January 10, 1980
Chris Whiteside was 6 years old when his father returned from a business trip to Montreal with a program from a Canadiens hockey game. His older brothers looked it over and decided he looked a lot like Gump Worsley, the Canadians’ pot-bellied goaltender. “I had this short haircut and a fat little face,” he remembers. “They kept calling me Gump, and the name stuck.”
From then on, “Chris” was banished to the realm of insurance policies and legal documents. Gump was his name, and it seemed appropriate because he wanted to be a goalie when he got older. “I liked the idea of challenging the shooter,” he says. “It seemed like a neat position.” It seemed like a crying shame to his father, who saw how fast he could skate and how hard he could shoot. Gump Whiteside in goal would be like Charo in a library. By the time he entered Germantown Academy, he was spending much of his time in the goal mouth, but it was the other team’s goal mouth. Whiteside led the Suburban Hockey League in scoring last year with 32 goals and 29 assists in 22 games. He leads the point race this year with 22 goals and 16 assists in just eight games. A week ago he contributed two goals and two assists in a 15-0 rout of Roxborough, leading GA to an 8-0 record and winning The Inquirer’s Suburban Athlete of the Week award. The prescribed method for winning a scoring title is to pour it on against the pushovers. Whiteside could easily have banged in six or seven goals against outclassed Roxborough if his old feeling for goalies hadn’t caught up with him. “We were ahead,
6-0, at the end of the first period,” coach Dick Crawford recalls, “and Gump asked me if he could sit out the rest of the game. could have been him. He didn’t want to score anymore. He didn’t want to bury the poor guys. “I broke up his line and sent him out there with two guys who could barely skate, and he kept setting them up. Other guys were taking slap shots from the blue line, but Gump just worked it around. It’s amazing he can play like that and win the scoring title.” Gump Whiteside will do it his way, thank you. He’s seen the enemy, and the enemy
The original
