Stan Mikita

Stan Mikita: Hall of Fame center who won the Hart, Lady Byng, and Art Ross in the same season twice, and played his entire 22-year career with the Chicago Black Hawks.

Stanley Mikita (born Stanislav Guoth; May 20, 1940 – August 7, 2018) was a Slovak-born Canadian ice hockey player who played his entire 22-year National Hockey League (NHL) career with the Chicago Black Hawks. Born in the Slovak Republic, Mikita was adopted and moved to Canada at the age of eight. After a few stellar seasons in the OHA, he was promoted to the Black Hawks in 1959. In the 1961 Stanley Cup playoffs, Mikita led the league in goals with six as the Black Hawks won the Stanley Cup, which made him the first Slovak-born player to win the Cup. The following season saw him named to his first All-Star Team on his first of fourteen consecutive 20-goal seasons. He won the first of four Art Ross Trophies as the leading point scorer in the season, which saw him record the most points four times in a span of five seasons. He won the Lady Byng Memorial Trophy, Hart Memorial Trophy, and the Ross Trophy in the 1966–67 and 1967–68 seasons, the first and so far only time a player has won each award in the same season twice. In 1972, he was the sixth person to record 1,000 points and in 1977, he became the eighth player to score 500 goals in NHL history. Generally regarded as the best centre of the 1960s, Mikita recorded over 500 goals and 900 assists in nearly 1,400 games. When he retired, he was one of only two players to record 500 goals and 900 assists for a career and he had recorded the most points for a player to have played with only one franchise. Mikita was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1983 along with the Slovak Hockey Hall of Fame in 2002. He had his jersey retired by the Black Hawks in 1980, the first player to receive the honor in franchise history. In 2017, he was named one of the 100 Greatest NHL Players.

Quick Facts

Hall of Fame: 1983
Born: 20 May 1940
Birthplace: Sokolče, Slovak Republic
Died: 7 August 2018
Place of death: Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Position: Centre
Shoots: Right
Played for: Chicago Black Hawks

Lore & Background

Mikita was born as Stanislav Guoth in Sokolče, Slovak Republic, during the brief period it was in existence as a client state of Nazi Germany. He was raised in a small farming community until 1948, when he moved to St. Catharines, Ontario. He was adopted by his aunt and uncle, Anna and Joe Mikita, who had emigrated from Slovakia to Canada 20 years earlier and were childless. They came to Czechoslovakia to visit the Guoth family before Christmas in 1948 and took the 8-year-old Stan with them when they went back to Canada. His parents believed that there was a brighter future for him in Canada than in then Communist Czechoslovakia, whose borders (including the area of Slovakia) had been reinstated at the end of World War II. His aunt and uncle also gave him their surname, and he anglicized his first name to Stanley. He attended high school at St. Catharines Collegiate. After three starring junior seasons with the St. Catharines Teepees of the Ontario Hockey Association, Mikita was promoted to the parent Chicago Black Hawks. In his second full year, in 1961, the Black Hawks won their third Stanley Cup. The young centre led the entire league in goals during the playoffs, scoring a total of six. The following season was his breakout year. Mikita became a star as centre of the famed 'Scooter Line', with right wing Ken Wharram and left wingers Ab McDonald and Doug Mohns. Combining skilled defense and a reputation as one of the game's best faceoff men using his innovative curved stick, Mikita led the league in scoring four times in the decade, tying Bobby Hull's year-old single-season scoring mark with 97 points (a mark broken two years later by former teammate Phil Esposito and currently held by Wayne Gretzky). In his early years, Mikita was among the most penalized players in the league, but he then decided to play a cleaner game and went on to win the Lady Byng Memorial Trophy for particularly sportsmanlike conduct combined with excellence twice. Mikita's drastic change in behavior came after he returned home from a road trip. His wife told him that while their daughter, Meg, was watching the Black Hawks' last road game on television, she turned and said, 'Mommy, why does Daddy spend so much time sitting down?' The camera had just shown Mikita in the penalty box again.

Did You Know?

Mikita was one of the first players to wear a helmet full-time after an errant shot tore a piece off his ear in December 1967.
He co-founded the American Hearing Impaired Hockey Association in 1973.
Mikita appeared as himself in the 1992 film Wayne's World, which featured a doughnut shop named after him.