The loss to New York was a harbinger of a year that would be filled with more disappointments than triumphs. Smythe insisted he considered the season “fairly respectable,”1 but it was mostly an opportunity to learn through failure. Toronto missed the playoffs for the third year in a row. Of the NHL’s ten teams, only two produced fewer points. Ace Bailey couldn’t match his strong rookie season and fell off drastically in scoring. The two players who impressed Smythe most were Art Duncan, the reluctant defenceman, and Joe Primeau, who made it into only two games but showed promise.
The next few weeks established a pattern that would hold through the season: they beat Chicago, lost to Boston, won two games, went four games without a victory, won a game, lost a game, won another game, lost the next one. By Christmas they had five wins, six losses, and three ties. They seemed to play better on the road than at home, a failing Smythe noted in a sarcastic monologue he delivered to the papers, suggesting that Toronto “is certainly a wonderful hockey town,” since the fans kept turning up to see such poor hockey. “It’s a wonder to me that the Leafs get any crowd at all after the insults [we] have heaped on the Toronto public.”2
They lacked offensive power, rarely scoring more than two goals in a game, so in late December he agreed to pay $17,500 to buy centreman Jimmy Herberts from the Bruins. Herberts, known as “Sailor” because he spent summers working on Great Lakes freighters, had been potting goals at a torrid pace his first three seasons. He didn’t like to pass much – he averaged six assists a year – but that wasn’t unusual; many of the top scorers were puck hogs. Bill Cook won the 1927 scoring championship with thirty-three goals and just four assists; Howie Morenz had seven, Babe Dye just five.
Herberts came highly recommended by Art Ross, which should have been a warning sign. Ross almost sold him to Ottawa, until the Senators balked at the asking price. Smythe offered $15,000, then raised it to $17,500, “the last cent we had in the treasury.” The papers weren’t convinced Herberts was worth the money. The Evening Telegram was outraged that anyone would spend so much on a hockey player when families were going hungry at Christmas.
The deal was a disaster from the word go. Smythe knew there would be trouble when Herberts showed up at his King Street office “all perfumed and smelled-up beautifully.” He’d brought along his wife, “a showy woman who wore very short skirts, which got shorter every time she moved around in her chair.” Ed Bickle, who was on hand, was too distracted by Mrs. Herberts to pay attention to the discussion, which centred on Herberts’ reluctance to play for the Leafs. His wife didn’t like Toronto and didn’t want to live there.3
Things didn’t improve when Herberts strode onto the ice for his first game, caught his foot on the gate, and fell flat on his face. Picking himself up, he skated to the wrong side of centre ice and lined up with the visiting Black Hawks, standing in his blue-and-white uniform among a pack of players in black and red while the crowd hooted in derision.4
Fortunately for Herberts, the Leafs got hot soon after his arrival. They won seven of their next nine, including a 6–1 victory over the Rangers that W.A. Hewitt called their best performance of the season. They beat New York again a few nights later, this time in Manhattan, and were still playing well in February when disaster struck. In a game against the Canadiens, Day was badly injured when a skate blade sliced through the back of his leg, cutting into his Achilles tendon.
“If ‘Happy’ Day is not a cripple for life as a result of his accident … on Thursday night he is a mighty lucky boy,” Hewitt reported. “It looked at first as if the tendon had been completely severed, for the gash was so deep that the bone was exposed … In the dressing room the trainers poured pure iodine right into the gash – a rough but excellent emergency treatment – and he was hustled right across the park to the hospital. Next day ‘Happy’ was handed a sniff of something that made him forget whether he was a hockey player or a lily white angel and the surgeons went exploring. To their delight they found a shred of the tendon still intact.”5
It was an enormous setback. Day was both the captain and the unquestioned leader. Doctors suggested he might be able to play the next season, but “if there is infection serious enough to ruin the shred of tendon which remains unsevered, ‘Happy’ Day will never again don a skate and he would drag his foot for the rest of his days.”6
It would, in fact, be eight months before Day was able to resume skating, a period of painful rehabilitation that raised him even higher in Smythe’s regard. He valued Day so much he offered to sell him a chunk of his sand and gravel company, handing over 16 per cent of the profitable firm he’d built himself and that was his main source of income. It was his own idea and an extraordinary gesture. He talked Day into the partnership, he said, because “I wanted him with me summer as well as winter for a long time, which turned out to be one of my best decisions. He was one of the best men I ever met.”7
Day’s departure put added pressure on Duncan, who at age thirty-three was forced to play up to sixty minutes a game, despite an injured shoulder. A new catastrophe struck when their top scorer, Bill Carson, fell backwards during a game with Detroit and was carried off unconscious.
As their fortunes declined, so did attendance and the attention of the newspapers. The Telegram, suspicious of pro sports, barely mentioned the team unless it was to complain about the NHL’s chronic lack of scoring. The Globe offered perfunctory coverage, while the Star’s Hewitt had sailed off to the Winter Olympics with Smythe’s former Grads team.
It must have grated on Smythe that, while the Leafs were playing to sparse crowds, his old team had become the toast of the nation. On March 8, when the Leafs could claim just one victory in their past eight games, the papers heralded the Grads’ imminent return from Europe after vanquishing all comers. “Homeward bound the Varsity Grads, Canada’s ambassadors of sport, sail today for the land of the maple leaf, bearing on their brows the coveted Olympic laurel,” proclaimed the Star. “They are known in every country as the world’s greatest amateur team. Not bad for an organization that three years ago didn’t exist. The rise of the Grads has been meteoric.” It managed not to mention Smythe, or the fact that the man who had created the team and produced its “meteoric” rise was even then scratching to get fans to watch his latest project.
As the season dragged to an end, almost any team seemed to galvanize interest more than the Leafs. On March 12, the Globe gave just two paragraphs to a preview of that night’s game, while devoting the better part of two columns to a playoff between Port Colborne and South Porcupine in the OHA’s intermediate division. The Toronto Marlboros were in the midst of a race for the OHA championship, with a team that included two rising young stars, hard-shooting Charlie Conacher and harder-hitting Reginald “Red” Horner. It had suddenly become easy to get tickets for the pro team, which had lots of empty seats, while everyone was scrambling to see the juniors. Even Toronto’s industrial league got more attention: Ravina Gardens was stuffed with five thousand fans to watch a team from the stock yards – led by “young and dashing leftwinger” Harvey Jackson – win the crown in the Big Six Mercantile League.8 There was plainly an audience for hockey in Toronto, it just wasn’t interested in the Leafs yet. When they were finally eliminated from any hope of making the playoffs on March 14, it was barely mentioned.
At the end of the previous season Smythe had overhauled the team, adding nine new players. Now he overhauled it again, adding ten more. He unloaded Sailor Herberts on the unsuspecting Detroit Cougars, hustling to cash the cheque after the Detroit owner tipped him that they were on the edge of insolvency. Smythe had quietly instructed players to feed Herberts the puck at every opportunity, padding his statistics so he’d be easier to sell.9
He bought Harold “Baldy” Cotton from Pittsburgh for $8,000 and acquired Andy Blair, a centre from Winnipeg, to play between Ace Bailey and Cotton. He swapped netminders with the Rangers, sending them John Ross Roach in return for Chabot, who had just finished winning the Stanley Cup. Lester Patrick didn’t like Chabot’s floppy style, and suspected his vision had suffered permanent damage when he was hit in the eye during the Cup finals. Chabot’s injury led to one of the NHL’s most legendary moments, when the forty-four-year-old Patrick donned the goalie pads to personally rescue his team in a moment of crisis. Smythe played a bit part in the story, which was not nearly as celebrated at the time as it became later. He happened to be at the game and raced to the Ranger dressing room when Chabot was knocked out of the play. In his usual take-charge fashion he offered to play goal himself, but got his words confused in the excitement and kept demanding, “Hang the nets on me and I’ll go in there.”10
By the next fall, only four regular players remained from the team Smythe had purchased eighteen months earlier. In addition to Cotton and Chabot, he’d added Horner from the Marlboros, a polite, deferential young man off the ice who played like an avenging angel once on skates and who quickly became a Smythe favourite. He came to the Leafs via Frank Selke, who had revived the Marlboros franchise in mid-decade and was managing the team when Horner, a seventeen-year-old kid who delivered groceries to the Selke household, asked if he might try out.11 Two years later he was playing in two leagues simultaneously and had just finished his second game in a little over twelve hours when Smythe appeared in the dressing room and suggested he drop “the amateur stuff” and join the Leafs. As in right now. The Leafs were playing Pittsburgh that night and Smythe wanted Horner in the lineup. Horner told Smythe he’d have to talk to his parents first, so Smythe stopped by the Horner home on the way to the game, met the parents, and drove his new defenceman to the rink.12
Despite the changes, the second season wasn’t much better than the first. Toronto placed third, moving up one spot, but mainly because the Maroons and Senators got worse rather than because the Leafs got better. Chabot cut their goals-against total sharply – suggesting Smythe had won the goalie duel with Patrick – but Toronto ended with just three more points than the previous year. They did make the playoffs, which pleased Leaf directors so much they bought Smythe a new car. And Ace Bailey won the NHL scoring race, though with just twenty-two goals, the lowest total ever to top the league.
League governors knew they had to do something about the low scoring. It resulted from strict limits on forward passes, which made offence difficult and delighted goalies. In all, the ten NHL goalies had racked up 120 shutouts on the season, including 22 in forty-four games by the Canadiens’ George Hainsworth, who ended the year allowing an average of less than a goal a game.
The governors had fiddled several times with the passing rules to generate more scoring, and in 1929 they finally got it right, legalizing forward passes anywhere on the ice as long as the puck crossed the defenders’ blue line before any of the attacking players.13 The impact was immediate. Offensive statistics exploded. In 1928–29, only two players had scored more than twenty goals; in 1929, three players scored more than forty. Smythe continued to juggle his roster, adding Charlie Conacher and Harvey Jackson – quickly nicknamed “Busher” – to a club that already included Horner, Bailey, and Primeau. It gave him a promising flock of talented young players, though the payoff was slow in coming. In the 1929–30 season, the Leafs slid back to seventh among the ten NHL teams with just forty points, worse than both the previous two seasons. After three full years as an NHL manager Smythe had yet to prove he was anything more than a tough-talking and often abrasive figure, running an underperforming team in one of the league’s least populous markets.
Yet, uninspiring as Leaf fortunes may have looked, the elements that would alter the future were not far from hand. Just before the 1929 season he hired Frank Selke as his assistant, paying him out of his own pocket after Leafs directors refused to approve the expense. They had known each other ever since the 1914 playoff in which Selke’s Union Jacks had gone down in defeat to Smythe’s Varsity team. They met again after the war when Selke took a job at the University of Toronto as an electrician at sixty cents an hour, supporting a growing brood of children that then numbered five and would soon expand to seven. Like Smythe, Selke spent his nights coaching, scouting, or watching hockey games. After moving from Kitchener he had taken positions with a series of local clubs, beginning with the University of Toronto Schools and later handling teams affiliated with a pair of Catholic parishes, St. Cecilia’s and St. Mary’s (where he coached Harold Ballard). Travelling around the province, shivering at frigid indoor arenas and even colder outdoor ones, Frank and Mary Selke often came across Conn and Irene Smythe huddled against the cold, as both men hunted talent.14
His schooling was limited; he had quit at age thirteen and worked at a series of furniture plants to help out family finances. A compact man, he weighed just 115 pounds on the day he married a woman named Mary Schmidt, who weighed just 85.15 He was already familiar with Smythe’s cantankerous reputation – “As coach at Varsity, Conn came into conflict with all of us,” he said –16, but he admired both his commitment and his passion for winning, which he shared.
When Smythe signed with the Rangers, he appointed Selke a scout in Toronto. When Smythe was fired, Selke quit too. It may have been Selke who tipped off Smythe that the St. Patricks were for sale, and once the team had changed hands Selke was hired to operate a short-lived farm team. But his main hockey activity, before being hired by the Leafs, was the Toronto Marlboros, which he had revived in mid-decade and built into one of the strongest amateur teams in the province.17
It was Selke’s Marlboros that attracted much of the press attention and filled the seats at Arena Gardens when the Leafs were struggling through their early years. They won the Memorial Cup as Canada’s junior champions in their fifth year of existence and began funnelling a regular supply of prospects to Smythe’s NHL club. As early as 1927, Selke tried to convince Smythe his junior stars were the answer to the Leafs’ woes, though Smythe at first was reluctant to bite. “There are times when I think there’s something wrong with your head,” he responded the first time Selke raised the subject.18
But he persevered and produced much of the talent that would thrill Canadian hockey fans over the next decade. In addition to Conacher, Primeau, and Jackson, his defence included Red Horner, Alex Levinsky, and Ellis Pringle, all of whom would play in the NHL, though Pringle only briefly, and forward Eddie Convey, who would play parts of three seasons with the New York Americans.
He didn’t so much discover Jackson as fail to get rid of him. Jackson grew up in a three-storey home on Quebec Avenue, not far from High Park. He learned to skate on an outdoor surface the kids called Poverty Pond on nearby Keele Street, wearing a pair of girls’ skates he’d “borrowed” from a cousin. Once his father got him a pair of boys’ skates, he played constantly – on Poverty Pond, on Grenadier Pond, or on the frozen edges of the Humber River.19 The Jackson household was a short walk from Ravina Gardens, where he eventually pestered the rink manager into making a deal: Jackson could skate all he wanted as long as he also shovelled the ice. When the Marlies arrived for a practice one day, Jackson was on the ice and wouldn’t get off. A smooth, graceful, effortless skater, he swooped in and out as the players milled around, trying without success to get the puck away from him.20 He also had an impressive shot that caught Selke’s attention. Cornering the kid, Selke asked whether he had signed with a team.
“Haven’t signed and don’t want to sign,” Jackson responded. That wasn’t exactly true – Jackson was usually on two or three teams at a time, but he wasn’t playing for a direct competitor of the Marlboros, and when Selke persisted he signed on.21
Selke stumbled on Charlie Conacher in a similar manner. Conacher came from a hard-up family of ten kids – five of each – who lived in a rough neighbourhood on Toronto’s Davenport Road. His father spent winters cutting ice in the lagoons off Toronto Island, waking at five and walking to the lake, cutting and storing ice for summer use until nightfall, then trudging back home, all for $7.50 a week.22 The Conacher boys – three of whom, Lionel, Roy and Charlie, would star in the NHL – played shinny twelve months a year, using pucks, tennis balls, or anything else that could be hit with a stick. Before starting they’d line up at attention while a friend played “God Save the King” on his mouth organ, just like in the big leagues.23
Conacher was such a poor skater the other kids stuck him in goal, the traditional place to exile slow-pokes, but he advanced enough by age seventeen to try out for Selke’s Marlboros team. He didn’t make the cut and spent the winter playing at the Ravina rink, lugging his equipment by streetcar as far as he could and walking the final mile. By chance he got into a game against the Varsity Grads; Selke was there and noticed his improvement, inviting him afterwards to try again with the Marlies. This time he made it.
Selke was hired by Smythe to deal with public relations and some scouting, but quickly became the indispensable agent who got things done, jollied up the press, and smoothed feathers when Smythe had ruffled them.
“Frank Selke is a little fellow not even as tall as his boss, Mr. Smythe, but with a pleasing disposition that makes friends wherever he goes,” attested Charlie Querrie. “He listens to all the complaints of twelve to fourteen hockey players, arranges all the transportation and hotels for the out-of-town trips, does all the newspaper advertising and tries to keep the newspaper boys satisfied with tickets etc., and when a game is on he is assistant to everybody. He runs messages for the manager, helps carry the spare sticks, looks for a doctor if anyone is injured, and is generally the handyman of the whole affair.”24
In the summer of 1930 one of the jobs Smythe assigned him was to travel to Ottawa to meet the Senators’ star defenceman, King Clancy. Smythe had the nucleus of a winner, but it needed a spark to elevate it from a team of talented youngsters into a cohesive unit with the leadership to excel. Smythe hoped Clancy was the man. He was an undersized defenceman with oversized spirit who had already been in the league nine years. He was born and raised in Ottawa and had never played anywhere else, but the Senators were increasingly desperate for cash and Clancy, their most valuable asset, was for sale.
After Boston’s Eddie Shore, he was considered the NHL’s best defender. He had a low, hard shot and could skate forever at top speed. He never gave in, and had an optimistic, infectious, enthusiastic personality that inspired teammates and fired up a team. Smythe told a Toronto magazine his “ideal player” would be “a big little man about five feet 10 inches high, around 175 pounds. He is a man who [learned] the game from the ground up when he was very young. He has legs and heart and head. Above everything, he’s a fighter, and a good sportsman. Heart is the big thing, more important than either strength or head work.”25
Clancy had all those attributes, other than size – he was 150 pounds soaking wet. The deal to bring him to Toronto was among the most important Smythe ever made and came at the end of a typically convoluted set of events that depended as much on luck and brazenness as on managerial aptitude.
Smythe had loved horses since the days when he accompanied his father to Woodbine racetrack. In the late 1920s, he bought a few of his own, putting the Leafs’ blue and white crest and colours on his racing silks. He’d never won a race, or even owned a decent horse until shortly before the 1930 season, when he paid $250 for a filly named Rare Jewel.
Rare Jewel was available because her owner, a Mrs. Livingstone, had abandoned racing after being humiliated one day at Woodbine. She owned another horse, named The Monkey. When it was withdrawn from a race at the last minute, a track announcer walked through the stands calling, “Scratch Mrs. Livingstone’s Monkey! Scratch Mrs. Livingstone’s Monkey!” The crowd picked up the call and started chanting along. Shortly after she sold her entire stable and gave up the sport.26
Even at $250, Rare Jewel wasn’t much of a bargain. She ran last so often that Smythe finally bet a friend she would come last during a race in Montreal.27 Rare Jewel came second last, spoiling even that bet. Nonetheless, Smythe entered her in the Coronation Stakes, an important annual event for two-year-olds at Woodbine with a purse of almost $4,000. Although reluctant, he was persuaded at the last moment by jockey Dude Foden, who thought she’d been showing improvement. Just before the race, Rare Jewel’s trainer and a betting pal of Smythe both surreptitiously snuck into her stall and fed her half a flask of brandy to provide a bit of extra pep, neither aware the other had also done so.
At first Smythe made just a token bet, but as the odds lengthened he upped his wager. Still, he had so little faith he decided to offset the risk by putting money on the favourite, a horse name Frothblower. He was standing in line with his $30 in hand when the Leafs’ former doctor happened by. Smythe had just fired him for misdiagnosing an injury – the doctor hadn’t noticed the player’s leg was broken – and the doctor started ribbing him for betting against his own horse. Quickly boiling over, Smythe put the money on Rare Jewel instead, then headed to the stands expecting to lose it all – along with $7 Irene had added to the pot. Instead, the brandy kicked in, and Foden – who had also bet on Frothblower – brought her home in first place. The payoff was $9,372 plus the purse. It was a monumental amount, enough to make the front pages of the papers the next day. Smythe gave the purse to Foden and the two men with the brandy flasks. He had already decided to use the rest to buy King Clancy.28
There were still some problems to overcome. Chief among them was uncertainty over whether Clancy would agree to play for the Leafs. The Senators were an established team, oldest in the league, and had been competing at the highest level since the turn of the century. The Leafs were newcomers, the latest variation on a team that couldn’t seem to hold on to its name or owners for more than a few years at a time. Ottawa had four Stanley Cups since formation of the NHL, and many more before that; the Leafs couldn’t seem to get out of fourth place.
Clancy made a good living in Ottawa: the Senators paid him $7,200 a year, plus $500 as captain. He also held down a job at the Customs Department that brought in $1,800 a year, for a total of $9,500, and at twenty-eight he still lived at home with his parents, where, he noted, “I don’t have any board to pay unless I feel like it.”29
There was also the matter of Clancy’s apparent hostility to the Leafs. Nothing seemed to give him more pleasure than whipping the Toronto team. The only conversation Clancy could recollect having had with Smythe was over a disputed goal, when Clancy told him: “Kiss my ass.” Clancy’s battles with Hap Day were so fierce and frequent, Smythe seriously wondered whether the Senator would be willing to wear the same uniform.30
But Selke discovered that Clancy off the ice was an altogether different creature than Clancy on skates. God-fearing, devoted to his family, and a man who seemed incapable of disliking even the most dislikable people, he professed surprise that Toronto was even interested in him.31
Selke reported back that Clancy was willing. That prompted a meeting with Smythe, where they quickly came to terms. As Clancy remembered it, he asked for $10,000. Smythe couldn’t afford it but offered $8,500 and $1,500 later. Clancy accepted.32
Reassured that Clancy would turn up, Smythe entered the bidding war for his services. With the onset of the Depression and the increasing costs of the expanded NHL, the Senators were a team in trouble. They had the lowest ticket prices in the league, charging just $2 for the best seats. In the 1929–30 season, when the NHL average gate per game had been more than $11,000, Ottawa averaged just $4,200. Even the Detroit team, forever teetering on insolvency, had averaged more than $7,000, and Toronto, in a rink similar in size to Ottawa’s, averaged more than $8,000.33
On September 1, the Montreal Gazette reported that Clancy had been sold to the Maroons for $35,000. Toronto’s Globe claimed both Clancy and goalie Alex Connell were part of the deal, “but for reasons best known to themselves, neither the Ottawa nor the Montreal club wishes to make an announcement at present.”
The report proved to be premature. New York and Detroit were also said to be interested. The Star reported on October 7 that the “scrappy manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs … breezed into town on Monday and went into a huddle with officials of the Ottawa hockey association” to talk turkey. When he emerged with a deal for Clancy it was treated as a triumph, except once again Smythe’s shallow-pocketed directors were balking.
The price he’d agreed to was $35,000 plus two players. After he put in his winnings from Rare Jewel, the club would owe $25,000. That was enough to pay four or five players at normal rates, and Smythe’s bosses weren’t convinced Clancy deserved it. To turn up the pressure, Smythe ran an ad in the Toronto papers: “Fans – The Directors of the Toronto Maple Leaf Hockey Club will make their decision on Friday regarding the purchase of Frank ‘King’ Clancy from the Ottawa Senators. What do you think of this deal? Write the hockey club’s office, 11 King St. West. Signed C. Smythe.”34
The response was immediate. More than two thousand letters poured in urging the club to complete the deal, on top of telegrams and telephone calls. Some fans stopped by Smythe’s office personally to lobby him. The directors, cornered, had little choice but to give their okay.
Everyone agreed it was a brilliant coup. The Star called Clancy the “most spectacular and useful player in professional hockey.” The Globe noted that “even in these days of frequent substitutions, he rarely rests, going at top speed all the time he is on the ice. A brilliant rusher and deadly shot, Clancy is also an invaluable player on the defensive side of the game.”
W.A. Hewitt wrote that the pairing of Clancy and Day “should make one of the greatest defences in hockey. With another speed merchant like Clancy working alongside of him, Day should rise to great heights and become one of the outstanding players of the game.”
Neither of the players Smythe sent Ottawa amounted to much. Eric Pettinger played twelve games without scoring a point and then disappeared to the International Hockey League. Art Smith played one season, gaining six points. Nonetheless, adding them to the trade raised the price of obtaining Clancy to $50,000, a figure that astounded people. No one had ever paid anything near that for a single hockey player before. Not long before the deal, a Toronto paper carried an advertisement for a “beautiful residence in the best part of Rosedale” on a seventy by two-hundred-foot lot, with twelve rooms including a billiard room, library, six bedrooms, twenty-seven-foot living room with heated sunroom, overlooking a wooded ravine and adjoining tennis court. Asking price: $23,000, less than half the Clancy price tag.
Attendance at Leafs games shot up, not only at home but on the road. “Around the league, people wanted to see what kind of hockey player was worth $50,000,” Smythe said. Tim Daly, the gruff, hard-to-impress trainer Smythe had inherited from the St. Pats was enthused despite himself.
“Before Clancy’s purchase they sold booster tickets at half price and such. But that ended when Clancy came. What hockey player could be good enough to cost $35,000, people asked. They were curious to see for themselves and it paid off. From then on there were no more booster tickets.”35
Clancy also had the hoped-for impact on the rest of the roster. Toronto finished the 1931 season in third spot among the ten teams. Conacher, Bailey, and Primeau all made the top-ten scoring list and Conacher led the league in goals. Clancy’s arrival had Smythe feeling so buoyant he went out and ordered a fancy new car for Irene as a Christmas present – a Franklin Transcontinent sedan, an enormous car with a running board and big, protruding headlights. At $2,395 it was the cheapest model Franklin made, introduced in a futile effort to stave off the ravages the Depression was having on the luxury car market. Having spent his Rare Jewel winnings, Smythe couldn’t really afford it. He just felt good about the future and was increasingly excited about another big project he had in mind, a new home for the Maple Leafs that he intended to be the best hockey arena on the continent.