Here -- Pull My Goalie

Be still my heart


I have a secret. I have kept this secret for about 30 years now. Only a few of my childhood friends know about this secret, and maybe even they have forgotten about it.

I have a fascination with pulling the goalie.

It is not easy to admit to fetishes, lest you get cross-eyed looks from folks. Even today, when more and more things "go", you're not sure if your "thing" will be accepted by mainstream society. But I am now finally comfortable that here, in this place we like to call "Hockeytown," it is acceptable to admit to my fetish of pulling the goalie.

It started in my adolescent years. My friend Bob Davis and I, especially (eventually we brought a few more pals into this inner circle of empty netdom) were the ones that fueled this fascination. We would actually hope that tie games were broken late in the third period so one of the teams would have to pull its goalie. And here's when I knew it was getting bad, when I knew my desire to see empty nets had crossed some imaginary line into something perhaps in need of therapy: I didn't even care if the Red Wings were the team who fell behind by a goal in a shattered tie game. As long as it meant a netminder would have to skate like the dickens to his bench, to be replaced by an extra attacker, that was fine with me.

We really started to jones for empty nets, boy. Even our tabletop hockey games, those wonderful inventions with the players who "skate" up and down the "ice" through the miracle of steel rods with rubber tipped handles, were brought into our sick preoccupation. If someone was trailing by a goal, the losing player would announce, "pulling the goalie!", and not only would he literally removes his netminder -- the little metal or plastic goalie would be popped free of his metal stub and tossed aside -- the player who was winning the game would have to remove one of his players. You know, to simulate the scenario of an extra skater. And if the big wooden puck landed near the vacated position, it was simply given to the team whose netminder was missing. Ah, good times.

I don't know how this whole thing started -- this feeling of excitement I would get when the goalie was pulled. But I think it held me because there was nothing quite like it in any other team sport. In no other sport was the makeup of the participants on the field, or the diamond, or the court, so vastly altered as in hockey, with its strategic option of removing your goalkeeper in order to replace him with an extra skater late in games in which you are trailing. You can't bring in an extra player in basketball. You can't "pull" your quarterback in football for an extra running back. You can't take the catcher out of the game so you can have an extra outfielder. But in hockey you could actually make such a substitution. Even now I think it's kind of cool, and I wonder who first came up with it.

"Okay, boys, look: I'm going to take Denny out of the net so we can have an extra skater on the ice to try to tie this game," the first coach may have said to his 100% Canadian group of players.

"Is that legal?," one of them was sure to have said. Heck, maybe even the referee asked the same question. Doubtful it was in the rulebook back then, either way.

Or how about this possibility: maybe the groundbreaking coach didn't know any better, and simply had his goalie vacate the net and join the fray, as an attacking forward. They didn't wear all that much extra padding back then, those netminders, so he wouldn't have looked all that out of place. Then maybe a second coach saw that and refined it. Who knows. But in either instance, can you imagine the thoughts of the perplexed 100% Canadian fans at that very first empty net game?

"Hey, our goalie isn't in the net any more, eh?"

"Yeah! Like what the heck are they doin', eh?"

"I don't know. Hand me another beer, eh?"

But actually removing the goalie is only half of the fun of my fetish. The very existence of the empty net itself opens a whole new world of excitement. I mean, the net is unattended, after all, and that means any puck that is fired toward it will elicit either screams of anquish from the fans whose team is losing, or yells of hope from the fans of the winning side who hope to see their team salt the game away. Meanwhile, the action around the non-vacated net is often fast and furious, with the losing team throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the opposing goalie. Fans of both sides watch the action unfold, one eye on the ice and one eye on the game clock. Those of us watching on television do a similar visual exercise, putting our peripheral vision to the utmost test by trying to watch the action on the lower third of the screen while also keeping track of the time remaining on the handy-dandy TV graphic at the top of the screen.



A TV director's fetish, too


Speaking of television, another one of my memories in the early days of goalie-pulling was the obligatory camera shot of the actual empty net itself. Even if the action was dramatic around the other goal, and the puck could be scored at any moment, TV directors back in the day felt it incumbent upon themselves to show, albeit briefly, an image of the abandoned net, lonely and as wide open as Don Cherry's mouth, completely defenseless against even the wimpiest of shots. I actually saw -- no joke -- a case in which the viewers were treated to a shot of the open net while the announcer screamed, "And they scorrrre!". Yes, we actually didn't see the game-tying goal because the TV people were too busy showing us an empty net. I wanted to strangle the director with his headset cord.

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...as my dad used to say, "What's the difference if you lose by one or lose by two?"
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I also discovered, in college, that not everyone was down with the whole pulling-the-goalie notion. At a Red Wings game once at the Joe, my girlfriend at the time furrowed her brow and narrowed her eyes as she saw the Red Wings goalie skating feverishly to the bench, to be replaced by the requisite extra attacker.

"What are they doing?," she said, in a voice combining annoyance with perplexity.

"They're pulling the goalie, for an extra skater," I said, thinking that would be all the explanation I would need. Now, let's watch the action unfold, sweetie. Wrong.

"But that's stupid. Now we have no goalie!" The mixture was now 100% annoyance and 0% perplexity. All I had done, in her mind, was confirmed the fact that the Red Wings now had no goalie to mind the net.

"But they're trying to tie the game. They need that extra skater." I found myself in unchartered territory. I never had to defend the strategy for this long.

"That's stupid," she repeated.

Just as I was about to shake her, the other team flipped the puck down the ice and square into the Red Wings' open goal.

My ears are still hurting from her diatribe. And I just sat there and took it, because how can you defend the undefendable?

I don't what the percentages are -- and I'm sure someone knows them -- of the success rate of teams who pull their goalie in hopes of tying a game. I'm sure they're not very good, but as my dad used to say, "What's the difference if you lose by one or lose by two?" In other words, what is there to lose? But when a goal is actually scored by the team with the extra skater, even if it's against your team, there is a definite uptick of excitement. The whole complexion of things have changed in a heartbeat. The game is tied. Overtime looms. A sure victory is no more, a certain loss averted. And the goalie skates back into his previously undefended net, almost in a mocking manner: "You had your chance, boys! And now I'm back in the net!"

The very first Red Wings game I attended -- January 21, 1973 -- featured an empty-netter. The Red Wings trailed the old Minnesota North Stars 4-3 late in the third period. Out went the goalie, and on went the extra skater. But, unfortunately, down the ice went the puck, and despite the efforts of one of the Wings defensemen, who dove valiantly, the puck crossed the goal line and went into the net. The Wings lost, 5-3. The box score the next morning, doubtless, had this little addendum following the goalscorer, assist(s), and time scored: (ENG). Yes, those three little letters that tell folks around the globe who didn't attend or see the game that an Empty Net Goal was scored.

I even have empty net trivia to share. Bet you didn't know there was actually an occasion when a team pulled its goalie -- and it was winning. It's true. On the final day of the 1969-70 season, the Red Wings were in New York to play the Rangers. The Wings were already in the playoffs, but the Rangers could only qualify through some odd tiebreaker in which the number of goals they scored in that final game was of a certain amount. Anyhow, the Rangers beat the Wings, 9-5. But what makes this wonderful trivia is that the Rangers pulled their goalie with several minutes remaining in order to try to score more goals. Not sure how many they scored that way, but the Red Wings scored two ENGs, in a losing effort. And the Rangers made the playoffs, by the way.


The Rangers once pulled Terry Sawchuk --
and they were WINNING!


Now I must confess that my fascination with pulled goalies isn't quite as strong today. I don't get as much bounce in my step when it happens, but it's still, to me, a unique type of strategy, and whomever came up with it is brilliant. I wonder if it worked the very first time it was used. If it did, maybe it was because the other team was too stunned to know what to do.

But still, when there is a one goal differential, and the clock ticks under two minutes remaining in the third period, my heart flutters a little bit. When will the goalie be pulled? How long will the coach wait? And I have one message for my old college girlfriend, if she's reading this:

"It's NOT stupid."

Been waiting 22 years to get that off my chest.