Marcel Bonin, who won three Stanley Cups with the Canadiens in the 1950s, died Sunday at age 93.
Bonin, a left-winger, won three consecutive Stanley Cups with the Canadiens in 1958, 1959 and 1960. They were the last three of five consecutive Cups for the Canadiens. Bonin, a Montreal native, also won the Cup with the Detroit Red Wings in 1955.
In 454 career games with the Red Wings, Boston Bruins and Canadiens, Bonin had 97-175-272 totals. A back injury ended Bonin’s career after he played 33 games with the Canadiens during the 1961-62 season.
Bonin’s linemates during his five seasons with the Canadiens included Dickie Moore, Jean Béliveau, Bernard Geoffrion, Maurice Richard and Henri Richard. When Moore won the Art Ross Trophy as the NHL’s leading scorer in 1957-58 with 36-48-84 totals, Bonin was his gritty linemate, producing 15-24-39 totals.
“We played to have fun and make the fans happy,” Bonin told the late Ian MacDonald in a Where Are They Now? article that was published in The Gazette in 2003. “We played for the fans. We belonged to them. We were proud and we worked hard to make our fans happy.”
Bonin scored the Stanley Cup-winning goal for the Canadiens in Game 5 of the 1959 final, a 5-3 win over the Toronto Maple Leafs at the Forum. Bonin scored 10 goals in 11 playoff games that year to lead the NHL.
“What I remember most about those days was the boys,” Bonin said about his time with the Canadiens in the Where Are They Now? article. “We were like brothers. When we’d go out after the game, everybody would go together. Not two guys go here and three guys go there.
“My best hockey memory is about the friends I made on those teams.”
One of the most famous stories about Bonin involved him wrestling a bear.
There was a travelling circus that came through Joliette, where Bonin lived, and there was a promotion that anyone who could put the bear down in a wrestling match would get $1,000.
“I start like a boxer and I give the bear a real punch on the jaw,” Bonin told Dick Irvin in his book The Habs: An Oral History of the Montreal Canadiens, 1940-1980. “They told me: ‘Hey, the bear is not a boxer, he’s a wrestler.’ I was not afraid, but the bear beat me.”
Bonin decided not to argue with the referee — former world heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis.
After his hockey career ended, Bonin worked as a police officer in Joliette for seven years and then worked for 16 years with the city’s school board, helping in student security. He also became an avid reader.
“When I was working for the school, I made friends with some teachers,” Bonin, who spoke no English when he began his NHL career with Detroit in 1952, said in the Where Are They Now? article. “They talked to me a lot about history and I became interested. I started reading a lot and now I have a nice little library of my own, with French and English books.
“I’m a happy man and I owe everything to hockey,” he added.