There used to be a bumper sticker that said, "Only the Lord saves more than Bernie Parent."
The Hall of Famer goalie, who had two Stanley Cup winning seasons with the Flyers, was in Buffalo signing autographs at Benchwarmers Sports Bar.
Parent is best recognized here as a goalide during the infamous 'Fog' game at the Aud in May of 1975.
Somehow a bat had gotten into the old Memorial Auditorium and was flying around the ice for quite a while during the game.
Jim Lorentz decided to take matters into his own hands. He was about to take the faceoff when he saw the bat coming. He raised his stick and swatted the bat in mid-air, ending its tour of the Stanley Cup finals.
Rick MacLeish picked up the dead bat and dumped him into the penalty box.
Right after the bat met his untimely death, a fog settled on the ice.
It was as if the bat's spirit decided to haunt the game in revenge.
In 1975, arenas were not air conditioned.
Temperatures at ice level reached 90 degrees.
With the humidity, the heat and the presence of over 16,000 screaming fans, it produced the first ever fog game.
The refs had to delay the game several times because the fog had become so dense that the players could not see halfway down the ice.
Players skated around in a unsuccessful attempt to clear the fog.
Auditorium workers had to come out with white bed sheets to try to dispel the low cloud cover.
Some of the fog dissipated, so play was resumed, only to be halted again and again because visibility was so poor.
The coaches for both teams, Fred Shero of the Flyers, and Floyd Smith of the Sabres instructed their players to shoot the puck anytime they got it because the goalies would have trouble seeing it.
This was a game where the fog played an important part.
Gerry Desjardins was the temperamental Buffalo goalie that night.
He seemed to be fighting the puck the first two Flyer goals.
MacLeish put a shot on Desjardins from 40 feet away and it got past him for the third Flyer goal.
During the intermission between the first and second periods, Desjardins asked to be relieved from his duties.
"After the second goal against me, I thought it was a grand time to get the hell out of there. I knew if I had stayed in, everything would have gone down the drain," Desjardins said after the game. "After all, we were only down by one goal. It was close at the end of the first period. Why waste it?"
In comes Roger Crozier to fill in between the pipes.
Crozier was stellar in his mop-up role.
He made three saves in a wild scramble in front of the net before Reggie Leach put in his own rebound to give the Flyers their fourth goal.
Don Luce scored for the Sabres in the second period also, so going into the third period, the Flyers were up 4-3.
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Rookie defenseman Bill Hajt pounded in a rebound of a Rick Martin shot past Bernie Parent to tie the game and send it into overtime.
The fog settled on the ice for the extra session and the players settled down to what seemed to be a long night.
The play had to be stopped seven times during the first overtime.
But, with around a minute left to play in the first overtime, Martin got the puck along the boards and passed it to Gilbert Perreault, who skated into the Flyer zone and then passed it to Rene Robert in the far corner.
Robert got in front of Flyer defenseman Jimmy Watson and he retrieved the pass right before the goal line.
"It's almost impossible to score from that angle," Robert related. "But I shot at the net, hoping somebody could get the rebound. It seemed to me he (Bernie Parent) wasn't ready for the shot. It went between his legs."
"I didn't see Perreault's pass," Bernie said afterwards. "I saw Robert's shot too late for me to come out and stop it. I'm surprised the overtime took so long. It was hard to see the puck from the red line. If three men came down and one made a good pass from the red line, you couldn't see the puck. A good shot from the red line could have won it. But it was the same thing for Crozier."
Some 30 years later, with all of our modern technology, the fog returns.
This time, the game between BC and BU is called due to the foggy 'on ice' conditions.
And here I thought todays hockey players were tougher than that.
I guess I was wrong...
VIVA LA OLD TIME HOCKEY!
Keywords: Hockey
