"Marcel Is Going Into A Slump"

In this day and age of performance bonuses, scoring 20 or 25 goals could mean 100s of 1000s of dollars in extra income.

But such salary clauses didn't really exist back in the days when Marcel Bonin played with the Montreal Canadiens. Therefor, Bonin didn't see scoring more goals as a positive, but a negative.

In Jean Beliveau's autobiography My Life In Hockey, Beliveau remembered a time when Marcel was riding a real hot streak late in the season. But because Bonin had reached his usual output of 15 goals, he didn't want to score any more goals.

"Jean, starting tonight, Marcel is going into a slump," Bonin told the dumbfounded Beliveau. Goals are hard enough to come by in the NHL. A player purposefully not trying to score goals was ridiculous.

"Fifteen goals, that's my usual production. I'm already there. If I score twenty, they'll ask me to score twenty five next year, and I can't. So for the next seven or eight games, I'll be the play maker," he told Beliveau, of all people. "You score. Marcel is going into a slump."

It's stories like that one that made Marcel Bonin's profile a fun biography to write. He was quite the character, once spending part of his summer wrestling a bear with the great boxer Joe Louis acting as the referee. And no, I'm not making that up.