“My face is my mask,” said Lorne Worsley, who played all but six of his almost 1400 pro games barefaced. He did without instruction, goaltending not becoming an art until well after he had hung up his pads and without an agent, hockey not becoming part of “The Sports Industry” until the waning years of his career.

His job was to stop the puck. He did it for 24 years, with good teams and bad, hitting most of the high points of his profession while not missing out on a few of the lows either. Worsley’s path to the Hall of Fame began in Montreal’s Pointe St. Charles district, a working class neighborhood where his father was frequently out of work.

How poor was the Worsley clan? The vegan-friendly “fish and chips” that were a staple of the family diet consisted of deep-fried potatoes served alongside battered, deep-fried potatoes.

The road hockey games of his childhood were played with homemade sticks, catalogue shin pads and biodegradable pucks. Tennis balls cost money but horses provided more than adequate substitutes as long as the mercury didn’t rise too near the freezing point.

By 14, young Lorne was done with his formal education, carrying a lunchbox and smoking a pack a day. When a local coach declared him too small for any other position, Worsley, already nicknamed Gump because of a supposed resemblance to a comic strip character, strapped on the pads.

The New York Rangers bought his rights and brought him to Broadway assigning the 20-year-old to their Eastern Hockey League farm club, the Rovers, to start the 1949-50 season. He went to St. Paul in the USHL the following season and spent 1951-52 with the Saskatoon Quakers.

Veteran Charlie Raynor went down to injury early in the 1952-53 schedule. His understudy was rushed in from Saskatchewan and played 50 games the rest of the way. His 3.06 goals-against-average made statisticians take notice. Fans and writers noticed too and the portly goaltender with the finely tuned body of a bus driver was voted the Calder Trophy as the NHL’s top rookie.

Having earned $7,500 his first year, Worsley figured he was well within his rights to ask for a $500 raise the next fall. His opinion was not shared by Rangers GM, Frank Boucher and he was sent packing to Vancouver Canucks of the Western Hockey League. The Rangers elected to go with AHL veteran Johnny Bower and, as they had done the year before, finished out of the playoffs.

The Gumper had a better time of it out west. The Canucks finished in first place and their netminder was declared both the outstanding goaltender and league MVP. The next fall saw Bower play the bulk of the season on the Pacific coast while Worsley reclaimed top spot in Manhattan.

With the poise and positioning of a marionette in the hands of an angry four-year-old, Gump Worsley reclaimed his place in the hearts of the Madison Square Gardens faithful. Playing in virtually every game for the next nine years, he was the club’s unlikely marquee player, both on and off the ice.

With buzz-cut hair and multi-chinned countenance, Worsley became the visual representation of what a goaltender, at his most frantic, looked like. Launching himself from post to post with remarkable speed for a man of his build, he also had the fastest arms and legs around. His limbs were often a blur as he caught or redirected pucks that came his way with all too frequent regularity.

His mouth was often as fast the rest of his rotund body and Gump, while he took the games seriously, certainly didn’t take himself too seriously. His off-the-cuff comments made things easy for the writers, who gathered around to hear his latest pronouncements, and turned his bon-mots into reams of copy.

Asked what team gave him the most trouble, he quipped, “the Rangers,” a comment that would probably divide today’s locker rooms, pitting one sensitive, finely tuned, and professionally represented athletes against another. The resulting meltdown would be widely identified as the turning point in the season by the pundits who would gather to assign post-mortem blame.

In the New York dressing room of the 1950s, however, it was taken in the spirit in which it had been uttered. Among Worsley’s most notable adversaries was Phil Watson, widely identified by players of the time as the poorest coach they ever had when it came to leading a group of men. Watson’s analysis of any game was simple. A win was due to his coaching, while a loss was the fault of the guys on the ice.

The friction between Worsley and Watson, a French-speaking native of Quebec City, was sustained, heartfelt, and often entertaining. Watson once publicly accused Worsley of playing poorly due to a beer belly. Worsley retorted to writers that beer was the poor man’s champagne and that he was strictly a rye drinker. There were many other skirmishes in the bilingual verbal war, most using the more colorful terms available.

Montreal didn’t make it through the first round of the playoffs in 1962-63 and the blame for their loss to Toronto was placed on Jacques Plante’s shoulders, giving the Habs a reason to dispose of a goaltender who, despite his brilliance between the pipes, was seen as bit of a head-case in the team’s management circles.

Plante ended up with the Rangers and Worsley became Habs property in a six-player deal made in the summer of 1963. Sending him the Quebec City’s Aces, the Habs preferred to give Charlie Hodge, who had patiently waited in the wings during the Plante years, filled in well when asked to do so. The Gumper appeared in only eight games with Montreal that season.

Called up the next season to replace an injured Hodge, Worsley found out what it was like to backstop a team with capable defensemen and skilled, speedy, forwards. He played 19 regular season games and took over the top job in the postseason, appearing in eight of the postseason match-ups as the Habs went all the way, earning the now-veteran netminder his first mention on the Stanley Cup.

Splitting net-minding duties with Hodge for the next two seasons, the Habs won another Stanley Cup in 1966. Worsley posted the best goals-against-average among goalies making it to the playoffs in both years. The tandem shared the 1966 Vezina Trophy.

One of the two was destined to be plucked by a new franchise in the expansion draft that saw the NHL double in size prior to the 1967-68 season. Charlie Hodge was taken by the Oakland Seals with their first pick in the expansion draft. Gumper, soldiered on in Montreal, sharing duties with young Rogatien Vachon.

Stanley Cups became as familiar to Worsley in Montreal as being home by early spring had been in his Ranger days. Partnered with Rogie Vachon, he got a third mention in 1968 and his last in 1969. The pair split the 1967-68 Vezina.

Gumper announced his retirement after the 1969 festivities, but it was a short one. Lured to Minnesota by Wren Blair, who dangled the biggest paycheck Worsley had ever been offered in exchange for part-time play, he spent the last four years of his career with the North Stars and scouted for the team for over a decade after finally hanging up his gear for the last time following the 1973-74 season. Named to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1980, he is the only goaltender enshrined with a losing career record.

Lorne John Worsley was born in Montreal on May 14th, 1929. He died on January 26th, 2007. He is survived by his wife Doreen, daughter Lianne, sons Lorne, Dean, and Drew, and by grandchildren Jennifer, Derek and Dylan.