Few players in NHL history did more with less physical ability than Camille Henry. Maybe that's why memories of him stand out so vividly.

It's not that Henry, who died Sept. 11 at age 64, wasn't tough. Anybody who could play in the NHL while making Theo Fleury look like Eric Lindros had to be tough. And it wasn't that he couldn't play. He had 24 goals as a rookie in 1953-54, good enough to win the Calder Trophy, and broke the 20-goal mark eight times as a New York Ranger back in the days when 20 goals actually meant something.

It's just that he was so, well, small -- small enough that he spent much of his career battling injuries and the notion that he was too brittle to play in the NHL.

There's an old gag line in appraising a player: "He's small but he's slow." That was Henry as a 20-year-old in 1953. He might have weighed 140 pounds after a big meal (one writer of the era called him "the slight, muscleless rookie"), but unlike other small, swift players, he had little skating speed. What Henry did have was the knack of knowing where the puck would be -- and how to get there at the right time. He could stickhandle and shoot with anyone in the NHL, and developed into one of the greatest tip-in artists of all time.

"I know the big guys are going to push me around," he once said. "I'm a little guy and little guys always get pushed. But I've got something that the big guys don't have. I've got elusiveness. They don't hurt me that much because they don't get much of me."

The elusiveness earned Henry his nickname: "Camille The Eel." He needed it, too: Despite his size, Henry was not a perimeter player. Most of his goals came from in front of the net, where he was a master of converting rebounds and redirecting shots past unwary goaltenders.

Henry was a power-play specialist as a rookie, scoring 20 of his 24 goals with the man advantage. His transition to a real hockey player was painful: Henry battled through a couple of broken arms and a return to the minors. At one point, the Rangers even put him on waivers -- and no one claimed him. Luckily for both parties, the Rangers had assigned him to Providence of the AHL, where they had decided to train in 1956. Henry kept scoring goals against the big club, finally forcing GM Muzz Patrick to give him another chance. After tearing up the AHL, he was with the Rangers by midseason -- this time to stay.

By 1957-58, the Rangers, doormats for most of the previous 16 years, were in second place and Henry was their leading goal-scorer, connecting 32 times while earning the Lady Byng Trophy. He kept on scoring, notching a career-best 37 goals in 1962-63 (despite missing 10 games) and adding 29 more in 1963-64. He was one of the few players on some lamentable early '60s teams who was worth watching. Henry appeared in a couple of All-Star games and even became captain in 1964 when Andy Bathgate was traded; he turned over the "C" to Bob Nevin a year or so later when the Rangers, seeking more size, dealt him to Chicago for Doug Robinson, a big forward who washed out a couple of years later.

Henry lasted in the NHL until 1970, but never had the kind of success he enjoyed in New York. He finished his Ranger career with 256 goals, still fifth on the team's all-time list, and is 11th in points with 478.

The last time that most New York hockey fans saw of Henry was in 1972-73, when he coached the ill-fated New York Raiders of the World Hockey Association. The Raiders were a bunch of misfits who represented the worst that expansion had to offer. They took the money and ran -- right over Henry, who had hoped that he could parlay his love of hockey and a good showing in the WHA into an NHL job -- maybe even with the Rangers.

But with the Raiders, the inmates ran the asylum -- and there was nothing he could do about it. The franchise moved to New Jersey the following season, leaving a heartbroken Henry in its wake. By 1976, only six of those Raiders were still playing hockey -- and Henry was being diagnosed as a diabetic.

The last two decades of Henry's life were hard. He had surgery to re-fuse some vertebrae in his back, an operation originally performed during his NHL career. He worked for a while as a skating instructor, then as a security guard, while his health kept deteriorating due to the diabetes that eventually killed him.

He lived most of his last years in poverty. When Henry received $85,000 last year from the Players Association pension fund surplus awarded by a court judgement, his reaction was that "Now I can have steak again." Unfortunately, he didn't have long to enjoy the money. He entered a Quebec hospital on July 22 and never got out.

"He did not have an easy retirement," noted former Montreal great Jean Beliveau, once a teammate of Henry in senior hockey in Quebec. "Then, just when he started to have a good time, he left us. He was never able to take advantage of it."

No one would mistake Henry for a great player. But it's hard to think of a Ranger who loved hockey more or played the game with more heart. Those of us who grew up watching No. 21 slither between a couple of defensemen for another tip-in will miss him.

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