About that picture of Lester Patrick in goal

A well-known, oft-reprinted photo shows Lester Patrick in a New York Rangers sweater, wearing pads, and holding a goalie stick, as he did during his legendary emergency stint in the 1928 Stanley Cup playoffs.

This photo was staged sometime after the event, maybe even years later. No one was pretending otherwise. But something else was going on that is hard to figure out. As

longtime Rangers PR man John Halligan wrote in The Official National Hockey League 75th Anniversary Commemorative Book (1991): “As startling an achievement as Lester Patrick’s was, there are no still photographs of this game.” (No moving ones either.) “Two posed shots exist, but both were taken after the fact.”

Stan Fischler added in New York Rangers Greatest Moments and Players (2015), “Many experts believe [one of the photos] is a phony, with Patrick’s head superimposed on that of another goalie.”

Indeed, one version was clearly doctored in pre-Photoshop times. I think the first one is legitimate, but I don’t know where, when, or by whom it was taken. Getty Images claims it’s from 1939 or 1940, but I think that’s a bit too late.

The earliest evidence I can find of either photo’s existence, oddly enough, is a cartoon that appears to be based on one of them, seen below, by Alan Maver in the Chicago Daily Worker of Nov. 18, 1936. Lester’s expression looks a little different, but his pose is identical.

In what I believe to be the original photo, Lester is standing against the boards in an unidentified rink, staring wide-eyed at the camera, with his mouth slightly open.

In the doctored version, he’s in front of a net and his mouth is closed. It’s not just an alternate shot from the same photo shoot, because he in the exact same pose. Not just similar, but precisely the same. His body has been cut out and pasted on a different background. For some reason, his head has been replaced with a different portrait, and a little bit has been cut out below his right arm, making him appear slimmer.

A clue to who may have created this version, and perhaps the original as well, is on the back of an original print for sale on eBay. It’s stamped Turofsky, Toronto. The Turofsky brothers, Lou and Nat, were prominent sports photographers. (This particular copy of the photo is doctored even more heavily because a grease pencil has been used to outline Lester’s pads and gloves, for better newspaper reproduction.)

The doctored version also appeared on the back cover of the Rangers program for Lester Patrick Night on Dec. 3, 1947, and in general seems to have been reproduced much more often than what I deem the original. The original, though, inspired various artistic renditions, including Lester’s 1960-61 card in the Topps’ All-Time Greats series and the 1983 Cartophilum postcard set, seen below.