Toronto and the Maple Leafs: A City and Its Team

By Lance Hornby and Ron Ellis

100 years of love, celebration, heartbreak, and even parades

On December 19, 2017, the Toronto Maple Leafs officially turn 100. In the spirit of the centenary celebrations, Toronto and the Maple Leafs explores the city’s relationship with its most beloved sports team. No matter how many times the Jays and Raptors make the playoffs, it’s a Leafs game that still brings the city together on a cold Saturday night and fuels the talk shows all summer. But why are fans so absorbed by a team that has not won a Cup in 50 years?

Veteran Leafs and NHL columnist Lance Hornby gives readers an insider’s perspective on how the pulse of the city and team became one through two world wars, the Depression, the zany Harold Ballard years, and, until recently, dysfunctional hockey operations. Toronto and the Maple Leafs includes insights and stories from Mayor John Tory to Joe Fan; from influential voices of the Leafs, such as Foster Hewitt and Joe Bowen, to the ushers, cleaners, and ticket scalpers. Not to mention a funeral director who performs Leafs-themed services.

An unforgettable book about the good teams, bad games, and bizarre times of this franchise’s history, this is the perfect companion for every Leafs fan.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: Oct 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781773050744

Book preview

Ellis

INTRODUCTION

I had two dreams growing up in Toronto: to play for the Leafs and to teach history.

Lacking skill for the first and the scholastic aptitude for the second, I found a dual career path: writing about the Leafs — both about the dry gulch of their half century without a Stanley Cup, and about the bigger human-interest picture of their unique place in the city mosaic.

When I was a kid, the players were larger than life, staring back with broad smiles and crewcuts from a team calendar that always seemed to have a Cup in the middle. Everyone at school treasured Leafs hockey cards and the posters by our beds, and we played a Leafs-themed table-hockey game. Someone who saw a Leaf on the street was a neighbourhood hero.

My first memorable game at the Gardens was in the Leafs’ last Cup year. I was allowed to stay up for the Game 6 win against Montreal, though it was a swift collapse afterwards, a playoff loss to Boston, when the Flyers beat the snot out of the Leafs, enduring the worst of Harold Ballard. I still watched every game from the family apartment, saw Sittler get 10 points and Lanny slay the Isles. When old enough to drink, having seen years of animated beer cartoons between face-offs on Hockey Night in Canada, of course I reached for a Molson.

But around the time the Leafs went low rent in the Norris Division and were reduced to scrapping with the expansion New Jersey Devils, it was time to back off. Having begun a writing gig, I obeyed the journalism-school maxim no cheering in the press box. Not that anyone would have heard me, often covering Centennial Colts games, doubling as P.A. man and official scorer, and tasked with finding the groove for O Canada on a giant LP of national anthems of the world.

In 30 years of covering hockey, at the Gardens, the ACC, and close to 60 NHL rinks past and present, the icebreaker question with every Canadian-born player, coach, or exec was, Were you a Leafs fan? It was a hit with 90% of respondents — 100% if they were from the GTA. Everyone had a Leafs story about themselves, their dad, mom, grandparents, siblings, or some other connection. Journeyman defenceman Ken Hammond told me his grandfather had helped build the Gardens. Some players were the sons of long-time season ticket holders.

What still amazes me on the road is seeing hundreds of Leafs fans — thousands in the case of games in Ottawa, Montreal, and Buffalo — coming by air, rail, and car to fill seats. In western Canadian cities, despite numerous appearances in the finals and six total Cups won by Edmonton and Calgary, the stands are still packed with Leafs sweaters worn by transplanted easterners and even young locals who stayed with Grandpa’s team instead of following Gretzky.

I’ve highlighted old Leafs in my daily Sun feature Leafs 101 and This Day in Leafs History, and I am touched when a reader will call or write in their thanks for recalling a happy or poignant memory about the team, or when I hear from a player or a descendant.

As the franchise reaches its hundredth anniversary, and realizing I’ve been around long enough to cover two Matt Martins, it was the right time to recognize the Leafs and their parallel history with Toronto. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did chronicling it.

Lance Hornby

Toronto, April 2017

CHAPTER ONE. Hockey Night in Toronto

LEAF LIFE

My Maple Leaf Gardens was a small laneway off Roseheath Avenue near the Danforth, with a sewer grate marking centre ice. It was next to the house where I watched them win the ’67 Cup on the basement black and white.

Since I often played alone (big kids never let you in their games on the street), Mom insisted I place my flimsy red-rimmed net away from the Roseheath side, so I wouldn’t be chasing my errant sponge ball into traffic. I’d stand on the curb, pretend it was the Leafs bench, dream I was Frank Mahovlich or Red Kelly, but always settle on my favourite, Dave Keon, then step on the ice, soaking up the cheers resonating in my head. Then I’d run the length of this cement stage, careful not to jam my 99-cent straight-blade from the hardware store into the sewer bars, release the shot, and close my eyes just as the mesh billowed.

HOME AND GARDENS

In early 1999, during the last days of NHL hockey at the Gardens, people began clinging to the 67-year-old building as if it were their ancestral home and had childhood height progress marked on its wall. They were exhibiting emotion and behaviour unlike anything seen in a town whose rink was sometimes known around the NHL as the Church for its quiet fans. Things started disappearing: direction signs, small pictures, the odd brick — even a toilet seat lid.

There was a couple doing the wild thing up in a private box, an east-side usher said. They even brought a pillow. I guess they wanted to say they were the last to do it in the Gardens.

THE GHOSTS OF CARLTON STREET

The rite of passage for a parent or an older sibling to take a new fan to a Leafs game started with the buzz of a Saturday night on Carlton Street: clanging streetcars, honking horns, gravel-voiced scalpers, and excited kids in minor hockey jackets. Then it moved inside the Gardens, through blue turnstiles as old as the building and ushers who weren’t far behind in longevity.

Massive black-and-white pictures dominated the front lobby and the east and west corridors. Profiled by famous portrait photographers of the day, such as those at the Turofsky Brothers’ studio at 92 King Street West and Harold Barkley, they had modest frames assembled by the Gardens’ carpentry shop. Many were also caricatures created by Canadian artist Lou Skuce, who drew for local papers and also designed the first Gardens program in 1931.

Nat Turofsky became official team photographer when he had the courage to make Conn Smythe take his hat off for a team picture in the early days of the Leafs. It was Turofsky who took the iconic snap of Bill Barilko scoring the Cup-winning overtime goal against Montreal’s Gerry McNeil in 1951.

Barilko scores the Stanley Cup–winning overtime goal on April 21, 1951. THE HOCKEY HALL OF FAME

One fan identified so strongly with the Ace Bailey portrait in the lobby — it had always been his father’s favourite when they attended games — that he made sure to be first in line to buy it at the Gardens’ auction in 1999.

THE HOUSE THAT CONN BUILT

It was not a Leafs player who offered the definitive word on the Gardens’ place in Toronto lore, but the man who never missed a game in more than four straight decades.

From his northwest corner sound booth, Paul Morris was witness to a significant chapter of Toronto history; the last four Cups, the conventions, the Beatles, the busy 1970s with nary a dark night on the event sked, the Marlies, the Rock (both music and lacrosse), and the circus (the animals and Harold Ballard). When the Gardens closed, so did his streak of 1,561 games.

Fans didn’t live here like I did, but they did in their dreams, Morris said the night of the last Leafs game. This was like home to many Canadians.

An estimated 117 million people passed through its doors. At one time, it was theorized that every person born in the Greater Toronto Area had attended at least one event, hockey or otherwise, or just popped by out of curiosity. My Italian-born mother-in-law didn’t understand hockey, but she knew the Gardens through her two favourite wrestlers, tag-team champs Dominic DeNucci and Tony Parisi.

Many of the hockey fans entered single file through turnstiles, with counters on top that clicked as the gate slowly turned. Those not among the thousands of season-ticket holders, who didn’t move up a subscriber waiting list that stretched back to World War II, massed at the gate on game night, awaiting the signal to sprint upstairs for prime standing-room spots.

For many, the journey downtown was half the fun; drinks, dinner on a crisp Saturday night via car or trolley, a subway full of fans, ascending the stairs at College Subway, past the pop art of Leafs players on the platform. Up top were scalpers and that familiar 60 Carlton Street marquee: NHL Hockey Tonight, Leafs vs. Canadiens . . . Bruins . . . North Stars . . . Capitals . . . Oilers.

Somehow the Gardens developed a soul, a life of its own, said former MLG business and public relations manager Bob Stellick. It was the ultimate gathering place in Toronto. People identify with it; they know exactly where it is and how to get there. Everyone still has a Gardens’ story.

For decades it was Toronto’s largest meeting and concert hall, a stage shared by Muhammad Ali, Winston Churchill, Pierre Trudeau, and entertainers from Elvis to the Beatles to the Tragically Hip. But the main act was the hockey team that seemed to draw as much energy from its surroundings as its audience did in the golds, reds, greens, and end blues.

There was definitely an aura in this building and if you played [there], you felt it, decorated Cup winner Allan Stanley once said.

It was such an honest place to play hockey, added 1940s veteran Howie Meeker. I don’t think they can build a building like this again.

Had Conn Smythe not put a shovel in the ground in the spring of 1931, there might not be a centennial to celebrate. Far from creating an iconic civic site, Smythe only wished to keep his investment as the Depression cast its shadow over Toronto. A buyer from Philadelphia was sizing up the Leafs for purchase and transfer out of town before Smythe put together a consortium of 14 investors to raise $160,000 of the $200,000 asking price. J.P. Bickell, a friend of Smythe’s, retained his 40% share.

One of Smythe’s first moves was to change the name of the team from the St. Patricks. He realized the Irish connection to the city but liked the sound of Maple Leafs, in homage to the emblem on Canadian uniforms in the First World War when he was soldier and aviator (shot down and imprisoned by the Germans), and fitting for the new blue-and-white sweaters he planned for them. According to Tom Watt, a coach of the Leafs in the early 1990s, Smythe was likely giving a nod to his days coaching at the University of Toronto and liberally borrowed its logo and colours.

The new Leafs still could not make money from crowds of a few thousand at the Mutual Street Arena, and they’d not won the Cup in almost a decade. In seeking a new home, Smythe was battling both a poor business climate and a nervous ownership group unwilling to start such a large project in unfavourable conditions.

But Smythe had seen what New York’s Madison Square Garden had done for the Rangers’ profile and thought Toronto’s time had come for a major indoor sports venue. After his first choice of sites at Yonge and Fleet Street, near the waterfront, and at Knox College on Spadina failed to click, he took note of a lot at Church and Carlton, owned by Eaton’s department store. It had come up for sale, intersecting two streetcar lines.

Eaton’s vice-president John James Vaughan objected when he heard that Smythe’s group intended to put up an arena; he feared it would draw a riff-raff crowd too near the chain’s new College Street store. But Smythe acted fast. Bright, young assistant Frank Selke publicized some initial drawings Smythe commissioned from the firm of Ross and MacDonald, who’d built Union Station and the Royal York Hotel. The art was included in a prospectus that was offered to the public for a dime.

That brought many excited fans on board, helped by Foster Hewitt’s presence on the growing medium of radio. Smythe also worked potential investors, including their wives, selling them on the cultural benefits of a new building. Among those who came aboard were Sir John Aird, president of the Bank of Commerce, Alf Rogers of St. Marys Cement, and eventually, Vaughan himself. Smythe chose the name Maple Leaf Gardens after the New York edifice, then in its second incarnation at 50th Street and 8th Avenue.

With weak soil and the buried Taddle Creek running under part of its southeast corner, support pylons were required to be pounded through the muck until they reached bedrock. But human obstacles remained the largest threat to Smythe’s vision as MLG Limited was incorporated. A hefty $1.5 million in financing had to start with a $500,000 mortgage with Sun Life Assurance, 100,000 shares of preferred stock, costing $10, and 50,000 shares of common stock at $3 a share.

The houses and small shops fronting Carlton Street were coming down when a shortage of several hundred thousand dollars was discovered, just as meetings to open contractor bidding were held at Aird’s office on King Street. Selke knew the Allied Building Trades Council was having a meeting downtown that day and hurried over to address the group, imploring the workers to take a leap of faith in hard times to see the potentially job-rich project go through.

He reminded them that he and Smythe already had their houses mortgaged to help finance the deal. That honesty and a little prodding of their Toronto pride helped a deal that saw 24 unions take 20% of their pay in stock. Those shares would hit $100 in 1947 and split four and then five to one in the mid-1960s.

More than 1,000 workers were on the site at the height of construction. Thanks to low demand because of the Depression, materials cost 30% less, which helped the project be completed in an astounding six months. The Gardens came to life with 760 tons of structural steel, 750,000 bricks, 77,500 bags of cement, 1,100 tons of gravel, 70 tons of sand, 950,000 feet of lumber, 230,000 haydite blocks, and 540 kegs of nails.

Among the doubters who thought the Gardens would either run out of financing or not be completed on time was King Clancy, who often wandered over after Mutual Street practices to check on its progress. But the 13-storey building, which Smythe boasted was entirely Canadian in conception, plan, design, and material, was indeed ready for opening night, November 12, 1931.

OPENING NIGHT FOR MLG

The band struck up Happy Days Are Here Again when the Leafs and Chicago Black Hawks came out for their 8:30 p.m. warm-up on pristine Gardens ice, before a crowd of 13,233 people — the largest to ever watch an indoor sporting event in Toronto at the time. Smythe and the official party wore top hats, though earlier in the day, Smythe had almost been detained by police. So obsessed was he to hear people’s first thoughts on the building — and to weed out scalpers — that he kept jumping from ticket line to ticket line to eavesdrop, raising the suspicions of a patrolling cop. He was escorted away until he could prove his identity.

After a lengthy list of speakers — Mayor William J. Stewart, city councillors, Bickell, Chicago captain Cy Wentworth, and Ontario premier George S. Henry — the game began. The first goal would come from Chicago’s Harold Mush March, who bookended his place in hockey history after scoring the last goal at Mutual Street Arena the season before. Tommy Cook passed the puck to March, who beat goalie Lorne Chabot. Charlie Conacher scored the first home goal, but the Hawks emerged 2–1 winners.

PRIDE OF OWNERSHIP

Part of the reason the Gardens was special for both the public and players alike was its appearance. Though a pea soup of cigarette smoke formed during intermissions before the ban, and the urinal trough rarely ran dry, the place was scrubbed down before every game and freshly painted each season, with every lightbulb replaced and squeaky seat oiled.

The most well-maintained building I’ve ever seen, four-time Cup captain George Armstrong recalled in the 1990s. You went to some of the others (Boston Garden, Chicago Stadium) and it was just terrible. They were built at the same time and they just became dives. But when kids today are as impressed as I was when I first walked in here in the 1940s, that really says something.

Smythe ran the building with military efficiency. Spit and polish was his trademark, said Brian Conacher, a member of the ’67 Cup team, son and nephew of two Leafs, and later the Gardens’ superintendent. That tradition always continued. Mr. Ballard always made sure there was a fresh coat on the walls and Mr. [Steve] Stavro spent a lot of time maintaining the history of the building and improving the aesthetics.

Smythe set the tone, always at the building at the crack of dawn and often staying late, even on non-game nights. He might drop by in the wee hours when hockey business dictated, and more than one overnight guard was sacked if Smythe showed up and found no one on duty.

Smythe had a sand and gravel company that was another livelihood, employing many Gardens workers and players. That business was also run at peak efficiency by the hawk-eyed Smythe, who watched every truck leave the pit past his office window, making sure its load was level to avoid road spillage and fines from the City of Toronto.

In the ’40s and ’50s when Hap Day was coach and GM, it was doubly hard on the staff because Day was as persnickety as his boss about punctuality, order, and cleanliness. Day would often come in to the Gardens at 6 a.m. and, starting from the greys, work his way down inspecting floors, washrooms, and concession stands. Day also had an underling call the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England each day and synchronize all Gardens clocks to Greenwich