Maven's Memories: Billy Smith's Origin Story

See if you can guess the answer to this Hall of Famer Billy Smith riddle:
What do Perth, Smith Falls, Cornwall and Hull have in common with Smitty?
The answer is that each of the Ontario -- and Quebec counting, Hull -- towns are responsible for Battlin's Bill's development into the greatest clutch goaltender of the modern era.

Smitty's saga began in Perth, a town right out of dream. In fact, a few years ago, Smitty and I were schmoozing in the Barclays Center press room when he told me, "Perth is one of the prettiest towns in Ontario."
I later checked it out and Bill's capsule travelogue was on target. His hometown sits on the amazingly scenic Tay River, which gurgles its way right through downtown.
If Smitty could be called "The Big Cheese of Perth," he had competition as a kid.
One of the town's landmarks is a mammoth, 22,000-pound cheese, honoring Perth's bygone cheesemakers who donated a similar gigantic cheese to Chicago's 1893 Exposition.
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Smitty attended the Perth and District Collegiate (high school) Institute during which he was honing his skills to sharpness. In 1968-69 he began playing serious organized hockey.
"My older brother Gordie was one of my inspirations," he remembered. "He played defense for a Junior team in Cornwall that I later played for, and he eventually made it to the NHL with the Capitals when they came into the league."
Since Gordie played defense, the kid brother started out as a blue liner. "I wasn't that great at defense and then, one day one of the teams needed a goalie so I volunteered." Smitty recalled with a smile.
He said he liked the fact that by playing goal, he got to play an entire game; plus he soon got to realize that goalies got a lot of attention when they played well.
"Bill also felt that playing goal meshed very well with his personality," his former Islanders teammate Glenn (Chico) Resch told me. Add to that the fact that Smith previously had played D and it was being preached at the time for the defensemen to protect the goalie and clear the crease.
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Resch: "And for the goalie, himself, to defend his crease physically. It all seemed to fit Billy's battlin' hockey mentality. He told me that all these points seemed to make sense. His youthful experience explained why he came to play NHL hockey the way he did."
At the age of 18, Smith got his first notice, playing for both the Smith Falls Bears and the Hull Castors. Nobody was calling him a future Hall of Famer at the time because all that teenager Bill desired was to improve his goaltending game.
His first truly big break came about when the Bears lost both regular goaltender Gary Doyle and then substitute Jeff McMullen. When the Bears coach realized that he had no one else to put on the pads, he gave Smitty the assignment.
Although Cornwall won the game, 7-3, the Cornwall reporter's story included a rave about the kid in the crease on the losing side. It had these precise words: "A young midget, Bill Smith, stopped 35 for the Bears after being called up as emergency replacement."
As a teenager, Bill began to get local newspaper mentions for his stellar work with the Smiths Falls Bears. In one of his first appearances in a local journal he was referred to as "Sixteen year-old Bill Smith in nets..."
Another journal referred to Smitty's "low goals against average." Directors of the Central Junior Hockey League voted Bill -- then a member of the Bears -- to the circuit's Second All-Star team. At the time, he was beaten out by Wayne Hughes of Hull who never reached the NHL.
What really mattered is that Billy got his name in the town's paper.
A season later he was imported by the very same Cornwall Royals in the fast Quebec Major Junior Hockey League and gradually commanded more attention.
One local newspaper highlighted Smitty after a 6-3 win over Trois Rivieres before 1,600 fans at the Cornwall rink.
"The star of the game was Cornwall goalie Bill Smith who stopped 60 shots including a penalty shot by Robert Richer in the third period," noted the sports page report.
Smitty played a total of 55 regular season games for the Royals and half a dozen playoff contests in the spring of 1970. His postseason mark of 2.33 goals against -- combined with a .935 save percentage -- impressed the Los Angeles Kings birddogs.

"They liked him well enough to draft Billy," said Bill Libby, who had been the Kings correspondent for The Hockey News. "Of course, it was too soon to tell how good he could be; but there were signs even then that Smitty would be better than average in the long run."
The Kings, only three years old in the expanded NHL, drafted Smitty in the fifth round of the 1970 Entry Draft and placed him on their American Hockey League team in Springfield, Massachusetts.
He played 49 regular season games and came away with a 3.51 goals against average. "You could tell," added Libby, "that he was getting closer to the NHL. Now it was just a matter of time. The thing is that it was still 'way too early to guess that he could become an NHL All-Star.
"In the 1971 playoffs we began to see how Bill would lift his game to another level," added Libby. "He helped Springfield to the Calder Cup, the AHL version of Stanley."
Smitty's playoff won-loss record was 9-1 with an impressive 2.56 goals against average. The NHL Kings promoted him for a five-game cup of coffee in 1971-72 before losing him in the 1972 Expansion Draft to the Islanders.
"He was our second pick," recalled GM Bill Torrey. "But there was no way of knowing for sure what was in store down the line. But, I guess, -- as they say -- the rest is history."
They are still saying that back where Smitty planted his roots. Right there in the Perth and District Sports Hall of Fame is the name, William John Smith.
Some still call him Battlin' Billy.
I call him the greatest clutch goalie of all-time.
(P.S. And, thank you so much, Perth, Ontario!)