AFSCME 3357-HOF'S BLOG

The History of Goalie Masks

I was talking to some guys, and one of them said that hockey goalie face masks didn't become common until the 1960s. No way, I said. A quick Google search - then - well, I'll be darned.

A guy named Clint Benedict experimented with a homemade mask in 1930,but quickly gave it up. Nothing new until a guy named Plante came along in 1959.

Benedict' experiment was not recorded as the first goalie mask in history. That moment came nearly thirty years later on November 1, 1959 after New York Ranger Andy Bathgate hit Montreal Canadien goalie Jacques Plante with a shot off the face. Plante would leave the game to get stitched up and later return wearing a mask he had made himself for practices. Plante won the game. This was the birth of the goalie mask. Plante was ridiculed for wearing this mask. Goaltenders were considered cowards to even think of wearing one, but Plante would often say "If you jump from an airplane without a parachute, is that considered an act of bravery?" In the time between Clint Benedict's experiment and Jacques Plante first putting on his mask, Benedict would encounter a mask that actually worked, worn by an unheralded young Canadian.

When Bendict's playing career was over, he turned to coaching and managing a team from the British Ice Hockey League named the Wembley Lions around 1934. There he encountered a young goalie from Winnipeg named Roy Mosgrove. Mosgrove had to wear glasses all the time. And so, in Winnipeg and then in England, Mosgrove donned a wire cage worn by baseball catchers. And it worked again thirty years later when a young goalie named Tony Esposito in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, could not play goal without glasses and borrowed the same piece of equipment from the sandlot. It would take decades for the players and the tinkerers to see the wisdom of Roy Mosgrove, and incorporate the wire cage with the fibreglass mask of Jacques Plante.

Are you telling me that it took until 1959 for some genius goalie to try a baseball catcher's mask? For crying out loud! I guess that's whey there aren't many goalies on the Nobel prize winners' list.


The idea was dropped until 1959History of Goalie Masks