Joseph Henri Maurice Richard was born on Aug. 4, 1921, the eldest child of Onesime and Alice Richard, who had left their native Gaspe to settle in Montreal.
Onesime, said to have been a good amateur hockey and baseball player, was a carpenter for the Canadian Pacific Railway who stretched a thin budget to support a growing family in the Bordeaux district in Montreal's north end.
The Rocket got his first skates at four and by the time he was a teenager, was dominating local school teams.
Then it was juvenile and junior hockey and a two-year stint with the Canadiens top farm club in Montreal marked by goals and injuries.
A broken left ankle in 1940 and a broken wrist a following year sparked doubts about the durability of the five-foot-10, 180-pound Richard.
Another broken ankle 16 games into his first NHL season in 1942-43 even moved general manager Tommy Gorman to try to trade the seemingly fragile young player that local sportswriters had begun to call the Comet.
It was teammate Ray Getliffe, forced to play against Richard in an intra-squad match, who called him the Rocket, a nickname, thankfully, that stuck.
It was a period of highs and lows for Richard. During his run of injuries, he married Lucille Norchat, the sister of a close friend, and twice had attempts to volunteer for the army turned down because of hockey injuries.
But it all turned around in 1943-44, when incidentally, Lucille gave birth to their first child, a daughter Huguette, who weighed nine pounds. Richard asked coach Dick Irvin Sr. if he could change his number from 15 to nine to mark the occasion.
With Richard scoring 32 goals -- the fourth-highest total in Canadiens history -- in his first full season and with rookie Bill Durnan in goal, the Canadiens leapt from fourth place to finish first for the first time in 19 years.
Richard added 12 more goals in the playoffs and the Canadiens took their first Stanley Cup since 1931. In one game in the final series against Toronto, Richard scored all Montreal's goals in a 5-1 victory.
It was in 1944-45 that Richard scored his 50 goals in 50 games, including one still talked about today when he carried 225-pound Detroit defenceman Earl Siebert on his back from the blue-line and deked goaltender Harry Lumley.
Another Cup came in 1946, by which time Richard was a full-blown sensation, not only for his eye-popping goals, but for the ferocious fights he often won against opponents sent out to harass him.
There were no goons or "policemen" to protect star players in those days, Richard, Howe and others fought their own battles and the Rocket regularly ran up more than 100 penalty minutes per season.
"Once he was challenged, he'd lose it -- he'd go nuts," said Red Fisher of the Montreal Gazette, who began covering the Rocket in 1955-56.
What really drove Richard crazy was that the referees wouldn't call many of the hacks and slashes from his checkers and the league would often mete out harsher fines to him than the marginal players sent out to put him off his game.
That put him on a collision course with Clarence Campbell.
The first incident was in the 1947 playoffs, when Campbell suspended Richard one game and fined him $250 for stick-swinging incidents with the Leafs' Vic Lynn and (Wild) Bill Ezinicki.
In Quebec, the penalties were met with outrage.
"In sports, star players are usually treated with respect... except if the star is French-Canadian," wrote Andre Ruffiange in the Front Ouvrier.
He accused hockey's English-speaking authorities of trying to "end of the reign of a French-Canadian as king of the game of hockey" by suspending Richard instead of his aggressors.
In 1951, a day after Richard was ejected from a game for complaining about a non-call after having his head ridden into the goalpost by an opponent, the Rocket got into a scuffle with referee Hugh McLean in a hotel lobby and was fined a then-record $500.
In the early 1950s, Richard was at the height of his game and his popularity. People of that era recall neighbourhood rinks filled with young boys, all wearing red, white and blue Canadiens' jerseys with Richard's No. 9 stitched on the back.
He even had a column called Tour de Chapeau (Hat trick) in the weekly Samedi-Dimanche (actually written for him based on interviews) in which, true to form, he pulled no punches.
In 1953, Richard wrote a scathing criticism of Campbell's decision to ban Boom Boom Geoffrion from all games played in New York that season. Geoffrion had broken a Ranger player's jaw with his stick after taking two slashes on the head.
Richard called the suspension a "farce" and Campbell a "dictator" and added that "if Mr. Campbell wants me out of the league for daring to criticize him, let him do it."
Campbell called the column "an attack on my personal integrity and an attack on the office of the NHL president," but there were no fines or suspensions.
Instead, Richard was convinced, under a vague threat from Campbell, to write what his authorized biographer Jean-Marie Pellerin called "the most humiliating retraction in the history of North American sports."
The column is believed to have been written by Canadiens general manager Frank Selke.
Richard agreed to stop writing the column and posted a $1,000 bond with the league a gesture of goodwill against any further controversies.
In his farewell column, which Richard wrote himself, he said he "no longer had freedom of expression. As a hockey player, I must obey my employer's orders. I won't judge their decision. I leave it to my friends to judge for themselves."
"How could one fail to understand the anger felt by French-Canadiens, who identified totally with Maurice Richard," wrote Pellerin. "Once more, the English boot had sent us running."
Detroit coach Jack Adams leapt to Campbell's defence, saying that Richard was becoming "too big for the league" and needed to be "put in his place."
That set the stage for the big one on March 13, 1955.
Richard had a two-point lead over teammate Jean Beliveau in the NHL scoring race and was in position for his first Art Ross Trophy with three games left in the season.
With 10 minutes left in the third period, the Rocket was slashed on the forehead by Boston defenceman Hal Laycoe, opening a deep gash. Richard went ballistic.
Richard chased Laycoe across the ice and punched him, then picked up a stick and whacked the Bruin twice on the back. When linesman Cliff Thompson tried to restrain Richard from behind, the Rocket wheeled about and flattened him with a punch.
On March 16, Campbell ruled that Richard was suspended for the rest of the season and the playoffs, killing Montreal's chances for a Stanley Cup.
Protestors began to show up at the Montreal Forum the next morning, with many wondering if Campbell, who had received death threats, would show up for that night's game against Detroit.
Campbell arrived 10 minutes into the match and took his usual seats with his fiancee.
At the end of the first period, one spectator tried to slap the league president. Some objects were thrown, scuffles broke out and then a tear gas cannister was thrown near Campbell's seats.
The police ordered the building cleared, the game was forfeited to Detroit, and spectators rushed out among protesters holding Vive Richard and Down with Campbell banners.
Fires were lit, windows broken and cars were overturned as riot police forced a mob of thousands eastward down St-Catherine Street.
The riot made headlines across North America. Mayor Jean Drapeau blamed the millions of dollars in damage on Campbell, whose presence at the game "was interpreted as a challenge."
Richard read his appeal for calm the next day and that incident was over, but the anger was never forgotten.
The next year, the Canadiens began their record string of five consecutive Stanley Cups, but the torch was already being passed from Richard to the next great Canadiens star -- Beliveau.
Richard was injured for most of his last three seasons and, overweight and no longer able to accelerate on skates as he once did, was convinced to retire in 1960. He held 15 NHL scoring records.
His regular-season records are now gone, but, testament to his reputation for scoring clutch goals, he still has, or shares, nine playoff records, including his six career playoff overtime goals and his 34 goals scored in Stanley Cup final series.
In retirement, he had a falling out with the Canadiens that lasted most of a decade during which he had a brief stint as coach of the Quebec Nordiques in the defunct World Hockey Association.
He has been a special ambassador for the Canadiens since 1980 and remained a popular figure, but it was when the Forum closed in 1995 that what Richard meant to his fans hit home.
While passing a symbolic torch for Canadiens captain Pierre Turgeon to take to their new building, the Molson Centre, a tearful Rocket received what was surely the longest standing ovation in the city's history -- reverent applause that went on and on.
"He carried the flag for an entire population -- and that's pretty heavy," the Gazette's Red Fisher said. "He felt he had to live up to that responsibility and he did it the way he knew how -- by scoring goals and responding to every challenge on the ice."
Two years ago, Richard came down with an inoperable form of cancer of the abdomen, which has since been held at bay by drugs well enough that he has resumed some public appearances.
The scare moved the Canadiens outgoing president Ronald Corey, who grew up idolizing the Rocket, to push for the creation of the Maurice Richard Trophy for the league's top goal-scorer.
Richard, who would have won it five times had it existed in his day, presented it for the first time in June to Anaheim's Teemu Selanne.
Maurice and Lucille, who died in 1994, had seven children and have 14 grandchildren.

The man who gave the Rocket his nickname

The winters of my childhood were long, long seasons. We lived in three places-- the school, the church, and the skating rink-- but our real life was on the skating rink. Real battles were won on the skating rink. Real strength appeared on the skating rink. The real leaders showed themselves on the skating rink. School was a sort of punishment. Parents always want to punish their children and school is their most natural way of punishing us. However, school was also a quiet place where we could prepare for our next hockey game, lay out our strategies. As for church, we found there the tranquility of God. There we forgot school and dreamed about the next hockey game. Through our daydreams it might happen that we would recite a prayer:

We would ask God to help us play as well as Maurice Richard.

We all wore the same uniform as he, the red white and blue uniform of the Montreal Canadiens, the best hockey team in the world; we all combed our hair in the same style as Maurice Richard, and to keep it in place we used a sort of glue-- a great deal of glue. We laced our skates like Maurice Richard, we taped our sticks like Maurice Richard. We cut all his pictures out of the papers. Truly, we knew everything about him.

On the ice, when the referee blew his whistle the two teams would rush at the puck; we were give Maurice Richards taking it away from five other Maurice Richards; we were ten players, all of us wearing the same blazing enthusiasm the uniform of the Montreal Canadiens. On our backs, we all wore the famous number 9.

One day, my Montreal Canadiens sweater had become too small; then it got torn and had holes in it. My mother said: "If you wear that old sweater people are going to think we're poor!" Then she did what she did whenever we needed new clothes. She started to leaf through the catalogue the Eaton company sent us in the mail every year. My mother was proud. She didn't want to buy our clothes at the general store; the only things that were good enough for us were the latest styles from Eaton's catalogue. My mother didn't like the order forms included with the catalogue; they were written in English and she didn't understand a word of it. To order my hockey sweater, she did as she usually did; she took out her writing paper and wrote in her gentile schoolteacher's hand: "Cher Monsieur Eaton, Would you be kind enough to send me a Canadiens sweater for my son who is ten years old and a little too tall for his age and Docteur Robitaille thinks he's a little too thin? I'm sending you three dollars and please send me what's left if there's anything left. I hope your wrapping will be better than last time."

Monsieur Eaton was quick to answer my mother's letter. Two weeks later we received the sweater. That day I had one of the greatest disappointments of my life! I would even say on that day I experienced a very great sorrow. Instead of the red, white and blue Montreal Canadiens sweater, Monsieur Eaton had sent us a blue and white sweater with a maple leaf on the front.-- the sweater of the Toronto Maple Leafs. I'd always wear the red, white, and blue Montreal Canadiens sweater; all my friends wore the red, white, and blue Montreal Canadiens sweater; never had anyone in my village ever worn the Toronto sweater, never had we even seen a Toronto Maple Leafs sweater. Besides, the Toronto team was regularly trounced by the triumphant Canadiens. With tears in my eyes, I found the strength to say:

"I'll never wear that uniform." "My boy, first you're going to try it on! If you make up your mind about things before you try, my boy, you won't go very far in this life."

My mother had pulled the blue and white Toronto Maple Leafs sweater over my shoulders and already my arms were inside the sleeves. She pulled the sweater down and carefully smothered all creases in the abominable maple leaf on which, right on the middle of my chest, were written the words Toronto Maple Leafs." I wept. "I'll never wear it." Why not? This sweater fits you... like a glove." "Maurice Richard would never put it on his back." "You aren't Maurice Richard. Anyway, it isn't what's on your back that counts, it's what you've got inside your head." "You'll never put it in my head to wear a Toronto Maple Leafs sweater."

My mother sighed in despair and explained to me:

"If you don't keep this sweater which fits you perfectly I'll have to write to Monsieur Eaton and explain that you don't want to wear the Toronto sweater. Monsieur Eaton's an Anglais; he'll be insulted because he likes the Maple Leafs. And if he's insulted do you think he'll be in a hurry to answer us? Spring will be here and you won't have played a single game, just because you didn't want to wear that perfectly nice blue sweater." So, I was obliged to wear the Maple Leafs sweater. When I arrived on the rink, all the Maurice Richards in red, white, and blue came up, one by one, to take a look. When the referee blew his whistle I went to take my usual position. The captain came and warned me I'd better stay on the forward line. A few minutes later, the second line was called; I jumped onto the ice. The Maple Leafs sweater weighed on my shoulders like a mountain. The captain came and told me to wait; he'd need me later, on defence. By the third period, I still hadn't played; one of the defencemen was hit in the nose with a stick and it was bleeding. I jumped on the ice: my moment had come! The referee blew his whistle; he gave me a penalty. He claimed I had jumped on the ice when there were already five players. That was too much! It was unfair! It was persecution! It was because of my blue sweater! I struck my stick against the ice so hard it broke. Relieved, I bent down to pick up the debris. As I straightened up I saw the young vicar, on skates, before me.

"My child," he said, "just because you're wearing a new Toronto Maple Leafs sweater unlike the others, it doesn't mean you're going to make the laws around here. A proper young man doesn't lose his temper. Now take off your skates and go to church and ask God to forgive you."

Wearing my Maple Leafs sweater, I went to church, where I prayed to God; I asked him to send, as quickly as possible, moths that would eat up my Toronto Maple Leafs sweater.

Forum for a true icon

Magical TV moment said it all about Rocket's legendary status