The old, creased image is a study of the hard man in repose; he’s laid out on the ice, eyes closed, a youthful, vigorous version of the enfeebled and forgetful man he is to become.
The man in the photo was baptized Reginald Stephen Fleming, one of the more brutish and feared players in an especially unsentimental era in the National Hockey League annals.
He is in full puck regalia, and unconscious.
The picture is a cherished memento that his first-born, 42-year-old Chris Fleming, keeps close at hand.
“When you’re playing the game, you’re so tough, ‘I don’t care, I’ll die for this game,’ and then when you’re 50, 60, 70 years old and you’re in a hospital and you’re in terrible pain, it’s a different story,” said Fleming, whose father died last summer at 73 after a series of strokes and heart attacks that had confined him to an assisted-care home near Chicago for five years.
Long before the myth of the taciturn, two-fisted loner was appropriated by the Spaghetti Western, it had taken up residence in sports like boxing and the NHL of the mid-20th century.
Few embodied that idiom, and its righter-of-wrongs code, like Reggie Fleming.
He was a mere sapling by the redwood standards of today’s NHL – he stood 5 foot 10 and weighed 185 pounds – but his beefy arms and tightly cropped pate earned him the nickname Mr. Clean. It was an appropriate moniker for a versatile player known above all for stepping in to sort out messes created by opponents or overzealous teammates.
Fleming played in the prehelmet days, when the game could be violent.
But there were no late-night highlight reels recapping the day’s biggest hits and fights.
“I had to protect guys … it was either going to be me or nobody,” an elderly Fleming later told his son in a video diary posted on YouTube.
Reggie Fleming was born in 1936, and spent his early life in Ahuntsic, in Montreal’s north end, an Anglo child in a mostly French-speaking neighbourhood.
That meant learning early to stand up for oneself, as did growing up in a rambling brick house with one’s parents and grandparents and a raucous menagerie of eight uncles and aunts, many of whom were close to his age.
Fleming attended D’Arcy McGee High School in downtown Montreal – long since converted into condos – and played several sports.
It’s likely around this time that Fleming suffered his first concussion – he is said to have suffered as many as 20 – although classmates from the period don’t recall any particularly gruesome incidents.
But even then, Fleming showed glimpses of the hard-boiled, relentless style that would make him famous.
“He was a tough character even then, but had tremendous hockey sense,” said Peter Vanier, who played hockey and football with a young Fleming at D’Arcy McGee, winning multiple city championships.
After trying and failing to make the Montreal Junior Canadiens, Fleming earned a spot on the team in 1953. It was then directed by Sam Pollock, who made it clear Fleming’s future would be assured with his fists.
Relatives remember Fleming as being consumed by hockey, and leaving home at 18 to turn pro (he never made it past Grade 11 at D’Arcy McGee) and make his name as a rough-houser.
“He was a very quiet guy when he was off the ice,” said his first cousin, Gerry Fleming. “It was just a job that he did.” Hockey can be fairly described as the family business.
Gerry worked at the Montreal Forum for 14 years as a security guard (often behind the players’ bench) and his son, also named Gerry, played 11 games for the Habs in the 1990s. A tough player in his own right, Gerry Fleming Jr. spent eight seasons in Montreal’s farm system.
He, too, can tell you about concussions.
“You’d sit in the penalty box after taking a punch in the head, and all of a sudden the right side of your vision would go black. Or your left. Usually it was back by the time the penalty was over,” said Fleming, now an assistant coach with the Springfield Falcons of the AHL. “You just shook it off and didn’t really think anything of it.”
