Bernie Parent was already a Flyers legend when he retired from the NHL in 1979. It's the rest of his life that made him a Philadelphia legend.
The Hall of Fame goaltender, who won consecutive Stanley Cups with the Flyers in 1974 and '75, died Sunday at age 80. The Montreal native spent a decade with the Flyers, then stuck around the Philadelphia area for the rest of his life; he was a ubiquitous presence at Flyers events, on local TV, at charity auctions, down the shore, et cetera. Shoot a hockey puck anywhere in the Philadelphia area over the last 45 years and you might’ve hit Bernie Parent.
To younger fans, Parent is best known as an avuncular, jovial booster of local sports and local causes. But his goaltending for the Flyers in the 1970s was what won the team two Cups, the only Philly team to go back-to-back in the last 75 years. The Flyers were still an expansion squad in a city so hockey-unaware that newspapers had to print the rules of the game when the franchise launched. “The two years that we won the Stanley Cup,” Bobby Clarke said yesterday, “he was the only member of that team that we could not have been without if we were going to win.”
Parent was born in Montreal in 1945. He took to hockey from a young age, with his older brothers shooting tennis balls at him in the backyard. “Once I stopped the first shot that settled it,” he said. “The challenge to make a save was always there. It was just in me.” He said he used to hide in the bushes to try to spot legendary Canadiens goalie Jacques Plante, who lived next to Parent’s sister. His junior career ended with a Memorial Cup win in 1965; Parent was named first star in the deciding game.
He’d already been drafted by the Boston Bruins, and began playing for them that same year. “I like the boy’s attitude,” Bruins GM Hap Emms said after Parent’s third game. “If Parent stands up under fire, Boston’s goalie problem will be solved for a long time.”
But Boston left him unprotected in the expansion draft two years later, and Parent became the original Flyer. The team took him in the first round of the 1967 NHL Expansion Draft. When selected, Parent was busy having a 17-pound pike mounted on his wall. “I caught it on a fishing trip last week,” he said. “Then I went over to the driving range where I heard on the radio that I was headed for Philadelphia.”
The roof blew off of the Spectrum in 1968; this is not a metaphor. In his first season in Philadelphia Parent split duties with Doug Favell, also acquired from Boston in the draft, and became the team’s top goaltender the following year. Looking for offensive help, the team traded him to the Maple Leafs for Rick MacLeish during the 1971 season. “It took a lot of soul searching by our entire organization to make this deal,” Flyers GM Keith Allen said.
Parent would find his way back to Philly as a more well-rounded netminder after spending time with his idol, Plante, in Toronto. The next year, Parent became the first player to defect to the new World Hockey Association, signing with the Miami Screaming Eagles before season’s end. Miami never ended up icing a team, and so Parent played for the Philadelphia Blazers. “He comes back to Philadelphia as one of the most popular players ever to take the ice here,” The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote.
He quit the Blazers one game into 1973 WHA playoffs after he said he didn’t get a $600,000 bonus he had been promised. Toronto traded his NHL rights to Philadelphia for Doug Favell, and Parent would spend the rest of his career in orange and black. He took a pay cut to return to the Flyers. “He didn't hold a gun at our head,” a Flyers spokesman said. “He wanted to come here. The bargaining was not that tough.”
There was a popular bumper sticker in the area: “Only the Lord Saves More Than Bernie Parent.” One man who had it on his car was Bernie Parent, the Inquirer reported in a March 1974 story about the decor in his home. “I like to pay taxes,” he told the paper when asked why he chose to live in Cherry Hill. He’d keep paying New Jersey taxes the rest of his life, eventually living in Wildwood Crest most of the year—when he wasn’t on his 45-foot yacht, The French Connection.
While the Inquirer wrote about his red and green shag carpeting, Parent was busy having one of the great goaltending seasons. He won the Vezina Trophy as the league’s best goalie and finished second in MVP voting, finishing the season with a 1.89 GAA over 73 games. In the playoffs he won the Conn Smythe Trophy with a .933 save percentage. "Parent robbed us," the Rangers' Pete Stemkowski said after the Flyers eliminated them from the playoffs. He’d shut out the Bruins 1-0 in the deciding game to give the Flyers their first title. Years later he’d tell Philadelphia magazine he was watching the clock in the final moments and didn’t even see Bobby Orr take a desperation shot with seconds left. “I didn’t know where the puck was, man!” he said. “If his shot is on net, it’s a goal. Who knows what happens then. Maybe we don’t win a championship. It just shows you how the universe works—you believe, you believe, you believe!”
Parent outdid himself the following season. He won the Conn Smythe again with four shutouts in just 10 games, including a 2-0 win over the Sabres in the Cup-clinching game. “He was beautiful,” Clarke said.
Parent played with the Flyers until 1979, reaching another Cup final in 1976. His career was ended by a freak accident in which the blade of teammate Jim Watson’s stick pierced Parent’s eye, blinding him. He spent two weeks in the hospital and eventually regained his sight. “I had the nurses grab my nuts, and I had to guess the right name,” he said. “One day my ex grabbed my nuts and I said the wrong name. That’s how the light came back!”
He coached a bit after retirement, then bounced around various part-time consulting jobs while hunting and fishing in his spare time. He split from his first wife in the 1990s and eventually got a job at Commerce, a now-defunct South Jersey bank whose gimmick was offering free coin counting.
Parent popped up basically everywhere and was not afraid to talk about anything to anyone. He had what was basically a sex column; “Unleash your hidden wolf on Valentine’s Day,” was one headline. In 2015 he went on local TV to talk about his gynecomastia. “He says when he looks in the mirror now he says, ‘Hello baby,’” CBS 3 reported. In 2016 he married Gini Gramaglia, with his granddaughter later saying that the marriage led Parent to drift away from his kids and grandkids. He did begin skipping Flyers events and doing more paid signings; his social media was clearly no longer written by him.
But he was still around. He was always around. He was at every Philly sports-related event. He was at Wing Bowl; he threw out a first pitch at the 2022 World Series; he was frequently spotted down the shore. Bernie Parent was born in Montreal, but he was a Philadelphian by choice.
