- Yvon Lambert, 76, had surgery on a fractured left femur and hip after a fall at a friend’s home
- The 1979 overtime hero is walking hospital hallways and hopes to be discharged this weekend
- Read below for what Lambert said about the fall and the goal Montreal still replays
Yvon Lambert broke his femur and his hip, and he still calls himself lucky.
The 76-year-old Montreal Canadiens legend fell last Saturday night at a friend’s home, missing a step he never saw and landing hard on his left side. He could not get himself up, and neither could the friends who tried. An ambulance took him to Lakeshore General Hospital, where chief surgeon Dr. Sevan Ortaaslan operated on him Monday afternoon in a procedure that ran more than two hours.
Lambert talked from his hospital bed Friday with NHL.com’s Dave Stubbs about how much worse it could have gone.
“When I look back now, I was kind of lucky to have just fractured the femur and hip. I could have hit my head on the way down. There was no damage to my shoulder or elbow, just a bit to my ankle. Who knows what could have happened?”
His wife, Danielle Caron, spent most of a day returning calls and messages. Mario Tremblay came by. Old teammates drained the battery on Lambert’s phone.
One man called the hospital without even asking to speak to him, just to pass along that Lambert had signed an autograph for him in 1998.
That kind of reach traces back to one night. On May 10, 1979, Lambert took a cross-ice feed from Tremblay and beat Bruins goalie Gilles Gilbert 9:33 into overtime of Game 7, ending the famous “too many men” semifinal and pushing Montreal into a Cup Final it took in five games against the Rangers.
Watch the goal Quebec has been replaying for 47 years:
Guy Lafleur had forced that overtime with a power-play goal at 18:46 of the third, the penalty coming after Don Cherry’s Bruins were caught with a sixth skater on Forum ice.
He scored 206 goals in 683 regular-season games and won four straight Stanley Cups from 1976 to 1979, finishing his career in Buffalo after the Sabres claimed him in the 1981 waiver draft. None of that travels the way the 1979 goal does.
Bell Centre home games still bring him out as an unofficial team ambassador, and fans stop him to say where they were when that puck went in. Catch him holding court during Montreal’s playoff run last spring:
A trip is gone because of the fall. Lambert and Caron were booked on a Norway cruise from Sept. 12-24, where he was set to coach four recreational games while the boat toured the fjords. He expects a stay at a rehabilitation facility instead.
In uniform he played through a punctured shin pad, roughly 300 stitches and years of Denis Potvin cross-checks, and he says none of it hurt like this. Even so, he is already sizing up the nine steps at his front door.
“When I go home, there are only nine steps to the house. I’ll stay on the ground floor. We’ll see how strong Danielle is. And this morning, I walked down the hallway.”
