Stan Mikita, 78, Dies; Hockey Hall of Famer Lifted Blackhawks

Stan Mikita, the Chicago Blackhawks’ undersized but smooth-skating and feisty center who teamed with his fellow Hall of Famer Bobby Hull in the 1960s in reviving a long-floundering franchise while popularizing the curved hockey sticks that changed the game, died on Tuesday. He was 78.

The Mikita family announced his death through the Blackhawks organization. No other details were given. The family announced in January 2015 that he was believed to have the progressive brain disease Lewy body dementia.

Although he grew up in Canada, Mikita was a native of Czechoslovakia — the first to play in the NHL. He spent his entire 22-season career with the Blackhawks and set still-standing team records for career assists, points and games played. His 541 goals are second in the team’s history, behind Hull.

A nine-time All-Star, he was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1983.

“Pound for pound, Stan Mikita was one of the greatest players of all time,” Hull was quoted as saying in “Heart of the Blackhawks” (2013), a biography of Chicago’s Hall of Fame defenseman Pierre Pilote, by L. Waxy Gregoire and David M. Dupuis.

Mikita captured the Art Ross Trophy as the NHL’s leading point scorer four times. He won it for a third time, along with the Hart Memorial Trophy as the league’s most valuable player and the Lady Byng Memorial Trophy for gentlemanly play, in 1967, an unprecedented sweep. He won all three awards again in 1968.

The Blackhawks won the 1961 Stanley Cup, their first championship in 23 seasons, behind Mikita, along with Hull and his blistering slap shots on left wing and the brilliant goalie Glenn Hall.

Mikita’s accidental discovery of how a curved stick could get off high-velocity shots with unpredictable movement ushered in a new age of offensive-minded hockey.

During a practice in the mid-1960s, as Mikita told it, he accidentally bent the blade of his stick. He continued to use it that day and found that his shots were diving and had greater velocity than sticks with the customary straight blades. He began fashioning a curve on all his blades with a heating process, and Hull did the same.

The New York Rangers’ Hall of Famer Andy Bathgate said he had used a slightly curved stick before Mikita made his discovery, but Mikita, and to an extent Hull, have been credited with turning straight blades into a relic.

Stan Mikita was born Stanislav Gvoth on May 20, 1940, in Sokolice, a village in what is now Slovakia but what was then Czechoslovakia.

Just before Christmas 1948, an aunt and uncle, Joe and Anna Mikita, who had immigrated to St. Catharines, Ontario, were visiting his family.

With the Soviet Union dominant over Czechoslovakia, Stanislav’s father, Juraj, a maintenance man in a textile mill, and his mother, Emilia, who worked the family vegetable patch, decided to have their 8-year-old son return with the Mikitas to Canada, where they felt he would have a brighter future.

The Mikitas, who were childless, adopted the boy, and he took their surname.

Young Stan became a whiz in bantam and then junior hockey and joined the Blackhawks in 1958 at age 18.

He was just 5-foot-8 and 150 pounds and worried that he would be overmatched in the rugged original six-team NHL, when skaters went without helmets.

“They handed me a uniform that was three or four sizes too big,” he once told the Hockey Hall of Fame.

Seeking to show that he could not be pushed around, he developed an ornery streak early on.

“I couldn’t accept the fact that the other guys were bigger than me and could beat me up,” he told The New York Times in 1969. “So I learned to do things. Maybe I tripped them.”

But after a couple of seasons, he realized he was taking foolish penalties. He tamed his game enough to be a two-time Lady Byng winner, and he concentrated on skating, puck handling, passing, scoring and winning faceoffs.

He scored a playoff-leading six goals when the Blackhawks eliminated the defending five-time Stanley Cup champion Montreal Canadiens in the 1961 playoffs, then defeated the Detroit Red Wings to capture the Stanley Cup.

Mikita received the Lester Patrick Award for contributions to hockey in the United States in 1976. He retired after the 1979-80 season with 926 assists to go with his 541 goals in 1,394 games.

He later worked as a golf pro at a course in Illinois and founded a hockey school for the hearing-impaired in Northbrook, Illinois, at which teammates were fellow instructors. A son of a friend of his was partly deaf.

“These kids have been rejected so many times in their lives,” Mikita was once quoted as saying by the Chicago Tribune. “You know how cruel kids can be. We like to think we can help them believe in themselves.”

Mikita’s survivors include his wife, Jill; their daughters, Meg and Jane; their sons, Scott and Christopher; and grandchildren.

The Blackhawks retired Mikita’s No. 21 in 1980 and later designated him a team ambassador, a community relations post. In 2011 they unveiled statues of Mikita and Hull outside the United Center, where they play.

He achieved another kind of immortality in the 1992 movie “Wayne’s World,” in which the characters played by Mike Myers and Dana Carvey hung out at a diner in Aurora, Illinois, near Chicago, called Stan Mikita’s Donuts. In recalling how he set the stage for the use of curved blades throughout hockey, Mikita said that he and Hull had tormented Hall, the Blackhawks’ star goalie, when they first experimented with them at a practice.

“Bobby had a 100-mile-per-hour slap slot, and then he could make it rise,” Mikita told the Newhouse News Service in 2007. “I was able to make mine knuckle and drop about a foot.”

Hall supposedly became so frustrated that he left the workout early.

“He went to the showers,” Mikita said, “got dressed and said he was never coming back.”