[DoodleBob]

Hextall was a hate him/love him guy, a sort of Dave Schultz in the crease. I wonder if some of it was that he effectively replaced the late (and loved) Pelle Lindbergh...I was at a 5-0 shutout of Lindbergh's and the Spectrum crowed modified the "Bern-eee" chant to become "Pell-eee".

You can file this under "unconfirmed but from a reputable source hearsay." In the late 1980s I was working near Philadelphia. A colleague told me about a customer call he made to a junk yard (it's a long story). The junk yard owner motioned to my colleague to come look at a wreck. The owner said it was Lindbergh's Porsche...

The owner showed my collegue the ignition, and said it was in the off position. The word on the street was that Pelle's girlfriend got scared with his drunk driving, and turned off the ignition. She thought that would only turn off the engine but didn't know it would also cause the steering wheel to lock up. If true, then the skid marks weren't simply a reflection of a drunk Pelle losing control (though the 0.24 BAL didn't help) but because he couldn't steer away from the wall.

Just now, as I was searching for a picture of Pelle's Porsche, I found this story that is almost, word-for-word, what my colleague said almost 30 years ago.

[airborne]

Wow! Pelle was going to be a great goalie. A terrible loss for hockey.

[major_gaff]

I was stationed at NAS Whidbey Island in Puget Sound when I saw that Pelle had died in the USA Today at the PX
news stand, so I wasn't there for it. I had been in the Marines for a couple of years at that point so the last Flyers
goalie that I had seen down at the Spectrum was Bob Froese...From what I had seen Lindbergh had great
potential...Such a waste