Bruce McNall loves to tell stories, sometimes for the joy of the telling, often to represent himself as something he is not. Or to please his audience. This day, just weeks after Donald Trump had been inaugurated as the forty-fifth president of the United States, McNall has a Trump story. “Donald came to a Kings game in 2014,” he says. “I’d known Trump over the years. I took him to a box with a bunch of lawyer friends of mine. And he says, ‘Bruce really screwed up.’ Yeah, of course I did, I think to myself. Then Trump says, ‘He should have borrowed the kind of money I borrow. Banks don’t screw with you then. He didn’t borrow enough money! When you borrow what I have, you own the bank. Not the other way around.’ ”
McNall laughs. He’s in his office in downtown Santa Monica, not far from the wealth, poverty, beautiful blondes, buff dudes, sadness, ambition, filth, tourists, drugs, sunburns and surfers of Palisades Park. All LA worlds converge in Santa Monica. It’s also not far from the elegant Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel, where the Toronto Maple Leafs lived, rested, healed and imagined themselves possible Stanley Cup finalists as they took on McNall’s Los Angeles Kings in May of ’93. A quarter century later, this is the part of LA where McNall is playing out the final chapters of his sensational and ethically questionable career in business.
A half mile from the Loews, he works out of a small, relatively spartan office with no view on the second floor of a ten-floor glass building at Wilshire and Third that has For Lease signs on the front lawn. Outside, there are panhandlers on every corner. His hair, once stylishly silver, is now thinner and totally black. He walks with short, tentative steps. “If I’d known I was going to live this long,” he says, “I would have taken better care of myself.”
He remains friendly and charming, just as he’s always been. Impossible not to like, really, which in many ways was both the source of his power and his undoing. Sixteen years after being released from federal prison, he rents a modest home in Malibu, a far cry from the $10-million mansion in Holmby Hills he once owned, where he held parties for Hollywood stars and sports celebrities. Once, he would have been driven home by limousine or taken one of his fleet of private cars, perhaps the Aston Martin. Now, he drives himself home in a leased BMW. There are no more $100-million deals, no more rare baseball cards to show, no billionaire sports owners knocking on his door.
He sometimes goes to Kings games when he’s invited and admires the team and its success under its current owners, including two Stanley Cups and investments in local minor hockey that have seen Southern California start to produce NHL quality players, unthinkable when McNall bought the team in 1988. He is still close with some of his former players, including Wayne Gretzky. He tells a story about how he, Wayne and Janet Gretzky and Caitlyn Jenner (formerly Bruce Jenner) all recently attended a funeral for the comedian Alan Thicke. The story comes with a punchline about Jenner playing from the ladies’ tees at the Sherwood Country Club.
He admits to all of his past sins and offers no excuses. He admitted it all in a book. There’s no pretence of innocence here. In terms of his hockey past, McNall understands he operated the Kings in a completely different era, when it was possible to do things it is no longer possible to do, when there were fewer rules and plenty of people willing to look the other way. So McNall did what he wanted and became the most powerful man in hockey. Back then, the NHL was a much smaller business. You bought a team, you pretty much ran it the way you wanted.
McNall bought the Kings for $16 million, mere pennies compared to the $650 million the league now demands for an expansion franchise. He rose to become chairman of the NHL board of governors. He handpicked Gary Bettman to run the league. He brought Anaheim and Florida into the NHL family. He was a one-man show making up the rules as he went along. Today, he is a living example of the contrast between the way the NHL did business then and the way it does it now. Now, NHL headquarters runs the league and has specific guidelines for everything, including which owners can talk to the media and what they can say. Back then, it was sometimes a free-for-all, with flamboyant individual owners free to cut deals, move franchises, speak their minds, rip the league office and trade hockey players for cold, hard cash if they needed, or just wanted, the money. When he bought the Kings, McNall stumbled into a world that would let him do pretty much whatever he wanted to do. So he did.
BY THE TIME THE 1993 Campbell Conference final series switched to a new stage in Southern California, it already felt like a unique piece of theatre was unfolding. The series was tied 1–1 after two bruising, controversial games at Maple Leaf Gardens. After the ugliness late in Game 1 that made Marty McSorley look like a bully and Wendel Clark a Good Samaritan, Kings officials lobbied strenuously, but unsuccessfully, to have star Leafs centre Doug Gilmour suspended for his unpenalized head-butt on McSorley in Game 2. The gamesmanship in the series was already intense. The Kings had received a hostile reception in Toronto, but now the two teams were in Los Angeles at the Great Western Forum for Game 3.
The action away from the rink was just as dramatic, although hidden from the eyes of fans and media, not to mention the players on both teams. As his team prepared for its first home game of the series after stealing home-ice advantage in Game 2, McNall was looking every bit the flamboyant sports owner. The NHL had never attracted a personality quite like him before, and in remarkably short time he had gained immense power across the league. He wore expensive suits and was surrounded by executives and lawyers. He had a broad smile and a big laugh that communicated confidence. But looks were deceiving. Inside, he was churning, his mind constantly racing as he looked for ways out of the corner into which he had painted himself. He knew he was in big, big trouble. He had acquired his immense wealth largely through fraud. For a decade, he had been generating phony financial statements to make it appear he was a much wealthier man. He had become involved in rare coins as a teenager, and by the late 1970s he was seen as an expert, travelling the world to conduct all kinds of murky transactions. Over time, he created phony inventories of those coins and used them to secure massive loans from six different banks. The amounts involved were staggering, an estimated $267 million. He had used some of those millions to get involved in the movie business and some to buy the Kings five years earlier. He had diverted money from the gate receipts of Kings games, the only revenue he had from the team, to prop up his other schemes.
As the Toronto-LA series was taking place, he cut the figure of a major hockey power broker with immense personal resources. In reality, he was madly trying to pay his bills, avoid his creditors, stay one step ahead of the law and sell his hockey team. He was so close to disaster, he could barely sleep at night.
Steve Stavro, by contrast, had become a multi-millionaire by legitimate means, principally through his grocery chain, Knob Hill Farms. He dabbled in expensive race horses and owned glamorous homes in Toronto and Florida. That was all in good shape. Now, however, he was also attempting to complete his acquisition of the Maple Leafs and Maple Leaf Gardens, and was using more questionable business methods to do so. Harold Ballard had died three years earlier, and Stavro was furiously trying to finish the process of getting his hands on Ballard’s hockey empire, even if it meant lying about the true value of the club so he could buy it at a bargain basement price.
So McNall had effectively stolen millions and used the proceeds to buy the Kings legally, while Stavro had made his money legally and was trying to steal the Leafs, the most valuable sports franchise in Canada.
The two men were not friendly. “Stavro and that gang liked Wayne, but they didn’t like McNall,” says Toronto sports consultant Brian Cooper, who worked for McNall. “Stavro didn’t like his style. Bruce was brash. I would literally see Stavro cringing when they were talking.” McNall and Stavro, the two impresarios who bankrolled the theatre of the Kings-Leafs series, were opposites in demeanour and public personality but similar in their willingness to look beyond the limits of the law, or at least the laws that limited others, to get what they craved. Both sought public acceptance, respectability, awards and affection. McNall, born in LA, was nonetheless an outsider, a self-professed geek who sought fame and perks by purchasing a unpopular sports team and making that team cool. Stavro was also an outsider, an immigrant whose father had run a fruit stand. He was drawn to more traditional and conservative corridors of power in Toronto and coveted the Leafs, the very essence of Toronto tradition, a team with legions of fans not only in the city but across the world.
As the series switched to LA for Game 3, the walls were starting to close in on both men. The authorities were sniffing around McNall’s business practices, while Stavro was being hotly pursued by Gardens investors who believed he was trying to rip them off. The investors were becoming increasingly public with their unhappiness, which was embarrassing to Stavro, an intensely private man.
McNall was extraordinarily popular with his players and other Kings employees. He was the fan who had bought his favourite team and wanted everybody to be just as happy cheering or working for the team as he was. The most noteworthy evidence of his largesse was the Boeing 727 he had bought for $5 million for the private use of the Kings. After years of tiring commercial travel, where a trip to Quebec City or Winnipeg could take a full day, the players looked at the plane as a complete luxury. Painted black and silver, it had first-class seats and television screens, plus a table at the back where the team masseur could work on players. No other NHL team had such a plane.
Stavro kept some distance from the Leafs and was publicity shy. He did buy all the players blue leather jackets with a commemorative patch for “winning” the NHL’s Norris Division by beating Detroit and St. Louis in the first two rounds of the ’93 playoffs even though there was no official title for accomplishing that feat. “We didn’t really know [Stavro],” says Gilmour. “He came in, took over the team, but we never saw him.” Stavro, Donald Crump, director Terry Kelly and other Leafs officials arrived at LAX on a charter flight for Game 3 with the kind of entourage Ballard never would have countenanced. They were enjoying the ride and the notoriety that came with running the Leafs.
Outside the Leafs dressing room, assistant coach Mike Murphy paced the hallway and conferred with head coach Pat Burns and fellow assistant Mike Kitchen. They were looking for ways to get the team rolling again. That was the job of NHL coaches. The players knew, for the most part, how to play, or they would never have made it to the world’s top hockey league. They could skate, pass, shoot. They could deal with the punishment of being bodychecked. They usually had a specific position they had trained to play for years. But that didn’t always mean they were collectively focused or organized in the best possible way, and that could change from day to day. As much as coaching in the NHL was about teaching and developing skills, it was more about staring at the same roster of athletes day after day, and then coming up with new ways to align them, motivate them and send them charging into the fray with the best possible chance to win. Line changes. Taking players who hadn’t played the game before and putting them into the lineup while yanking other players out. Trying to find ways to get certain players out on the ice against certain players from the other team, and avoiding getting your worst players out against their best. By the time NHL teams got to the final stages of the Stanley Cup playoffs, that was all coaches could do. So every day, they examined those options. When they won, they’d go with the same combinations. When they lost, they’d shuffle the deck.
For Murphy, a lot more was on the line in a personal sense than for either Burns or Kitchen, and he was surprised how emotional he had become about the series. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been surprised. For fifteen years, he had given the Kings his best as a committed hockey man, first as a player, then captain, then assistant coach, then head coach. He’d raised his four children in Southern California. But twenty-seven games into the 1987–88 season, Murphy had been fired unceremoniously as the team’s head coach. “My LA years ended on a sour note,” he says. The way in which he was fired would have left anyone bitter. The team was on the road in Washington, and when he went up to his suite at the downtown Hyatt hotel he found the key didn’t work. He went down to the front desk and was directed to the concierge, where he found his luggage all packed. He was told to go to the room of general manager Rogie Vachon. “We’ve decided to make a change,” said the Kings GM. Murphy was stunned.
Now, five years later, he was with the Leafs, locked in an intense playoff battle with the Kings. “I wanted to beat them so bad,” says Murphy. “I was a good player for them, a captain, a coach, and when it was over I was dismissed and kicked out of town. It hurt. Then you add to that I was working with the Leafs, my childhood team, well, I couldn’t believe it. There was a lot of emotion for me in that series.”
Murphy was the link between the Leafs and Kings, part of the history between Toronto and Los Angeles that had existed decades before men like McNall and Stavro tried to buy it all and call it their own.
Bill Barilko of Timmins, Ontario, one of the great legends of Maple Leafs history for scoring the Cup-winning goal in 1951 then disappearing in a plane crash, made the first plane ride of his life to California in the fall of 1945 to rent a room in a three-bedroom house at 265 South St. Andrews Place near Hancock Park, south of Hollywood. He was there to play for the Hollywood Wolves, who had a loose affiliation with Conn Smythe’s Maple Leafs. “Because the Wolves games were on TV, a bit of a fan base grew around Bill,” says author Kevin Shea, who wrote Barilko: Without a Trace. “He began to be seen in photo shoots with various Hollywood starlets. He became ‘Hollywood’ Bill Barilko.”
When the Kings joined the NHL in 1967 with five other US teams—Philadelphia, Minnesota, Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Oakland—the league was almost exclusively populated by Canadian-born players. Players from the great Leafs teams of the 1960s that had won four Cups suddenly found themselves headed to California. Red Kelly became the first coach of the Kings, and Terry Sawchuk was one of his goalies. Bob Pulford, Dick Duff, Pete Stemkowski and Eddie Shack would follow them.
Kings owner Jack Kent Cooke was born in Hamilton, Ontario, before his family moved to the Beaches area of Toronto. In 1945, with the help of financier J.P. Bickell, who had at one time helped Smythe build Maple Leaf Gardens, Cooke bought a Toronto radio station, then six years later branched out into sports by purchasing Toronto’s minor pro baseball team. Eventually, he moved south, went into business in California and became a US citizen. In 1966, having been unable to buy into big-league baseball, he sought and ultimately bought an NHL expansion franchise for $2 million, named it the Kings and began building the Forum.
In 1972, Pulford became LA’s new head coach. While a Leaf, he’d played golf at Toronto’s Lambton Golf and Country Club with John Murphy, whose son Mike was a high-profile NHL prospect. In those days, if you were a star bantam hockey player in Toronto, you were a star NHL prospect. Mike Murphy came from an Irish Catholic family, learned to skate on a backyard rink and played peewee hockey for his local parish. After two seasons of Junior A hockey skating for the OHL Toronto Marlboros, Murphy was selected in the second round of the 1970 NHL draft by the New York Rangers, twenty-fifth overall.
Pulford followed the progress of his golf buddy’s son and convinced the Kings to trade for the right winger in the fall of 1973. Murphy was dealt to Los Angeles along with defenceman Sheldon Kannegiesser and forward Tom Williams. Murphy remembers flying out of Kennedy Airport on a drizzly, cold New York day and landing in bright sunshine at LAX. “LA is tired now, but back then it was literally lotus land, a beautiful place. Everything was fresh and new, and things were booming. Everything was casual,” he says. “The sun was shining, and life suddenly became easy. It was a much different scene than I had left.” Another Ontario boy was headed to Hollywood.
This was also around the time McNall, a young man growing up in Arcadia, California, became a lifelong fan of the Kings. The team had drawn poorly in the first few seasons, but now it was improving and fans like McNall at least had something to cheer for. “They were a secret that about eight to nine thousand people shared,” says Bob Borgen, who was born and raised in LA and later went on to become the producer of televised Kings games. McNall was a student at UCLA when a friend convinced him to attend a game. “Nobody was there,” McNall recalls. “You could buy twenty-dollar tickets for three dollars. I got caught up with it. I loved a lot of the players, like Vachon and Butch Goring. I just enjoyed the sport a lot.” The 1972–73 season marked the first time the club drew more than ten thousand fans on average to games.
Murphy became the team’s captain in 1977. He had married a Californian named Yvonne Horvat, who sang the national anthems at Kings games once or twice a season for several years. (Yvonne had an older sister, Connie, who married Kings forward Vic Venasky, and a younger sister, Sandra, who later married another Kings player, Daryl Evans. Three Sisters for Three Kings, as it were.) Life in LA in the ’70s was intoxicating for young people, including young athletes, with easy access to parties, drugs and alcohol. Alongside Gene Carr, his more adventurous Kings teammate, Murphy would go to Dan Tana’s restaurant, a favourite haunt of actor Jack Nicholson, and then to the famous Troubadour nightclub to mingle with celebrity musicians like Glenn Frey, Jackson Browne, J.D. Souther and Linda Ronstadt. Carr was good friends with the musical types and got into the lifestyle. Frey called him “Hockey Hollywood” and sometimes wore a Kings jersey with Carr’s number 12 on stage with his band, The Eagles. Some believe Frey helped write the hit “New Kid in Town” with Carr in mind. “Once we left the rink, nobody knew who we were. We weren’t celebrities. But life was really good,” says Murphy.
The same year Murphy became captain, Dave Taylor, the son of a Scottish immigrant and a Quebecois mother from the Northern Ontario mining town of Levack, population three thousand, joined the Kings. He signed for $40,000 a year and a $15,000 bonus, another Ontario hockey player looking for fame and fortune in Los Angeles. “I remember my dad saying, ‘If you don’t want to work in the mines, you better skate faster,’ ” says Taylor. As Murphy’s days as a front-line right winger for the Kings were fading, Taylor jumped past him on the depth chart and became part of the Triple Crown Line with Marcel Dionne and Charlie Simmer. In the 1980–81 season, all three players managed one hundred or more points, the first time that had happened in hockey history. In 1983, with Murphy’s career effectively over, GM George Maguire offered him a job as assistant to the GM, and then he became an assistant coach to ex-Leafs bench boss Roger Neilson during his short stint with the Kings. Then the Kings hired Pat Quinn, who kept Murphy as an assistant and made Taylor, not Dionne, his captain.
In December 1986, Quinn was suspended by NHL president John Ziegler for negotiating a contract and accepting a $100,000 bonus cheque to become president and general manager of the Vancouver Canucks while still under contract to the Kings. Murphy, with little experience, became LA’s new head coach for the final thirty-eight games of the ’86–87 season, and then, after the first few months of the following season, he was fired. Jerry Buss was still theoretically in control of the Kings, but McNall, a minority owner, was becoming increasingly involved in the day-to-day operations. By the spring of ’88, McNall had bought out Buss, and soon after he swung the blockbuster trade that brought Gretzky to the Kings. McNall quickly became front and centre, quoted everywhere and anywhere, and wanted his players to be front and centre with him. He wished to be friends with his players, and he was. He liked to hang out with them, buy them things, do business deals with them. Early in his tenure, before the Kings got their plane, he would fly his private jet to away games then fly a select number of players, usually seven, back to LA while the rest flew commercial. The players who got picked were called the “Magnificent Seven,” and the unlucky ones were the “Dirty Dozen.” “I loved him,” says goalie Glenn Healy. “I loved his stories about coins. I looked at him as an awesome person who was a great owner. He was a player’s guy through and through. That said, I still don’t know what was real. That’s part of the legend.”
McNall’s generosity, albeit expressed using other people’s money, knew few bounds. “We’re in Vancouver one day, so myself, Gretz and Kelly Hrudey, we were walking down the street, and there was a Versace store,” recalls McNall. “We walked in there and looked around, and there was this really great leather jacket. Kelly kept looking at it. The price was twenty-five thousand dollars for this jacket. So I said, ‘Hey, Kelly, how many shutouts are you going to get for this?’ And I bought him the jacket.” Hrudey’s recollection is slightly different. He remembers the jacket costing around $6,000. It was black, hip length, with gemstones all along the arms and body. “It was something a rock star like George Michael at that time would wear,” says Hrudey. That was the kind of owner McNall wanted to be. “In today’s NHL culture, you couldn’t do that,” says McNall. “But I didn’t just watch the game like it was robots on ice. These were people who I got to know and care about.”
The Kings had changed from an NHL outpost to a preferred destination for players. Tony Granato and Tomas Sandstrom arrived in a trade for popular Bernie Nicholls in 1990. Granato became Gretzky’s roommate on the road and his linemate, and he found himself enthralled with the attention showered upon the Kings. When Granato went to join the Kings in Vancouver after the trade, he was surprised to learn he was rooming with “W. Douglas” at the team hotel. He ran into broadcaster Bob Miller on the elevator and asked Miller who this Douglas fellow was. “That’s Wayne’s pseudonym on the road,” Miller told him. It was evidence of the new world Granato was entering. “Everybody, including everybody in Hollywood, wanted to be a part of the LA Kings when we were on our run,” Granato says. “There was only one person who could have made that possible. That was the excitement, the presence, of Wayne, that everyone just wanted to be a part of it. The rest of us were fortunate to be there and experience that excitement. It’s hard to explain, to be in LA, to watch people who knew nothing about hockey suddenly want to be part of it. The people that would come into the locker room just to shake Wayne’s hand. It really was a heckuva ride for all of us.”
It was all flashy and exciting, but it was largely built on a foundation of lies. The media estimated McNall’s worth at $100 million, which was nowhere close to reality. He had multiple homes and nine cars, but also massive debt underwritten by phony financial statements. His hockey business couldn’t pay its bills. “Economically, I had made a huge mistake when I got Wayne in ’88. It wasn’t about getting Wayne. It was the business around it,” says McNall. “I didn’t own the building. I didn’t own the parking. I didn’t own the television. I didn’t own the radio. I didn’t own the food services. All the ancillary things that make franchises profitable today, I got none of it. I just got ticket revenue, basically.”
The Kings built the highest payroll in hockey without the revenue streams to pay for it, and McNall also promised Gretzky he would always be the highest paid player in the NHL. “Then, I could do that. I could manoeuvre around,” McNall says. “We could do whatever we wanted to do. I guess I could have gone to the other [NHL] owners and said, ‘Guess what, if you want Wayne to play in your building and hope he doesn’t happen to get sick that day, I want half your revenue.’ I could have played some extortion game, I guess. But that’s not real ethical within the sport itself, so I really couldn’t pull that off.” Amidst the razzle-dazzle and circus atmosphere, not to mention McNall’s uncanny ability to get people to like him, nobody inside or outside the Kings organization understood that what seemed too good to be true really was too good to be true. Everyone wanted to believe McNall really was the man who had figured out how to make the NHL popular and profitable in Los Angeles.
For years, scribes and broadcasters from traditional hockey regions like Canada, the northeastern US and Minnesota had been coming to LA to see the Kings, often as much for a warm winter vacation as to see anything noteworthy. The Triple Crown Line generated a lot of attention. But for most of the 1980s, the important hockey stories were taking place on Long Island or in Montreal or in Alberta and being broadcasted on Hockey Night in Canada from the show’s Toronto studios, far from Hollywood. Then Oilers owner Peter Pocklington sold Gretzky to the Kings, and suddenly playoff encounters with Edmonton and Calgary brought more attention from the hockey establishment to 3900 West Manchester Boulevard in Inglewood, California, home of Cooke’s “Fabulous Forum.” This was not one of LA’s most glamorous communities, nor was it a hockey community in any real sense. Inglewood had been slow to integrate over the decades, but by the early 1990s it was split roughly equally between African-American and Hispanic residents. LA’s economic boom of the mid-1980s hadn’t benefited places like Inglewood or South Central LA, which became hard hit by street gangs and the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s. Here, there was more economic despair and racial tension than affluence and progress. This was the hardscrabble place the Kings called home.
In the 1970s, during training camp, the team would have two-a-day practices and the players would live at the Airport Park Hotel across the street from the Forum. That stopped happening as the community changed and struggled, and players were more careful as crime became more of a concern. The Forum was where they played and practised, and then they quickly drove to tonier areas of the city where they lived and raised families. Visiting NHL clubs wouldn’t stay anywhere near the arena, and there were few appropriate hotels. They would stay in Santa Monica or near Los Angeles International Airport, then bus in and out. Postgame watering holes like Harry O’s in Manhattan Beach, owned by former Kings forward Billy Harris, were destinations more than staying in Inglewood or going to downtown LA. Hockey players got frequent reminders that LA came with unique safety challenges. In November 1991, for instance, three Leafs players—Jeff Reese, Claude Loiselle and Bob Halkidis—were robbed at gunpoint after a game against the Kings not far from their LAX hotel. They lost about $1,000 in cash and jewellery, including Reese’s wedding ring.
On April 29, 1992, four LA police officers were acquitted of assault in connection with a sensational incident in which local resident Rodney King had been beaten after a high speed car chase. The acquittals sparked race riots in South Central LA that then spread to areas across Los Angeles County including not far from the Forum. There was looting and widespread assaults as a horrified America looked on from afar at the mayhem. More than 3,600 fires were set, and the National Guard was called in. When it was over, fifty-five people had been killed and two thousand injured.
Bruce Springsteen was recording in East Hollywood as word of the violence spread. “I stopped for a moment near the Hollywood Bowl where my windshield was filled with city-wide fury,” he wrote in his 2017 autobiography. “It was a fiery, smoking panorama from a bad Hollywood disaster picture….Unlike the Watts riots of 1965, the fire this time looked as if it might spread out beyond the ghetto of those afflicted. Fear, and plenty of it, was in the air.”
For Kings players, who had been eliminated in the first round of the playoffs by Edmonton the day before the Rodney King verdict, this was a brand new reality, a new danger surrounding their daily workplace. Hrudey was at the end of his third full season in LA, living with his wife and young family in Redondo Beach. “I remember the day the verdict came down, and [truck driver] Reginald Denny getting beaten up at that intersection. We were quite a ways from there, but from our second floor balcony you could see the fires in the distance,” he says. “What I remember most about that day is, living right across from us, there was a young guy. His dad was a police officer on the Redondo Beach police force. The son comes over around four o’clock in the afternoon and he’s got a gun, a .357 Magnum. He says, ‘My dad wants you to have a gun.’ And I said, ‘No, I’m not interested. I’ve never held a gun in my life. I don’t really believe in guns.’ He said, ‘Okay, but we’re going to keep watching what happens.’ About six thirty, his dad comes back over and says, ‘You’re gonna take this fucking gun. And you’re gonna protect your family at all costs.’ He would not accept no. I’ll never forget that.”
Playing for McNall, and getting the chance to play with Gretzky, still made players happy to be in Los Angeles. They saw themselves as playing for the most generous, warm-hearted owner in hockey. When the NHL Players’ Association chose to strike briefly in the spring of 1992, Hrudey remembers the Kings voting with the rest of the players to strike but also feeling like he had betrayed McNall. “I know he took our vote personally, and why wouldn’t he? But we weren’t voting to go on strike that day because of the way we were being treated. We were voting to go on strike because of the way the rest of the players were being treated by some of their organizations.” They didn’t know yet about McNall’s financial shell game.
In 1991, McNall added to his collection of sports toys by purchasing the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League from Harry Ornest, the former owner of the St. Louis Blues and the Hollywood Park racetrack, across the street from the Fabulous Forum, and also one of the largest shareholders in Maple Leaf Gardens and the Leafs. Gretzky and actor/comedian John Candy were McNall’s partners in the Argo purchase. The price was $5 million, and suddenly McNall was a significant presence in Toronto, home of the Blue Jays, a growing powerhouse, and the awful Maple Leafs. Jack Kent Cooke had left Toronto twenty-five years earlier to become a high-profile sports owner in Southern California, and now LA hockey money and a hint of Hollywood glamour were coming to influence the Toronto sports scene.
Like most McNall deals, the Argo transaction was heavily financed. McNall believed that the Argos might also give him the inside track if the National Football League ever decided to put a team in Toronto. Gretzky had a relationship with Brian Cooper dating back several years from the Wayne Gretzky Celebrity Sports Classic, held annually in Brantford, Ontario, Gretzky’s hometown. He convinced Cooper to come aboard with the Argos, first as executive vice-president, then eventually as chief operating officer.
At the time, Cooper didn’t know McNall or Candy. He met McNall at a party at Gretzky’s Balboa Drive home in Los Angeles. “Bruce drives up in a Bentley,” says Cooper, “and he’s dropping names left, right and centre. Don Henley, Sylvester Stallone….His company had just done The Fabulous Baker Boys. I thought, This is impressive. Money was nothing. We go out to dinner, and they’re ordering bottles of six-hundred-dollar wine, talking about his investments with Merrill Lynch on coins. He’s blowing me away. Later, we go to a Kings game. Before the game, there’s dinner at the Forum with celebrities. Elton John, Rob Lowe. And we start talking about the Argos.” The football team had traditionally lost money. McNall made a splash by signing University of Notre Dame star Raghib “the Rocket” Ismail, but the Argos had to pay Ismail $4 million up front, completely outrageous by the standards of the small nine-team league. Indeed, the $18-million, four-year personal service contract was more than he would have made in the much larger NFL. The vision was that Ismail would do for the Argos what Gretzky had done for the Kings. But just as the Kings couldn’t actually support those types of contracts, Ismail certainly didn’t make financial sense for the Argos.
The Argonauts organized a spectacular opening night, with Dan Aykroyd and Jim Belushi performing as the Blues Brothers at halftime and celebrities like Mariel Hemingway on hand. It was different from anything the Leafs or Blue Jays had ever produced, and very different from anything the Argos or the CFL had ever seen. The spectacular evening made waves in Toronto, and attendance increased. “What made it fun was that John [Candy] loved it,” says Gretzky now. “If John hadn’t been involved, I don’t know if I’d have been willing to jump in. But John truly loved it.” With Ismail, quarterback Matt Dunigan, running back Michael “Pinball” Clemons and a host of stars, the Argos went 13–5 and captured the Grey Cup. Ismail had been a disappointment, but he scored on a thrilling kickoff return to win the title game. The dollars behind the project made no sense, however, and McNall’s Argos left unpaid bills all over town.
THE LEAFS, MEANWHILE, had been in a state of paralysis after the death of Ballard in April 1990. Nobody knew who was going to buy the team. “We just don’t know. I can see a lot of lawsuits flying around here,” said Paul McNamara, chairman of the Maple Leaf Gardens board of directors. McNall and Ballard had crossed paths at NHL governors meetings. “I liked him in some ways, although he was not a likeable human being for the most part,” says McNall. “We were distant. We’d say hello, we’d talk. He’d disagree with everything I wanted to do, and I’d disagree with everything he wanted to do. We were not buddy-buddy, nor from a business standpoint did we agree on many issues. They were traditionalists, very much, in what they were doing. And I was not. I’m sure they viewed me as some kind of alien.” Having McNall show up in town and start generating flashy headlines with the Argos just made the Leafs look old, tired and broken.
When Ballard died, the organization owned several ancillary businesses that were losing money. Selling the major junior Toronto Marlboros, the CFL Hamilton Tiger-Cats and Davis Printing, which printed Leafs tickets, freed the team from $5.5 million in losses annually, and moving the team’s American Hockey League affiliate from St. Catharines, Ontario, to St. John’s, Newfoundland, saved another $1 million. The team’s business operations were outdated and messy. There were no budgets or financial records, and very little security around the building. Ballard himself had been scalping Leafs tickets for years, and his estate was left to deal with a trail of debts and liabilities. “By the end, people were exhausted with the Harold regime,” said Bob Stellick, who worked in the team’s front office. “We were barely a franchise. We knew we had no chance of success.”
Bill Ballard, one of Harold’s sons, angled for control after his father’s death. Many thought one of the major Canadian breweries, always active in the sport, would emerge as a majority owner. Then there was Stavro. A Toronto businessman of Greek-Macedonian heritage, Stavro, born Manoli Stavroff Sholdas, immigrated to Canada with his parents when he was seven years old. He was reserved and publicity shy, a product of Toronto when it was, as once described by famed literary critic Northrop Frye, “a good place to mind your own business.”
After Ballard’s death, few believed the sixty-two-year-old Stavro would be the one to take over. “He was not a confidante of Mr. Ballard,” says Bob Stellick. “He was never around.” Stavro also had only a passing financial interest in the team. Long-time Detroit Red Wings executive Jimmy Devellano owned 32,375 shares in Maple Leaf Gardens (MLG) Ltd., making him the third largest non-controlling shareholder in the company. Don Giffin, who had been named chief executive officer of MLG Ltd. the previous January, owned 60,000 shares, while Harry Ornest, the same man who had sold the Argos to McNall, owned 90,000, about 3.5 percent. “Stavro had only five hundred shares. Five hundred! That’s how interested he was,” says Devellano. “I think I was closer to Harold Ballard than Stavro was.”
But Stavro had known Ballard for decades and had been appointed to the board of the Gardens in 1981. He told Theresa Tedesco, author of Offside: The Battle for Control of Maple Leaf Gardens, that he believed Ballard wanted him to own the Leafs. “I figured he believed in me and I could do something with the club,” Stavro told Tedesco. That belief was apparently strong enough for Stavro that he was able to convince himself that angling for control of the Leafs wasn’t a violation of the trust Ballard had placed in him by making him a co-executor of his will.
The scramble for control of the Leafs and MLG Ltd. began within months of Ballard’s death. Harold E. Ballard Ltd. (HEBL), a holding company, controlled 80 percent of Gardens shares. Ballard willed control of HEBL to a three-man trust of Stavro, Giffin and Donald Crump, who were also named executors of his estate. The trustees were to “retain and vote” the HEBL shares for no more than twenty-one years and direct any proceeds from the sale of those shares to the Harold E. Ballard Foundation, a charitable organization. Ballard’s intentions as expressed by his will seemed clear; he wanted charities to benefit from the sale of the Leafs, not his friends, and not the trustees. It was thought Giffin and Crump, who had been named commissioner of the CFL while Ballard owned the Tiger-Cats, would be allies in getting the best deal for the club and the arena. Giffin had helped Ballard get the loan with the TD Bank he needed to buy control of the Leafs when Stafford Smythe had died in 1971. But he ended up being outflanked by Stavro, with Crump’s help. The grocery magnate wanted the team for himself. Stavro “seized an opportunity,” according to Devellano. “The other executors didn’t have the money to finance it,” he says. “Stavro was able to do it.”
The chase to own the Leafs shifted in October 1991 when Stavro became chairman, gaining a foothold he hadn’t had. He paid off a $20-million loan Molson Breweries had made to Ballard in 1980, and in so doing purchased the right to buy Gardens shares from Ballard’s estate. Molson also sold its MLG shares to Stavro. There was no doubt he was now in it not to safeguard Ballard’s interests but to further his own. It was no longer about selling the team to the highest bidder via a public auction to benefit Ballard’s favoured charities. Stavro never believed he was in a conflict of interest as an executor or trustee. He convinced himself that Ballard wanted him to own the Leafs, and he was determined to pay the least amount of money possible for the team, even if it meant Ballard’s charities might end up getting less. Or nothing. When Giffin died on March 20, 1992, it removed the final obstacle for Stavro to take over the Leafs. Rather than maximize share value to benefit the Harold E. Ballard Foundation as he was supposed to do, Stavro offered shareholders a lowball price of $34 a share. To substantiate that figure, he misrepresented the value of the team’s television revenue. He just assumed he could strong-arm other Gardens investors into selling.
By the time the Leafs-Kings series opened on May 17, 1993, however, Stavro was having more and more trouble fending off disgruntled shareholders like Devellano and Ornest. His plan to use his position as an executor of Ballard’s will to get his hands on the Leafs was running into new roadblocks with every passing day. Government agencies and financial regulators were starting to take notice. Devellano and Ornest refused to bend to his will. “I didn’t like Stavro, because I thought he was arrogant,” says Devellano. “He thought of me as a peon, thought he could just sort of get rid of those little guys. We fought, and we fought hard.”
MCNALL HAD EVEN bigger problems. Increasingly stressed by his money woes, he wanted to build a new arena as a solution. Instead of paying off his debts, he figured making more money would solve his problems. He spent the ’92–93 season furiously working on a complex deal organized with Sony Corporation and his friend Peter Guber to create Sony Sports, a deal that would net him about $100 million for the Kings and ease his cash flow problems while keeping him involved in a senior executive position with a good salary. It was another way to keep the shells moving in his daily shell game.
Guber attended many of the games of the Leafs-Kings series in the spring of ’93. But that massive transaction fell apart, at least partly because McNall identified another potential investor, a telecommunications company called IDB Systems, he found more appealing. “We didn’t really know what was going on,” says Gretzky now. “Quite frankly, it wasn’t our business to know. So it stayed out of the locker room. The only thing I knew, because Bruce and I had been friends from the day I got there, was that he was trying to sell the team and that he was close to making a deal, and they were going to revitalize the Forum and re-do it, and build a new [arena], etcetera, etcetera. But we didn’t know what was going on in his business world. It was just people guessing. We had no facts to base it on other than he was trying to sell the team and that was all going on during that year.”
Players and coaches started noticing something wasn’t right. During the ’93 second-round playoff series against Vancouver, the team didn’t stay downtown as usual but out in the suburbs. “The talk was that the previous hotel bill hadn’t been paid,” says Hrudey. McSorley says at one point the GM told the players that a member of the training staff wasn’t going to be travelling with them anymore even though he was the person primarily responsible for sharpening the players’ skates. Melrose remembers having to bring certified cheques to hotels on the road and paying for buses in cash. He’d played in the World Hockey Association when budgets were lean and sometimes players didn’t get paid. He knew the telltale signs when ownership had a case of the shorts. “The stick companies were complaining about not getting paid. Things like that. You could tell,” he says. “The day-to-day running of the team was being hampered, there was no doubt about that. I’d been in hockey long enough to know that any time you have to pay in cash, that’s not a good sign.”
Other NHL owners didn’t seem to know about McNall’s financial problems. He says he felt like an “imposter” at NHL meetings because his debts so outweighed his actual assets, but other owners still wanted him to continue as chairman of the league’s board of governors. He wooed Disney boss Michael Eisner and Blockbuster Video owner Wayne Huizenga as new expansion partners for the league and pocketed half of Anaheim’s $50-million expansion fee for getting the deal organized, temporarily solving some of his money problems. But only temporarily. His core company was still in debt to the tune of at least $200 million. Both he and Stavro were doomed to lose all they had won. It would just come crashing down earlier for McNall.
AFTER FLYING BACK FROM Toronto with the team on “Air McNall,” the Kings owner took his usual seat on the glass for Game 3 of the ’93 Clarence Campbell Conference final alongside celebrities like actor James Woods and Entertainment Tonight personality Mary Hart. Movie stars and superstar athletes had been enjoying McNall’s generosity for years, and he had turned Kings games into who’s-who gatherings of Hollywood names. Pregame meals at the owner’s tables at the Forum Club were well-attended feasts that drew celebrities like Michael J. Fox and Andre Agassi.
Down at ice level, Murphy moved in behind the visitors bench below the spoked-wheel ceiling of the Forum. Only a Plexiglas barrier separated him from the Kings bench he had either stood behind as a coach or sat upon as a star player wearing number 7. His stomach was churning with anticipation. Lineup changes had always been the antidote for coaches after losing games, so the Leafs had yanked Kent Manderville, Mike Eastwood and veteran Mike Foligno out of the lineup and inserted young winger Rob Pearson, centre Dave McLlwain and defenceman Dmitri Mironov. A new line was created with Peter Zezel at centre between captain Wendel Clark and Pearson. Hopefully, if it worked out as Murphy and the rest of the Leafs staff planned, these new configurations would give the Leafs a much-needed blast of energy for the team’s first trip to the West Coast in three months. On that trip, they’d beaten Vancouver 8–0, San Jose 5–0 and the Kings 5–2, so there were good memories.
Mark Osborne, playing with McLlwain and Bill Berg, had the best early scoring chance for either team. McSorley hooked McLlwain to the ice, but as the speedy centre lost his balance and spun around, he managed to move the puck to Osborne at the top of the right circle. Osborne fired, but Hrudey made a sprawling save moving to his left. At the other end, Felix Potvin played the puck behind the net, and as he was circling back in front to his crease, he lost his balance and fell on his backside. Potvin had given up a softie for the winning goal in Game 2, and now he was in a precarious position. Darryl Sydor jumped on the loose puck at the top of the left circle and hammered a slapshot. In a sitting position, Potvin somehow blocked it, although he looked around bewildered as though asking for an explanation of how he’d done it.
Nikolai Borschevsky made a rare early appearance for the Leafs, but he was nailed with a stiff check by Sydor along the side boards inside the LA zone and immediately went off, not to be heard from again this game. Clark absorbed a big bodycheck from McSorley inside the Leafs zone but moved the puck forward to Pearson, the kind of hit to make a play the Leafs needed after taking too many unnecessary penalties, some for retaliation, in Game 2. But as the play moved into the Kings zone, Tim Watters blocked a Clark shot and trapped the puck between his legs. As the whistle blew, Pearson charged into Watters, knocking him down. Referee Andy Van Hellemond didn’t like that, and early in the game the Leafs were short-handed once again.
Potvin made big saves on Tomas Sandstrom and Tony Granato as the visitors killed off the penalty. But then the Kings scored to take a 1–0 lead. With the puck against the boards in the Leafs zone, defencemen Bob Rouse and Sylvain Lefebvre both went behind the net, a cardinal sin for a Burns-coached team. Burns wanted one defenceman guarding the area in front of his team’s crease at all times. Sandstrom suddenly burst out of the pile with the puck and slipped a pass through Gilmour’s skates to Rob Blake, who was cruising in from the right point. He was Clark’s man, but Clark wasn’t watching carefully enough. Looking like a trained goal-scorer, Blake patiently waited for Potvin to go down, then backhanded the puck over the fallen Leafs goalie at 8:49 to give the Kings the lead.
Gilmour seemed to take personal offence at that goal. He took at run at Alexei Zhitnik, just missing the LA defenceman, then stole the puck from Pat Conacher and set up Glenn Anderson for a great scoring chance that Hrudey turned away. The Kings, however, seemed to be demonstrating that they were a faster team than the Leafs, which most analysts had predicted going into the series. Toronto appeared always a step behind on a Forum ice surface that was less rutted and mushy than usual, because the NBA Lakers had already been eliminated from the playoffs and the rink no longer had to be covered in plywood between Kings games.
Within a span of a few minutes, the Leafs then lost two of their regulars up front. Tired of being the nail, Zhitnik became the hammer and nailed Zezel with a high hit behind the LA net. Zezel crumpled to the ice and had to be helped off. He didn’t return and was later diagnosed with a neck strain. Dave Andreychuk, trying to compensate for his lack of scoring chances by hustling on the forecheck, tried to get around Charlie Huddy as Huddy set a moving pick in the Kings zone. The Leafs forward inadvertently wrapped his stick around the veteran defenceman’s head and caught him in the face. Van Hellemond gave Andreychuk a high-sticking major and game misconduct. Burns, wearing a grey suit and a yellow tie with a cartoon character motif, shook his head as Andreychuk skated to the Leafs dressing room. Murphy blew his lips outward in exasperation. The Leafs were down to ten forwards, but at least they were able to kill off LA’s five-minute power play without further incident.
In the second period, Warren Rychel hit Gilmour hard, continuing the theme from the first two games of physically abusing the Leafs captain while Gretzky, looking like he had a little more jump in Game 3, escaped similar treatment. “The Kings are zeroing in on Gilmour, and why wouldn’t they? It got him off his game in Game 2,” said broadcaster Harry Neale.
The Leafs got consecutive power plays when first Zhitnik went off, and then Blake. Instead of scoring, however, Toronto’s extra-strength unit gave up a goal. Todd Gill got caught up ice, giving McSorley and Jari Kurri a two-on-one break against Mironov. The big Russian looked uncertain and rusty as he pedalled backwards, not surprising, since he knew he didn’t have the confidence of the coaching staff. He didn’t take away either the shot from McSorley or the pass. After luring Potvin towards him, McSorley slid a pass to Kurri, who buried his hundredth playoff goal into the open side to make it 2–0 for the Kings.
The Leafs looked stunned. But their veteran poise quickly asserted itself, and they began to fight back. Gilmour scored his fourth goal in three games, a power play goal off a nifty pass from Anderson to make it 2–1. Ken Baumgartner, on only his third shift of the game, managed to redirect a centring pass from Clark past Hrudey to tie the game 2–2 less than two minutes later. It was exactly the kind of contribution from support players the Leafs hadn’t been getting. A good sign.
Before the second period was over, Zhitnik scored a power play goal on a feathery pass from Gretzky to make it 3–2. The Russian blueliner was again demonstrating he could take a hit and keep on ticking. The Kings had outplayed the Leafs, and took that one-goal lead into the third period. The Leafs knew they hadn’t responded to all the lineup changes, but despite that, still had a chance to win Game 3. Sometimes road victories weren’t pretty, and there was still a chance to capture this game by winning ugly.
Robitaille, oddly ineffective after scoring sixty-three goals during the regular season, took a slashing penalty with one second left in the second, allowing the Leafs to start the third period on the power play. Melrose sent out speedy Pat Conacher to kill the penalty, along with Dave Taylor, now a thirty-seven-year-old spare part on the fourth line, a far cry from his days as a member of the fabled Triple Crown Line. Taylor had seen it all as a King. He’d had his cheques signed at different times by Cooke, Buss and McNall and had never played for another team. He had been captain of the Kings when Gretzky arrived, but after one season he voluntarily gave it to Number 99. “He was the leader and the spokesman,” Taylor says of Gretzky. “In my heart, it was the right thing to do.”
Taylor had been a healthy scratch by Melrose in the first game of the 1992–93 season, a sign he didn’t fit into the coach’s plans. But he changed Melrose’s mind. Injuries over the course of the season meant he dressed for only forty-eight games. A severe concussion suffered when he was hit from behind by Edmonton’s Louie DeBrusk was a major setback, and he’d scored just six goals during the regular season. Once upon a time, when he played with Marcel Dionne and Charlie Simmer, that would have been a good two weeks work. But the Triple Crown Line was history, and Taylor wasn’t that player any more. Still, he gradually gained Melrose’s trust as a reliable fourth-liner and penalty killer. When Melrose was uncertain which cards he wanted to play, he often sent Taylor out as his favourite default option.
That trust paid off on this night. With the Leafs hoping to tie Game 3 with a power play goal, Gill carried the puck up ice but lost it to Conacher, who skated back over his own blueline, attracting four Leafs players. Conacher backhanded the puck off the right boards past Dave Ellett to Taylor, who found himself all alone with Gill scrambling to cover from the other side of the rink.
As he had so many times on so many highlight reels in his better days with Dionne and Simmer as his linemates, Taylor steamed down the right side. With a flash of white tape on his Sherwood 3050 “featherlight” stick, he wound up and slapped a perfect shot over Potvin’s right shoulder at 1:26 of the third, the second short-handed goal of the game for the Kings. Potvin “was a butterfly goalie, and I was just trying to go high. Every once in a while, you hit the target you were aiming at,” says Taylor, who would later have a picture of himself celebrating the goal framed for his home. The goal restored LA’s two-point margin, deflating his old Kings teammate Murphy and the rest of the Leafs bench. It was the last important goal Taylor would score for the Los Angeles franchise. He remembers it mostly as a sign that he was still pulling his weight. “Everybody likes to score. Everybody likes to contribute.”
The Kings carried that margin the rest of the way, although once again there were shenanigans in the final minutes of the game. Clark cross-checked centre Jimmy Carson. The Leafs might not go after Gretzky, but the Kings’ other skill players were fair game. LA, meanwhile, continued to focus on Gilmour. Winger Gary Shuchuk elbowed the Toronto centre, knocking his helmet off. Gilmour then had a breakaway chance, but he was hooked by Huddy from behind and then slashed twice across the hands. Van Hellemond kept his whistle silent. A frustrated Gilmour low-bridged Robitaille without the puck in sight. The two veterans continued their argument into the penalty box. With a faceoff and eight seconds left, Burns sent out Baumgartner with McSorley for the Kings. Melrose, however, quickly called McSorley back to the bench and put out another player. With the game won, he wasn’t about to see his top defenceman embroiled in a pointless fight with the Leafs enforcer.
When the 4–2 score was in the books, with the Leafs managing only twenty-two shots in their worst performance of the series, the two teams had in just five days played three games and flown across the continent, a punishing pace. The Kings had consolidated the home-ice advantage won in Game 2, while the Leafs, now down in the series, had some soul-searching to do. They’d only delivered at best three quality periods of hockey in three games, were getting production from less than half of their forwards and their special teams weren’t functioning effectively.
The Kings were just two wins away from bringing the Stanley Cup final to California for the first time in NHL history. That would mean more gate receipts for McNall, and he needed all the infusions of cash he could get. If he couldn’t make the deal with Peter Guber happen, maybe he could at least pay the stick bills. The Kings owner was in big trouble away from the ice as his financial world, what he liked to call his world of “wobbly dominos,” was starting to collapse. But he was also a long-time Kings fan, and hockey was his oasis away from the madness. For a few hours, he could just cheer on the team and players he loved.
EVEN IN THE DISTINGUISHED company of a wide variety of luminaries at the Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto, Steve Stavro stands out. Before he died in 2006, he oversaw the construction of a mammoth monument to himself. His tomb stands twenty feet high, an ostentatious piece of over-the-top art befitting a man who saw himself as a titan of industry. It reveals a man of incredible ego with an oversized view of himself as part of Canadian history. Atop the monument, which is surrounded by three large, snarling lions, is a statue of Alexander the Great on a rearing horse, with both hoofs in the air, symbolic of a hero who had died in battle. Alexander the Great didn’t, however, die in battle. Neither did Stavro. Below the ancient king are Hellenic scenes and symbols and logos from Stavro’s life in business, including the emblem of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Stavro may have exhibited fairly conservative taste in life, but not in death. The tomb is a shrine to a man built to glorify himself.
The nature of Stavro’s legacy depends on who is reviewing the history. His supporters portray him as a philanthropist and a sportsman. He was awarded the prestigious Order of Canada in 1992. Others argue his legacy is besmirched by the highly questionable manner in which he acquired the Leafs and took the organization private, the conflict of interest he had as an executor of Ballard’s will and buyer of the famous hockey team and the way in which he deliberately hid from other public shareholders information regarding the true value of Maple Leaf Gardens Ltd.
After several years of litigation involving the Ontario Office of the Public Guardian and Trustee, Stavro was forced to pay $49.50 per share for the team, 46 percent more than the $34 he originally offered. It cost him millions of dollars, and was a public humiliation. Anyone who had followed the entire process understood what he had tried to get away with. His determined fight to own the Leafs left casualties. “When I sold, I got 1.6 million dollars on an investment of about three hundred thousand,” says Devellano now. “That’s the good news. The bad news is, if they had just let me stay in, those shares would be worth twenty million dollars today. Twenty million dollars! So you can see why I don’t like Steve Stavro. As I sit here, I’d have twenty million dollars.”
Forced to come up with millions more to buy the team, Stavro told management to sell off players and refused to allow Fletcher to sign Gretzky as a free agent in 1996. Three years after he was strutting like a peacock around the Leafs as they battled the Kings in the postseason, now he was selling off hockey assets because of his own financial challenges. An investigation by the Ontario Securities Commission into his purchase of the Leafs ended with the company agreeing to pay a $1.6-million fine on behalf of Stavro. Ultimately, Stavro lost control of the hockey club in 2003 and was also forced to shutter his grocery chain and sell off properties like his luxurious mansion in West Palm Beach. If he’d hoped to own the Leafs until his last breath, like Ballard, that hope was dashed. One Gardens insider compared the hockey franchise to the famous Hope Diamond, a glittering object of desire that was rumoured to be cursed.
Bruce McNall, by contrast, has lived with his mistakes since he was released from jail in 2001. He was sentenced to prison in 1997, when he was forty-six years old, on five counts of conspiracy and fraud and started his sentence at the minimum security federal prison at Lompoc, California. He was later shifted to Safford, Arizona, Oklahoma City and finally Milan, Michigan. He spent six months in solitary confinement, a punishment he says he incurred because guards were getting him to sign sports memorabilia and he refused to divulge their identities when prison authorities investigated. “I can tell you this much. When I walked into prison the first day, I thought, This is heaven! This is great! Wonderful!” He insists it was a relief after years of lies and juggling his financial commitments. The end came when he defaulted on a $90-million bank loan in December 1994. He was forced to sell the Argonauts and the Kings, as well as his various homes and luxury cars. Many of his friends and players, including Gretzky, stood by him and still vouch for him. They choose to remember his generosity and good nature, not his crimes. “Despite living in mansions, with jets and helicopters and teams and all that stuff, what came with that was enormous responsibility,” says McNall. “I was responsible for not just myself and my immediate family. I was responsible to the teams, to all the employees I had, and, when you own a franchise, to the people in those cities. Which meant LA and Toronto. So all of a sudden I went from that to having no responsibilities. Zero! I couldn’t fix anything, I couldn’t help anybody. I couldn’t do anything. So I thought, This is easy. This is cool.”
McNall says his years in prison and the loss of his wealth, status and family changed him. “I feel much more peace of mind. I never want to get myself back in a situation where I have that many responsibilities, that hassle, that lifestyle. I’ve had it. If I hadn’t, would I want it? Sure. But look, I’ve lived every dream of every guy in the world. I was in the movie business. There were movie stars I was dating, any girl I might want, two sports franchises that were hugely successful. My whole life was about acquiring stuff, whether it was teams or houses or whatever. Ever since [prison], the idea of ownership is not important to me. Because we all rent anyway. So don’t obsess yourself with owning stuff.”