As a 24 year-old rookie in the AHL in 1950-51, Wally Hergesheimer dented the twine 53 times in 82 games (regular season and postseason) and ran away with rookie of the year honors. This paved the way for his promotion to Broadway, and for his first three years with the Rangers the goals just kept coming. Despite his slight stature and the loss of two fingers on his shooting hand in an accident as a teenager, “Hergy” had an uncanny knack for suddenly showing up in front of the net at just the right moment to sweep the loose puck into the cage. Rangers legend Frank Boucher praised Hergy as “one of the trickiest players I ever saw around the net…I don’t know how he did it, but he’d zoom out of nowhere to bat the puck in the net. And the funny thing was you seldom noticed him until he scored a goal.” I get the feeling if you saw him do it once or twice, it would appear that he’d gotten lucky, but Hergy clearly knew what he was doing because he just kept banging them home at an impressive rate for as long as his health held up.
For those first three glorious years, Hergesheimer led the Rangers in goals each season. League-wide, only Ted Lindsay, Maurice Richard, and Gordie Howe scored more total goals over the 1951-52—1953-54 seasons. Center Paul Ronty was Hergy’s constant companion on the ice, and the two had quite the connection. Assumedly, there was a left-winger on the ice with them, but Ronty and Hergesheimer rarely noticed. Of the 83 goals Hergy scored in his first three seasons, Ronty had an assist on 50. The player with the second most assists on those 83 goals had nine!
Hergy’s injury luck ran out close to the end of the 1953-54 season. After a loss in Boston on March 11, The New York Times reported: “The defeat was sad enough for the Broadway Blues. What was even sadder, however was the fact that their highest-scoring forward, Wally Hergesheimer, suffered a broken leg. Wally received the injury early in the third period, in a collision into the boards after being checked, quite legally, by Leo Labine.” It turned out to be one hell of a nasty break. The Times later reported Hergesheimer was finally checking out of the hospital eight days later. When the following campaign kicked off in the fall of 1954, Hergesheimer’s leg still was not fully healed. He was finally “permitted to don skates”1 in early November, eight months after the injury, and was back in game action on November 24th.
Hergesheimer might have still been trying to get back in game shape 14 games later when he snapped his leg “in almost the same place”2 in a collision with Maple Leaf Ted Kennedy. That spelled the end of his season. Paul Ronty dearly missed his right-hand man and “lost his scoring touch”3 with Hergy out of the lineup. Ronty was waived in February 1955.
Thankfully, Hergesheimer’s bum leg healed and held up well enough for him to skate in every Rangers game during the 1955-56 season. He managed another 20+ goal season, but there was concern that the two leg fractures had “permanently slowed up Hergy.”4 GM Muzz Patrick dealt Hergesheimer to Chicago in exchange for Red Sullivan.
Hergy struggled to put up points in a partial season with the Black Hawks and got another broken bone, this time in his shoulder, and that was almost the end of this time in the National. Early in the 1958-59 season, the Rangers brought him back with the idea of using him exclusively on the power play,5 but Hergesheimer was soon back in the minors for good. He swatted in a bunch more goals for quite a few more years in the minors before retiring to his hometown Winnipeg. After his hockey days, he “was a manager with the agency that controls alcohol sales in Manitoba.”6 Wally Hergesheimer passed away in 2014.
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