The year was 1971. Sam Pollock, the legendary Montreal Canadiens general manager/horse trader, had already manoeuvred his way into the top pick in the National Hockey League's amateur draft, giving him the opportunity to select Guy Lafleur, a future Hall of Famer.
But he wanted more.
"The two best juniors by a mile that year were Lafleur and Marcel Dionne," recalled Scotty Bowman, one of the many Pollock protégés who went on to have fabulously successful NHL careers. "The night before the draft, we met for three hours and Sam grilled everybody in the room - Al MacNeil, Ronnie Caron, Claude Ruel and a couple of scouts - What should they do with Lafleur and Dionne?
"Then he excused himself and made a call to Ned Harkness, in Detroit, to propose a trade. The Canadiens had just won the Stanley Cup in '71 and Sam offered Detroit Phil Myre, plus either Terry Harper or J. C. Tremblay and something else, to get the second pick. And Detroit was going to do it, because they were going to get three players who could help them.
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"I remember Sam came back in the room and said, 'If I make this deal, could it be another [Jean] Béliveau and [Bernie] Geoffrion for 10 years?' But nobody would stand up and say yes, so he didn't make the deal - because that's how Sam worked. If there were five people in the room, he would never do anything until he talked all five people into doing what he wanted to do.
"But that's how Sam operated. If there were two great players in the draft, he wouldn't be satisfied with saying, 'I'm getting Lafleur, to hell with Dionne.' He wanted them both."
Mr. Pollock left an unmatched legacy as an NHL wheeler-dealer. In 14 years as the Canadiens' general manager, he was at the helm for nine Stanley Cups. But, as Mr. Bowman pointed out, Mr. Pollock joined the Canadiens organization in 1947 and spent 17 years working behind the scenes in player development before getting promoted to GM - counted this way, he had his fingerprints on a total of 15 Stanley Cups in a 31-year span.
"The best way I can say it is, when all the rest of us were standing at the corner, waiting for the light to change, Sam was already three blocks down the street," said Frank Selke Jr., whose father gave Mr. Pollock his first job in the Canadiens organization.
Mr. Pollock, known as Sad Sam because of his dour visage, forged his reputation as a result of the many out-and-out thefts he completed. But the seeds of his success were sewn much earlier, when he joined the organization at 19 as an assistant coach with the 1945-46 Junior Canadiens.
He was hired largely because of his teenaged success managing a softball team made up mostly of Canadiens players, some of whom were 10 years older than him. Mr. Selke's father was impressed with the way Mr. Pollock handled people, even at that age.
Mr. Pollock would eventually succeed the senior Mr. Selke as Canadiens GM, and was later chairman of the Toronto Blue Jays between 1995 and 2000. His love for and knowledge of baseball was as great as his love of hockey, according to the younger Mr. Selke.
"On a scale of 1 to 10, if Sam was a 10½ in hockey, he was an 11 in baseball," he said. "... Sam would talk about baseball far more than he would talk about hockey. He'd say, 'I don't want to talk about hockey because then you'll know what I'm thinking and I don't want people to know what I'm thinking.' "
Mr. Pollock was intensely private. He would watch the Canadiens play from Section 66 in the old Forum - the highest part of the building.
