Andy Bathgate

NY Times Obituary

Andy Bathgate, the hockey Hall of Famer whose scoring touch gave Ranger fans something to cheer about while watching usually lackluster teams in the 1950s and early ’60s, died on Friday in Brampton, Ontario. He was 83.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, his wife, Merle, said.

Playing with the Rangers for 12-plus seasons, Bathgate was named to the all-N.H.L. squad four times in an era when his rival right wings included the brilliant Maurice Richard and Bernie Geoffrion of the Montreal Canadiens and Gordie Howe of the Detroit Red Wings.

The Rangers made the playoffs only four times during Bathgate’s years, though they played in a six-team league, but he pressed on, a graceful skater and a superb puck-handler and passer who had one of hockey’s hardest slap shots and a highly accurate wrist shot.

“He gets no garbage goals,” Frank Selke, the managing director of the Canadiens back then, told The New York Times.

Bathgate once held the Ranger record for goals with 272, a mark eclipsed by Rod Gilbert in 1973. He won the Hart Trophy as the N.H.L.’s most valuable player in 1959 after scoring a career-high 40 goals. He played in eight consecutive All-Star Games and was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1978.

Although a Ranger mainstay along with his fellow Hall of Famers Harry Howell, on defense, and Gump Worsley, in goal, he was hardly a New York celebrity.

“I’m very seldom recognized on the streets,” he told Sports Illustrated in January 1959, when he appeared on its cover. “It’s different in Toronto and Montreal, but then hockey is the big sport there. People have so many other things to do in New York.”

Apart from all his achievements, Bathgate was also a footnote to hockey history.

Early in the 1959-60 season, Canadiens goalie Jacques Plante poke-checked him when he was coming in on net, and as Bathgate told Turner Sports Network 50 years later, “I went headfirst into the boards and I cut my ear and cut my face a little.”

Bathgate decided to retaliate.

On the night of Nov. 1, 1959, when the Rangers faced Plante and the Canadiens at the Garden, “I came down left wing,” Bathgate recalled. “I was trying to hit him somewhere where he’d remember me and boom, I nailed him. He bled good.”

Plante was cut on the cheek and the nose by Bathgate’s first-period shot and was stitched up. He grabbed a cream-colored mask that he had been saving for the right moment and returned to the ice wearing it, to the astonishment of the crowd. He kept it on for the rest of the game, a 3-1 Canadiens victory, and stuck with a mask for the rest of his career, becoming the first N.H.L. goalie to wear one on a regular basis.

Bathgate later told Plante that his maneuver sending him into boards “could have ended my career.”

He said Plante showed no resentment over Bathgate’s payback, responding, “It’s all in the game.”

Andrew James Bathgate was born on Aug. 28, 1932, in Winnipeg, Manitoba. His father, Andrew, a truck driver, died when Andy was 13. His mother, Alma, moved the family to Guelph, Ontario, where he joined his brother Frank on its Biltmores junior team. In his first game, Andy sustained a knee injury so severe that as a rookie with the Rangers in 1952 he had to have a steel plate implanted.

Bathgate led the N.H.L. twice in assists and tied Hull as the league leader in total points, with 28 goals and 56 assists, in 1961-62.

He was traded to the Toronto Maple Leafs in February 1964 and scored the first goal in their 4-0 clinching victory over the Red Wings in Game 7 of that season’s Stanley Cup finals.

He later played for the Red Wings and the Pittsburgh Penguins, who selected him in the 1967 expansion draft. He had 349 goals and 624 assists in his 17 N.H.L. seasons.

After leaving hockey he owned a driving range in Mississauga, Ontario.

In addition to his wife, Bathgate is survived by their son, Bill, and daughter, Sandee Bathgate, and six grandchildren. His brother Frank, who played in two games for the Rangers when Andy was a rookie, died last February at 85.

Notwithstanding the shot he aimed at Plante’s face, Bathgate was not considered a roughneck. He spoke out against hockey violence in an article in the January 1960 Canadian edition of True magazine titled “Atrocities on Ice.” He warned that spearing — thrusting a stick blade into an opponent’s midsection — could one day kill a player.

The article, written with the collaboration of Dave Anderson, who was later a sports columnist for The New York Times, appeared three years after the Rangers’ Red Sullivan nearly died from a spearing by the Canadiens’ Doug Harvey. Clarence Campbell, the N.H.L. commissioner, fined Bathgate $500, his fee for the article, calling it “prejudicial to the league and the game,” but Campbell did not take issue with Bathgate’s warning.

Bathgate, who wore No. 9, and Howell, who wore No. 3, were jointly honored at the Garden in February 2009, when their numbers were raised to the rafters.

Bathgate’s flew alongside the No. 9 jersey that had recently been retired to honor Adam Graves, who introduced him as “the greatest player ever to wear No. 9 for the New York Rangers.”