This is the first one. One email, every weekend: the week's pieces, the Overtime before it goes on the site, and what we cut and why. The week's piece is Paul Henderson, and the reason it is here is that the man who scored the goal of the century once took a two-way contract with the Atlanta Flames for a trainer's salary and a two-hour commute, so his daughters could stay in their school. Then he said no to Calgary. Twice. The Overtime below is the part of that story the site does not have yet. You have it first.

This week

Paul Henderson's Escape from Canada (The Scrapbook, Riley Quinn)
This week in 1979 he signed with Atlanta. Thirty games, one perfect night at Maple Leaf Gardens, and a golf card in the Calgary Herald that lists him as "Paul Henderson of Calgary Flames," the only place he was ever ours in print.

Cole Reschny Is the Youngest Captain in North Dakota History. He Is 19. (Rinkside Dispatch, Taylor Brooks)
North Dakota's players voted on Wednesday and picked a sophomore. The Flames' 2025 first-rounder is the first underclassman to wear the C at UND since Dave Hakstol in 1990-91.

Ken King's Three-Thirds Big Deal (The Scrapbook, Riley Quinn)
Nine years ago this week, Mayor Nenshi put three doors to a new arena on the table with $185 million behind each, supposedly. Ken King looked behind all three and walked. This one already has its Overtime on the site, the political trail, if you missed it.

Overtime: Paul Henderson's Escape from Canada

This section appears on the site on Tuesday, September 22. You are reading it first.

The other winger

The story ends on a golf card. What follows is for readers who want to know how the two wingers from the 1972 line left the game in the same season, and what Henderson said he was looking for. Every line here is from the Gazette of December 29, 1979, or the Herald of February 24, 1981, and the sourcing is in our fact-check.

The same season. When the Herald reported Henderson's retirement, Eric Duhatschek put one more name in the story. Ron Ellis, the other winger on the Clarke line in Moscow, "also retired involuntarily this season, in a shabby ceremony orchestrated by team owner Harold Ballard and general manager Punch Imlach. Ellis found out Toronto was buying out his contract for the remainder of the season when the nameplate over his locker was missing one morning." So the two wingers who flanked Bobby Clarke in September 1972 went out in the same season, one because his league folded under him in Alabama, the other because his nameplate was gone in Toronto. The Herald's word for Henderson's exit was "quietly." Ellis did not get that.

Why Toronto. The piece says he was sick of being a hero. The Gazette's version has more in it. After the Summit Series, Wayne Parrish wrote, "by season's end, he had just 18 goals and a year later when his contract with the Maple Leafs expired, he jumped to Bassett's Toronto Toros." Henderson's own accounting of the WHA years is one sentence long. "It was worth it, because it eventually got me out of Toronto."

What he was looking for. This is the part of the 1979 interview that never makes the this-day-in-history pages. "All I could feel was this tremendous restlessness within me," he told Parrish. "I was searching for something. I had healthy kids, a lovely wife, a nice home, and yet I knew something was missing in my life. There was no quietness." His answer to what changed was one word. "God," he explains. "I became a Christian in 1975. I decided to give my life to the Lord. Our whole family has grown so much in the last three years."

Moby Dick. He knew how it looked from Canada, and he laughed about it. "Paul Henderson in Birmingham, Georgia?" he laughs. "You might as well have said I was Moby Dick." That is how the Gazette printed it. Birmingham is in Alabama, and was in 1979. We have left the line as it ran, because a Montreal paper putting Birmingham in the wrong state is its own small proof of how far off the map he had gone.

What was next. In December 1979 the Gazette had his plan: "He hopes to work in the ministry once he obtains his green card, but for now he'll continue playing with the Bulls, an old man in a young men's league." Fourteen months later the Herald had the other branch of it: "Should the CHL reinstate the Bulls' franchise next year, still a possibility at this point, Henderson then would consider getting involved in some non-playing capacity. If it does not, Henderson probably will return to Canada and buy a farm."

We will leave him there, in February 1981, with the two plans on the table, because that is where the two newspapers leave him. What he did with the rest of his life is a better-known story than the one above, and it is not the Scrapbook's to retell. The page was always about the thirty games, and the golf card, and a man who kept saying no to Calgary for the right reasons.

What we cut, and why

The day. Every this-day-in-hockey page puts the signing on September 17, 1979, and every one of them is copying the same unsourced table. We went looking for something from the time. The Calgary Herald's transactions column for that Monday has Edmonton signing a kid named Mark Messier and Mike Bossy's new deal with the Islanders. It does not have Paul Henderson. He is not among the two players Atlanta signed on September 7 and not among the 19 sent to Birmingham on September 24, so the month is a matter of record and the day is tradition. The piece says September 1979 and never the 17th. Two other things stayed out for the same reason: a December 1979 Herald item about his agent that we found in the index and did not open, and a link between Henderson and Floyd Smith, the Leafs coach whose car accident put Dick Duff behind the bench the night Henderson scored twice at the Gardens, which we could not source in time.

How the cover got made

The editor built the reference frame himself: the moving truck from behind, the framed photograph facing out, the Alabama plate, the sign. Getting it from a photograph into the Scrapbook's comic look took five failed attempts in one day (a scratched plate, a sky that came back as pegboard, a version that redrew the whole scene) before a one-paragraph instruction to "redraw the first image in the art style of the second" landed it with the composition untouched. The glow on the photograph came back as a neon tube and was crushed by script; the embers were rolled by hand.

Coming up

Tuesday, September 22: Morgan Frost Was the Other Guy in the Trade. He Led Calgary in Goals. (Roster Report, Taylor Brooks.) Philadelphia moved a centre it had stopped waiting on. Calgary played him down the middle, watched him win faceoffs, and then signed him themselves.

Also Tuesday: the Henderson Overtime goes on the site.

From the archive

Tim Hunter's Atlanta Ex: the other Atlanta story on the site. Atlanta sold Rick Bowness for cash; eight years later he was in a headset on the Winnipeg bench in Calgary, throwing a right hand at a Flame.