Inaugural NHL All-Star Game in 1947 was full of hard hits, hard feelings

The safest bet in Las Vegas at the 2022 Honda NHL All-Star Weekend is all of the players involved will actually speak to one another.

That wasn't the case 75 years ago in the inaugural NHL All-Star Game, the defending 1946-47 Stanley Cup champion Toronto Maple Leafs playing a team made up of 17 players from the five other Original Six teams.
The dislike legendary Montreal Canadiens forward Maurice "Rocket" Richard had for Detroit Red Wings thornbush forward "Terrible" Ted Lindsay was so intense that, sitting across from each other in a Maple Leaf Gardens dressing room, the two men -- All-Star linemates on Oct. 13, 1947 -- wouldn't exchange a word.
"We didn't even say hello," Richard would later growl. "[Lindsay]tried talking to me but I just ignored him. I didn't like him, not even for an All-Star Game."

The 1947 NHL All-Star team. Bottom row, from left: Bill Quackenbush, Bill Mosienko, Bobby Bauer, Ted Lindsay, Edgar Laprade. Middle row: Milt Schmidt, Tony Leswick, Max Bentley, Grant Warwick, Maurice Richard, Doug Bentley, trainer Ernie Cook. Back row: Frank Brimsek (defending All-Stars net in the top photo), Woody Dumart, coach Dick Irvin, Butch Bouchard, Ken Reardon, NHL president Clarence Campbell, Jack Stewart, Bill Durnan.
The season-opening exhibition would be great fun for the 14,169 who bought a ticket, if not for those players who loathed each other. More importantly, it gave birth to the Players Pension and Savings Plan, which had been proposed to the NHL that May by a players committee.
The NHL would put into the fund two-thirds of the proceeds generated by an annual All-Star Game, beginning in 1947, plus 25 cents from every paid Stanley Cup Playoff ticket. It was estimated that $60,000 would be raised yearly, with players each contributing $900 annually -- a healthy chunk of salaries that at the time averaged $5,000.
Upon reaching age 45, players would be eligible to apply for pension benefits that totaled $8 per month, per year of NHL service; with a 10-year career, a player would be paid $80 per month for life. Group insurance coverage also was available to all plan members.
The fund netted $25,865 from the 1947 All-Star Game, another $12,933 going to the Community Chest of Greater Toronto, the Maple Leafs' charity of choice.

Howie Meeker receives the 1946-47 Calder Trophy, as the top rookie in the NHL, and a silver tray from Maple Leaf Gardens vice-president W.A.H. MacBrien before the 1947 All-Star Game.
Before the game, Toronto's Howie Meeker was presented the Calder Trophy, voted as the NHL rookie of the year for 1946-47. The Maple Leafs were showered with gifts from local merchants -- silver trays, cufflinks, watches, lighters, cigarette boxes, hats, golf balls, photos, neckties and knives. The All-Stars, who each received a $1,000 bonus, were given miniature gold pucks, engraved for the occasion.
Canadiens coach Dick Irvin, the former Toronto coach who would be behind the All-Stars bench, accepted a gift from Maple Leafs owner Conn Smythe.
Irvin then wondered aloud whether the home team's new knives were "a more dangerous weapon than the axes Smythe said the Canadiens used last season as woodchoppers" in a punishing six-game Stanley Cup Final.

Toronto Maple Leafs captain Syl Apps and coach Hap Day with the Stanley Cup after the team's 1947 championship victory.
That probably set the stage for a game that would be anything but the breezy, all-smiles event it is today, the All-Stars clawing out a 4-3 victory against coach Hap Day's Maple Leafs.
Indeed, the intensity was worthy of Game 7 of a Stanley Cup Final.
Chicago Black Hawks brothers Max and Doug Bentley, Richard and the New York Rangers' Grant Warwick scored for the winners; linemates Harry Watson, Bill Ezinicki and Syl Apps replied for Toronto.
"We were so determined to win, you could almost hear the fellows grinding their teeth as they walked to the ice. I never saw a group so fired up in all my career," said Canadiens forward Ken Reardon, quoted in Andrew Podnieks' 2000 book "The NHL All-Star Game: Fifty Years of the Great Tradition."

All-Star Bill Mosienko leaves Maple Leaf Gardens on a stretcher with a broken ankle suffered in a second-period collision.
Reardon wasn't joking; he and Toronto's Vic Lynn each took a second-period fighting major and Reardon fenced all night with anyone in a Maple Leafs sweater. Several players retired to the clinic for stitches, victims of high sticks or cuts sustained when their faces met the new Herculite glass that had replaced wire fencing behind the nets and in the corners.
Montreal's Butch Bouchard and Toronto's Ezinicki, their long-time feud crackling, drew coincidental minors from referee King Clancy, though they could have been majors. The two scrapped in a last-minute rumble, as did Boston's Milt Schmidt and Toronto's Gus Mortson, after Day had pulled goalie Turk Broda in a bid for the tying goal.
Chicago forward Bill Mosienko left the arena on a stretcher -- grinning for a photographer when being wheeled out -- after his ankle was broken in a second-period collision with Toronto's Jim Thomson. When Mosienko was being fit for a cast, his wife was in another hospital back home in Winnipeg, giving birth.
The fear was Mosienko would be lost to the Black Hawks for the season, but he returned after having missed the first 20 games of the 60-game schedule.

Toronto Maple Leafs forward Harry Watson scored the first goal in NHL All-Star Game history.
Watson scored the first goal in All-Star Game history, beating Canadiens goalie Bill Durnan at 12:29 of the first period. It was pride alone that had Durnan in goal, the 1947 Vezina Trophy winner having had knee surgery a few weeks earlier. He surrendered all three Maple Leafs goals 25:01 into the game before giving way to the airtight Frankie "Mr. Zero" Brimsek of the Boston Bruins.
Richard and Lindsay would be All-Star Game participants 11 times consecutively from 1947-57, teammates again in 1948 and 1949, opponents on eight occasions from 1950-57. They never exchanged a word.
Decades later, they met up at a charity event and the Rocket broke his silence, stunning his most bitter rival with a few words to a fellow legend he'd forever detested.
"We used to go to functions in Toronto, probably Hall of Fame functions, three or four or five years after we were through playing," Lindsay recalled in 2016, three years before he died, Richard having predeceased him in 2000.

The Montreal Canadiens' Maurice Richard (left) and Detroit Red Wings' Ted Lindsay participated together in 11 NHL All-Star Games, three times as teammates. In 11 consecutive games, they never spoke.
"I always gave the Rocket a nod and it probably took four or five years before he nodded back. When he finally nodded back, I figured the ice was melting and we were going to be able to have a drink together."
But not just yet.
Finally, those nods led to a few words, out of the blue, Richard profoundly moving his old foe. Lindsay often said he would take that conversation to his grave without sharing it with a soul, and indeed he was true to his word.
"It was personal between Rocket and me. It was unexpected," he said of their short talk. "I was really taken aback. I appreciate what he said because we hated each other, it's the only way I can put it."
Photos: Turofsky/Hockey Hall of Fame