Bernie Parent was the Broad Street Bullies’ brightest star. Now he’s the Flyers’ de facto mascot.

First in a series remembering the Flyers, who won their first Stanley Cup championship 50 years ago.

Starting at the crack of Bernie Parent’s rear end, the pink and sepia scar bisects his hindquarters and continues meandering upward for close to 12 inches. It looks like he could unzip his back like a jacket. Minutes earlier, he had been standing on the porch of his mother-in-law’s house in Warminster one morning in March, eager to greet a guest, his arms wide and welcoming, and you never would have known that Parent had undergone back surgery — his third in five years — in January. That he could not bend over, could not pick up anything from the floor, could not rotate his torso. That his body was now a 5-foot-10 stackable storage drawer loaded with rods and screws and wires.

“I love going to the airport now,” he said. “Bottom line, I got screwed.”

Joking is what Parent has done virtually every hour of definitely every day of certainly every year since he joined the Flyers — rejoined them, actually — more than a half-century ago. Yes, the Broad Street Bullies got the perfect nickname and the pop-culture references and the everlasting adoration after winning those back-to-back Stanley Cups — the first of them 50 years ago Sunday — but Bernie was the backbone. Bernie was the best player on maybe the most beloved dynasty in this city’s sports history. He’s also something else now: the de facto mascot of that team, the twinkling-eyed face of the 1973-75 Flyers.

“The players grow older. We all do,” he said. “But the team will never get old.”

How often does this happen? How often does the most important or best known player on a team that will be remembered forever become its happy-go-lucky spokesperson? Julius Erving doesn’t spend his days cracking wise about the 1982-83 76ers or his post-basketball life. Even Bob Clarke, the captain and leader of those Flyers, keeps his relative distance and a low profile.

Sure, Peyton and Eli Manning have launched careers in comedy, but not in the name of keeping alive memories of the 2006 Colts and 2007 Giants. And they’re the exception. There’s too much status at stake, too much image preservation at work, for an all-time great to show a silly side or to allow himself to be the butt of a joke. Good Lord, Tom Brady tried to humanize himself by consenting to a celebrity roast, and it was obviously excruciating for him to sit there for three hours, forcing a phony smile as raunchy one-liners rained down on him.

» READ MORE: The Broad Street Bullies were almost the ‘Blue Line Bandidos.’ They had other nicknames, too.

Bernie isn’t like that. Bernie is around the Flyers and out among the public all the time, always with his wife, Gini, whom he’s been married to for eight years. He’s 79. She’s 55. “People come up to me sometimes and say, ‘How old is your daughter?’” he said. Bernie’s even older than his mother-in-law, Teresa, who is 73. When Wayne Gretzky or Derek Jeter is asked how he met his wife, you won’t hear either of them say, “I was a pole dancer, and she would put 20 dollars down.” Which is what Bernie says when he’s asked how he met Gini. Which is of course not how it went. She grew up in Germantown and owns a hair salon. A mutual friend, thinking they’d hit it off, introduced them. They did. “He’s just fun-loving,” Gini said.

On one of their first dates, they were sitting in a restaurant booth having lunch, and a female diner recognized Bernie. The woman was so excited that she approached the booth, asked Gini, Could you move over?, and sat down to talk to him. It was Gini’s first insight into the power of his popularity.

“I never owned a jersey until I met Bernie,” she said.

“But you wear clothes,” he said.

“I try to.”

They show up at brewpub parties and car-dealership promotions and the Flyers Wives’ Fight for Lives Carnival: 100 events a year — 100 events that don’t even include those hair-restoration radio ads he used to voice, with their earworm tagline: Hey Doc, great save! — 100 events where Bernie’s just there being Bernie, firing quips tommy-gun style. Whatever those jokes lack in originality, he makes up for in enthusiasm and rat-a-tat frequency, and everyone loves it, him most of all.

That’s the thing, though: Bernie isn’t really supposed to do that, is he? Joe Watson can do it. Bob Kelly can do it. They were role players. They might be forgotten if they weren’t out there shaking hands and starring in local promos and saying Remember when? No one’s forgetting Bernie. Bernie wasn’t a role player. Bernie was a star. Bernie was the best goaltender in the world, unfurling maybe the best season any goaltender has ever had, and yet he can’t stop making himself and everyone around him targets of a never-ending stream of playful puns and double entendres.

“He doesn’t do it for show. It’s sincerely who he is. He’s like this all the time,” Gini said. “He gets it. He gets the whole Philadelphia fabric. He gets the whole thing about being an athlete here. He doesn’t walk around like, ‘Hey, I’m Bernie Parent.’ But that’s why people love it: because he doesn’t. If we walk into a room and nobody says hi, Bernie will say hi. He’ll introduce himself. That’s the most important thing about Bernie: He loves his fans and loves people, and it shows.”

That connection might never have formed and solidified had the circumstances of Parent’s life and career been different. Growing up in Montreal, the son of a laborer and a housewife, the youngest of seven children, Bernie wore jeans, boots, and galoshes when he began playing hockey. He didn’t learn to ice-skate until he was 12; that was when the family’s only pair of skates was finally handed down to him.

The Flyers plucked him out of the Boston Bruins’ system with their first pick in the 1967 NHL expansion draft. They traded him to the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1971, where he was tutored by his idol, Jacques Plante. Then they watched him return to the region in the summer of ‘72, when — after he had jumped to the World Hockey Association’s Miami Screaming Eagles for a five-year, $700,000 contract, a houseboat, and a new car — the Eagles relocated to Philadelphia and became the Blazers.

» READ MORE: In 1972-73, Philly had two pro hockey teams. Here’s the wild story of the short-lived Blazers of the WHA.

His return was hardly triumphant. The Blazers’ first game was on Oct. 13, 1972 … a Friday. The ice at the Civic Center buckled and cracked, and fans threw souvenir orange pucks at the players. Peppered with shots every night behind a porous defense, Parent played in 63 games, many in front of half-empty arenas, including for home games. “I recognized everyone who booed me,” he said. “It was exciting, but at the same time, I realized the NHL was where I belonged.” The Blazers, he said, took $500,000 from his escrow account to pay down debt. After the team’s first playoff game, Parent told owner Bernie Brown that if the money wasn’t back in his account the next day, he’d quit. It wasn’t. He did. In the middle of the series.

“Could we trust him after this?” John McKenzie, the Blazers’ player-coach, said at the time.

The other team in town could. Bernie’s rights transferred back to the Maple Leafs, and they traded him back to the Flyers for his friend, fellow goalie and former teammate Doug Favell, in May 1973. He was as colorful and quirky as anyone on the roster. On game days, he’d eat a 16-ounce porterhouse with 10 mushrooms — 10, always 10, though he was never sure why — take a nap, and watch The Three Stooges.

The ritual worked. It always worked. All the mythology around the Bullies and Clarke’s inspirational effort and Fred Shero’s innovative coaching can sometimes obscure Parent’s dominance in ‘73-74. “It’s difficult to say how good I was,” he said. No, it’s not. Consider one remarkable statistic: Because they were penalized so often, whether for fighting or other infractions, the Flyers that season faced 109 more power plays than any other team in the NHL. Yet they still led the league in penalty-killing percentage (.884), a testament to the quality of their goaltending. The quality of their goaltender, to be more accurate.

Parent led the NHL in games (73), victories (47), shots faced (2,006), saves (1,870), save percentage (.932), goals-against average (1.89), and shutouts (12). Then he went 12-5 in the playoffs, somehow posted a better save percentage (.933) than he did during the regular season, and blanked Bobby Orr, Phil Esposito, and the Bruins, 1-0, at the Spectrum in the Stanley Cup Final’s decisive Game 6. (”Joe,” Parent told Watson in the game’s final minute, “we’re gonna have women lined up outside our door every day this summer.”)

Half the cars on the road around the Delaware Valley seemed to have ONLY THE LORD SAVES MORE THAN BERNIE stickers slapped on their bumpers. His backup, Bobby Taylor, appeared in just seven games. Take Parent off that club, and there’s no championship to celebrate. The Bullies would have been goons and nothing more.

The recent back surgeries were the reason he and Gini were staying with her mother. Just easier that way. The two of them usually split time between the Jersey Shore and South Florida, where he starts each day by reading books about self-help and positive reinforcement. It’s his way to keep his demons at bay.

The injury that ended his career in February 1979 — a stray stick blade knifed through a hole in his goaltender’s mask and nearly cost him his right eye — would alone have given him plenty of reason to fall into depression and wonder what might have been. He mentored Flyers goalie Pelle Lindbergh, then was at his friend’s bedside when Lindbergh, after driving drunk and crashing his Porsche into a retaining wall, died in November 1985. His first marriage fell apart. Even while he was playing, he “looked for answers,” he once wrote, “at the bottom of beer bottles,” especially on the road with the boys.

“After practice, too, Bernie,” Gini said. “You guys used to go to Rexy’s.”

“We had some good times there,” he said.

He joined Alcoholics Anonymous and has been sober for 46 years. “I’m so grateful,” he said. “When you communicate with the Lord, beautiful things happen in your life.” So Gini takes care never to have a drink while he’s around, and she books his appearances and manages his schedule and cuts his hair. Someone has to keep the man who is both the giant and the jester of those Flyers teams looking sharp. “She charges me four hundred bucks and expects a hundred bucks for a tip,” Bernie Parent said. The players get old. The jokes might, too. The jokester hasn’t.