“A lot of guys were killed on the beaches. They were good hockey players. They could have made the (NHL) just like nothing. Some were lucky. I was very lucky.” Johnny Bower

The best hockey players and the best soldiers have been said to share some of the same qualities: discipline, pride and determination.

Sometimes a little cheating goes a long way, too.

Former Maple Leaf goalie great Johnny Bower, 90, admitted on Monday that he lied so he could enlist in the army for the Second World War. He was only 16, but you had to be 18.

“I lied a little bit, sure,” Bower said with a big chuckle at the Hockey Hall of Fame, which unveiled an exhibit called Hockey Marching As To War to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the start of First World War.

Bower said he had a ready answer when asked for his birth certificate: “I said we had a big fire at home and it was burned. I lied there so I could get in. I wanted to go with my other buddies.”

Bower’s wife, Nancy, 89, laughed about the white lie later in a phone interview. Had she known him then, she said, “I would have stopped him.”

They met in 1948 after Bower returned from war, and were married that year.

There’s also the story of Frank McGee, a gifted playmaker for the Ottawa Hockey Club and Ottawa Silver Seven, who was so determined to fight in the First World War that he cheated on the eye exam. McGee — who would die in action — was blind in his left eye from a hockey injury, but hatched a clever scheme to pass the test: When asked to cover one eye and read the chart, he covered the left first. On the medical record, his vision is described as “good” for the right eye. When asked to read with his left, he covered the left eye again.

He was cleared for combat, but that medical record — one of many artifacts and personal items on display in the hall exhibit, scanned and searchable by iPad — shows nothing written down for McGee’s left eye test, suggesting the doctor wasn’t fooled and just overlooked it.

Bower said that as a boy growing up in Prince Albert, Sask., he wanted to join friends sent to Vernon, B.C., for training. The Leaf legend went on to be stationed in London. Later, when soldiers were selected to fight in Dieppe, Bower couldn’t go because of arthritis in his hands.

“That’s the reason why I didn’t see action,” Bower said. “A lot of guys were killed on the beaches.” Bower said he knew of four or five hockey players from Prince Albert who never came back.

“They were good hockey players,” Bower said. “They could have made the National league just like nothing. Some were lucky. I was very lucky.”

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Leafs and Red Wings great Red Kelly, now 88, was also a guest at Monday’s hall unveiling. Kelly was too young, at 15, to enlist when the Second World War began. But in 1954, while playing for Detroit, he visited troops during the Korean War while on a sports junket. Kelly recalled showing a film of Stanley Cup highlights to the troops, who in turn treated the visiting players to dinner.

He also remembers seeing up close — from lookout towers and through barbed wire — the realities of war.

“I saw the terrain they were fighting in,” he said. “I saw what they had to go through, saw the conditions they were in, knowing that they were out defending us, giving us the country that we have today. They’re at the top of the list. They’re our military. What they did in the war is fantastic. I just say thank God for the military.”

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