruins had sent scouts to check on some older players. Orr played all sixty minutes of the game, minus two minutes spent in the penalty box, and already displayed an ability to control the puck and the game that he would later be notable for in his professional career.

At the age of fourteen the Boston Bruins signed Orr into their organization for $2,800. They arranged for him to play in Canada's Junior A hockey league, which was populated mostly by nineteen- and twenty-year-olds with strong hopes of making it to the NHL. Orr continued to live in his hometown of Perry Sound, Ontario, a three-hour commute from the rink where his team, the Oshawa Generals, played and practiced. Orr in fact did not practice with the team, and only played in home games, but he still made the second all-star team in his first year. He made the first all-star team every year after, and, at age sixteen, he appeared on the cover of Canada's national magazine, Maclean's.

At eighteen, the youngest age at which a person was allowed to play in the NHL, Orr signed a record-breaking two-year contract with the Bruins. Orr would be making $25,000 a year, plus an undisclosed signing bonus estimated to be $25,000 to $35,000 itself. The previous record for a rookie contract was $8,000 a year, and at that time only three players in the entire NHL, all tested veterans, were making more than $25,000 a year. Boston fans quickly pinned their hopes for a Stanley Cup, a prize which had eluded them for twenty-five years, on this fresh-faced, buzz-cut young star. He would not disappoint them.

Bobby Orr's most memorable hockey moment—the most memorable moment in all of hockey history, many say—is without a doubt "The Goal," as it is still referred to reverentially more than thirty years later by hockey fans in Boston and around the country. It was May 10, Mothers' Day, 1970, twenty-nine years since the Bruins had last won a Stanley Cup, and Boston was playing the St. Louis Blues in the fourth game of the championships. It was hot and humid inside Boston Garden, and the game had just gone into overtime. Thirty seconds into the fourth period, Orr stripped the puck from Blues player Larry Keenan and passed it to his teammate, Derek Sanderson. Orr sprinted towards the net and Sanderson passed the puck back to him. Just as Orr took his shot, Blues defenseman Noel Picard used his stick to trip Orr, sending him flying. The goal went in, and Boston Record American photographer Ray Lussier snapped the famous picture of Orr flying through the air, parallel to the ice, with arms outstretched and a look of sheer joy on his face. He had just brought the Stanley Cup back to Boston.