Stéphane Richer Autograph Card

The Tampa Bay Lightning are still on top of the Atlantic division, so that's one reason to showcase this card; but last week was also Mental Illness Awareness week, which has kind of became a Bell publicity stunt in the last couple of years, but whatever helps, I guess.

But in the last few years, retired hockey player Stéphane Richer has also had a great impact, starting with a revealing interview with TSN's Michael Landsberg, but also opening up to various newspapers, getting the word out.

To this day, Richer remains the last member of the Montréal Canadiens to have scored 50 goals in a single season (a feat he achieved both in 1987-88 and 1989-90), and the two-time Stanley Cup winner (Habs, 1986, and New Jersey Devils, 1995, when he finished second leading scorer in the playoffs), and his extremely accurate and heavy 100-mph slap shot combined with speed and strength always seemed like he could have ended up in the Hall Of Fame, though his statistics ended up falling short: 421 goals and 819 points in 1054 regular-season games, and 54 goals and 98 points in 134 postseason games. He does rank 39th of all-time in game-winning goals, and his two 50-goal seasons ranked him just outside the league's top-5 those years.

But the reason why he seemed disinterested are clear and out in the open now: he battled extreme depression. Four days after his Cup parade in New Jersey, he attempted to kill himself by driving at top speed in his Porsche 911 on a highway with his lights out, hoping a missed curb would end his days.

In regards to his hockey career - the stats of which are two paragraphs ahead, a very successful one for almost anyone - he had this to say: "I would have loved to have been able to play just a few games with no doubt in my mind (that) I could be a good hockey player. I always had that doubt, that thing about every game, telling yourself (that) day, ''I'm still good''. I would have loved to see just one year, or six months, whatever it is, (that there were) no problems, where I don't think about anything (and) just play the game. How good could I have been?" That's food for thought.

The thing about depression is that there's still a stigma attached to it, it's still viewed as a ''weakness'' more than an ''illness', but like Landsberg said: "This is not leaving unless you push it away, unless you proactively do something to get rid of it. And that always starts with one thing: sharing. If you don't tell anyone else about this ever, you will never get better and tomorrow will never be better than today. So the hope is that the more you share, the more support you will have, the more people that will come to you with treatment options and the less isolated you will feel."

And that's true of a lot of things in Life. The world isn't that great a place for a regular schmuck, full of wars, bad people, crooks, thieves (in the street or in public office); you buy a car to get to your job that barely pays enough for you to pay for the car, the house you're never in and the food that sustains you just enough to keep the cycle going. But when all those schmucks decide to band together, they might realize they're the majority, and that might affect change.

Same thing with women, who have lost a decent chunk of headway and ''rights'' in the past two decades, yet there's more of them (they make up 52% of the population), they're smarter (they make up 75% of university students in many places), and they're ready to take over from the dinosaurs who can barely hold their positions by making the most rules changes they can before the inevitable happens.

Any group will realize when just opening up about their experience that they are far from alone, and in fact might be a majority. We just live in a ''divide-and-conquer'' world that somehow put it in our brains to not band up or ask for help.

That was my two cents. I hope I didn't alienate too may fine folks.

But back to the man responsible for taking me on that train of though, Stéphane Richer, featured here with the Lightning's white (then-home) uniform:

It's the signed insert (and Gold variant) of card #133 from In The Game's 1998-99 Be A Player set, featuring a black-sharpied autograph with his jersey number (44) tagged at the end. The team named him alternate captain to mentor a young Vincent Lecavalier, grooming their first-overall pick to become the face of the franchise.

Stéphane Richer: 4 Autographed Cards

I sent Stéphane Richer these four cards and a fan letter on October 18th, care of the golf club where he's the resident professional, and got 4/4 back today (November 1st), signed in blue sharpie, with his jersey number (#44) added. Less than two weeks, outside of golf season, and with Richer making three public appearances in that span for charity causes. Talk about a quick turnaround!

Stéphane Richer played parts of two seasons of major junior hockey with the Granby Bisons before turning pro, where he would meet a goalie he would see a lot of in the next few years, Patrick Roy. They would make the jump to the AHL together in 1984-85, winning the Calder Cup with the Sherbrooke Canadiens and the Stanley Cup the following season with the Montréal Canadiens. For the next four seasons, the Habs would be contenders for the President' Trophy during the regular season and would make another Stanley Cup Finals appearance in 1989, where they lost to the Calgary Flames.

But my defining ''Richer moment'' came during training camp prior to the 1987-88 season, when he candidly replied to a reporter's question about his objective for the season with these words: ''I'm going to try to score 50 goals''. The nerve, coming off a sophomore season that saw him score 20 (in 57 games), after a 21-goal rookie campaign (in 65 games)! And yet, he was on pace for most of the season, despite missing 8 games to injury, when came the last game of the season - and he was three goals short. Of course, he scored a hat trick, becoming the first player since Guy Lafleur's heyday to score 50 goals in a single season for the Habs, a feat he would repeat - and surpass - two seasons later, when he scored 51.

No other Canadiens player has scored 50 in a single season since. As a matter of fact, only Vincent Damphousse has managed to reach 40, in 1993-94.

After a ''disappointing'' 31-goal season in 1990-91, he was traded to the New Jersey Devils with Tom Chorske for their captain, Kirk Muller, and backup goalie Roland Melanson, a trade that may have benefitted both teams but sent shockwaves in both teams. Richer would win the Cup with the Devils in 1995, while the Habs won it in 1993.

During his first three seasons with the Devils, Richer scored 29, 38 and 36 goals respectively and, considering their style of play, lets one believe he would have scored at least 10 more per season had he played on another team. And as the decade was ending and Réjean Houle took command of the Canadiens, Richer was brought back to bring the team back to to glory with the absence of Roy - a feat which proved impossible to achieve. Midway through the second season of his Second Coming, he was shipped the the Tampa Bay Lightning with Darcy Tucker and David Wilkie in exchange for ''enforcer'' Mick Vukota, Patrick Poulin and Igor Ulanov, ironically weakening the team even more.

It was all downhill from there - both for the Habs and Richer, who disappeared from my radar and went on to play stints with the St. Louis Blues, Pittsburgh Penguins and the Devils again; he even played 2 games with the IHL's Detroit Vipers in 1999-2000. He retired from pro hockey after the 2001-02 season, but briefly made an appearance in semi-pro play in 2004-05 for the Sorel-Tracy Mission, with whom he tallied 2 goals and 6 assists in 8 games while trying not to kill anyone with his world-renowned powerful slap shot.

Blessed with size and strength beyond that of an athlete from his generation, Richer could have been anything he wanted: sure, he had terrific hockey skills, as his exploits will attest to, and he's now a golf pro - but back in his playing days, he was also a heck of a baseball/softball player, which is what he was doing when he was famously quoted as saying, during the 1994-95 lock-out: ''I don't understand why we're not playing hockey. Let's get a deal done and get back on the ice where we belong. We should be playing hockey.'' And that's all he wanted, really: not the cash, not the attention, just to play.

The card on the top-left was the first card I fell on when I opened my first pack of Topps' 1987-88 O-Pee-Chee cards; it's card #233 in the set, and sees him sporting a thin mustache (for the times), while he had cut it off by the time the card on the top-right came out, from the 1989-90 Topps set (card #153). Notice how both cards sport the trademark Topps/OPC ''uneven borders'' where the card isn't centered properly.

The card on the bottom-left is from the 1992-93 Pro Set collection (card #93) and is the only card I own of that year's Pro Set output that isn't a Parkhurst, so I probably traded for it. It has Richer wearing the Devils' old jersey with the green lines and patches on the shoulder, while the card bottom-right has the more modern one where the green has been replaced by black. That one is a thick card with a foil contour from Pinnacle Brands' 1996-97 Pinnacle Summit (card #99); I'd never seen those cards before last year, when I purchased a whole box of them. Notice the Habs' logo on the bottom: he'd been traded back to the Habs that summer for Lyle Odelein.