Montreal Canadiens 100th Year Commemorative Watch
I won a watch! How? With a twitter trivia contest that the Montreal Canadiens decided to have since they got their 100,000 follower. A Co-worker and long time friend Kent Villard happen to see on twitter (Before I did that day) That the habs were giving away 5 watches. They were going to ask 5 trivia questions, and the first person to respond on twitter with the correct answer would win a watch valued at $300. With 100,000 followers, it was a long shot, but heyI had as good of chance as any:
Question #1: Who was the oldest player ever to play with the Canadiens?
Answer: #1: George Hainsworth
I was way off. I did a quick search online, but that amount of time there were already 20 answers posted... so I knew there would be no time for searching. So first player that I could think of for the other questions would have to be it, hoping I could guess right.
Question #2: Who was the first Russian to play in a Canadiens uniform?
Answer #2: Oleg Petrov
The only Russian I could think of was Alex Kovalev, once again way off. So I kept watching twitter, noticing the questions were coming in about once every 15-20 minutes.
Question #3: Who was the youngest player to play with the Canadiens?
Answer #3: Goaltender Olivier Michaud
Once again I was way off. I put in John LeClair as I thought Montreal drafted him out of high school and thought he would play right away. Funny enough, I had never heard of this Michaud guy before. Apparently, he played 20 minutes as a back up due to injury in the 2002 seasons.
Question #4: Who was the first Canadiens defenseman to win the Selke trophy.
Answer #4: Jacques Laperriere
Most Gentlemanly? Really I dont know how anyone would know this without doing research. I got in Larry Robinson, but once again, good guess, with no time to do the research.
Question #5: Who was the first Defenseman to score a hat-trick in the Stanley cup Finals
Answer #5: Eric Desjardins
I knew this answer. What made this even more interesting is that twitter was asking the questions in both french and english and the french popped up first, I understood the question and got my answer in.. 15 seconds... I was the first!! The second person to get an answer in was 20 seconds after me, and he answered wrong. But it didn't matter, I then received a direct message from the Canadiens stating that I had won.
This contest was on a Friday and the watch arrived the following Wednesday. It was sitting between my screen door and front door when I arrived home from work that day. At first I didn't realize how it could be worth the amount of money the canadiens said it was... but then I read the certificate of authenticity. This is the 100th year commemorative watch. There were only 6720 of them made. One for each of the 6720 games the canadiens played in there 100 year run. They are numbered and mine is number 3039. I am trying to find out which game this was in there history.
On the right of the case, there are trading cards. One for each year the Habs won the Stanley Cup. On front is the printed season and on the back the scores of the games, and the semifinal scores for both teams.
I went on eBay and looked to see if anyone was selling watches like this... 1 person, was selling it for $499. This will be in my Canadiens collection for life.