Remembering George Robertson (Part One)

Winnipeg's George Robertson was the hero in the 1946 Memorial Cup final as he scored twice in Game 7 to lead the Winnipeg Monarchs to victory.

This is part one of a three-part series on George Robertson, a former Montreal Canadiens forward with a very interesting tale. Enjoy!

The late George Robertson is perhaps the most fascinating former player that I’ve ever interviewed. A highly touted prospect out of juniors after scoring the 1946 Memorial Cup winning goal, Robertson took over Toe Blake’s left-wing position after he retired on the famous “Punch Line” playing with none other than the great Maurice “Rocket” Richard and Elmer Lach. Robertson was a player as you’ll read who liked to have a good time off the ice, and likely because of that, his career in the National Hockey League was short-lived. If trying to compare him to the modern game, I would consider him to be a 1940’s version of a “draft-bust” with a particularly interesting story.

As a member of the Society for International Hockey Research (SIHR), I get to go through their awesome database of old hockey players on a daily basis. I remember first finding out who George Robertson was when browsing a list of the oldest former NHL players that are still alive. I was looking to see if I had missed anyone from Manitoba that I would like to chat with and low and behold I saw that a George Robertson of Winnipeg had played 30 games for the Montreal Canadiens in 1948-49.

The problem was going to be finding him because there was no information on where he lived these days. All it showed was that he was born in 1927 and is still alive at 91 years old. I tried doing some digging on the internet but found nothing, so I reached out to some contacts at the Manitoba Hockey Hall of Fame who I thought would hopefully put me in the right direction.

I ended up speaking with a Hall of Fame board member who passed on George’s phone number. He relayed that Robertson is “very standoffish” and somewhat of a “grumpy old man.” He had unsuccessfully tried to get George to come to downtown Winnipeg for an interview on camera for the Manitoba Hockey Hall of Fame’s Oral History Project a few years ago and George said something along the lines of why they can’t just film it in his garage instead.

With this in the back of my mind, I called up Mr. Robertson thinking he might just shut me down quickly because as I’ve experienced, some people don’t necessarily enjoy talking about their old hockey days and you have to respect that. However, anything perceived as standoffish was quickly squashed when I told him how willing I was to come down to his place and talk to him. He seemed open to it and so we planned for an afternoon a few days later. I called him the day of and he said to come on over, so I quickly drove the thirty minutes to his place just north of the city in East St. Paul on Henderson Highway (right on the Red River). I knocked on the door and he greeted me with a firm handshake, “Nice to meet you, I’m George Robertson.”