It’s hard to believe Scotty Bowman will turn 91 on Sept. 18.
That’s what I was thinking after seeing a photo of the former Canadiens head coach at a recent golf tournament with 13 players who were on the teams he coached to four straight Stanley Cups, starting in 1976.
I was thinking that again after spending an hour speaking with Bowman on the phone Wednesday afternoon from his summer home in Buffalo. The man who won a record nine Stanley Cups as a head coach — the first five with the Canadiens — is still sharp as a tack with a magnificent memory and a brilliant hockey mind.
The fifth edition of the Serge Savard Invitational golf tournament on Aug. 13 paid tribute to the 1970s dynasty team that Savard was part of. The tournament was held at Le Mirage Golf Club, which a group led by Savard purchased from Céline Dion in 2020.
The former players who took part were Savard, Larry Robinson, Guy Lapointe, Yvan Cournoyer, Bob Gainey, Jacques Lemaire, Steve Shutt, Ken Dryden, Yvon Lambert, Mario Tremblay, Doug Risebrough, Doug Jarvis and Rick Chartraw. The first eight players on that list (along with Bowman) are all in the Hall of Fame.
Two other players who were part of those four Stanley Cup teams sadly passed away: Guy Lafleur (another Hall of Famer) from lung cancer in 2022 at age 70 and goalie Michel (Bunny) Larocque from brain cancer in 1992 at age 40.
Bowman doesn’t look or sound like he’s 90.
“People say: You don’t look 90.’ I say: ‘Some days I feel like I’m 100 and some days I feel 80, so that makes me 90,” Bowman said with a chuckle. “I’m doing OK. I try to keep busy as much as I can.”
Bowman spends the winters in Florida and is a regular in the press box at Tampa’s Amalie Arena with Lightning GM Julien BriseBois making sure he always has a good seat. He also watches a lot of hockey on TV.
The Verdun native noted that of the 13 former Canadiens at the golf tournament, seven were anglophones and six were francophones. Lafleur and Larocque were also francophones.
“We had a good combination of players that got along,” Bowman said. “It’s quite unusual that a team would have 15 players playing for four years in a row on the same team. You can hardly get two or three in a row now. It’s a different era with the salary cap and everything else.”
It would be impossible to have another dynasty team like the 1970s Canadiens in today’s salary-capped NHL and Montreal fans during that time were spoiled with talent. But Bowman said it was more than just talent that resulted in six Stanley Cups for the Canadiens in the 1970s, including 1971 and 1973. Bowman noted that the players spoke about that during a dinner that was part of the golf event.
“Everybody had a chance to talk about the team,” Bowman said. “The thing that came through, I thought, the most important is that it was a full team of players. The Hall of Fame players talked about Bunny Larocque. He played over 100 games in those four years and he only lost 13 or something. If you look up Bunny Laroque’s record he didn’t lose many games.”
During those four Stanley Cup seasons, Larocque had a 79-13-15 record with a 2.55 goals-against average as Dryden’s backup.
“The Hall of Famers also mentioned the importance of Jarvis, Risebrough, Lambert, Tremblay … they were defensive players and hard workers, but they felt that they made the team complete. We had a good group of players that we could count on and they worked really hard. Jarvis, Gainey, Risebrough, Tremblay, Lambert, a lot of times they set the pace. They were players that never got outworked at all. The team was a complete team. I give a lot of credit to the leadership they had on the team.”
Bowman also gives credit to former GM Sam Pollock, who built the team, and his assistant coach Claude Ruel, who Bowman noted was an outstanding teacher, especially with the defencemen.
“It was quite an event,” Bowman said about the golf tournament. “In Montreal we had so many good players and to see them all in the same room was really something.”
When asked what the key to his success was as a coach, Bowman said with a laugh: “I started young.”
After a head injury ended his playing career, Bowman started coaching a Junior B team in Parc-Extension at age 19 before Pollock hired him to coach the junior Hull-Ottawa Canadiens the next year.
“When I first started coaching the other coaches were ex-players in their 30s,” Bowman recalled. “They weren’t coming up like me. But I was very fortunate because Sam Pollock gave me a break in Ottawa. I got hooked up with the right people and that’s what’s important.
“If you don’t get hooked up with the right team or the right players, it’s not an easy task,” Bowman added. “That’s the way I look at it.”