It was the summer 1973 and Bobby Clarke, as he will always be known in our hearts, was 23 years old and still unknown to the majority of Philadelphia sports fans who would grow to admire, love and worship him, the sport he played, and the team he played for -- the Philadelphia Flyers of the National Hockey League.

Young Bobby Clarke was my age, then and now. But on that steamy morning 33 summers ago when I arrived at then-Flyers coach Fred Shero's ice hocky camp for kids while researching a newspaper story about why Philadelphia-area teeenagers were going cukoo for a game played on frozen ponds in Canada, I recognized Bobby Clarke not as a young man born the same year as me, but as some benign and impossibly beautiful otherworldly being.

Had Clarke not been wearing his front teeth at the time, I'm sure the impression would have been less celestial and more Flin Flon. The joyous gummy grin of Bobby Clarke, the overachieving rink rat who looked like he'd lost most of his teeth in a tractor pull, had yet to become the iconic nice guy image of the Broad Street Bullies. In 1973 the faces of Flyers' players were about as recognizable to most Philadelphians as the players on the city's indoor soccer and lacrosse league franchises are today.

After the first Stanley Cup championship over the Boston Bruins in May of 1974, Bobby Clarke's image was as well known as Donovan McNabb's. After winning a second cup the following year and then beating the world champion Soviet Red Army team at the Spectrum in 1976, Flyers captain Bobby Clarke's portrait was as ubiquitous in South Philly rowhomes as Sunday newspaper supplement color photos of JFK.

The next time I met Bobby Clarke was in the summer of 1984 shortly after he retired as a player following a record-setting 15 year career in the NHL and days before he was named, for the first time, general manager of the Philadelphia Flyers. I happened to be standing near him at a reception and he offered his hand and introduced himself, "Bob Clarke," he said. Gone was the unlined seraphic countenance that had captivated me 11 years earlier. His still handsome face was now a latticework of pale scar tissue on top of older scar tissue, the handiwork of how many mid-game sutures, the results of how many boards slammed, how many pucks stopped, how many head butts, high sticks and cheap shots to the face?

Bobby Clarke the player never wore a helmet or face mask during his 1,144 National Hockey League games, and the taut-skinned face of Bob Clarke the general manager was a kiosk advertising a hundred collisions in dozens of hockey rinks where even angels feared to tred.

I knew Clarke wouldn't remember our first encounter, but he did remember the Radnor rink and the summer coaching clinic, and when I tried to describe what he looked like at age 23 with his shoulder length hair and that indescribably peaceful expression on his face, he interrupted. "That was before I got ugly," he said, "I looked like a girl." He was pretty, there is no question about that.

The third time I met Bobby Clarke he was surrounded by mummers on New Year's Day 2005. It's quite possible that in all the years that Clarke has called Philadelphia home, he had never actually seen the Mummers Parade live on Broad Street since New Year's falls in the middle of hockey season. But due to the NHL owners lockout that cancelled the 2004-2005 season, Clarke was in Center City on the first of January, and as luck would have it, he and a group of friends sought refreshment at Dirty Frank's bar at 13th and Pine, which happened to be occupied at the time by 50 dress wearing wenches from the James "Froggy" Carr comic club who had completed their march up Broad Street and were making a pit stop while returning to their clubhouse in South Philly.

When I say that Bobby Clarke was surrounded by mummers, I believe it would be more accurate to say that he was swallowed whole. Bobby Clarke walks into a bar full of beer-drinking working men from South Philly wearing satin dresses with matching bloomers, well, you can only imagine the reaction. As infuriated as the average Flyers fan was at that time about the cancelled season, as contraversial and disappointing as Clarke's tenure as general manager had been, the sight of Bobby Clarke, working class hero, walking into the front door of Dirty Frank's on New Years Day and being greeted and swarmed as if the Flyers were defending Stanley Cup champions, well sir, it made me believe I saw evidence of that missing angel in every happy scarred and painted face I saw.

This article was featured on the Inquirer's op-ed page on October, 27, 2006