Ron Duguay, Rangers favourite with the flowing hair, dies at 69
The forward played 12 NHL seasons, eight of them in New York, and was part of the Rangers team that reached the 1979 Stanley Cup Final.
Ron Duguay, the long-haired forward who became one of the most popular New York Rangers of his era, died Thursday. He was 69.
Duguay had been diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. He told the New York Post it started in the colon and that he had fought it for more than a year, losing his appendix and gallbladder along the way.
The Rangers called him "one of the most popular players in franchise history" in a statement, and said his skating style, "with his hair flowing as he moved down the ice," won him the admiration of New Yorkers.
Duguay played eight seasons in New York (1977-83 and 1986-88) and was on the team that reached the 1979 Stanley Cup Final, a five-game loss to the Montreal Canadiens. That club upset the top-seeded New York Islanders in six games in the semifinals. Duguay skated without a helmet, and the curly hair that streamed behind him made him famous. He appeared in a 1979 Sasson jeans commercial with Phil Esposito, Dave Maloney and Anders Hedberg.
With the Rangers, Detroit Red Wings, Los Angeles Kings and Pittsburgh Penguins, he had 620 regular-season points (274 goals, 346 assists). He added 53 points (31 goals, 22 assists) in 89 playoff games.
On April 6, 1980, he scored nine seconds into an 8-3 win over the Flyers in Philadelphia, tying a Rangers record for the fastest goal to start a game shared by Fred Cook and Jean Ratelle. The Rangers took him in the first round (No. 13) of the 1977 NHL Draft, and he went straight from junior hockey in his hometown of Sudbury to the NHL.
He was traded to Detroit in June 1983, returned to the Rangers in a January 1987 trade with Pittsburgh, and was sent to Los Angeles in February 1988. After his playing career he spent 12 years as a Rangers analyst on MSG Network.
Longtime hockey writer Stan Fischler, "The Hockey Maven," remembered Duguay this week for an MSG Networks feature that sent the two of them shopping at a store just south of Chambers Street, where Duguay put him at ease and picked out an outfit for him that included a brown leather jacket. Fischler still has the jacket and wore it for a photo taken this week.
