If These Walls Could Talk: Toronto Maple Leafs: Stories from the Toronto Maple Leafs Ice, Locker Room, and Press Box

By Lance Hornby

Chronicling the Maple Leafs for 35 years, longtime Toronto Sun beat reporter Lance Hornby provides access into the Maple Leafs' inner sanctum as only he can. From the heyday of the 1940s when Toronto won five Stanley Cups in Maple Leaf Gardens to the current star-laden era with Auston Matthews and John Tavares, this book provides a one-of-a-kind, insider's look into the great moments and interesting anecdotes from the Leafs' storied history. Read about how a lifetime pass to Leafs games was lost in a poker game; why Charlie Conacher dangled King Clancy by his feet from an open hotel window; how Mike Babcock learned he was related to Dave Keon; the wild times of the historic Gardens during the chaotic Harold Ballard era; and the legendary pranks of Doug Gilmour, whose sense of humour only was rivaled by his skill on the ice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Oct 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781641253253

Book preview

To my fellow writers and broadcasters on the Leafs beat of past, present, and future. Keep those stories coming.

Contents

Forword by Mark Osborne

Introduction

1. Young Guns

2. The Original Leafs

3. The Final Cup Era

4. Media Madness

5. Maple Leaf Gardens

6. Harold Ballard

7. The Super ’70s

8. Road Trips

9. The ’80s and ’90s

10. One-Liners

11. Fan-Demonium

12. Go, Go Goalies

13. The Wild West

14. Coach’s Corner

15. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

16. The 21st Century

17. The Fighters, Enforcers, and Pranksters

Acknowledgments

Sources

Forword by Mark Osborne

Playing Saturday on Hockey Night in Canada is still the ultimate high for an NHLer. It’s even better when you play for the Toronto Maple Leafs. From the instant you wake up that morning, the buzz in the city is palpable. In my era of the 1980s and ’90s, by the time you arrived at Maple Leaf Gardens, the atmosphere was unbelievable—no matter how the Leafs were doing or what team was in town. It’s still that way at Scotiabank Arena.

When I played minor hockey in the city or as a member of the Niagara Falls Flyers facing the junior Marlies in the afternoon, we’d come to the Gardens early to soak it all in as we watched the Leafs skate in the morning.

The first time I was traded to the Leafs—from the New York Rangers in March 1987—it was a dream come true, but it was also a shocker. We’d played the night before, and I’d had a good game. So when our general manager in New York, Phil Esposito, phoned that morning, I actually thought he might be calling to compliment me. Little did I know, I’d be coming home.

Gord Stellick, later to be my co-host on Leafs radio postgame shows, was the Toronto assistant general manager at the time. He remembers the deal, too. My father had passed away four or five months earlier. My mom was now alone and moving back to Toronto from Vancouver, so it was a nice gesture by both teams to work something out for me to be closer to her.

My first thought before everything sunk in was: Wow, this is the team I grew up watching. Right away, it all came back: Hockey Night, the sights and smells, the subway rides from the west end with Dad, the College Station stop, the walk down Carlton Street with all the fans—and all the scalpers. I remembered the scent of the popcorn and the chestnuts in the hallways, the ushers with their white hats, and how the bright lights from above accentuated the vivid colours of the seats and playing surface as you emerged from the tunnel and gazed toward the ice. Now I was walking in that same building as a Leaf.

When I took that first step inside the dressing room, all I could think of was how proud my dad would’ve been and that I wished he could see me play there as a Leaf. There was a sweater hanging with Osborne on the back. I’d been traded for Jeff Jackson, so they gave me his No. 12 and just switched the nameplate. I’d already played for two Original Six teams, having been drafted by the Detroit Red Wings, so I considered myself very fortunate to make it three, including my hometown team. But I didn’t have a lot of time for nerves—not at 4:30 pm on a gameday.

I don’t know if someone can ever be prepared to play for the Leafs. Unlike in Detroit and New York, in Toronto you sense that people know you when you walk around the streets. But you also come to realize what the Leafs were all about for so many decades. They were Canadian boys who did not take that adulation for granted.

At the time I arrived, things hadn’t been going too well. There were even draft prospects who’d said they didn’t want to play in Toronto. But Wendel Clark had been picked first overall a couple of years earlier and he was changing the views of a lot of people. We played the Pittsburgh Penguins that first game, and it was a great start for me. They had Mario Lemieux, but we played really well and won 7–2. I had a goal, and it was assisted by Russ Courtnall and Todd Gill, who was still with the team when I came back to Toronto a second time in the 1992 trade with the Winnipeg Jets for Lucien DeBlois.

The dressing room is where a team truly grows and the great stories begin. I had the good fortune the first time that coach John Brophy played me with Gary Leeman and Ed Olczyk. The writers called us the GEM line, combining the first initials of our first names, though those two were really the gems, and I was the scuffed-up marble. We had a measure of balance. We were 1-2-3 in team scoring in ’87–88, and Leeman scored 50 a couple of years later.

But it was more than just hockey with us because we became close friends off the ice.

Olczyk and Leeman got into horse racing as part owners, and I tagged along. Olczyk and I both got married the same year in 1988. Sure, I was disappointed to be traded in 1990, but at least I went with Olczyk to Winnipeg, and we had a lot of tales about that place, too.

They say timing is everything, and that was certainly the case when I was dealt back to the Leafs two years later. The team was about to turn the corner, even though few players, fans, and media realized it. Pat Burns came in as coach a couple of months after I returned, and we suddenly had that respectability everyone had waited so long for. It was a lot like what’s happening with today’s Leafs.

Burnsie put me on a line with centre Peter Zezel and fellow ­winger Bill Berg, and we checked hard, hit hard, and scored a bit. I really enjoyed that role. It became even more special to me that the team as a whole did well, and we almost made it to the Stanley Cup Final in ’93.

To have experienced the desolation of the Harold Ballard era when I first arrived, to watching people celebrating and closing down the streets to traffic, that was crazy. I have some great memories and pictures from that time. My wife, Madolyn, and my kids, Abigail and Eliza, tease me that that I’m still riding those stories today. And I’m sure I’ll keep telling and re-telling them for years to come. You don’t forget anything about being a member of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

—Mark Osborne

Maple Leafs left wing 1986–94

Introduction

Hey, you hang around the Maple Leafs? Must have a few good stories, eh?

Those of us on the beat hear that all the time from fans; while at dinner with friends; via the mailman, the store clerk, or an out-of-town writer curious about Canada’s most scrutinized hockey team. I can only reply, Sure, I have some. How much time do you have?

It’s an intoxicating topic. Once you spin one colourful blue-and-white yarn, you think of another and another with the audience wanting an encore. Often they add their own experiences at the Gardens, involving friends, parents, or grandparents. Maybe they hate the Leafs and have a good tale about a rival getting the last word. For better or worse, to grow up in Toronto is to grow up with the Leafs.

With the Leafs having gone more than 50 years without a title—a challenge fellow authors of the Montreal Canadiens, Dallas Cowboys, and St. Louis Cardinals in the If These Walls Could Talk series didn’t face, by the way—writing this book meant digging into a trove of ­older ­stories from the back files. That’s the fun part, as the century-old Toronto franchise is often equal parts history, honour, humour, and human error. Yes, even in championship seasons—13 Stanley Cups from their inception as the Toronto Arenas to their final four in the 1960s—there were still plenty of rough patches. Conversely, their darkest hours produced many light moments.

More than 900 players have suited up for the franchise since 1917, and through many winters, their stories have come to light: a three-team NHL, the construction of the Gardens during the Great Depression, the war years when hockey was a diversion, the good men, the bad apples, the triumphs, and troubled times.

My generation grew up when the Leafs ruled the city. They were on TV every Saturday night before the Blue Jays, Raptors, and Fortnite. Though the players were sometimes snowy specs on a tiny black-and-white screen, they seemed larger than life. And the Gardens looked so small from my living room yet so immense when I blinked into its bright lights on my first visit.

My big brother, Mike, took me to see the Boston Bruins-Leafs game on January 7, 1967. We sat in the reds near ice level and we probably dressed up like every patron who attended the Gardens in those days. Toronto won 5–2, and when I recently looked up the summary of that night, Frank Mahovlich opened the scoring from Dave Keon and Ron Ellis, three players I would get to interview extensively in my newspaper years.

As a nervous young reporter in the mid-1980s tentatively taking a seat in the press box for the first time, I took stock of everything around me in case I wasn’t allowed back. More than 30 years later, I’m still compiling notes. Hockey as a whole has allowed me to follow the Leafs around the world. I’ve gone to both sides of the Atlantic for exhibition games and all the way to Asia and the Middle East, where I accompanied alumni in their visits to Canadian troops on peacekeeping missions.

Splitting my time between the Gardens and the Air Canada Centre—recently renamed Scotiabank Arena—I’ve been to almost 60 arenas where the Leafs have played. My duties at the Toronto Sun newspaper have given me great latitude in many stories on the team’s past and a chance to interview players going all the way back to their 1932 Stanley Cup team—the first title at the Gardens—to Auston Matthews and the stars of tomorrow. I’ve been quite fortunate to have a seat on the bus—literally and figuratively—and hope you enjoy this ride.

1. Young Guns

Mike Babcock has a term for his young stars, referring to them as touched by a wand from God. There is no doubting Mitch Marner brings something special to the table every night. The sports term making something out of nothing seems the most apt description of the Maple Leafs’ top scorer in 2017–18. What’s amazing is most of us have no time and space, whatsoever, Babcock said. We’re banging it here, banging it there, and chasing it. Then the really good guys have all the time in the world, and that’s what we’re talking about [with Marner]. It seems effortless, and they have the puck all the time, and you can’t figure out why. They’re just better.

During the 2016 Leafs development camp in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Marner once more crossed paths with Mason Marchment. The then-163-pound Marner found himself looking up at 6’4 Marchment, who two years earlier had received a 10-game OHL suspension for a check to Marner’s head, when he was with London, and Marchment was with Erie. I still tell him he has never said sorry to me," Marner said, laughing.

Marchment, son of former Leafs defenceman Bryan Marchment, claimed he apologized immediately and always maintained it was an accident. Marner was flying past the Erie net after a scoring chance and, while looking away, put himself right in Marchment’s path for what the latter argued was a self-defence posture. Unlucky, really, Marchment said, I honestly didn’t even know I was suspended for it. I was dressed for warm-up the next game, my coach came up and said, ‘You’re not playing.’ I had to watch the video to see why.

Marchment later worked his way into the Leafs with an entry-level contract in 2017.

Marner had a less contentious beginning with Matt Martin. Marner wasn’t going to assist on many goals by fourth-line thumper but did help with his marriage proposal. Martin decided the time was right during the spring of 2018 during a Sunday stroll in Toronto’s 19th century Distillery District of shops and restaurants.

His longtime girlfriend was Sydney Esiason, daughter of former NFL quarterback Boomer Esiason. Martin’s future father-in-law was a huge New York Rangers fan, so there was a somewhat dicey introduction years earlier when Sydney brought home a New York Islander to meet Dad. But the two men eventually got along famously.

Matt got Sydney and their dog, Jax, to pause at an art installation, where hundreds of padlocks were on display by couples to show love and friendship. Matt urged her to take a closer look and while she turned her back he got down on one knee with a ring. Jax got in a few face licks, and a small crowd applauded. Marner shadowed them with a camera and posted the highlights.

* * *

One of the first things that new 32-year-old general manager Kyle Dubas did upon replacing Lou Lamoriello in the summer of 2018 was to relax the rules on facial hair. Not only did beards come back in a hurry, but Auston Matthews had the green light to appear in a GQ magazine fashion layout, among similar shoots in other publications. He and Marner did a cameo as Cannon Dolls in the Nutcracker ballet, and Matthews also appeared on a salty no-holds-barred podcast or two.

Rookies were permitted to do in-game TV interviews, another Lamoriello no-no. We want them to have interests outside of hockey, to be able to express themselves as individuals, Dubas said. "My philosophy has been: if a person feels they’re at their best as an individual, they’re going to have their most to give to the team. One of Auston’s great interests, outside of the team, is obviously fashion, and it’s interesting to see the feedback to GQ. Some people are critical, some are thinking, What is this? But that’s only because it’s a non-traditional hobby outside of hockey. If a player golfs, listens to music, or likes a certain type of movie, nothing is ever said. But if it’s fashion or something different, such as Garret Sparks likes to DJ…For one it takes a lot of courage [for Matthews] to put yourself in those types of photos. Then you read and you get to know him. I know some people would say, ‘Just focus on hockey,’ but hockey takes up four hours of their day. There’s 20 more hours that we need them to have fulfillment. If it’s fashion, clothing, golf, playing Fortnite, whatever, as long as they’re filling those other hours, and we’re helping and encouraging them, I think they’ll be better when coming to perform."

Auston Matthews pulls on his Maple Leafs sweater after Toronto selects him No. 1 overall in the 2016 draft.

For someone dubbed saviour, Matthews was not on many fans’ radar until about a year before the lottery balls lined up for the Leafs. When Toronto made a Christmas trip to western Canada around New Year’s 2016 and their last-place finish was starting to take shape, I happened to draw a seat next to a holidaying Marc Crawford, who was then Matthews’ coach for Zurich in the Swiss League. You are not going to believe what this kid can do, said an enthusiastic Crawford, who coached the Colorado Avalanche to the Stanley Cup in 1996 after doing a fine job with Toronto’s farm team in St. John’s, Newfoundland. His release, when he lets it go from between the defenceman’s legs, using him as the screen, is incredibly quick and deceptive. He’s in a league with McDavid and Eichel already. He comes from a good family. Trust me, Toronto is going to fall in love with this kid.

* * *

Within 24 hours of John Tavares’ big Canada Day signing with the Maple Leafs, his No. 91 had popped up in the crowd at Blue Jays games, a major betting site moved its needle on Toronto to Stanley Cup favourite, and one car owner proudly drove around town with a JTAVARES vanity license plate. It was in hopes of him one day coming to Toronto, said real estate manager Tim Parsons, who’d ordered the plate a few years earlier. I was anxiously awaiting July 1.

Yes, Toronto went J.T. cray-zee after the unrestricted free agent signed. He broke the news by posting a pic of himself asleep in Leafs sheets, and it was widely re-tweeted, indicating he’d chosen home over many NHL suitors. Why wouldn’t the city get excited? Star free agents rarely leave their draft teams after nearly a decade when they have prime production years to go. Tavares had been captain of the New York Islanders—their beacon of hope in troubled times on and off the ice—and was counted upon to eventually lead them back to contention in a new arena.

But to choose Toronto, which not long before had been as desirable as Siberia because of its mouldy roster and impatient fanbase, that took a leap of faith. It was a landing padded by a seven-year contract for $77 million, a very good supporting cast, and a Stanley Cup/Olympic champion coach in Mike Babcock.

It was hard for Tavares not to see that adulation heaped on him from the moment general manager Dubas took him on a tour of the dressing room, when he was mobbed at the club’s first charity outing of the season, and then training camp in Niagara Falls, Ontario. It’s an adjustment, being in one place as long as I have been, Tavares said. There is some familiarity from being from here [born in the suburb of Oakville and brought up in nearby Mississauga], but there are still a lot of new things. Plenty of days I’ve gone out and not been recognized. I’ve had a lot of attention about people being happy that I’m coming home. That support has been fantastic. [Now it’s] just worrying about myself and doing what I have to do to be ready for the season and help contribute. I was very fortunate to be in the position I was in. I just felt the opportunity, the fit to play where I grew up, where I fell in love with the game…you grow up watching them, and that’s what you think when you’re six or seven years old, [that] you’re going to wind up playing for them. I had this once-in-a-lifetime chance.

Tavares had little sleep in the 72 hours leading to the ­unrestricted free-agency deadline, in which several teams, including the Isles, went hard after him. One of the messages Tavares received during the free-agent interview period was from a young gun Leaf, Matthews, a fellow first overall pick separated by seven years.

Although a small faction of conspiracy theorists wondered if Matthews would have his nose out of joint that he was no longer the clear No. 1 centre and because Tavares’ arrival would block his path to being captain, this was no crank phone call. Matthews wanted to reiterate all the things that Tavares heard about the hip young Leafs dressing room with Marner, Morgan Rielly, and William Nylander were true. They needed him. He’s a guy who takes his craft very seriously and he’s been one of the premier players since he’s been in the league, Matthews said. We’re extremely excited to have John. He makes our team a lot better. It’s another step to reaching our ultimate goal.

Halfway through the 2018–19 season, Matthews made his own commitment, a five-year deal for more than $58