Ron Greschner remembers his Madison Square Garden debut like it was yesterday.

He’d been called up to the New York Rangers on Oct. 30, 1974. He got to practice on Nov. 1. He played his first NHL game on Nov. 3 against the Buffalo Sabres and Gilbert Perreault, who Greschner called a top-three player in the league at the time.

Brad Park had started on defense, and Greschner jumped on to replace him. Perreault was coming down the ice.

“Here’s a guy coming down the ice, one of the best players in the league,” Greschner told amNewYork he was thinking at the time. “My first game, he’s going to go around me. I’ll be back in the minors tomorrow, and I’ll be retired on the fifth of November.”

The fourth iteration of the Garden, then just six years old, had terrible ice. It worked in Greschner’s favor.

“[Perreault] lost the puck in the water,” Greschner said. “I carried the puck the other way. I looked like a hero.”

It was the start of a legendary Rangers career. Greschner played 981 NHL games, all for the Blueshirts — the fourth-most in franchise history. He holds the Rangers’ record for penalty minutes, amassing 1,226 over his 16-year playing career. He ranks second in goals by a Rangers defenseman. He was part of three deep playoff runs in 1979, 1981, and 1986.

“I’m not even sure magical is a good enough word for it,” Greschner said about the Rangers’ 1979 run to the Stanley Cup Final. The crowds at the Garden were the loudest he’d ever heard.

New York swept the Los Angeles Kings in the Preliminary Round, then dispatched the Philadelphia Flyers in the quarterfinals in five games, outscoring them 28-8. The Rangers then beat the New York Islanders in six games to advance to the Final.

“The city started to rumble,” Greschner recalled. “Wherever you went, you got free food, free booze, and what else would you want? After we beat the Islanders out, I used to come home. There’d be like 15-20 bottles of champagne in my lobby of my building. The whole city was crazy.

“I only wish one thing that happened in my career, that we’d have won in ‘79 or ‘81 or ‘86, that we’d have won a cup, because that would have cemented those teams back then. There was a bunch of good guys on those teams. They deserved it.”

 

Rangers to celebrate ‘The New Garden’ Saturday

During Saturday’s Original Six matchup against the Montreal Canadiens, the Rangers will honor “The New Garden” as part of the club’s centennial season celebrations. 

Around the Garden prior to Saturday’s game, the Rangers Blue Crew and two Rangers alumni will be sporting Centennial-branded hard hats and handing out posters of “The New Garden.”

On Saturday, the Rangers will also release a special edition hand-drawn Rangers Centennial Print, created in partnership with artist Chandler Withington at Archive 22. Only 200 total prints will be available, 100 released online at the MSG store and 100 sold in-arena. New York will also wear its Centennial uniforms for the sixth time this season.

The Garden has always been a unique place to play, from its iconic concave ceiling to its rich history.

It had its quirks. Greschner recalled from his first exhibition game that the locker room at the time wasn’t the nicest. The circus used to be on the same side as the penalty boxes — “You could smell the elephants,” Greschner said.

From the aura of the Garden to the passion of Rangers fans, Greschner insisted that the Garden is the “most amazing place to play.”

“When you walk into that building, the first thing you see is the [concave] ceiling,” Greschner said. “There is no place like that you walk in. I’ve been going there for almost 52 years, and I still get butterflies in my stomach when I walk in.”

 

Centennial exhibition outside section 108/109

Fans attending Rangers games at the Garden this season can visit the Rangers’ Centennial exhibition, presented by Pellera, outside sections 108 and 109.

The exhibition features items that span the Rangers’ 100-year history, including Rod Gilbert’s 400th goal stick, a 1979 Stanley Cup Semifinals trading card, the Steven McDonald Extra Effort Award, and the famous Gilles Gratton “Lion” mask — based on the goalie’s astrological sign.

“That mask was iconic,” Greschner said. “Nobody ever did that before.”

Greschner has kept several jerseys from his Rangers career, including a road jersey from his first season, before the NHL mandated names on the back. He’s given a lot of his stuff to his nephews and kids.

For Greschner, the Rangers’ centennial season is the first time he’s seen some of his former teammates in more than 40 years. He said the two players who will be missed the most are Gilbert and Eddie Giacomin. He was close with both.

“I would like to hear being on the ice with those two guys on Saturday,” Greschner said. “Would have been amazing how loud that building would have been … That would have been just an amazing thing, for those two guys to be there for ‘The New Garden.’”

Greschner has always loved meeting Rangers fans, even as the new generation is focused on the current Rangers, as he found one day during a visit to the MSG Training Center.

“There was little kids, had no idea who I was until their mother and father told them what I was, which is fine with me,” Greschner said. “I understand they’re all [Matt] Rempe fans, which, so am I.”

Tickets to “The New Garden” night are available on the Rangers website. More information about the Rangers’ centennial season celebrations can be found here.

For more on the Rangers, visit AMNY.com