Bobby Orr: The Great What If

2009

Bobby Orr has become hockey's Jimi Hendrix, its Jim Brown, its Ben Hogan--the ultimate, wistful argument over what might have been.

Hendrix's death at age 27 . . . Brown's retirement at 29 as the NFL's reigning MVP . . . Hogan's near-fatal car accident at 36, in the prime of his golf career. . . .

And Orr's surgery-ravaged knees, effectively ending his career at 28, though he would try to keep playing until age 30, in constant pain, a best-forgotten closing sequence with Chicago.

But if half of Orr's legacy is the sadness of "what if," the other half is surely the glory of what was.

Orr's 10-season prime in Boston was the most breathtaking I ever saw.

There was nothing he could not do, in close quarters, at high speed --and though I saw Wayne Gretzky up close for a decade like that in Edmonton, when he separated himself from every other forward in the game by miles, his was a more cerebral art, something more like sleight of hand, not fully understood until the puck was in the net.

Gretzky, for all his greatness, rarely made the pulse race quite the same way Orr did, rarely brought you out of your seat before the fact the way Orr could when he circled behind his net, surveying the ice, starting a rush.

Other supremely talented defencemen lasted longer, scored more. No one before, or since, made me smile for the sheer joy of watching him play. No one made me sadder when his legs wouldn't carry him any more. When he played in the 1976 Canada Cup, he was barely a shadow of what he had been, and still scored nine points in seven games and was named the tournament's MVP. It was, in essence, his farewell to the game.

Was he the greatest ever? Impossible to say. Give Gordie Howe the final word.

"Losing Bobby," he once said, "was the greatest blow the National Hockey League has ever suffered.'