The Greatest Moment

Chances are you’ve never had your face immortalized on a postage stamp or been invited to a private reception with the Queen. But LeaderImpact Group’s Paul Henderson has.

His performance at the 1972 Summit Series – the first-ever hockey showdown between the Soviet Union and Canada’s best NHL players – has become the stuff of legends.

Canada was down three games to one, with the one game tied, when Henderson scored two game-winning goals to tie the series. But it was his performance in Game 8, when he leapt over the boards in the final seconds of play to bang in one more that forever etched him into the Canadian consciousness.

More than 12 million people were watching on September 28, 1972 when Henderson restored Canada’s faith in hockey – two million more than watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. Following the game, Henderson’s face was on the front page of every newspaper in the country. The Toronto Sun even renamed their paper The Hender-Sun for a day.

Without a doubt, it was one of the finest moments in the history of Canadian sports.

”I came back to Canada and I was the toast of the town,” Henderson recalls. “It was incredible. They gave me a car. They gave me golf clubs. I went on all kinds of television programs. Everybody in the world wanted my autograph. My kids couldn’t go to McDonald’s without being recognized. My friends would say to me, ‘You know, Henderson, you’re one of the luckiest guys in the world.’”

But Henderson didn’t feel lucky. He felt confused. If success was supposed to bring him happiness, why didn’t he feel happy?

A new goal
Henderson had been dreaming of playing professional hockey since he was in grade five. He’d already played in the NHL for 8 years, and now he was the hero of a nation. He had everything he could want, and yet, somehow it wasn’t enough.

‘Deep down there was this restlessness,” he recalls.

When the NHL season resumed, Paul’s inner turmoil mounted and his disagreements with Maple Leaf’s owner, Harold Ballard, did nothing to improve the situation.

Frustrated, he began turning to alcohol for comfort.

”One night I came home and I was just ripped,” he remembers. ”My wife was a great gal but she’d had enough. She was standing at the top of the stairs with fire coming out of her eyes when I came home. She frightened me so bad, I fell down the stairs. She was 12 inches away from me when she told me to get up and stop acting like a fool.”

”Later when I got into the shower, I thought about what she said,” he continues.”I felt like a whipped dog. I’d never felt dumber or more stupid than that night. It was the last time I ever got drunk.”

The afterlife
Not long afterward, Henderson met one of those religious guys – a so-called born again-er. ”He started to ask questions that got me thinking,” Henderson says. ”Things like, ‘Paul, if you died tonight, do you know where you’d spend eternity?”’ But Paul Henderson wasn’t into dying. He was 28-years-old, after all. Still, he couldn’t stop thinking about what the man had said.

”I really thought that Christianity was for people who couldn’t cut it,” he says. ”I was really negative toward him, but then I started to ask my wife, ‘Do you think there’s anything after this?”’

Intrigued, Henderson started reading the Bible and asking questions. It was a spiritual quest that continued for two and a half years.

”I got to a point where I wanted to become a Christian and I couldn’t do it,” he recalls. ”What would the Toronto Maple Leafs say? What would the guys in my golf and country club say?”

But in March 1975, Paul finally found the courage to give Jesus a shot. There were no cameras there to record the action. No play-by-play commentators. No cheering fans. It was just Paul and Jesus.

Nevertheless, it was a moment that forever changed his life.

”Scoring that goal in Russia, from an athlete’s standpoint, was the greatest thing that ever happened to me,” says Henderson. ”But in comparison to having the Lord as my Saviour and walking for Him, even that pales in comparison.”