I was recently asked who my idol was when I was a kid. What I thought interesting about the question was that it was assumed, correctly as it happens, that I had an idol when I was a kid. It's just one of those things that goes with the territory of growing up, having a person we look up to for some reason or another.

Like a lot of young boys, when I was a kid my idol was a sports figure. Unlike so many other kids who picked the real popular players of the day, my favourite's best days were long behind him. Henri (don't pronounce the H and make a sound like "on" and you'll have a good idea how to say his name) Richard's glory days had been in the fifties with his brother Maurice "The Rocket" Richard and the sixties with Jean Beliveau.

By the time I found out that a player on my favourite team had a last name the same as my first name his career was beginning to draw to a close. He did score the game tying and game winning goals in the 1971 Stanley Cup championship against Tony Esposito and the Chicago Blackhawks, but the real story that year was Montreal's rookie goalie Ken Dryden. He'd only played six games in the regular season before coming in and starting every playoff game and stoning the opposition cold.

Four years later, Henri retired after winning his eleventh Stanley Cup, and his first as Captain of the Montreal Canadians. He had been a small, elusive player who could skate circles around the bigger players looking to make him part of the boards. He never had the most powerful shot in the world, but it seemed to be able to find the back of the net anyway. Maybe not with the regularity of his more illustrious brother, but his goals always seemed to be important.

They were the goals that would put the team back into the game when it seemed the game was lost, or the goal that broke the spirit of the other team in a tight playoff series. His goals always seemed to carry a little of the team's past glory with them, and you could almost see the other team wilt when he scored, as if all of a sudden a Canadian's win was now inevitable.