In Winnipeg, we have a 32-year-old nephew with Special Olympics credentials in curling and snowshoeing. Austin doesn’t play hockey, but he knows about Billy Mosienko, the only National Hockey League player ever to score three goals in 21 seconds.
Every week, Austin is a five-pin bowler at Billy Mosienko Bowling. Every week, he sees the huge mural on the building’s south wall, an artistic replica of perhaps hockey’s most memorable post-game photograph: Mosienko and the three pucks he used to score hockey’s quickest hat trick. The photo’s a fixture at the Hockey Hall of Fame.
So is the record.
Monday will be the 74th anniversary of Mosienko’s quick trick. If the record doesn’t stand another 74 years, it will be shocking. Players have scored two goals in four seconds—and five and six—but three in 21 is always beyond reach. Some shifts don’t last that long today.
Mosienko broke the record set by Carl Liscombe of Detroit—by 101 seconds, almost five times faster. Hockey’s greatest goal scorers never came that close: Wayne Gretzky (2:18), Rocket Richard (2:21) and Alexander Ovechkin (4:24). Only one other player ever scored three in less than a minute: Montreal’s Jean Beliveau in 1955, and he needed twice as long to do it—44 seconds. This century, just two players have three goals in under two minutes. Only one team ever beat Mosienko: the Boston Bruins scored three in 20 seconds, by Johnny Bucyk, Ed Westfall and Ted Green.
On the night of March 23, 1952, Mosienko did that himself. While an established goal scorer, he was an unlikely super star, one of 14 children whose father fed all those mouths from being a boilermaker for the CPR. He was small, at 5’8” and 165 pounds, with quick, choppy-yet-smooth strides. Mosienko was closing in on what became his second 30-goal season in an era when scoring 20 made for a great year. And yet, he had a knack for scoring in bursts—five years earlier, he scored twice in seven seconds.
The best player on the NHL’s worst team, Mosienko was the right-winger for Chicago’s famous Pony Line, with Max and Doug Bentley before the brothers were traded. On March 23, his linemates at Madison Square Garden were Gus Bodnar and George Gee. It was the final night of the season. Four minutes into the third period, New York led 6-2.
Mosienko quickly changed that. In 21 seconds, he put New York goalie Lorne Anderson, playing the last of his three NHL games, in the record books. He put Bodnar in it, too, for the three fastest assists ever, still the record. And he was two inches away from four goals in 66 seconds when after deking Anderson, he slid the puck two inches outside the post.
A hockey writer friend of mine, Arv Olson, did something I’d always wished I’d done. Three decades after that night, he interviewed Mosienko. “The record has been good for business,” he told Arv. “It’s kept my name alive all these years. I hope it’s one record that stays in the book.”
Also on the wall at Billy Mosienko Bowling, maybe as a heritage site for future generations of Austins.
