In the ordinary way of things, Smythe’s dramatic rise should have been matched by an equally dizzying fall, as hubris, foolishness, or life’s way of balancing credits with debits caught up with him. But the fall didn’t happen. While much of the country struggled to get by, and the NHL was whittled down team by team, Smythe and his Leafs prospered. His players grew to be idolized by a generation of fans. Both his businesses flourished. He established himself as a leading figure – perhaps the leading figure – in the NHL. He used the position to shape a team that represented his view of hockey as both a sport and template for life.
From the beginning the Gardens wasn’t just about hockey. Too many “dark days” – when there was no hockey or other major event scheduled – would do serious damage to the bottom line. W.A. Hewitt was in charge of booking, and the variety of events he found to fill the building underlined its utility as a major entertainment facility beyond its role as home of the Leafs.*
Just a few weeks after the opening game it was jammed with a Sunday afternoon religious service that almost started a riot. W.A. had arranged an appearance by Denton Massey and his York Bible Class. Foster, in addition to his announcing duties, was responsible for technical arrangements for all public speakers. The Hewitts expected a moderate crowd and were overwhelmed when forty thousand believers tried to cram themselves inside. Two hours before the service was to begin, police on horseback struggled to control the crowd. Traffic was paralyzed and W.A. hesitated to open the doors for fear someone would get crushed.1
Winston Churchill, long before he took on the Nazis, visited Toronto and took on Foster over the appropriate microphone to use in addressing a packed house. Churchill insisted on a lapel microphone and dismissed Hewitt’s warnings that it wouldn’t be adequate in the huge building: “When I want your advice, young man, I’ll ask for it.” Foster was right, but Churchill bellowed on anyways, microphone be damned.2
There were wrestling matches, including a charity contest between Hap Day and Red Horner for which admission was a bundle of wearable clothing. There were six-day bicycle races, rodeos, motor shows, and concerts, including one by a group known as Phil Spitalny and His All-Girl Orchestra.3 There were prize fights as well, although Smythe distrusted the notoriously corrupt boxing industry and wanted little to do with it.
But the Maple Leafs were the main attraction. They dominated sports sections, covered by a growing army of reporters, from the opening day of camp to the final game of the playoffs. After their 1932 triumph, Toronto made the Stanley Cup finals seven times in the next ten years. Fans came to take it for granted, the way New Year follows Christmas.
As the Depression went from bad to worse – the prairie soil drying up and blowing away, hobo jungles swelling, desperation growing, politicians wringing their hands at their inability to cope – fans found the money, year after year, to fill the Gardens. Regular-season games averaged around ten thousand paid fans for every one of the twenty-four home games. The Gardens made a profit of $40,000 its first year, $48,000 the next, and, after a dip in 1934, worked its way up to more than $87,000 by 1938. The subscriber list grew as well, so that by 1940 almost half the seats were sold before the season opened.4
Fans couldn’t get enough of their new heroes. There was always plenty of drama. Ace Bailey’s near death after being pulverized by a check from Boston’s Eddie Shore in December 1933 had the city on edge for weeks. There was the team’s mysterious inability to repeat its 1932 Cup triumph, beset by so many close calls the papers started debating the Maple Leaf “jinx.” There were regular soap operas as Conacher and Jackson staged salary holdouts, or Smythe went to war with one of the other owners.
Toronto was still a compact city in the 1930s, and NHL rosters were smaller than they are now. Only fourteen players on the 1932–33 team played more than twenty games. They were mostly kids, just in their twenties, and good-looking local kids at that. Jackson was twenty-one, Conacher twenty-two, Horner twenty-three, and Primeau twenty-six. All grew up not far away. The Conacher brood went to Jesse Ketchum Public School on Davenport Road. Primeau was from Lindsay, Ontario, but played his hockey at St. Michael’s College, where the Roman Catholic priests seemed to have a licence from God to churn out NHL players. Jackson lived a short walk from the Ravina rink, where Frank Selke first ran into him. Horner worked his way up through the Toronto Hockey League from the time he was a bantam and was delivering groceries for his half-brother’s shop on Spadina.
Selke knew every Toronto team that ever won the Stanley Cup – and led Montreal to a half-dozen more – and maintained there were more “truly great players” in the league from 1927 to 1934 than at any other period.5 For five years the Kid Line was the toast of the city and the scourge of other teams. It aggravated Lester Patrick that while his own top line – the one recruited by Smythe – was considered the best in the league, it was the Kid Line people wanted to see.6 It seemed deliberately assembled to mesh the personalities and playing styles of its three members: Primeau the calculating, self-effacing centre, who assessed opposing weaknesses and ruthlessly exploited them. Jackson, the slick, elegant speedster, with moves so smooth they disguised just how artful he was. Selke considered Jackson the personification of style – an effortless, fluid, natural skater “with the profile of a movie star, the physique of a champion wrestler, and the poise of a ballet dancer.”7 And Conacher, the big, charging, elemental right wing, whose modus operandi was to bull straight at the net – going over opponents if necessary – before unleashing the most feared shot in the league.
It wasn’t really assembled that way, of course. It came together the same way as most other lines: trial and error, by a coach sticking players together to see what happens. In the case of the Kid Line, magic happened, the result proving so effective and popular that in later years, when Smythe wanted to break it up, he shrank from doing so for fear of the outcry.
Primeau may have been the brains of the operation, but Conacher gave it its impact. In a 1932 interview for The Canadian magazine, Selke observed: “Conacher is a hunter. His interest lies solely in the kill. From the moment he takes the ice until he returns to the bench the boy is thinking in terms of goals. Nothing else occurs to him as of any interest whatsoever.” He was a large man in an era of small players. Most NHLers ranged around 150 or 160 pounds, with some even less. At 200 pounds Conacher was among the biggest, with an impressive build and a natural authority that gave opponents pause, often enabling him to avoid mayhem simply by making clear his readiness to engage in it. He quickly became King Clancy’s personal policeman, protecting the small but excitable defenceman, who rarely won a fight, but never quit trying. “I’d get into a fight with somebody and the first thing you know [Conacher] would knock the poor fellow down and push me down on top of him,” Clancy remembered. “He’d say, ‘King, you won that one.’ ” Once, Conacher and Jackson hauled Clancy out from under an opponent, carefully placed him on top, and skated away pleased with themselves, turning around to find Clancy back on the bottom.8
Conacher had honed his shot through endless repetition, firing pucks, Indian rubber balls, or whatever else was available all through the winter and summer, strengthening his wrists and his accuracy. Once, he amused himself by standing at the blue line and targeting pucks at the clock on the end wall of the Gardens, shattering it on the second try. In 1931, he led the league in goals, and for the next five years dominated the upper reaches of scoring leaders, twice topping the list. Foster Hewitt loved to watch Conacher bull his way up his wing and unload his howitzer at the opposing goalie. The two became friends and remained so long after Conacher’s career was over. Clancy deeply admired him and Turk Broda, when he joined the Leafs halfway through the decade, followed Conacher around like a little brother.
When he came to write his memoirs, Smythe claimed Conacher and Jackson were both overrated and depended too much on Primeau to set them up. He thought they relied too heavily on natural ability and didn’t take care of themselves, “too busy driving their new cars and chasing women.”9 But that was later, when he’d built up a lifetime of resentments. In a 1947 address outlining the attributes of a good sportsman and good citizen, he picked Conacher and Syl Apps among the best six players of the previous decade. His criteria did not depend on performance alone: “If you do not live right in any other profession it is often still possible to continue and make a success. But in sport if you do something that is against the good of the sport you blacklist yourself immediately and are through.”10
Conacher was just about everything Smythe demanded in a player: dedicated, hard-working, able to score goals by the bushel, but more than willing to use his fists when required. If anything, the big right winger pushed himself too hard, abusing his body when less intensity might have considerably prolonged his career.
Smythe had more of a case against Jackson, who took his fleeting good fortune for granted. Although his personal troubles became more pronounced when his career had ended, the signs were evident early on. He was a big, boyish kid who liked hunting, fishing, golf, the great outdoors, women, and alcohol. He treated his talent the way he treated money, spreading it around until it was gone. He was just eighteen when he broke in with the Leafs and could have served as the prototype for generations of similarly ill-starred hockey greats to follow, young men who were handed their dream when they were too young and inexperienced to keep it from sliding into tragedy. Jackson’s approach to responsibility was to avoid it; his attitude to temptation was to give in.
Smythe saw hockey in broad terms, as a demonstration of attitude and personality that reflected the fundamental character of a person. “In picking hockey players, it is as important to pick a man off the ice as on the ice,” he said. “Those players who can live right off the ice, think right, control themselves off the ice, are the best on the ice.” He repeated the sentiment many times to different audiences, and enforced it on his teams.11
He expected them to comport themselves properly at all times. Players were representatives of the team, their community, and their country, and they were to demonstrate proper manners and solid citizenship. They wore shirts and ties in public and were clean-shaven. They behaved themselves on the road as well as at home.
When the Leafs were travelling by train there were jokes and card games, but no alcohol and certainly no women. The same went for the dressing room: the strongest drink available was ginger ale, Smythe’s preferred beverage.
Smoking was also forbidden in the change room. During a crucial playoff series with Boston, Toronto was being manhandled by the Bruins until Clancy and Conacher hatched a comeback plot while huddled in a cubicle in the toilet, sneaking a smoke.12 And Smythe couldn’t always control outside visitors. Billy Barker, the First World War ace he’d named as Leafs president, was due once to deliver a pep talk. Barker, though, had a drinking problem and crashed his car on the way to the arena, turning up muddied and bloodied and smelling of booze (though still able to deliver a passable speech).13
Smythe also made an exception on almost all his rules for Tim Daly, the team trainer he inherited from the St. Patricks. Smythe had a soft spot for Daly no one could explain, allowing him to violate almost every creed Smythe set down. Daly gave Busher Jackson his nickname, calling him a “fresh young busher” when the cocky rookie refused to help carry some sticks. Daly smoked and drank and got into trouble. Once, Smythe had to retrieve him after he drunkenly tried to register at a YWCA. His actual name was Thomas, but he was nicknamed “Tim” and had been a boxer in his youth. He talked like he still had a few teeth loose; sportswriters loved trying to decode his unique interpretation of the English language and puzzled endlessly over why he got special dispensation from the usually inviolable code of conduct. Smythe denied Daly received preferred treatment, but insisted he was willing to make allowances “for people that are worth making them for.” Daly, he insisted, “was a good man, a good trainer. He did his job, part of his job, absolutely perfect. Never lost a stick or a bit of equipment.”14
Yet another Smythe code outlawed fraternization with players on other teams. Even a passing remark during a pre-game skate could result in a fine or banishment. If teams happened to find themselves on the same train, there was no mingling, no conversations, little eye contact, and no sharing tables in the dining car. Players who got too friendly might not dislike one another enough for the rugged type of game Smythe preferred. The other teams had the same attitude; though there was no official rule against fraternization, the league encouraged the sense of mutual hostility that predominated.
He favoured slogans that reflected his views. One – “Defeat does not rest lightly on their shoulders” – would be painted in the Leafs dressing room. Gardens stationary was inscribed with “The heart of the nation’s sporting life.” A Leafs publication recounting the team’s history was headlined “FOR THE GOOD OF THE PEOPLE.”
It was one of his core contradictions that he advocated total war on the ice while simultaneously lecturing on the importance of sportsmanship, clean living, and traditional values. Someone gave him a copy of “The Sportsman’s Prayer,” which he kept, and which included the plea: “Help me always to play on the square, no matter what the other players do. Help me to come clean. Help me to see that often the best part of the game is helping the other guy.”
If asked, he would probably have insisted the prayer accurately reflected his view. Yet one of his most favoured players – a man he insisted was grossly underappreciated – was Red Horner, who for eight consecutive years beginning in 1933 topped the NHL in penalty minutes, even surpassing Eddie Shore for the all-time single-season record in 1936, which would stand for another twenty years. Rather than curbing Horner’s aggressive instincts, Smythe made him captain and later made sure he entered the Hall of Fame.
He would have argued that Horner was just doing his job and refusing to be bullied. His value was in his ability to draw attention from opposing forwards. When Horner went to the penalty bench, Smythe told people, he usually took a player of equal or greater value with him. Opponents were so busy trying to flatten him, he’d add, they gave Conacher and others the room they needed to score goals.
Joe Primeau was the opposite of Horner, but stood equally high in Smythe’s regard. Primeau averaged less than sixteen minutes in penalties per season over his seven-year career. His life off the ice was just as ordered and gentlemanly. He and Clancy were both staunch Catholics and sometimes met to attend mass together.
For all his promise, Primeau had trouble breaking the Leafs lineup. For two years he was up and down for tryouts, never quite sticking. In a game against the Maroons, Smythe let him onto the ice for a single shift, late in the third period, to take a faceoff against Nels Stewart with strict instructions to ensure Stewart didn’t get the puck. The puck dropped, Stewart grabbed it, stepped past Primeau, and scored. Elapsed time, maybe three seconds. Primeau headed back to the bench and straight back to the minors.15 But once he made it, Smythe viewed him as the key to the Kid Line, the skilled passer who got the puck to his linemates at just the right time, even if he had to absorb considerable punishment to do it. In one game, when an opposing player knocked out two of his teeth, Primeau wiped away the blood and kept playing. He rarely had anything to say to reporters that wasn’t about teamwork or his devotion to the game, and Smythe was convinced that without him Conacher and Jackson would be far less effective.
Despite the ascetic conditions Smythe favoured, the spirits of a dozen youthful hockey players were too much to contain.16 Conacher, Clancy, and Hap Day were among the worst offenders. Smythe never understood how an otherwise sober, disciplined, straitlaced man like Day could be such a chronic practitioner of practical jokes.
Day once dove into a hotel pool in his best suit for a twenty-five-dollar bet.17 Another time, he and Conacher stole into Clancy’s room while he was having a pre-game nap, removed all the lights bulbs, closed the curtains, and covered him with black ink, racing from the room to leave him groping in the dark.18 When Baldy Cotton complained too much about another of their gags, Conacher dangled him by the legs out a hotel window, demanding, “Do you think you could shut up if I let you back in?”19
Smythe prized Clancy as much for his spirit as for his skills. He managed somehow to be fiercely competitive, yet popular even with the most bitter rivals. He was friends with everyone, even counting Eddie Shore as a pal despite innumerable clashes. Shore was easy to bait, and Clancy was a champion baiter.20 In one game, finding Shore on his knees, Clancy took the opportunity to give him a shot to the head. When Shore dared him to try it again, Clancy said sure, “get back down on your knees.”
Clancy was a devout Catholic and liked to tell how, having been sucker-punched by the much-feared Sprague Cleghorn, he awoke to find himself looking into the face of a priest and assumed he was being given the last rites.21
Everything the Leafs did took on larger-than-life importance as the team grew to dominate winter sports. It was no longer enough for newspapers to simply report the outcome of a game; fans wanted news on anything to do with their heroes. The Toronto Star had as many as four columnists covering the team by mid-decade, competing with one another for descriptions of the team’s magnificence. An April 1933 game took precedence on the Globe’s front page over news that Hitler had put the notorious Jew-hater Alfred Rosenberg in charge of his foreign office.22 Imperial Oil began a tradition of picking a game’s best players as a means of selling its “three-star” brand of gasoline. The choices, selected by Charlie Querrie, ran in the next day’s paper and didn’t skimp on the praise. In a game against the Canadiens, he wrote, Busher Jackson, “the Boy Phenom,” was “going by his checks so fast he put braids in their legs.”23
Smythe was more than willing to play his part in feeding the frenzy. The writers wanted material and he gave it to them, encouraging Selke and Irvin to dream up angles as well. Reporters poked fun at his temper, creating the popular image of red-faced, pepper-pot Connie Smythe, the “little corporal” or “little dictator” who was always on the edge of erupting at something or other, who kept a supply of hats (light grey with a black band) in his office so he could fling them at referees, who baited and berated opponents, coaches, and officials alike. Smythe became notorious for tearing off around the rink, circling the galleyway fronting the box seats, as he chased players and officials like a hound after a rabbit, waving his arms and shouting instructions and insults. His official perch was near the end of the bench, but he was often absent, preferring to follow the play wherever it took him.
He was no less reluctant to leap the boards and skitter across the ice, if he felt his concerns were falling on deaf ears. One December an official turned around to find Smythe standing behind him on the ice and demanded to know what he was doing there. “I just came out to wish you a Merry Christmas,” Smythe deadpanned.24 Far from being embarrassed about his behaviour, he was happy to feed the image, once posing for a series of photographs in an empty arena, shaking his fist through the wire mesh screen at an imaginary referee, so the papers could get a decent shot. He developed a much-publicized taste for spats, a fashion that covered the shoe and buttoned up over the ankle. A magazine ran a photo of a player and two officials trying to lift Smythe off the ice, where he’d gone “to throttle one of the referees” only to end up flat on his back. Smythe isn’t visible in the photo, but is identifiable by “his spatted ankle.”25
Andy Lytle, a Star columnist who began covering the team in the mid-1930s, termed him “a deliberate scene-stealer.” “No man in sport is more alertly aware of publicity’s value than Smythe … He is that rare thing in sports writers’ lives, a man constantly alert to story potentialities.”26
Feuds were a staple source of free publicity, and Smythe had almost as many as there were teams. He bickered with managers, coaches, owners, players – whoever was available. It reflected his will to win and his view of all opponents as enemies, but there was more than simple choleric at play. He felt any action that disrupted an opponent’s equilibrium was a weapon to be used. He did his best to distract competitors and shatter their focus. If opposing players were busy griping about Smythe, they couldn’t be giving their full attention to the game.
It was a tactic that worked better with some than others. Despite his resentment at being fired by New York, it was hard to provoke an eruption from the patrician Lester Patrick. He had much more luck with short-fused warriors like Jack Adams in Detroit and Art Ross in Boston, both of whom were rough-edged former players who’d gotten into coaching or managing as a way to stay in the game.
All three were caustic and autocratic. Smythe earned Adams’s ire by unloading the fast-declining Sailor Herberts on his struggling team, after Ross had unloaded Herberts on him.* Adams got even by tricking Smythe into revealing he had an eye on a promising defenceman named Wilfred “Bucko” McDonald, then snapping up McDonald before Smythe could.27
His rivalry with Ross was a case of mutual detestation that kept newspapermen scribbling joyously for years. Ross had constructed the Bruins from the ground up, creating a strong, successful franchise that won Stanley Cups in 1929 and 1939. When Toronto arrived in Boston for the 1933 semifinals, they hadn’t won a game there in four years. Many in the league complained that Ross and Bruins owner Charles Adams fostered an intimidating atmosphere that made a trip to the Garden a low point on most schedules. Referees hated officiating there and opposing players weren’t much happier. The visitors’ dressing room was tiny, dirty, smelly, and cramped.28 To get to the ice, visiting teams had to run a gauntlet of loud-mouthed fans who specialized in heaping abuse with braying Boston accents.
Boston’s constant carping about the quality of refereeing got on everyone’s nerves. When Ross claimed once that league officials were biased in favour of Canadians, Frank Calder reminded him that all the players on U.S. clubs were Canadian too.29 Mocking Boston’s defensive style, Smythe once placed an ad in a Boston paper inviting people to watch “a real hockey team, the Toronto Maple Leafs.”30 When he heard Ross was having hemorrhoid problems he sent a dozen roses across the ice, with a note – written in Latin – indicating where he should shove the flowers.31
The Boston coach’s approach to the rivalry was more heavy-handed than Smythe’s, which tended toward needling and mockery. Smythe and Frank Selke had several run-ins with thugs they charged were encouraged by Ross. A group of longshoremen spent an entire game behind the Leafs bench trying to goad Smythe into a fight. During another game two men, apparently mistaking Selke for Smythe, provoked him repeatedly until a policeman intervened, warning Selke that one of the men was a well-known local killer.32 On yet another occasion a pair of heavies threatened Smythe on his way to the dressing room as Ross watched. The diminutive Selke dove at Ross and knocked him down; as the Leafs duo made a quick exit, Smythe called back that he wouldn’t waste his time on “anybody that a man as small as Selke can lick.”33
Ross’s eagerness to pick a fight culminated in a spectacular beating administered to the Boston manager at a gathering of league governors late in the decade. According to Smythe, Ross spent the evening insulting Red Dutton, a hard-nosed former defenceman who was managing the New York Americans. Dutton had carved out a successful NHL career despite being so badly injured in a 1917 blast of shrapnel that doctors had almost cut off his leg. Dutton ignored Ross until the Boston manager threw a punch, and then broke his nose, his cheekbone, and knocked out several teeth. “I never saw a man take such a beating and say nothing,” said Smythe. “Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving recipient.”34
The most storied clash between the two took place after Eddie Shore levelled Ace Bailey in the second period of a game on December 12, 1933, with a hit that ended Bailey’s career and very nearly his life. Bailey had no idea Shore was coming, and Shore claimed he had no idea Bailey was there. The hit happened behind the play, so most of the crowd was looking the other way when it took place.
The game, as usual, had been chippy. There had already been a number of clashes involving Shore. Boston’s all-star defenceman was a walking explosive device: anything could set him off at any given moment. He was said to have collected nine hundred stitches during his playing career and once famously played every minute of a game in Montreal after missing the team train in Boston and driving all night and all day through a blinding snow storm, his hands frozen to the wheel. Not only did he play, he scored the only goal.35
He wasn’t having a good night, though. With the game tied and two Leafs in the penalty box, Smythe sent out Bailey to kill time, backed by Clancy and Horner. Bailey managed to rag the puck for at least a minute, killing off half the penalty by himself. After a whistle he got the puck again and used up more valuable seconds. Finally, tiring, he shot it into the Boston end and coasted to his own blue line for a rest.
Shore picked up the puck and lugged it toward the Leafs net, but was met by Horner and Clancy, both of whom later took credit for dumping him. Clancy said he gave Shore a knee, Horner said he slammed him into the boards. Half the papers next day sided with Clancy, the other half – and goalie George Hainsworth, who had the clearest view – backed the Horner version. In any case, Shore went down and skidded into the faceoff zone to the side of Hainsworth.
Clancy grabbed the puck and skated away.
For Shore it was just one more frustration. He paused and glared at the referee, then got to his feet and skated away wearily, heading for a gap between Horner and Bailey on the blue line. Bailey was hunched over with his stick on his knees, still catching his breath, when Shore suddenly changed directions, picked up speed, and smashed into him with such force Bailey was launched into the air and landed on his head with a loud crack.
He lay on the ice, his legs twitching, his head bent as if his neck had been broken. The crowd howled, then quieted as they realized Bailey was hurt. Horner – who sixty years later was still wondering if Shore’s hit had been meant for him36 – went straight for Shore, spoke to him briefly, then punched him so hard Shore went backwards and cracked his own head open, a pool of blood spreading across the ice. The arena went berserk. The Bruins bench emptied as they set out after Horner, who found himself alone until Conacher arrived and the two raised their sticks to do battle against the legion of Bruins. Fortunately, the showdown ended without additional injuries, and the players divided to carry off their wounded, the Bruins hoisting Shore onto their shoulders while the Leafs gingerly moved Bailey to a small room used by a Boston minor-league team.
Selke had been watching the game from the press box and hurried down just as a local doctor made a quick examination of Bailey and said ominously, “If this boy is a Roman Catholic, we should call a priest right away.”37 Smythe, meanwhile, had run into a mob of Boston fans outside the dressing room. One man, named Leonard Kenworthy, yelled that Bailey was faking it. As the next day’s paper reported, “Kenworthy said Smythe told him he would ‘knock his block off’ and Kenworthy told him to try it. Smythe did, Kenworthy claimed, and in striking him broke his glasses and cut Kenworthy’s face to such an extent three stitches were taken to close the wound.”38
Clancy and a Leafs spare named Charlie Sands heard the commotion and came to help out. “They parted the crowd, punching as they went along. The King opened a pathway wide as a door and got to Connie’s side and pulled him away while he and Sands held the belligerent crowd at bay.”39 Kenworthy reported Smythe to the police, who arrested him and bundled him off to jail, where he was held until well after midnight and released on a promise to appear next time the Leafs were in Boston.
Shore, who had been stitched up and fitted with a bandage, appeared in the tiny room where Bailey was lying, along with Ross. Shore stuck out his hand to apologize; when Bailey sat up to grasp it his face turned a sickly grey and he was pushed down again. First reports on Bailey’s condition said it was “serious but not critical.” The next day it had worsened to a skull fracture and cerebral hemorrhaging. Doctors were fighting to save his life. Smythe was indignant at the lack of cooperation from Boston officials, complaining he’d been pestered by police when he should have been with the injured player.
After doctors performed emergency surgery on Bailey’s skull they realized he had suffered a double concussion and would need a second operation, which he was in no condition to endure. For a week he teetered between life and death, the papers obsessively covering every development. Smythe, convinced Bailey couldn’t survive, phoned Selke and instructed him to begin arrangements to ship his body home.40 Selke refused, instead telephoning radio stations and asking them to urge listeners to pray. On December 20, Bailey was finally declared out of danger; two days later it was reported he could move his arms and legs and feed himself. It wasn’t until a month after the hit that he was judged well enough to go home.
Ross and Smythe spent that time in a high-wire contest that carried dangerous implications. Ross was convinced Canadian teams — which meant Smythe – held too much sway with Calder. Ross’s boyhood friend, Frank Patrick, had recently been appointed NHL managing director, largely as a means of remedying the balance. Calder disliked Patrick and didn’t trust him. They travelled separately and stayed in different hotels, even when attending the same league event.
As the Leafs lined up behind Bailey and the Bruins behind Shore, their duel threatened the cohesion of the league. There were suggestions the Smythe-Ross conflict could prompt the U.S.–based teams to break away from the NHL.41
Smythe, who stayed at Bailey’s side throughout the ordeal, launched sulphurous blasts at Boston management. Like Bailey, he didn’t blame Shore, whom he called “one of the finest sportsmen I ever met.”42 Instead he blamed Ross and Adams for overworking him, leaving him in a near stupor.
“The owners have made a million dollars out of the Bruins in the past three years, and now they won’t spend a dime on the team. They are letting Shore and Tiny Thompson [the Bruin goalie] bear the brunt of the game. Shore has been used so much I doubt he fully realized what he was doing when he knocked Bailey down.”43 At the same time, he demanded Shore be suspended for the rest of the season as a lesson to the team and wanted Boston to share Bailey’s medical expenses.
Ross responded in kind, blasting Smythe for “giving to the newspapers interviews which I regard as the wildest kind of ballyhoo, calculated to pack them in when the Bruins play in Toronto. It seems a shame that Smythe takes this time to wash his dirty linen and cause new feuds. I feel, personally, that the Boston fans, every single one of them, regret, as we do, this unfortunate accident to a very fine chap. They are even more disgusted with the ranting from one supposed to be representing the city of Toronto, while our players and our entire organization are praying that this lad’s life may be spared.”44
Toronto newspapers questioned the sincerity of Ross’s distress. Shore had been bundled off to Bermuda to escape the spotlight, but was suffering “mental anguish,” a phrase Ross repeated so often that fans started mocking him with it and Ottawa owner Frank Ahearn told reporters Ross should shut up. “Many people wish that Art Ross would quit talking about Shore’s mental agony. All this talk will not make people forget about poor Bailey lying in hospital with two holes sawn into both sides of his skull. No one will forget the real mental agony of Mrs. Bailey and Bailey’s family.”45
In the end, perhaps the only two people who emerged with their reputations intact were Shore and Bailey. The Boston defenceman was suspended for six weeks, but the incident actually seemed to increase his popularity. Bailey publicly absolved him, he was treated like a hero in his first game back in the Bruins lineup, and fans in other arenas didn’t boo him as lustily as they used to.46 Toronto newspapers went overboard in assuring readers that beneath his crusty exterior, Shore was just a good old Canadian farmboy. Oddly, it was Horner who was suddenly cast as a villain for having belted Shore after the fact. He began receiving death threats and was warned before a game in Chicago that someone in the crowd might take a shot at him. When a light bulb fell to the ice and exploded, he thought the threat had been fulfilled.47
Bailey returned home January 19, stepping off a train at Sunnyside Station near High Park to be greeted by Smythe, Primeau, and Jackson. Coincidentally the Leafs were to play Boston at the Gardens that night, and, though Shore was still serving his suspension, no one was taking any chances. One fan counted forty-two policemen protecting the player benches and dressing rooms. The Bruins wore new leather headgear designed by Ross. Toronto won easily, 6–2, but it was a rough affair that left half a dozen Leafs bruised or battered.
Shore and Bailey met again on the night of St. Valentine’s Day at an all-star game – the first ever – played in Bailey’s honour. Ross said Shore wouldn’t play – he didn’t want anyone making money off his star’s new notoriety – but Shore did suit up, accepting a commemorative medal and souvenir sweater from Bailey. The wounded Leaf wore an overcoat and glasses, the long thin scars on his skull plainly visible beneath cropped hair. They shook hands and briefly embraced. The crowd roared. Fans were in a forgiving mood that night: they cheered when Shore first appeared, cheered again when he clasped Bailey’s hand, cheered almost every time he got the puck. The previous day Bailey had explained his philosophy to a reporter visiting his home: “If Shore meant to slough me, in the fullness of time something will happen to him. If he didn’t, if it was just one of those things that occur when men clash in the heat of physical combat, then everything will be all right with him. I believe it will all work itself out.”48
Smythe told the crowd of fourteen thousand that Bailey’s sweater No. 6 would never be worn by another Leaf, the first major professional sports team to retire a number. The game produced $20,909.40 for Bailey. On top of $6,000 he’d received from the Bruins, it amounted to about four years’ pay. He never played again, though he coached the University of Toronto to several championships and worked at the Gardens as a timekeeper until fired, as an old man, by Harold Ballard when Smythe was safely dead. Smythe continued to help with the Baileys’ finances for more than forty years after that 1934 benefit, working with NHL president Clarence Campbell to increase payments from the Bailey trust in 1962 and again in 1974.49
* The construction of Maple Leaf Gardens instantly doomed the arena on Mutual Street. It struggled on, hosting big-band concerts, tennis matches, and bicycle races. In 1962, it was renamed The Terrace and turned into a three-level parking garage, curling rink, and roller-skating arena. It was demolished in 1989 and replaced with condominiums (Globe and Mail, April 22, 1989).
* Smythe was quick to get even with Ross for selling him Herberts, talking up the qualities of centre Bill Carson and then selling him to Ross at an exorbitant price just as Carson’s skills went into swift decline (www.bobbyorrhalloffame.com/inductee-corner/2003/inductee/3/bill-carson/).