It's not to say modern hockey players do not bring intensity to their work. But the player has not yet been born with more of it than Maurice Richard when he sensed a chance to score.

The old Rocket's intensity is the characteristic that most remains in memory 40 years after a September morning in 1960 at the Montreal Canadiens' training camp when he quietly told Toe Blake, his coach and former linemate, that he had decided to hang'em up. It was the eve of his 19th season.

As a player Richard scored goals from all angles and positions, sometimes with a defenceman draped across his body. Or he'd whirl with his back to the net and in an uncanny knack lace loose a puck past the bewildered goaltender. Goal-mouth photographs often showed his black eyes locked in a maniacal stare.

Off the ice, at home with his wife Lucille and their six children, the Rocket was a loving, indulgent father.

"They can have anything they want," he'd tell visitors.

That was all right with Lucille. "He tells people that he loves his children and hockey," she said. "Sometimes he remembers to put me in there. I come before hockey but after the kids."

The Rocket wasn't a big man, though thick-bodied at five-foot-10 and about 180 pounds, but he was strong and enormously determined when he had the puck inside the enemy blueline. Nor was he a polished skater; indeed, he often looked awkward alongside his linemates Toe Blake and the lively centre, Elmer Lach.

Richard breaks the glass in Maple Leaf Gardens.

But give the Rocket the puck with a chance to score and he seemed unstoppable, frequently staggering under hulks 40 pounds heavier. Once, on an unforgettable occasion, he was pinned under strapping, 225-pound defenceman Earl Seibert, who spent 15 seasons in the NHL knocking people down. This time, the Rocket leaned low to try to avoid Seibert and was staggered when the defenceman barreled across his bent back. When he straightened, Seibert was still riding him. Rocket took two or three staggering strides, recovered the puck and somehow faked the goaltender out of position. Then he swept the puck past him.

Other goals were as memorable as unorthodox, one so dramatic that the detail of it is clear in the minds of witnesses long since grown old. The score was 1-1 late in a 1951 playoff game against Boston. Richard had taken a deep cut over the left eye. He was hurriedly bandaged in the infirmary and soon sent back out, the patch-out job held in place by gauze and adhesive tape.

Slowly, blood began seeping down the Rocket's cheek, forming a thin reddish line to his chin. Then a moment developed when he was cradling the puck deep in his own zone, peering up the ice through the frenzied, hazy Forum air.

A left-hand shot, he started slowly along the right boards and got past his check, Woody Dumart, with a quick burst that got him across centre ice. At the Boston blueline, the all-star defenceman Bill Quackenbush and his partner waited grimly.

Richard and "Sugar" Jim Henry shake hands after Rocket returned from a head injury to score the Stanley Cup winner on the Bruins netminder.

But Richard lunged past Armstrong and plodded his way over the blueline as Quackenbush came across, forcing him to the corner and trying to pin him there.

Somehow Richard twisted free of the heavy contact, his progress measured the halting, staggering strides of a man struggling to walk in thigh-deep water. He pushed along the backboards, hauling Quackenbush with him, and by now looking exhausted pale, gaunt, the blood still trickling down his cheek, stumbling along the boards and staggering to the front of the net just as it appeared Quackenbush had him trapped behind it. The goaltender, Sugar Jim Henry, dived, seeking to smother the puck, but the Rocket pulled it clear and whacked it into the vacated net.

That goal won the game, eliminated the Bruins, sent the Canadiens into the Stanley Cup final where, ironically, they were blistered in four straight games by a Detroit juggernaut of Gordie Howe, Ted Lindsay and Sid Abel. In a sense, though, defeat was a form of poetic justice. One year earlier, the Canadiens had gone into Detroit and won an opening playoff game on a goal by Richard after 61 minutes and nine seconds of overtime. Then they won the second game on a goal by, yep, the Rocket, this time in 42 minutes and 20 seconds of overtime.

Intense and determined on the ice, the Rocket was often a tempestuous fellow away from it, too. Such as a time he spotted a referee, Hugh McLean, in a New York hotel lobby one Sunday morning following a Saturday night in Montreal when he felt McLean had been unfair to him. He had picked up a few lumps and bumps in the Forum without the referee calling a penalty. He had brooded much of the night in his berth on a train to New York.

So when he spotted McLean in the hotel he jumped from his chair, grabbed McLean by the collar and tried to punch him. An NHL linesman, Jim Primeau, and a couple of Canadiens players dashed to McLean's aid, and managed to subdue the sizzling Rocket.

This incident, and a further outburst in which Richard's excessive zeal induced him to take his stick to Boston defenceman Hal Laycoe, and punch a linesman, Cliff Thompson, twice in the face, helped precipitate the most violent reaction in NHL history.

As discipline, NHL president Clarence Campbell suspended Richard for the balance of the season and all playoff games. The city was stunned, then wrathful. When Detroit played in the Forum two nights later, President Campbell and his then secretary, Phyllis, who later married him, sat in their box in the first period while fans booed, hissed and threw eggs and debris. When a smoke bomb exploded nearby people began rubbing their eyes and coughing. A fan jumped at Campbell and hit him twice.

A teargas bomb goes off in the Forum

Police led Campbell and his fiancee to safety. The city fire director ordered the Forum vacated, fearing a panic. An uproar erupted when the P.A. voice said the game had been cancelled and forfeited to Detroit. Fans milled into the streets, smashing store windows, bumping bystanders, looting.

For two days the city boiled. Damage was later estimated at $100,000 and 37 people had been arrested. Finally, the Rocket made an appeal over radio and television from a hookup in the Canadiens dressing-room.

"I will take my punishment and come back next year to help the club and the younger players win the Cup," he said, in part.

"So that no further harm will be done, I would like to ask everyone to get behind the team and help the boys win."

Peace broke out.