The above photo was originally published in March of 1981 in the Montreal Gazette showing Canadiens great Guy Lafleur acknowledging the Montreal Forum crowd for saluting him on having just scored his 1000th NHL regular season point. That's Mario Lemieux clapping just above him in the dark sport coat and tie. Being just 15 years old, more than three years before the Penguins drafted him first overall in 1984 and even before he began tearing it up the QMJHL later that year, he was pretty much an unknown back then. His presence in the photo was therefore never really noted at the time; he was simply just another fan in the crowd. The photo was promptly filed away and quickly forgotten about.
Until now.
Here's the story on how this photo resurfaced, from the National Post:
http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/03/18 ... ckey-hero/
It seems unusual from a 2015 perspective that there's no large pane of glass separating the team bench from the fans but IIRC the Forum stayed this way until the Habs moved out in the mid-1990s. Certainly there was no glass separating Patrick Roy from Ronald Corey on that Saturday night in December of 1995 when Roy advised Corey he'd played his last game in a Montreal uniform.
It's kind of interesting that this photo of Lemieux saluting his idol took so long to resurface. One might imagine ML long since mentioning in interviews about how he was right there behind the bench the night Guy got his 1000th point — perhaps prompting a re-examination of all the old documents well before this. But then again he was never all that comfortable in the media spotlight so perhaps ML just kept it to himself. With technology being what it is these days and the leaps it will undoubtedly make going forward, and increased media attention, a player of Lemieux's calibre today would already be sufficiently well-known at 15 that we probably wouldn't have to wait until he was nearly 50 years old some 35 years later to see something like this.
If you're the trivia type, see if you can identify all of Guy's teammates on the bench surrounding him. Here are the names, L-R, hidden in a spoiler:
Denis Herron, Pierre Mondou, Pierre Larouche, Keith Acton, Doug Wickenheiser
The photo above as it originally appeared in print in 1981 was greatly cropped but ML is still clearly visible as can be seen in this scanned copy:
