All roads have always led back to Kingston, Ontario, for Doug Gilmour. Back to the head of the great Saint Lawrence River. Back to the site of the penitentiary that held some of Canada’s most notorious criminals, where his father worked for decades. Back to his formative years in hockey, starting at Calvin Park Public School and playing with the Church Athletic Team. Back to being the smallest player, to being doubted. The belief and the confidence had to come from a place deep within. A dark place within. Other than his parents, Don and Dolly, his older brother, Dave, and maybe his best buddy, Ian MacInnis, there weren’t many in Kingston who imagined Gilmour would one day grow into one of the NHL’s biggest stars. Most just thought he had the wrong attitude. Or maybe the right one, the one a small player had to have. “There was a sportscaster, growing up in Kingston, named Max Jackson,” recalls Gilmour. “He would say, ‘If you can’t play a sport, be one.’ That was his line. Well, I was a poor sport. I fucking hated losing more than anything.” Everybody was the enemy, trying to keep him down.
It’s fifteen years since he retired as an NHL player, and Gilmour doesn’t compete like that anymore. He can’t. He has a chronically sore neck, evidence of those days when he was right at a comfortable cross-check level for bigger NHL defencemen. He takes it easy in Leafs alumni games. This night, he strolls casually into his new hockey kingdom fashionably late. The entrance to Kingston’s K-Rock Centre at the corner of Ontario Street and The Tragically Hip Way brings him into the arena behind the home team’s net just as the national anthem is starting. In a stylish short leather jacket and casual pants, he looks more like a hip hedge fund manager than a traditional hockey man. His team, the major junior Kingston Frontenacs of the Ontario Hockey League, quickly builds a lead in their playoff game. The building is only about one-third full. Gilmour has been involved in the operation of the team for a decade, either as coach or general manager or something else, sometimes happily, sometimes not so happily. At one point, he hired, then fired, his former Leafs teammate Todd Gill as head coach. They haven’t spoken since. He drafted Max Domi, son of former teammate Tie Domi, then was told the Domi family wanted Max to be traded to a better team. Ugh. The politics of the junior game were no fun at all. Everybody had an agenda.
Gilmour came back to Kingston to join the Frontenacs when his dad got sick, leaving a job as assistant coach with the Leafs’ top farm club, one that probably would have led him back to the NHL. He has stayed on for a decade, commuting from his home in Burlington, just outside of Hamilton. He worked with the “Fronts” during his father’s final days, and for years he continued making the drive to visit his mother, who suffered from dementia and didn’t remember that he’d been to see her. Being with the Frontenacs kept him close to his family. He lost his mother in the fall of 2017.
For two periods, as he watches his Frontenacs, Gilmour sits in the press box, jokes and tells stories. Some are about his dad coaching him as a boy, some are about the NHL. He laughs about playing in Chicago for Bob Pulford and that day in practice when Pulford didn’t notice one of the lenses in his glasses was missing. There was also the year he played a half season for Rapperswil of the Swiss elite league and, as the team’s leading scorer, had to wear a helmet painted a gaudy metallic gold, part of a league sponsorship deal with a Swiss bank. He’s still in touch with friends from that team.
Gilmour also tells the story about that day in 1996 when, as the very popular captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs, he met with Cliff Fletcher and offered to surrender his captaincy to Wayne Gretzky. Fletcher summoned him to his Maple Leaf Gardens office and told him there was a deal in the offing to bring Gretzky to the Leafs as an unrestricted free agent. Gretzky had been dealt to St. Louis by the Los Angeles Kings the previous season but was looking elsewhere. Vancouver and the New York Rangers were possibilities, but Fletcher was convinced he had the inside track. “I said, ‘No problem. He can take the captaincy.’ That’s how much I respected Wayne,” Gilmour recalls. It was more than that. Gilmour might have been less than a good sport as a youngster, but he had his role models. He grew up first admiring Bobby Orr, and then, when he was playing junior down the highway in Cornwall, Ontario, admiring Gretzky. Adoring Gretzky, more like it. Wanting to be Gretzky. Tucking his sweater into his hockey pants like Gretzky. Using a straight stick like Gretzky. “I copycatted everything from him,” says Gilmour. “Making plays from behind the net, everything.” There were only three years between the two, but because Gretzky was a legend at such a young age and had started his professional career as a seventeen-year-old in the World Hockey Association, Gilmour didn’t view him as a contemporary. So when it seemed Gretzky might become his teammate, his immediate reflex was to take a back seat to his hero and let Gretzky wear the C with the Leafs.
Gretzky as a Leaf never happened. Leafs owner Steve Stavro, confronted with financial problems, refused to approve the funds to pay for Fletcher’s plan. Gretzky says if he had signed with Toronto, which he would have done at a bargain basement price, he would never have accepted the C from Gilmour (although he did accept the captaincy in LA when Dave Taylor insisted he take it). “Dougie was without question the captain of that team with what he had done,” says Gretzky. “I would never have gone in that direction. Ever.” The respect was apparently mutual.
Gretzky, if he had joined the Leafs, would have attracted much of the attention that for Gilmour had become a heavy burden. The missed opportunity came a little more than three years after the two had gone head-to-head in the 1993 Clarence Campbell Conference final as the star centres of the two highest-profile teams in hockey at the time. That occasion wasn’t billed just as Toronto versus LA but as Gilmour versus Gretzky, for the first time putting Gilmour on the same marquee as the player he’d modelled himself after. As a Leaf, he’d blossomed into a dynamic, must-see player, a player who got the big minutes of playing time that stars demanded, a player who moved the crowd to the edge of their seats when he grabbed the puck and burst towards the other team’s net, capable of either making a perfect pass to a teammate or scoring himself. This series would be the biggest challenge of Gilmour’s career, the biggest conundrum. How did you compete against your idol, a player you had always deferred to? How did you refuse to lose and be the best you could while not making your idol look bad or second best? Letting Gretzky be better wasn’t an option. But beating him would not only be difficult, it would almost be disrespectful. If it had to be done, it had to be done the right way. And if the right way got a little crooked, well, he’d never listened to Max Jackson anyway.
THERE WAS NO WAY the NHL was going to allow Game 2 of the ’93 Campbell Conference final to pick up where Game 1 had left off. Gary Bettman had taken over the leadership of the NHL three months earlier, and if there was to be further mayhem, by gosh it had to at least appear that the league was trying to contain it. Back in 1976, Toronto fans remembered, the league had lost control of what was happening on the ice to such a degree that Ontario attorney general Roy McMurtry issued arrest warrants for three Philadelphia players—Don Saleski, Mel Bridgman and Joe Watson—after a playoff game between the Flyers and Leafs. Given the events that had transpired between the Leafs and Kings in Game 1, one might have wondered if this series was headed down the same path. There were surely enough good citizens of Toronto who would support the arrest and imprisonment of the outlaw Marty McSorley. Someone just had to print up the WANTED posters and they’d be plastered all over town.
“A McSorry Incident!” screamed the headline in the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper, commenting on McSorley’s hit on Gilmour in Game 1 and his fight with Wendel Clark. The accompanying picture showed McSorley looking as if he’d been captured on a perp walk after being arrested. “That was a real cheap shot,” Leafs GM Cliff Fletcher was quoted as saying. “The intent was to put [Gilmour] out. Fortunately, [McSorley] didn’t.” The nature of the news cycle at that time allowed the story to gather steam on the off-day between games.
The game had ended just before 11 P.M. on Monday night and then would have been reported on the late evening sports shows. Toronto was just getting the beginning of twenty-four-hour talk radio. There were no internet chat rooms—there was no internet—no iPhone interviews, no “wheel” showing the same TV highlights through the early hours of the morning. The morning papers, three of them in Toronto, would land on doorsteps and in hotel lobbies at dawn, and by the time the teams arrived for practice at the Gardens, the debate on what had happened the night before would be cranked up again, providing another day of theatre and lively quotes.
A particularly sensational or critical story might get pinned up in somebody’s dressing room stall. Players didn’t receive media training, and team officials weren’t eavesdropping on every interview to interrupt if the questions or answers got too provocative. There were more notebooks than television cameras, and no podiums or formal interview areas. A reporter might just catch a player in the hallway, or walking to the team bus. Off-days were often entertaining, a chance for coaches to set the stage and players to get their opinions in the paper. “Dougie’s just gone back to his planet to rest,” quipped Leafs head coach Pat Burns on being asked about the health of his star centre when Gilmour didn’t show for practice. There were lots of threats, implied or otherwise. The Leafs talked about inserting their own enforcer, Ken Baumgartner, who had been a healthy scratch for twelve consecutive games. Baumgartner confirmed he had chatted with Burns but did not reveal the subject matter. “It’s classified information,” he said.
Kings head coach Barry Melrose, meanwhile, said he thought Gilmour’s hip check on Alexei Zhitnik in the third period was a much dirtier hit than McSorley’s. “They were knocking us all over hell’s half acre,” said Melrose. “We hit one guy and Canada wants to send out the militia.” McSorley received more than one hundred threatening messages in his hotel room, all intercepted by his brother. Fletcher predicted there wouldn’t be any more assaults on Gilmour. He declined to provide details. “Ever play in the NHL? Go ask someone who has,” said Fletcher. That had been part of hockey for as long as the game had been played, the dark suggestion after an ugly incident that revenge would be on the menu in the next game. Truth was, it rarely happened that way. The next game was often quiet. Retaliation, if it ever happened, would come further down the road. Served cold.
Still, a sense of order was important, or at least it had to be implied. That was the NHL in those days: often it produced ugly violence but then acted embarrassed by it, or pretended to be surprised and horrified. Don Koharski was officially handed the job of ensuring order was restored in Game 2. Koharski was a veteran NHL referee, and he knew what he was expected to do. He would clamp down on the Leafs and Kings early and often in the second game, sending a steady stream of players to the penalty box. Many were called for misdemeanours that hadn’t been called in the series opener. It was like the NHL rule book had been reviewed and revised between games.
MCSORLEY, LIKE A BRUISED survivor of single combat, skated out for Game 2 with a grotesquely blackened right eye courtesy of a Clark punch. “What else could a guy from Hamilton expect after mugging Doug Gilmour, the Gardens’ Sirius, the brightest of night stars, and fist-fighting with Wendel Clark, the Leafs esteemed captain from the wheat belt? He got exactly what he expected—a shiner,” wrote legendary Star columnist Milt Dunnell. Clark didn’t anticipate McSorley would be looking for him in Game 2. “Truth is, we play a lot alike,” said the Leafs captain. “This time, he got the black eye. Next time, I’ll probably get one.”
Both teams had made lineup changes for Game 2, and not to add finesse. The Kings inserted winger Warren Rychel, who had led the NHL in fighting majors during the season. The Leafs replaced smallish centre John Cullen with six-foot-three pivot Mike Eastwood, although Eastwood was not regarded as a player who sought out physical confrontations. Koharski had his eye on Rychel from the start, and at the forty-five-second mark he sent him to the penalty box for a high-sticking minor on his first shift of the series, an early sign that the referee intended to assert his authority. As the Leafs went to the power play, McSorley stood up Gilmour with a punishing hit at the LA blueline, clearly not backing off an inch despite all the controversy after the first game. Gilmour didn’t respond, but moments later he carried the puck into the LA zone at the right boards and cut into the middle, just like he had in Game 1 before being nailed by McSorley. He wasn’t backing off either. This time, however, it was he and winger Nikolai Borschevsky going two-on-two versus the LA defence pairing of Rob Blake and Tim Watters, and because the Kings were short-handed, Blake was not as free to come across aggressively as McSorley had. Blake and Watters miscommunicated slightly as Gilmour and Borschevsky criss-crossed and worked a give-and-go play. Gilmour finished it off with a backhand move for his third goal of the series at 2:25 to give the Leafs a swift 1–0 lead. It was a shocking start. The Kings had been outshot 22–1 in the third period of Game 1, and now the Leafs had stunned them with an early goal in Game 2.
That made it three goals for Gilmour in just over three periods of competition against the Kings, a dream start to the series for him and for the Leafs. It also continued the dreamlike narrative that had dominated the Leafs’ playoff run and their regular season. Clark was Toronto’s heart and soul, of that there was no question. But Gilmour’s acquisition from Calgary on January 2, 1992, had breathed life into a moribund franchise that had once been the pride of all of English Canada. It had changed the Leafs just as much as Gretzky’s trade from Edmonton to Los Angeles four years earlier—one of the most famous deals in hockey history—had changed the Kings.
THE GILMOUR TRADE WAS crucial for a number of reasons. For starters, it had at least temporarily bailed Fletcher out of a very awkward position. He’d been hired in the summer of 1991 by then Leafs president Don Giffin but had little confidence he’d be able to stay in his new job for long. Giffin and Stavro, both wealthy Toronto businessmen, had been two of the three executors named to handle the estate of Leafs owner Harold Ballard, who had died in April 1990. For more than two decades, Ballard had been the biggest mouth in hockey. He had bought into the Leafs in 1961 with Stafford Smythe—son of Leafs founder Conn Smythe—and John Bassett, and was part of the club’s ownership during the glorious 1960s as the team won four Cups, although he had little to do with the actual team.
Ballard outlasted both of his business partners and took control of the Leafs and the Gardens in late 1971. The following year, he went on trial on forty-nine counts of theft, fraud and tax evasion. He was convicted and sentenced to nine years in prison. His first stop was the maximum security Millhaven Institute, in Bath, Ontario. While incarcerated there, he called Red Kelly to ask if he might be interested in coaching the Leafs. Later, Ballard was moved to a nearby minimum security facility, and was paroled in October 1973. For years, members of the Toronto media referred to Ballard as “Millhaven Fats.” Instead of being permanently banished from the NHL lodge, he simply returned to run the team and resumed his place on the NHL board of governors. Four years later, he was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, an outrage that was evidence of that institution’s corrupt nature in those days and the manner in which NHL business could be steered to suit the whim of powerful owners.
As the sole owner of the Leafs, Ballard was charitable with his money but also crass, sexist and often vulgar. There had been no NHL owner quite like him before, and there hasn’t been one since. He told CBC Radio host Barbara Frum to “keep quiet” during an interview and suggested that women were only good in the bedroom and the kitchen. After reconsidering his decision to fire head coach Roger Neilson, he wanted Neilson to show up for the next game with a paper bag over his head. To protest the shooting down of a Korean jetliner by a Soviet fighter jet, he flashed the message “REMEMBER KOREAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 007 SHOT DOWN BY THE RUSSIANS. DON’T CHEER. JUST BOO” on the video scoreboard at the Gardens during an exhibition hockey game between Canada and a Soviet team. He refused to trade legendary Leaf Dave Keon in the latter stages of his career, then lost him to the World Hockey Association for nothing. He all but drove star centre Darryl Sittler out of town. Ballard was part provocateur, part carny. He said what he wanted when he wanted. But he wasn’t a successful hockey man. He never produced a winning team. From 1971 until his death, the Leafs won eight playoff series and made it past the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs once. In his final years, with his eccentric partner, Yolanda Babic, by his side, the team slipped further and further from the mainstream. Other clubs started acquiring Russian players as they became available, but Ballard wouldn’t allow it. The Leafs became more a subject for tabloid gossip than a contender for the Stanley Cup. Giffin and Stavro, both on the Gardens board of directors, each quietly had his own ambitions of succeeding Ballard and running the famous hockey club when he died. They soon became rivals.
Fletcher watched from afar as the Leafs organization spun into chaos and uncertainty following Ballard’s death. He quit as GM of the Flames after the ’91 playoffs, then considered an offer from the New York Rangers before agreeing to join the Leafs as GM after being courted by Giffin in his capacity as team president. He was given a long-term contract and a large salary, the kind of salary Ballard never would have approved. “I was assured absolutely, categorically, Steve [Stavro] would never get the team,” Fletcher says now. The assurances turned out to be empty.
The night before he was to be introduced as Toronto’s new GM in June 1991, Fletcher was invited to meet Stavro for dinner at the Palace Restaurant in Toronto’s Greektown. It wasn’t a congratulatory meeting. It was a dismissal. “Steve wanted to meet me,” says Fletcher. “Everybody told me not to go. But I thought, I’ll go. Stavro had his lawyer there with him. We had a talk. He said, ‘I like you. But you’re going to be a casualty of war. If you’re smart, you’ll get right back on that plane tomorrow and head back to Calgary. Because when I take over, you’re gone.’ ” Stavro’s preferred choice as GM was local businessman Lyman MacInnis, who had once tried to organize a sale of the Leafs from Ballard to iconic Canadian singer Anne Murray. But Stavro was powerless to remove Fletcher immediately, because Fletcher had an iron-clad, five-year, $4-million contract, and Stavro didn’t yet have controlling interest in the hockey club. “I just played it out,” Fletcher says.
But he didn’t have a lot of time with which to work. Stavro was hovering, determined to make the Leafs and the Gardens his own. Fletcher needed to do something dramatic to turn the hockey team around, to provide evidence that he could make the Leafs a winner and help make them a money-maker. The team was in terrible shape, and Fletcher knew there was no time for gradual rebuilding plans. After twenty years of running NHL teams, he was an experienced trader. He knew how to make big deals, and he needed to make some. Quickly.
The initial situation was dire. At his initial training camp workout in the fall of 1991, Fletcher watched briefly from the stands then walked down to the ice surface and called over his assistant coaches Mike Murphy and Mike Kitchen. “Can’t you get them to skate faster?” he pleaded. It’s not like Fletcher had imagined it would be much better. “I’d been coming in here with Calgary for years and walking out with eight-goal victories. I knew exactly what the team was,” he says now. But there was perception and there was brutal reality. On Boxing Day, Toronto went into Pittsburgh and surrendered the first goal of the game to winger Joe Mullen. Leafs winger Kevin Maguire tied the game 1–1. Then the Penguins scored eleven consecutive goals, with Leafs goaltender Grant Fuhr, acquired a few weeks earlier in Fletcher’s first big deal as Toronto GM, left in for all the Pittsburgh goals. Mullen ended up with four goals, and the embarrassed Leafs fell to 10-23-5 on the season, the third worst record in the NHL. Fletcher’s first months as saviour of the Leafs were not going well. “Cliff was flipping out,” recalls Bob Stellick, then a public relations aide. Fletcher understood the rebuilding task at hand, but losing to the Penguins like that was humiliating to the proud hockey lifer. “It was like…hide the rope,” he says grimly.
With Fletcher’s old team in Calgary, the situation was very different. The powerful Flames had won the Stanley Cup two years earlier with a payroll of $4 million, and they were struggling to come to grips with the fact that their payroll was about to get a lot bigger, probably well over $10 million, if they wanted to stay at the top. Stars such as Gilmour, Joe Nieuwendyk, Gary Roberts, Al MacInnis, Gary Suter, Sergei Makarov and goalie Mike Vernon were all going to have to get paid. It was a tricky situation for GM Doug Risebrough, who had played with some of those players—but not Gilmour—during his own five-year playing stint in Calgary before retiring. Risebrough and Gilmour had bickered about a new contract for the veteran centre for months, and it had turned personal. Really personal. Gilmour had made about $411,000 the previous season. The battle over a new contract had ended in arbitration, quite often a messy process for NHL players. The team offered $550,000 at the August arbitration hearing. Gilmour asked for $1.2 million, and arbitrator Gary Schreider decided on $750,000. That enraged Gilmour, who felt that because the league got to pick the arbitrators, the system was rigged against players.
Risebrough wasn’t all that pleased with the result either as he contemplated his payroll challenges. Youngster Theoren Fleury, making only $251,000, was good enough to supplant Gilmour as the team’s number-two centre behind Nieuwendyk. Risebrough started looking for other NHL clubs who might want Gilmour in a trade, something Gilmour learned quite by accident. In early October, with the Flames in San Francisco before a game with the San Jose Sharks, Gilmour woke early to hear a loud voice from the adjoining hotel room. It was Risebrough on the phone, clearly unaware Gilmour was in the room next door. Gilmour got out of bed and lay by the door to Risebrough’s room, listening. “What the fuck are you doing?” said Tim Sweeney, who had woken to find his roommate on the floor. “Come here,” Gilmour hissed, waving him over. The sight of two NHL players lying on the carpet to eavesdrop on their neighbour must have been hilarious. But to Gilmour it was no joke. He heard Risebrough talking in cold, businesslike tones to someone at the other end about why he was going to have to trade Gilmour, and soon. That just made the already strained relationship between GM and player worse.
Gilmour hung in for thirty-three games knowing Risebrough was trying to trade him. A number of teams had expressed interest. Los Angeles, for one. Gretzky had spoken to Gilmour about his fight for more money, and the Kings were the highest-spending team in hockey. Hartford, perhaps, could be convinced to part with the original Little Ball of Hate, winger Pat Verbeek. Then there was poor, downtrodden Toronto, an easy mark for many teams over the years. The Leafs had traditionally been a team desperate to do anything to get better, like four years earlier when they traded their first-round pick in the 1990 draft to New Jersey for veteran blueliner Tom Kurvers, who initially refused to join the awful Leafs organization. The pick had turned into the third selection overall for the Devils and landed them future Hall of Fame defenceman Scott Niedermayer.
Risebrough had apprenticed under Fletcher. They had a close relationship, and talks commenced. Then, after a New Year’s Eve victory over Montreal, Gilmour decided he’d had enough and left the Flames. Less than twenty-four hours later, Fletcher and Risebrough agreed on a trade that sent Gilmour and four other players—defencemen Jamie Macoun and Ric Nattress, goalie Rick Wamsley and young winger Kent Manderville—to Toronto from the Flames. In exchange, Calgary received star winger Gary Leeman, enforcer Craig Berube, defenceman Michel Petit, young blueliner Alexander Godynyuk and backup goalie Jeff Reese. It was, to a great extent, a money deal. Toronto was taking on salary; Calgary was dumping it. Stavro may have wanted to fire him, but until that happened, Fletcher had a free hand to spend on players. He’d already added Fuhr’s $1.247-million contract for the ’92–93 season in a deal with Edmonton, but this trade with Calgary was going to cost the Leafs a great deal more, starting with the understanding they’d have to re-do Gilmour’s contract. Within a year, they’d double his earnings. Not only did Gilmour want more money, so did Macoun and Nattress, while Wamsley was looking for more playing time in order to secure another contract.
For the Flames, not only did the trade relieve financial pressures, Leeman was also a potential replacement at right wing for Brett Hull, who had been traded by Fletcher to St. Louis several years earlier as the Flames tried to win the Cup. Calgary did win it all in ’89, but the deal had become an embarrassing one for the Flames. Hull had scored seventy-two and eighty-six goals for the Blues the previous two seasons and was on his way to seventy goals in ’91–92. Leeman wasn’t Hull, but he had scored fifty-one goals two seasons earlier, and that was after back-to-back thirty-goal seasons. With better players in Calgary, he might score even more.
But he was a bust in Calgary. Indeed, the trade with Toronto so weakened the Flames they missed the playoffs, and then, with a less powerful club the next season, they were the first-round victims of the Kings in the ’93 playoffs. The Gilmour deal, then, helped set the stage for the classic ’93 playoff confrontation between the Leafs and Kings. Gone forever were the days when the road to the Stanley Cup went through Alberta. The trade strengthened the Leafs immeasurably and also cleared the way for LA to make the playoff run they hadn’t been able to gain since acquiring Gretzky.
“We were so bad,” says Fletcher, recalling the trade. “So how could things get worse? I knew the players I was getting better than the ones I had given up. I didn’t know how Leeman was going to play when he went to Calgary. He could be a fifty-goal scorer. They loved Leeman. I don’t know why he didn’t play well when he got there. But he never played anywhere near the level he did with Toronto. I knew we were getting three solid guys, and the young kid in Manderville, and with Gilmour, we had to do it.” He remembers the trade wistfully, evidence of a bygone era in the game. “Today, there’s no trades like that. Today, I really feel for the general managers. Everybody makes mistakes in this business. At least when I was a general manager you had a much better chance to recover from a mistake. You could spend a little money. You could go out and get another player. Today, these poor guys, they commit to a player and they commit to the money you’re giving him, they’re screwed. Twenty-five years ago, there were a lot of teams that were sloppy, a lot of teams that couldn’t spend money to hire personnel, a lot of teams that weren’t up to snuff. Today, it’s a level playing field. Everybody wants to get an edge. But today, it’s almost impossible. How do you get an edge? You can’t.” Fletcher insists he didn’t set out to fleece Risebrough, his former student, out of anger or bitterness with his former team. “I wanted to win the deal, but I didn’t want to see Calgary killed like that,” he says. “I’d run the team for nineteen years! But I never asked for anything. All I did was say yes to every proposal they made.”
The deal was one-sided from the start, an enormous windfall for the Leafs and a major victory for Fletcher, known as the “Silver Fox.” Stavro, at least for the time being, couldn’t possibly make a move to fire him. For Gilmour, nicknamed “Killer,” it was the opportunity he craved, a chance to be the focal point of an NHL team for the first time in his pro career and a chance at a larger pay cheque. He was twenty-eight years old and already had registered a hundred-point season in the NHL. He was ready for a bigger role, and the Leafs were a team desperate for stars and firepower. When Gilmour arrived in Toronto, expectations were tragically low. The stink from the Ballard years was still in the air. Gilmour was a highly respected player, but how much could one player possibly do? As it turned out, it was more than anyone would have predicted.
A plus for Gilmour was that Toronto was closer to Kingston, which meant family members were able to visit more easily and watch him play. His marriage had dissolved in Calgary, and now he could start over nearer to home. Over the course of five seasons as a Leaf, he would change his address six times, constantly searching for a home he could retreat to and feel comfortable in while learning to embrace life as a hockey superstar. He was wealthy and single but unable to find a place to rest his head. At the beginning, he moved into an apartment building on Wood Street, adjacent to Maple Leaf Gardens, where many incoming players often stayed temporarily. He rented a two-bedroom apartment for $2,000 a month—very expensive in those days—and stayed for more than a year.
The World Wide Web had only just been invented, so what existed of internet access for most people, including sports writers, was extremely limited. Social media was a long way off, while Bell Canada was just starting to advertise its exciting new “call waiting” feature on Hockey Night in Canada broadcasts. Hockey players in Toronto, while famous and recognized on the street, could live a life of privilege while existing in relative privacy. P.M. Toronto was a lively and very public bar across the street from the Gardens, and while Gilmour lived on Wood Street it was a go-to place. His teammates unwound there, local entrepreneurs interested in making connections with NHL players came by, and there were all kinds of new friends available. It was a place where Leafs players knew the owner and could enjoy a slice of privacy. Gilmour’s teammates called him “Backdoor Gilmour” for the way he would sneak out the back door of the bar and go home early. One second he was there in the middle of the party, the next he was gone.
He struggled to find a more permanent home. “In my second year, I moved to the west end, to a warehouse condo,” he recalls. “After a game one night, I went over to Mr. Sub. A guy says, ‘Hey, Doug Gilmour! How you doing? You smoke crack?’ I said, ‘No, I’m good.’ So then I moved again. Mostly, I didn’t go out. People think I went out all the time. I didn’t. I was in my little pad. I had my daughter Maddison with me on the weekends. I had my parents there on the weekends. During the week, Monday nights we all went out to the Phoenix [nightclub]. That was about it. I didn’t really go anywhere. My security blanket was having friends on the outside. We did things people didn’t talk about. We went to shelters, gave out Christmas presents, sleeping bags, jackets.”
Gilmour cut a very different public figure than Clark, the simple farm boy with straightforward farm attitudes in the big city. Gilmour was a walking contradiction, a conundrum. He seemed secretive, but he could also be open and trusting, and his generosity knew no bounds. He would take sportswriters into his confidence, but never to rip a teammate or a coach. He talked the talk of the traditional hockey player, but you quickly got the sense he had seen a lot of things in his career and his life. He’d been married young, and it hadn’t worked out, but he loved to talk about his daughter and spend time with her. Soon, he started a new, very public romance with Amy Cable, a Gardens usher, and eventually married her. He was a complicated character who had been around the block, and he wasn’t a hypocrite; he didn’t pretend to be Mr. Clean, or even a clean hockey player.
He was also a refreshing change on the Toronto sports scene, a Leaf who wasn’t tarnished by years of losing. Fuhr and Glenn Anderson had been acquired from the Oilers to add a winning edge, but Gilmour was immediately a much greater presence and seemed to breathe confidence into an organization that had little. Always small for his age, and eventually small for the NHL, he had succeeded by overcoming his lack of size and brought that same “no fear” attitude to the Leafs dressing room. He also became the biggest practical joker on the team and dealt with the new inconveniences of fame in his own mischievous way. “One day we had an open practice for the public,” he recalls. “Outside the arena, it was jammed. I thought, How am I going to get in there? So I put my Leafs jersey on, put on a ball cap and walked in with the crowd.”
Hockey-wise, Toronto was a perfect fit. In his first forty games in Maple Leafs blue and white, Gilmour managed forty-nine points playing as a true number-one centre for the first time in his career. The Leafs caught fire in the second half of the ’91–92 season after getting Gilmour from the Flames, but they couldn’t quite catch the North Stars for the final playoff berth. After the season, Fletcher dismissed head coach Tom Watt and hired Burns to replace him. Burns and Gilmour held their first one-on-one meeting at Filmores, a famous Toronto striptease joint. “That was Pat Burns,” chuckles Gilmour. It wasn’t exactly a place Gilmour would find uncomfortable either.
Gilmour would be not only Burns’s best offensive player but also his most conscientious defensive player as well. It was the perfect marriage between coach and player and, by early in Game 2 of the ’93 conference, a relationship that looked like it might take the Leafs to their first Stanley Cup final in twenty-six years.
The confrontation in the conference final with Gretzky, Gilmour’s role model as a junior, seemed nearly poetic, but it was also awkward. Some of the nastier tactics Gilmour used against other opponents were inappropriate against Gretzky. At the same time, this was another chance to prove himself, and to prove again that the Flames—and Risebrough—had made a tragic mistake by underestimating him, like people had been underestimating him since he was a boy with big hockey dreams.
He’d played against Gretzky many times, but this was a much bigger stage, and unlike in Calgary, he wasn’t supported by other elite centres in Toronto. “There was a lot of respect there for Wayne,” says Gilmour. “A lot of guys I’d chirp at. Wayne was one guy I wouldn’t chirp at. So I played different against him. But I wanted to play hard against him. I tried to hit him, but clean. You think I didn’t want to beat him? That was my challenge. Beat him.” With a 1–0 lead in Game 2, Gilmour seemed well on his way to meeting that objective. The Leafs were dominating the Western Conference champions just as they had during the regular season, and celebrations of a possible Toronto-Montreal Cup final were already under way.
There wasn’t much recent history between the teams, but there was some. The Leafs and Kings had met four times during the regular season, and the only game that ended in an LA victory, on November 21, had contained an incident that foreshadowed the bad blood that would surface in the conference final.
Gilmour assisted on three of the four Leafs goals in that game, but he also picked up a high-sticking minor for hacking Kings winger Tomas Sandstrom. Afterwards, it was revealed that Sandstrom’s arm was broken. It takes a heck of a chop with a stick to break an NHL player’s arm. The league, with long-time NHL counsel Gil Stein temporarily at the helm after the resignation of president John Ziegler, took action. Stein had invented the concept of suspending players for nongame days, and he suspended Gilmour for eight. He could play, but not practise. “It was an accident. It was not intentional,” Gilmour said at the time. “I get ten whacks like that a game. But because I injured a guy, I get crucified.”
It cost Gilmour $28,984 in pay plus a $500 fine. Burns was predictably outraged on behalf of his most important player. “Guys get whacked all the time. Guys get broken arms,” he said. “The Kings are always crying about something….LA or Pittsburgh, you can’t touch them without getting a suspension….I looked at the tape and didn’t see anything. We’re too quick to condemn Doug Gilmour. Why does everyone want to hang Doug Gilmour by a rope?” Don Cherry chimed in from his Hockey Night in Canada bully pulpit, calling Sandstrom a “backstabbing, cheap-shotting, mask-wearing Swede and he got exactly what he deserved.”
Gilmour’s peculiar status during his ban mystified newcomer Bill Berg when he was picked up on waivers from the New York Islanders. “I said, ‘Doesn’t he practise? Does he just play games?’ ” Berg recalls. Sandstrom missed twenty-four games after the Gilmour slash, and some had suggested that the McSorley hit in Game 1 could be traced back to that incident. Hockey players could carry grudges for weeks, months or years, either for themselves or on behalf of teammates.
THE 1–0 LEAD EARLY IN Game 2 had the Leafs on a roll, much to the glee of the Gardens crowd and the twenty-five thousand Leafs fans watching on a huge video screen a few blocks away at SkyDome. But the Leafs couldn’t make that early lead last. Burns usually liked to start his prized checking line of Bill Berg, centre Peter Zezel and winger Mark Osborne after goals either for or against the Leafs. He felt that trio could either build on momentum, or stop any momentum the opposition had going. This time, however, he went with two inexperienced forwards, Eastwood and Manderville, alongside veteran winger Mike Foligno. That curious decision backfired. With the Leafs forwards uncertain of their checking assignments, LA defenceman Charlie Huddy fired a high shot that produced a big rebound, and speedy Mike Donnelly slammed the puck past Felix Potvin at 2:56 to tie the game 1–1. So much of the talk before the series had been about LA stars like Gretzky, Jari Kurri and Luc Robitaille. But Donnelly, along with his linemates Corey Millen and Tony Granato, would prove to be a much more significant factors in the series than anyone initially believed.
Two goals in the first three minutes of a Stanley Cup playoff game was highly unusual. The Leafs made it even more surprising by scoring again before the game was four minutes old. Clark didn’t appear to have much speed as he lugged the puck through the neutral zone, moved around Sandstrom on the right boards and skated in on Watters. The Leafs captain spun towards the boards and attracted the attention of three LA checkers, leaving Anderson, with a reputation as one of the best playoff scorers in NHL history, to cruise untouched into the Los Angeles slot just like he had in scoring a goal in Game 1. The veteran winger coolly redirected Clark’s centring feed past Hrudey. The goal came just sixty-three seconds after Donnelly’s, and it meant that between the two games the Leafs had scored five times on Hrudey in less than fifteen minutes of action. They were picking the veteran goalie apart.
Koharski kept calling penalties, trying to keep a lid on the game. Melrose chewed gum furiously on the LA bench, clearly concerned his team hadn’t been able to contain Toronto’s best players. Towards the end of the period, McSorley and Gilmour came together again along the boards, and McSorley delivered a sneaky punch to the much smaller man’s jaw. No Leaf—no NHL player, probably—would dare do the same to Gretzky.
But for McSorley, Gilmour was fair game. Koharski either didn’t see the punch or didn’t acknowledge it. It was the kind of bullying from bigger players that Gilmour had endured his entire career, and he wasn’t about to start accepting it now. He never, ever backed down. Seconds later, after the whistle, Gilmour shoved McSorley at the side of the LA net, and McSorley shoved him back. Gilmour then clearly leaned in and head-butted the Kings defenceman in the face. Head-butting, like kicking, was supposed to be out of bounds for honest hockey players. But Gilmour, no hypocrite, never said he was honest all the time on the ice. “You know, I wasn’t all there sometimes when I played,” he recalls. “These were the days when you had to survive, and I was 170 pounds. It was survival. I had to get people to think, Hey, this guy’s not all there. After the game, after I took my helmet off, I would often go home thinking, Are you stupid? But when I put the helmet back on, I wanted them to think I was crazy.” Years earlier, while playing in St. Louis, Gilmour’s older teammate Brian Sutter had been shocked at how vicious Gilmour could be when antagonized. He nicknamed Gilmour “Charlie,” as in Charlie Manson, the murderous California cult leader. “That’s where my nickname ‘Killer’ later came from. It started with ‘Charlie,’ ” says Gilmour.
Koharski was standing less than five feet away when the Leafs star lowered his helmet into McSorley’s face. He saw the head-butt. He’d probably also seen McSorley’s punch. Koharski could have thrown Gilmour out of the game, and probably should have. Instead, he gave both players roughing penalties. In those days, that’s what they called “managing” the game by veteran referees. “Gilmour cut my lip with the head-butt,” recalls McSorley. “It was right in front of Koharski. I said, ‘You gonna call that?’ He said, ‘Get away from me.’ He wasn’t going to call it.” Gilmour never denied he’d done it. “One hundred percent, I did it,” he says now. “Oh, yeah, I got away with it. I did it on purpose. I was pissed.”
Gilmour escaped a more serious penalty for the head-butt, but the Kings and McSorley were clearly getting under his skin, distracting him from scoring and setting up his teammates. The more time he spent trying to get even with McSorley or defending his honour like he’d always done, the better it was for LA in a best-of-seven series. The Kings wanted him to react. It would sap his energy, make him less dangerous offensively. The respect Gilmour had for Gretzky was not being extended to him just because he was Toronto’s biggest star. He was fair game for any Kings player who had the urge to give him a whack. But there wasn’t a Leaf who would even think about skating over to Gretzky during a scrum and punching him in the face.
Of course, Gretzky also wasn’t inclined to do the things Gilmour would do. Partway through the second period, Koharski gave Gilmour a roughing penalty for skating over and taking a poke at Granato as he sat on the LA bench. All the Kings were now out to irritate Gilmour, and it was working. The momentum the Leafs had generated by blowing the Kings out of the Gardens in the third period of Game 1 and scoring two quick goals early in Game 2 was slowly vanishing. The game bogged down. The home team took penalty after penalty, including one by usually placid winger Dave Andreychuk.
Andreychuk had come over in a deal with Buffalo during the season and scored twenty-five goals in thirty-one games playing mostly with Gilmour as his centre. Suddenly, he was being paired with other linemates and wasn’t nearly as effective, which seemed to frustrate him. He was sent off for knocking down Hrudey beside the Los Angeles net. “Boy, oh boy, Mr. Koharski is in the hair-splitting business tonight,” said Hockey Night in Canada commentator Harry Neale. With Andreychuk in the box, Granato tied the game on LA’s third straight power play. Granato took a pass from the speedy Millen, wheeled in front and fired a shot through Potvin’s legs to make it 2–2. Granato had become an opponent half the Toronto team wanted to kill, and now he’d been the one to score.
Before the period was over, Clark took a charging penalty for decking Granato after he hit Gilmour. The LA strategies were working; Clark had been drawn into defending Gilmour again. The Leafs had clearly lost the plot, or at least any sense of what the objective was. During the second intermission, Melrose refused to let any Kings players go on the Hockey Night in Canada show. After Game 1, Gilmour had gone on the show, and Don Cherry, a fellow Kingston boy, had given him a big kiss on the cheek. Melrose either interpreted that as a bias against his team or just wanted to get his players to think that was the case. He was looking for any edge, and creating an us-against-the-world atmosphere for his team might give him one. He wanted to get his Canadian-born players in particular to believe the hockey broadcast they’d all grown up watching had turned against them.
The game stayed close past the halfway mark in the third. With Macoun and Kings winger Pat Conacher sent off for hacking at each other with their sticks, there was suddenly some room for offence, with four skaters out for each club. The Leafs sent out Gilmour and Anderson, with Todd Gill and Dave Ellett on defence. The Kings countered with Gretzky and Sandstrom, backed up by Blake and rookie Darryl Sydor. From inside the LA blueline, Sandstrom passed the puck to Gretzky at the right boards on the far side of the Gardens surface. Gretzky, in trademark fashion, pulled up. Several Toronto checkers paused for just an instant, which was all Gretzky ever needed.
The moment others hesitated, he saw openings no other players saw. He hit Sandstrom in stride with a tape-to-tape pass just outside the Leafs blueline. The Swedish winger wasn’t quite in the clear. He had Anderson over his left shoulder and Gill in front of him to his right. But he had just enough room. A strong, skilled winger, Sandstrom turned to his left, shrugged off a weak stick check by Anderson and fired a snap shot that may have caught Potvin by surprise. The shot beat him high to the glove side inside the right post. It was a soft goal, Sandstrom’s seventh of the playoffs, and partial revenge for the Gilmour slash that had broken his arm during the regular season. Gilmour was on the ice, but too far away to stop the Kings’ scoring play. The Kings had their first lead of the series, 3–2, with less than eight minutes to play in the third period.
Even though the visitors were up by one, they had a problem, albeit one of which very few of the Kings players were aware. Hrudey, unbeknownst to everyone else on the ice, could barely stand up in the LA crease. He was a zombie. He was no longer sweating profusely, as he usually did. He had a case of the cold sweats, uncomfortable for any athlete. “I had hit a wall. I couldn’t move,” he says. Clark, proving to be the force the Kings feared he would be, tried one bull rush after another to even the game. With two minutes left, he had a glorious chance in the slot but fired wide of the left post, sending the puck whizzing past the dazed Hrudey’s left ear. “Luckily for me, they didn’t get another great chance,” recalls Hrudey. “I don’t think I could have stopped it.”
With thirty-four seconds left, there was a faceoff in the Kings zone to the right of Hrudey with Potvin out of the Leafs net for an extra attacker. Gilmour wasn’t conceding anything. He won the draw over Conacher, but a Macoun point shot went wide. With three seconds left, the Leafs iced the puck, and Gilmour took McSorley heavily into the end boards. Another confrontation seemed momentarily possible, but McSorley just skated away. He wasn’t about to let LA’s hard-fought road victory be tainted by a late-game brouhaha. The Kings had stolen home-ice advantage, and the series was tied 1-1.
Gilmour had scored half of the Leafs’ goals so far. Gretzky, meanwhile, had two assists but had generally been quiet. Having the edge in the Gilmour-Gretzky matchup, however, hadn’t been enough for the Leafs in the second game. It was the other players on the LA bench, players willing to do the dirty work, who had done most of the damage in Game 2, either by scoring or making Gilmour see red. The Leafs had allowed LA nine power plays in Game 2 with a succession of penalties, killing their chances of getting an early stranglehold on the series.
Sandstrom’s winner was symbolic, the first indication in the series that the dream sequence of the Leafs’ season might be interrupted. Gilmour seemed bothered by the opposing team for the first time in these playoffs, a storyline Toronto would need to change as the series moved to California.
The Kings were back in the series at least partly because they were willing to abuse and antagonize Gilmour in a way the Leafs were unwilling to abuse or antagonize Gretzky. It was apparently acceptable for any player on the Kings to take a shot at Killer, but no Leafs player seemed to believe it was acceptable to do the same to “The Great One.” McSorley hadn’t hesitated to deliver a nasty head shot in Game 1, but Gretzky was unlikely to receive anything similar. Certainly, no one was willing to deliver a destructive hit like Gary Suter had laid on Gretzky two years earlier, knocking him out of the ’91 Canada Cup. A slash like the one from Adam Graves that had broken Mario Lemieux’s hand in the ’92 Stanley Cup playoffs? Unthinkable. Gretzky simply existed in a different category.
The easy explanation for years had been that with players like McSorley and Dave Semenko riding shotgun for Gretzky over the years, opposition players were unwilling to pay the price of taking “liberties” with Number 99. Now, however, the Leafs clearly weren’t afraid of McSorley or what he might do. Clark had already fought him and left him with a shiner. Gilmour had hit him, as had Berg, Osborne and others. It wasn’t out of fear of McSorley that the Leafs weren’t being as nasty to Gretzky as they could be. It was out of deference. Nobody had told them to behave that way. It was just understood. Gilmour and Gretzky were the stars of each team, but one had a little more freedom to operate than the other.
GILMOUR’S GOT ANOTHER story to tell as he watches his Frontenacs play. He called a few days earlier to renew his Maple Leafs season tickets, and the woman at the other end of the line didn’t recognize his name. He laughs about it, not insulted. He takes it for what it is. Not everybody remembers. Not everybody was there back in ’93 when he and Gretzky went head-to-head, winner-take-all. Back then, it seemed unlikely he’d ever have to buy a drink in a Toronto bar, let alone buy his own Leafs tickets. But time rumbles along. Other stars have worn the Leafs uniform with distinction since he did. Mats Sundin. Gary Roberts. Curtis Joseph. These days, it’s Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, William Nylander. Gilmour and Clark often do promotions together wearing their old jerseys. They’re the old-timers now, the alumni, just like Johnny Bower and George Armstrong were when Number 93 and Number 17 were the headliners on the ice.
For Gilmour, long gone are the days of the $4-million mansion in one of Toronto’s most prestigious neighbourhoods. He talks about scaling down his lifestyle, selling his remaining property in Kingston. His mom and dad are gone now. Fewer ties hold him to his hometown. He talks about making life simpler, daydreams of a time when he won’t be in hockey anymore. Maybe he’ll buy used classic furniture and refinish it in his garage. He’s a trim 182 pounds, and there’s still a full head of hair, but it’s greying. There are deep creases in his face. He lives with his partner, Sonya, and their preteen daughter, Victoria, his fourth child from three different unions. He’s also a grandfather now. Maddison, the youngster who once would visit him in that Wood Street apartment, is married to a professional hockey player, Evan McGrath. They live in Austria with the couple’s infant daughter. Gilmour also has two boys with Amy Cable. His oldest son, Jake, was drafted by the Frontenacs, and at one point Gilmour traded Jake’s rights to another OHL team. That’s junior hockey. Sometimes you trade your own kid. Jake attends Brock University, while his younger brother, Tyson, forged a reputation as a high-scoring winger with the Powassan Voodoos of the Northern Ontario Junior Hockey League. There’s a chance he might land a scholarship at a US university.
It was only for that brief time, for two weeks in the spring of ’93, that Gilmour and Gretzky were the two main characters on the same stage, occupying the same space. These days, Gretzky is back squarely in the hockey limelight as an executive with the Edmonton Oilers. He was the NHL’s ambassador during its centennial season. His number is retired, not just by the teams he played for during his career but by every NHL club. Gilmour’s jersey was retired by the Leafs. Otherwise, he’s more removed from that stage now, and that’s where he wants to be. He wrote a book and did a promotional tour for it, but he doesn’t yearn to be back in the NHL mainstream. He’s done with that. When he first joined the Frontenacs, they weren’t a well-respected OHL team. Top prospects wouldn’t play there. Domi’s kid was just one of them. Over time, Gilmour has helped change that, slowly making Kingston a place where elite players play, where future NHLers get their start. He’s no longer officially the team’s GM, but he’s involved in an unspecified capacity and frequently makes the seven-hundred-kilometre round trip from his home to Kingston and back during the season in his BMW X5. It’s not the NHL, but it’s enough. It’s comfortable.
Back in ’93, it was about him and Gretzky, the two top scorers not just of their teams but the entire playoffs. For that one series, they were more than opponents; they were equals, although Gilmour chafes at that characterization. “No, no, I wouldn’t say I was his equal. I wouldn’t say that,” says Gilmour. He’s not sure who had the edge in that famous one-on-one confrontation. “To this day, I think he’s great,” he says of Gretzky. “He’s awesome. When I turned fifty, they had a quiet party for me at a small bar in Toronto. He came. Brought Theo Fleury with him.” When they met in ’93, Gilmour afforded Gretzky a level of courtesy he afforded few others in the NHL. No insults, no trash talk. No stickwork. Others might get the Killer treatment, but not Gretzky. “I couldn’t play his game, although I tried to play it sometimes,” says Gilmour. “But I could beat him in a different way. I had to be a little crazier. I had to run someone. But I loved playing against Wayne. It was a challenge. Do I think I beat him in that series? Did I give everything I had? Yeah, I think I did okay.”