The life of the Kid Line was an exhilarating but brief five years, ending in the summer of 1936 when quiet “Gentleman” Joe Primeau sent Smythe a polite letter confirming his plans to quit hockey to concentrate on his concrete block business. His departure was like the fall of the first domino, which set others tumbling in turn. Before the final one landed, Clancy and Conacher would both be retired, Hainsworth out of the picture, and Day playing out the string as a New York American.
Smythe didn’t see it coming. Day was thirty-five, Clancy thirty-three, but both seemed to have several seasons still in them. Primeau, the senior member of the Kid Line, was just twenty-nine. It was clear the Leafs would need a replacement for Hainsworth, who had been acquired from Montreal for Chabot and was ancient at age forty-one. But Smythe had someone in mind for that.
Conacher’s decline was the most disheartening. Entering camp in 1936, he was examined by the team doctor and judged to be in the best shape of his career. When he was slashed hard on the wrist in a preseason game by Detroit rookie Johnny Sherf,1 he expected to shake it off quickly. But his recovery lagged and in November he was still not right. “Every time I try to shoot, the pain shoots from wrist to finger tips,” he complained.2 He lacked his old power, a situation opponents quickly seized on. Despite repeated rests and specially designed casts, the problem persisted all season, limiting him to just three goals in fifteen games.
He was injured again the next fall, this time in the shoulder. He spent frustrating weeks recovering, his arm strapped to his side, his forearm folded across his chest. When he was finally judged healthy again he struggled on the ice. Something just wasn’t right. In January he skated angrily off the ice after a practice, briefly consulted the team doctor, and announced he’d had enough. He was hanging up his skates at age twenty-eight.*
Clancy’s departure was less of a surprise. He was a small man who’d been in the league sixteen years and thrown himself into every game without restraint. During training camp he noticed he was losing weight at an alarming rate. Six games into the season, in a match against Detroit, he couldn’t keep up with his check. It was his second game in two nights, and it was too much for him. After brooding about it for a day, he informed Smythe, Selke, and Irvin he was through. Then he went and woke up Andy Lytle to ask him to keep it out of the papers until he’d talked to his wife and wired his father. Lytle obediently waited a few days before sharing the moment with his readers.
“His fighting chin was out and his voice didn’t quaver as he told me it was goodbye to a playing career that began when he was seventeen and ended Sunday night in Detroit,” Lytle wrote. “ ‘I know I’ve lost that old speed, that mythical half yard athletes talk about,’ ” Clancy told him. “ ‘I saw it very clearly in Detroit. I knew I was supposed to take a certain player out of it, yet I stood as though rooted and let him score.’ ”3
Smythe promised to pay him through the end of the season and keep him on as an “ambassador” for the team. Clancy tried to address his teammates, but couldn’t find his voice and left the locker room in tears.
As the 1937 season opened, only Horner and Jackson remained from the team that had christened Maple Leaf Gardens six years earlier. There were prospects in the pipeline, but Smythe hadn’t expected he’d have to press them into action quite so soon. Still, his luck held. He solved his goaltending problem when he went to scout a Detroit goaltender named Earl Robertson and stumbled instead on a pudgy, little-known kid from Brandon, Manitoba, named Walter Broda. Primeau’s departure was offset by the arrival of Sylvanus Apps, signed by Smythe after he took Irene to a football game and watched Apps run rings around the opposition. Apps was so good he turned right winger Gordie Drillon into a scoring star, much as Primeau had stoked the skills of Conacher and Jackson. Add in Nick Metz, a twenty-three-year-old left winger from Wilcox, Saskatchewan, and – after dipping to fifth place for a season – the Leafs were back on top of the league, and with much younger legs. Horner, at twenty-eight, was suddenly the oldest man on the team. It was possible to argue that, in losing Conacher, Primeau, and Hainsworth while gaining Apps and Broda, they were even stronger as a team.
Apps was an all-round athlete from Paris, Ontario, who qualified fully for Smythe’s idea of a hockey player with great “bloodlines.” He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke, he didn’t curse. He was so morally upright he’d been pondering a career as a Baptist minister, and so firm in his convictions he kept Smythe waiting two years before acceding to his pleas to join the Leafs. First he intended to compete in the 1936 Olympics, where he placed sixth in the pole vault. He didn’t play a single hockey game in the minors; he went straight from little-known amateur to NHL star, so steeped in natural ability he led the team in scoring his first season, beating out Busher Jackson by five points and coming within a point of tying Dave “Sweeney” Schriner as the league’s leading scorer.*
He was, said Smythe, “the epitome of the kind of player I wanted,” a particularly telling accolade given that Apps was missing an ingredient his boss never tired of stressing – he didn’t take penalties. Horner, who Smythe had named captain on Conacher’s retirement, averaged more than one hundred minutes a year in infractions. Apps, in his entire career, would spend just fifty-six minutes in the box and go one full season without a single penalty. It didn’t matter: Apps, like Primeau, managed to be tough but clean at the same time and made everyone around him better. He won the Calder Trophy as rookie of the year, contributed to a resurgence in Busher Jackson’s career, and was viewed as largely responsible for Drillon scoring at a rate of almost a point a game. One year, when he broke his leg and missed much of the season, he tried to return part of his paycheque to Smythe.
Broda’s talents were as camouflaged as Apps’s were obvious. He was unemotional and unsophisticated, fresh off the Prairies and not skilled enough to hide it. On his first trip to Manhattan he stared up at the skyscrapers and observed innocently, “It ain’t much like Brandon, is it?”4 When Conacher mischievously told him he could be thrown in jail for sneaking a few souvenirs across the border, he panicked and eagerly handed them over to Conacher instead. He had a grade school education – barely – and was known as Turk because he had freckles like a turkey’s egg.5 He and Hainsworth were supposed to play alternate games, but after Hainsworth allowed four quick goals in a 5–1 loss to New York just seven games into the season, Smythe abruptly gave him his release. Except for the war years, when he was in uniform, Broda would miss precisely one game over the next eleven years.
Broda didn’t qualify as a man with top bloodlines but earned Smythe’s next greatest accolade: he was “decent and loyal as a man can be.”6 Bob Davidson, who joined the Leafs the year before Broda, was similarly favoured because he was “loyal.”7 Loyalty meant staying put. Elmer Lach and Doug Bentley, on the other hand, weren’t loyal because both had tryouts with the Leafs but ended up starring elsewhere. Lach and Bentley were a couple of Saskatchewan boys spotted by a Leafs scout in 1937 and invited to a tryout. Neither weighed more than 130 pounds, according to Lach, and were sitting on the bench looking tiny when Smythe happened by and wondered out loud what those two “peanuts” were doing in Leafs uniforms. When Selke gave them five hundred dollars a few days later to visit Niagara Falls, they headed straight back to Saskatchewan instead. Fifteen years later, when Lach was considering retirement, Smythe reminded him: “You still owe me five hundred dollars.”8
Being loyal and having good bloodlines were separate attributes. Bloodlines were about leadership ability and character. Players with good bloodlines tended to abstain from alcohol and tobacco and qualified in Smythe’s mind as suitable to serve as the team’s captain. Being loyal implied devotion to the team and Smythe’s way of doing things, and a willingness to obey instructions. You had to be loyal to have good bloodlines, but loyalty alone didn’t signify good bloodlines. Both measures were part of the ranking system he applied to all his players. There were “plus” players, “neutral” players, and “minus” players. “You have to have plus players to win hockey games … A plus man is a man who can do more than his own job. In other words, he can hold his own man, can play his own position and out-do the other man. A neutral man, if you cannot get plus men, is effective, but minus men are no good.”9
Toronto’s rapid revival in the late stages of the decade was fortuitous, as Smythe’s attention was increasingly drawn to the imminence of war in Europe. He was determined, once again, to play his part. The fact he was in his mid-forties, had a wife and four children, and had more than fulfilled his duty to his country was of no consequence. When Irene and military authorities did all they could to dissuade him it only hardened his resolve. He was going to fight, and that was that.
Irene, understandably, couldn’t comprehend his insistence on enlisting. She had waited for him once, for four long years, agonizing when he was shot down, reported dead, then carted off to POW camp. There had been much less at stake then – just the two of them, pledged to each other, but not married yet and young enough to start again if necessary. Now everything was different, except his attitude. Adding to her bewilderment was Smythe’s resistance to any position away from the front lines. He wanted to get out there where the bullets were flying. He wanted to risk his life.
He was straightforward in his reasoning. In a 1941 interview he explained:
I’m the kind of a fellow that when we come back from New York or Chicago and get off at Sunnyside, I take a big breath and am glad this is my country. I’ve got a wife and family – four little kids, and I have always had one old enough to be proud of and one young enough to make me a big shot. A long while ago I started as a barefoot boy, and through a lot of generous acts and through a lot of gracious people I got where I am today. If a man like me won’t fight for my country, I’d just like to know who would.10
He also felt he had little choice. For years he had been teaching hockey in military terms: teamwork, selflessness, bravery. “When war came I had to face that. Had I been talking fiction or fact? Was I a fraud or did I live up to my own principles?”11
He saw the battlefield and hockey rink as symbiotic: both depended for success on shared habits and attitudes. Hockey players needed to play as a team, be constantly vigilant, but ready to attack on all fronts. “A good way of life would be a combination of the army way and the sports life,” he said. “In the army faithful dogged perseverance will get a man ahead, and he will be looked after in the line of social services – have his clothes and living and medical care. If that could be combined with sports, where the individual can, on his ability, hurdle the requirements of seniority and red tape, you can have a good way of life.”12
Barely a week after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Smythe and other NHL governors met to discuss implications for the league. As soon as the federal government passed the National Resources Mobilization Act (NRMA) enabling Ottawa to requisition men for military duty, Smythe urged Leaf players to join up promptly: “It is my advice … no matter what your age or your position as a family man is, that you sign up immediately with some non-permanent militia unit and get your military training in as soon as possible. The advantages of this move are obvious. In case you are honoured by a call to the Canadian Army … you will be ready. [In any case] you will have complied with the regulations and be free to play hockey until called on.”13
He followed up with individual memos, requiring each player to identify which unit he’d registered with. A 1940 report on enlistments among the seven NHL teams showed Toronto led with twenty-five. Players resident in Toronto had mostly joined the Toronto Scottish regiment while those elsewhere had signed on to local outfits. Even Foster Hewitt had registered, with the 45th Field Battery.
Even before a shot was fired Smythe found himself at odds with Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s handling of the conflict. He complained the thirty-day training period specified in the NRMA was unrealistic – you couldn’t build an army on men with just four weeks’ training. He won that argument – the training period was later extended indefinitely – but it was just the first of many differences he would have with King’s war policies. The prime minister, opaque and evasive as ever, was far from enthusiastic about preparing for war. They were at opposite ends of the ideological pole: Smythe still an unapologetic Empire loyalist, King worried about preserving the fortunes of the Liberal party and holding together a country split between English speakers who felt the tug of duty and French speakers who saw no need to fight another of Europe’s wars.
Before he could begin telling Ottawa what to do, however, he had to get the army to accept him and organize his hockey team to do without him. The second task was easier than the first.
With Apps and Broda as its backbone, and the subsequent addition of Sweeney Schriner (in a trade for Busher Jackson), Lorne Carr, Wally Stanowski, and diminutive centre Billy Taylor, he felt he was leaving the team well stocked. But he had concluded that after nine years at the helm, it was time to replace Dick Irvin. Irvin had taken the club to the finals seven times, but for all Toronto’s dominance of the regular season, it still had just one Stanley Cup. Somehow, something always seemed to get in the way of victory: in 1933, Toronto was so worn out by its semifinal victory over Boston – the last game of which went to six overtime periods – that it had little energy left for New York. A few years later against Chicago, Smythe outsmarted himself when he forced the Black Hawks to replace their injured goalie with a little-known minor leaguer named Alfie Moore, who was so upset at his poor reception – even the Chicago players treated him like a no-hoper – that he stoned the Leafs and shifted the momentum to Chicago’s side long enough for them to win the series.
Smythe had decided Irvin had a fatal weakness. He wasn’t “tough enough.” He fell in love with players and put the same ones on the ice whether they were performing well or not. Smythe wanted someone more hard-nosed, who could “fire people, bench them, live always on what a man could do today, not what he had done a few years ago.” He wanted Hap Day.14
Irvin may not have agreed with Smythe’s assessment of his strengths and weaknesses, but concurred about it being time to move on. Before the 1939–40 season ended, he and Smythe had reached a gentlemen’s agreement, and Smythe had quietly offered his services to the Montreal Canadiens, arguing that Irvin could help save the club.
Montreal’s survival was a serious concern. It had changed hands twice in five years, at one point almost suffering the indiginity of being moved to Cleveland.15 Dick Irvin Jr. recalled that attendance in Montreal for his father’s last game as Leafs coach was “about 1,500.”16 The team was dead last, and the Forum, though just fifteen years old, seemed old and run down. Sending Irvin to Montreal served Smythe’s own interests by strengthening the team and ensuring the league remained viable. Organizing his own departure, however, was running into some troubling undercurrents.
In 1941, he prepared a document specifying lines of authority for Leafs executives in his absence and the duties that went with them. Day would have full responsibility for the hockey team, Selke would handle scouting with assistance from Smythe’s old friend, Squib Walker, while Ed Bickle and W.A.H. MacBrien would liaise with the league office.
Day was delegated authority for any trades or acquisitions. Initially Smythe marked in Selke as well, but scratched out his name and stipulated that Day would make decisions in consultation with himself, when possible, and the executive committee. It would prove to be a crucial alteration.
Under “Policy” he stipulated that the Leafs should at “all times stress offensive tactics and players,” Gardens attractions should maintain high standards to avoid reducing prices, and public relations – another Selke duty – should involve “truth and nothing but.” In another decision that would provoke criticism, he stipulated it was “very important” that there should be no free passes, including to men and women in uniform.17
He called a meeting to explain his directives and was upset at the perceived eagerness of some directors to see the back of him. Even before he’d completed his remarks, he related, Selke, MacBrien, and Bickle left the room to begin discussing plans. “I never saw anybody so anxious to get rid of a man as those three were to get rid of me,” he complained.18 The sense of being hurried toward the exit would only intensify as events unfolded.
His lessened duties came with a 50 per cent cut in pay. He also began selling off the stable of horses he had accumulated, at “sacrifice prices.”19
Despite his eagerness to answer the call to duty, Canada’s army was far from certain it wanted to place the call. The reason was obvious. He turned forty-five in 1940, twice the age of the recruits being sought. The army wanted eager young men in their teens and twenties who could be easily moulded physically and mentally for the ordeal they would face, not middle-aged men with reluctant bodies and fixed ideas about how wars should be fought. No one could quite understand why a wealthy family man with a business to run would insist on a combat position when there were plenty of useful things he could have done on the home front. The army brass felt he would be more useful as part of the cheering section, assisting in recruitment and public relations chores.
Smythe, naturally, thought otherwise. Fighting for his country meant just that – pointing guns at the enemy and pulling the trigger. It didn’t mean giving speeches or flying around as a jumped-up ambassador while others were doing the dying. He began calling anyone who had some clout and might help. He pestered Frank Ahearn, the former Ottawa Senators owner, who had been elected as a Liberal MP. He wrote directly to the defence minister, James Ralston, and to C.D. Howe, the minister for munitions. He signed on for drilling practice in Toronto, and when that was cancelled for the winter he wrote Ahearn in frustration: “Surely there must be some way a man could prepare himself at least, if he is not actually able to fight for his country.”20
He appealed to his old friend from North Street, Bay Arnoldi, who had helped him in 1915 and was a colonel in Canada’s militia. Arnoldi came through again, sending him to refresher courses and putting him in charge of training at Toronto’s Armouries on University Avenue, where the main law courts now stand. He took a refresher course to renew his qualifications as a pilot, even though he’d disliked flying since getting shot down.21
The NRMA stipulated that men could be required to serve at home, but would be sent overseas only if they volunteered. Smythe was volunteering his heart out, but no one was listening. Finally, he hit on forming his own battery, just as Gordon Southam had done twenty-five years earlier. He figured if he offered a prepackaged unit, all trained and equipped and ready to go, the army could hardly say no.
It improved his morale and gave him something to do, but 1941 was not 1915 and Canadian military thinking had come some distance since then. In the first war, even the top soldiers had been little better than enthusiastic amateurs, happy to embrace well-meaning civilians with the means to organize their own outfits. But the ensuing slaughter had buried such thinking, and superior levels of professionalism had been adopted in the interim. Unlike 1915, no one thought this war would be a jolly lark in which they’d deliver a sound thrashing to the Huns and send them on their way. Europe’s still-scarred battlegrounds remained as testament to the savagery to come. Hitler wasn’t the Kaiser, and this wasn’t a family dispute among members of the European aristocracy. Canadians might not have appreciated yet the full madness of the Nazis, but they understood that Germany presented an enemy that would not be easily subdued.
Smythe didn’t let that stop him from tracking down volunteers for his battery, signing up lacrosse players, a golfer, two sportswriters, and members of his staff from the Gardens and the sand pit. The two writers were Ralph Allen, a talented, overweight columnist from the Globe and Mail who Smythe judged “the most slovenly soldier who ever lived,”22 and Ted Reeve of the Telegram, a much-admired former athlete who was seven years younger than Smythe and afflicted with injuries from a lifetime of competition. “He had flat feet, bashed up knees, arthritis in every joint, dislocated shoulders. You name an athletic injury and Reeve had it.”23 Smythe considered him a hero just for turning up.
Although he did nothing to advertise it, Smythe’s meticulous tracking of NHL enlistments uncovered an embarrassing situation that would dog the league throughout the war. Players were signing up to do their training, but very few took the next step and volunteered for service overseas. Along with his list of Leaf players and the units they’d joined, he had a second account of Gardens staff who had signed on, and it was this second roll, of lower-paid and less-glorified men, who were going to Europe. Smythe knew the name, rank, location, and serial number of almost a dozen men who by 1941 were either already in Europe or on their way. They were ushers, drivers, cleaners, and painters. There was a night watchman and a couple of doormen. While they had put their families and humdrum jobs aside to serve overseas, not a single one of the two dozen men on the roster of players and top Leafs prospects was willing to match them. It would remain that way to the end of the war, a period many top NHLers spent playing to packed arenas on military-sponsored teams in Canada. Smythe defended the situation at the time, but later admitted it had troubled him. He argued it wasn’t the players’ fault if the government failed to order them to the front. The men had obeyed the rules and completed their training; it was Ottawa’s job to institute conscription and send them where they were needed. More than one observer noted the paradox between Smythe’s own willingness to put his life on the line while refusing to criticize much-younger hockey players who weren’t as bold. The suggestion that he was happy to keep them out of harm’s way so they could keep playing hockey didn’t hold up, since Apps, Broda, and others spent long periods in camps around the country that kept them away from the NHL in any event.
He was careful to ensure fans knew the Leafs were doing their duty, pumping out programs and promotional material with photos of Privates Broda and Davidson of the Toronto Scottish, Privates Nick and Don Metz of the Regina Rifles, and Private Wally Stanowski of the Winnipeg Rifles. Privately, he kept up an active correspondence with the stable-hands, ushers, drivers, and other men in England, sending them regular care packages of cigarettes and other goodies from home. They sent back hand-scribbled letters filled with appreciation, bits of news, and evidence of their homesickness. “I’d very much like to be at the stable this spring painting,” wrote Jim Williamson, who was in England with a unit of drivers. “I’d get a kick out of painting a new cottage too. Maybe I could give Hughie some more pointers bass fishing.”24 Lou Pollock, a member of the Gardens cleaning staff who had joined the 48th Highlanders, assured him “the boys” enjoyed listening to rebroadcasts of Leafs games carried by the BBC.25 They were put together by Foster Hewitt, who worked into the early morning hours reducing his broadcasts to an extended package of highlights that were transmitted to Britain.
Even as Smythe pestered the government for a job, he grew bolder in offering it unsolicited advice. He became deeply involved in a campaign to pressure Ottawa into appointing Andrew McNaughton supreme commander of the Canadian Forces, berating Mackenzie King when he failed to pay heed.
McNaughton was a former chief of defence staff who had entered the first war at the head of the 4th Battery and ended it as commander of all Canadian Corps artillery. He was a man of many talents, both soldier and scientist, and had invented a forerunner of radar, which he sold to the government for one dollar and which dramatically increased Canadian success in knocking out German guns. After the war he joined the regular army, helped establish a network of camps that put unemployed men to work during the Depression, and became head of the National Research Council.26
McNaughton returned to the military in 1939 as commander of the 1st Canadian Infantry Division and was sent to Britain as senior Canadian officer as the steady flow of recruits grew into an army. His reputation was so high that a campaign grew up to assign him virtually unlimited power over the war effort. It struck a chord with veterans like Smythe who mistrusted the government and doubted its willingness to prosecute the war as they saw necessary.
In 1940, Smythe wrote a series of letters harshly criticizing the prime minister. In response to a King speech in June, he sent a telegram couched in his usual uncompromising tone:
Two weeks ago you said on the air that you and your government would welcome constructive criticism. Here is mine – You and your government to stop asking the people to have faith in their leaders but rather for you and your government to have faith in the people. Put in effect immediately conscription of new money and industry. To harness the power thus obtained recall McNaughton at once … [Give him] full power to build Canada’s war machine not only to protect Canada but to take part when needed for England.27
When King’s secretary responded with a bland reply, Smythe fired back that the war effort was “to say the least, poorly organized” and bemoaning that King refused to meet him so he could put forward his views “man to man.” He warned he was about to publish an open letter to the prime minister, which appeared soon after in a veterans’ magazine.
It was even more critical than his previous letter had been. Canada, he suggested, was “at the bottom of the league” in readiness and King was “out of touch with the opinions of the public.” He concluded with another warning: “Persons who don’t listen to public opinion have a great deal of difficulty holding their jobs.”28
In his records Smythe left a chart illustrating what he had in mind for McNaughton. It showed the general as the centre of a web of resources that included infantry, artillery, and air power but also “capital,” “womanhood,” “labour,” the “middle class,” and “factories.” There was no explanation of how it fit together, but Smythe was clearly thinking in sweeping terms.
His politics were straightforward and a bit naive. His dislike of Mackenzie King was intense, but he recognized the Conservatives had no one better. Like King and many others, he had grossly underestimated Hitler. After the German dictator invaded Czechoslovakia and justified it as necessary to provide Germans with liebensraum, or living space, Smythe wrote Hitler a letter on Gardens stationary suggesting he cut a deal with Britain, handing over his tanks for safekeeping in return for land Germany had lost in the first war. If Germany needed the tanks for defensive reasons, he reasoned, Britain could always send them back.29
His involvement in trying to draft McNaughton petered out as he became more deeply involved with his battery. But he found other ways to agitate. In the winter of 1941–42, he began a course at Petawawa, outside Ottawa, to qualify as a major and came to the conclusion troops were being inadequately trained: “I was astounded to find out that because of dental parades and medical parades and clothing parades and inspections and bath parades and a million other things, and guard duty and so on, that my men were training seventeen hours a week to become a soldier, and that, of course, was not seventeen hours in succession.”30
He considered it a scandal and contacted Joseph Atkinson at the Star. Atkinson frankly admitted he didn’t believe the story, but assigned Greg Clark, a respected reporter, to investigate. Shortly afterwards Smythe received a note from Atkinson attesting that he had Clark’s report. “It is of such a nature that I don’t know what to think or do about it,” Atkinson admitted. “The view expressed by you to me is fully substantiated and there is much more.”31
Smythe met with Atkinson and was told Clark had discovered recruits received even less training than Smythe had calculated. He was unwilling to publish the discovery, however, since the Star supported the government and its policies and was unwilling to endanger public backing for either. Some time later Smythe ran into Clark at a train station and upbraided him for his lack of backbone. Knowing what he knew, Smythe said, why didn’t he take the story and print it elsewhere under his own name, as Smythe’s father had once done? They had a furious argument, followed soon after by a letter from Clark.
Dear Conn,
After due thought on your remarks at the station platform the other night I have reached this point: you go peddle your peanuts and I’ll go peddle my papers.
Yours for Victory,
Greg Clark32
Clark refused to speak to Smythe again for the next twenty years.
Smythe was still at Petawawa when the Leafs staged what was, to that point, the greatest comeback in NHL playoff history, rebounding from a three-game deficit to win four in a row against Detroit and finally capture their second Stanley Cup. It was something of a mixed blessing: Smythe was ecstatic to finally nail down another Cup, but it came in a season when he spent less time with the club than in any previous year and was only sporadically involved in its management. He would have vehemently disputed any suggestion he was not directly responsible for its success, having chosen the players, appointed the coach, and assigned the duties. But it was hard to miss the fact that Hap Day had finally succeeded in bringing glory back to the club in the one year that its micromanaging boss wasn’t around to get in his hair.
No one had picked the Leafs to dominate that season. Boston seemed the strongest team, but New York surprised everyone by finishing first, three points ahead of Toronto and four up on the Bruins. Detroit, after finishing fifth, nonetheless hustled its way into the finals, setting up what was expected to be an easy victory for the Leafs.
Once again, though, the Red Wings proved tougher than expected. They won the first two games at the Gardens and the third at the Olympia, all but guaranteeing Toronto would prolong its decade of disappointment. No team had ever rebounded from three games down, and almost no one believed it was possible.
The Leafs comeback began in the second period of the fourth game when, down by two goals, Bob Davidson scored, followed quickly by Lorne Carr. Day had astonished everyone by benching Gordie Drillon and Bucko McDonald, removing his top scorer and one of his toughest defencemen. He replaced Drillon with Don Metz, and it was Metz who scored to put Toronto ahead 4–3. They were still up by one when, late in the game, Detroit suddenly came unglued. It started when Detroit’s Eddie Wares earned a ten-minute misconduct for a dispute with referee Mel Harwood. When Wares finally went to the box the Wings sent seven men onto the ice, earning another penalty. Centre Don Grosso, named to serve the penalty, got into his own battle with Harwood and ended with another misconduct. When the final whistle mercifully ended Detroit’s misery, manager Jack Adams leapt onto the ice and went straight for Harwood.
“Bedlam broke with the first exchange of punches,” the papers reported.33 “Harwood stood his ground and swapped sock for sock with Adams. Grosso joined in the slugging. Spectators added their punches.”
Harwood was removed under police escort, but the crowd converged on a linesman left behind and started a new free-for-all. A reporter noted that during one brawl a female spectator removed her shoe and threw it on the ice. “It wasn’t a particularly good shoe,” he added. “The sole was worn almost through.” Frank Calder was spotted by the crowd and required police help to leave the building. Although Detroit was still up three games to one, Wares – who had started it all – proved prescient when he told a reporter: “You know what’s going to happen. It’s going to go seven games.”34
He was exactly right. Adams was suspended for the rest of the series and the betting line immediately shifted in the Leafs’ direction. “Sure we’re worried,” the Wings’ chief scout responded sarcastically when questioned. “Why, the Leafs only have to win three games and we need to win one. Boy, are we worried.”35
That night Toronto overwhelmed the Wings 9–3, and two days later tied the series behind a 3–0 Broda shutout. The teams would return to Toronto for the last game.
Smythe hustled down from Petawawa to be there. Everyone wanted to know whether Drillon would still be on the bench, despite having scored more Stanley Cup points than any previous Leaf. “I won’t know myself until Saturday afternoon how we will line up,” Day said.36 Hostility remained high on both sides. Adams was caught by a photographer talking on a Gardens phone. “Get away, you goon,” he roared, “or I’ll smash that machine to pieces.”37 A record crowd squeezed into every nook and cranny, 16,218 in all.
In the end, Drillon didn’t play. Detroit scored in the second period, but Toronto replied with three in the third. Adams spent the game pacing restlessly in the Wings dressing room, listening to Foster Hewitt on the radio. With two minutes left and the Leafs up by two goals, he appeared unexpectedly at the Toronto bench, tapped Day on the shoulder, shook his hand, and returned to the dressing room.38 The game ended with Toronto up 3–1. The jinx was broken and Smythe, so giddy he could barely talk, grabbed Calder’s hat and waved it at the crowd as the league president was in the midst of handing over the Cup.
What hadn’t been noticed was the test of wills going on between Smythe and Ed Bickle. George Cottrelle, the Gardens’ president, had been named controller of oil for the duration of the war. That left Bickle in charge, and before the game he’d banned Smythe from entering the Leafs dressing room. Smythe, wearing his major’s uniform, was uncharacteristically uncertain what to do. Toronto had made the finals without him and staged a miraculous comeback from a three-game deficit. If he defied Bickle and went marching into the room and the Leafs lost, his intervention could be held up to blame. And despite the common assumption that Connie Smythe answered only to himself, Bickle was his boss, and, technically speaking, he was no more than a half-pay former manager who was away on an extended leave.
His dilemma was settled when Day insisted he light a fire under the team at the end of the second period, when they were down by a goal. The strain was showing, and both teams were tiring. Smythe cornered Schriner, Carr, and Taylor, two veterans and a rookie, and delivered one of his patented dressing-downs, designed to annoy them to the point they’d score a goal just to teach him a lesson. Schriner, not exactly taking the bait, grinned at him and pledged, “What ya worrying about, boss? We’ll get you a couple of goals.”39 Six minutes into the third period he scored the tying goal, assisted by Carr and Taylor. Ten minutes later he scored again – from Carr and Taylor – to put it away.
Smythe returned quickly to Petawawa, but the dispute with Bickle went with him. He’d been welcomed, he said, like “a skunk at a garden party.”40 It didn’t help when, two days after the game, the Star ran a column extolling the quiet brilliance of Frank Selke in bringing about the triumph.
Five months after the Cup victory, as Smythe was finally preparing his battery for embarkation to England, he received another unsubtle communication from Bickle, suggesting by telegram that he step down from the Gardens’ executive committee. It was supposed to be temporary, but would require a shareholders’ vote to return him to his seat later on. “Do not relish being left off executive after twelve years,” he wired back. “However if majority of executive in favour of it will make it unanimous.” He didn’t hear back.41
With that simmering in the background, the 30th battery, Royal Canadian Artillery, set sail for England in October 1942. Just weeks before its departure he had received a distraught call from Irene, alerting him that Stafford – who had enlisted in the Navy – was due home on leave soon and planned to marry his girlfriend, Dorothea Gaudette, a Catholic. Unable to get away, he insisted the wedding be postponed, but Stafford went ahead with the ceremony – two ceremonies in fact, one Catholic and one Protestant. Both he and Dorothea wrote him letters explaining their decision, which they’d discussed at length. Dorothea’s mother was as staunchly opposed to her marrying a Protestant as Smythe was to his son marrying a Catholic. Dorothea’s letter reveals how intense the religious divide remained and how much the young couple feared Smythe’s reaction.
Referring to their plan to be married by a priest, she wrote, “I know that is against your wishes but until the end of the war I have to live at home and that is impossible if I get married any other way, as I would be a total disgrace in the eyes of some people.”
She begged him not to blame Stafford. “Please don’t hold anything against him. He has always considered you first before, but I am taking the blame for this. I want you to take it out on me and not him. He thinks the world of you and always will.” She vowed their children would never be put in the same position. “It may be years before the war is over and we can set up housekeeping but when that time comes we will have to go away from Toronto to live so that we won’t be hounded by people who think they are doing the right thing.”42
Irene was in similar agony but for different reasons. “I am sorry about mother but I am afraid she has gone off the deep end about me,” Stafford wrote to his father. “I wish you could convince her that I can never forget how much she has loved me all my life and what she’s done for me. Tell her for me that no one can ever take over the place in my heart which she has always had, because I think that that is the real trouble.”43
Although not entirely mollified, Smythe met the newly married Stafford in Halifax on the way to Europe and they had a warm visit, the older man proud of his son’s eagerness for action. Besides, it would be almost three years before he was back in Canada to do anything about it, and by then life had changed.
* Conacher attempted a comeback, playing a year in Detroit and two with the New York Americans, but never approached his level of play with the Leafs.
* Schriner was born in Russia, but moved to Calgary as a baby. His nickname, seldom explained, came from his childhood adulation of a semi-pro baseball player, Bill Sweeney.