Eddie Shack and the Stories Hockey Simply Won't Forget

One of the funny things about old hockey players is that, eventually, their statistics stop telling the whole story. Eddie Shack scored goals. He won Stanley Cups. He played a long NHL career. All of that is on the record. But when people remember Shack, they don't always begin with the numbers. They remember the stories.

One story that has followed Shack around for years involves opposing players supposedly taunting him because they believed he couldn't read. After one such incident, according to the story, Shack scored a goal and skated past the other team's bench shouting, "G-O-A-L!"

Now, I have no idea whether that happened exactly that way. And honestly, that might almost be beside the point.

The Eddie Shack stories have outlived the numbers.

Somebody in the comments section shared an old story about Shack that they believed came from his biography and that the game was against Detroit. Another remembered Shack as such a prankster that, during a charity baseball game organized by Darryl Sittler, he supposedly got caught in a rundown between first and second and simply ran across the infield to third base.

That's Eddie Shack hockey. Or at least, that's how hockey fans remember Eddie Shack.

And maybe there is something worth thinking about there. Today's NHL players are covered more thoroughly than athletes have ever been covered. We know their ice time. We know their expected goals. We know their zone entries, shooting percentages and contract clauses. But how many of them have stories? Real stories.

The kind that get passed from one hockey fan to another for 40 or 50 years.

Shack played in an era when stories could sometimes matter almost as much as statistics.

Shack played in an era when hockey players could become characters almost as much as athletes. They weren't carefully managed brands. They didn't have social-media teams helping shape every sentence. Sometimes they did something funny. Sometimes they did something ridiculous. Sometimes someone told a story about them, and it got better every time it was repeated.

And eventually, the story became part of the player. That's probably what has happened with Eddie Shack. Maybe he really did skate past an opposing bench spelling out "G-O-A-L." Maybe he didn't. But the fact that hockey fans can still picture him doing it tells us something important. The story fits.

That's how hockey mythology works. The facts matter. But personality matters, too.

Shack became almost larger-than-life in Toronto.

Eddie Shack is remembered not simply because of what he did on the ice. He's remembered because, somewhere along the way, he became larger than his statistics. And perhaps that's one of the things old hockey still understood particularly well.

The game needs characters. Because long after we forget the numbers, we'll still remember the stories.