Albert Ernest Stafford Smythe died October 2, 1947. He was eighty-five and had been ill for months. He had been living in Hamilton in a small apartment with a housekeeper, who wrote Smythe in July warning that his father was “very feeble” and had suffered greatly during a recent heat wave:
He was almost prostrate and I personally began to think it was almost more than I could manage. His knees would buckle up, his hands got stiff – feet swollen and his eyes running – altogether he was very helpless.… if the weather gets hot again as it very likely will I hate to think of the effect it will have on your father.… The doctor said the handwriting is on the wall and it’s just a matter of time.1
Albert’s second wife, Jane, had died in 1940. For a time he’d shared the apartment with Conn’s half-sister Moira and her husband, Thomas “Doc” Davis, after they married in 1941. Conn sent money every month – $100 until the fall of 1945, when he raised it to $200. Albert, Moira recalled, was as indifferent to financial matters as he’d ever been. He’d add Conn’s cheques to the pile of bills and magazines he kept on a table, foraging for one when he needed it.2 His estate came to $1,192.78. He had $742 in one bank account, $193.37 in a second account, an uncashed dividend cheque for $4 from Goodyear Tire and Rubber, of which he owned one share, and various worthless shares in a number of mining firms.
Wherever Conn got his blunt nature and drive for worldly success, it hadn’t come from his gentle, literary, contemplative father. Albert lived surrounded by the immense library of books that had grown without interruption throughout his life. There were thirty-five thousand volumes stuffed into the small apartment. In the room he used for an office they were three deep on the shelves lining the walls and piled in neat stacks on the floor, with a narrow path winding through to a “working” area consisting of two overturned orange crates. One held a typewriter, while he sat on the other to work. After the World folded in 1920, he’d continued his journalistic career with stints at several other newspapers, primarily in Hamilton. In 1945, when The Canadian Theosophist issued a special edition to mark Albert’s sixtieth year of service, the Hamilton Spectator remarked that he had “established his merits as a journalist of exceptional ability and force” and that his poetry had “won the highest praise from the discerning.” He was a recognized authority on the works of Charles Dickens and president of Toronto’s Dickens Fellowship for several years.
J.V. McAree, a respected Toronto columnist, wrote: “Like most of us in the newspaper work he had his periods of good and ill fortune. But he never complained. When he told me of some disappointment, some harsh blow of fate, he always smiled. Life, apparently, was turning out much as he had expected; and he had spiritual reserves of strength and buoyancy which made him imperturbable.”3
After Moira moved out Albert had considered marrying again, if only for the help he needed around the house, but Conn had put a halt to any such thoughts. He considered the woman Albert had in mind wholly unsuitable and wasn’t going to stand for it. “Why don’t you try living together for a year?’ he suggested disingenuously. He hired an agent to go through Albert’s belongings after his death and received an awestruck report on the volume of his correspondence: “The letters, of which there are millions, seem to be all personal. I don’t think he ever threw anything away, so although we kept a careful eye out for hidden treasure, anything that looked legal or valuable, we junked everything except the enclosed handful.”4
Conn signed his share of the modest estate over to Moira, except for some bits of furniture for Hugh and Stafford and a few letters. Some of Albert’s books and documents were taken by McMaster University for its archives, others by the Toronto Theosophical Society. Most of the rest were donated to a Hamilton veterans’ organization.
Death prevented Albert from seeing his son finally reach the peak of his hockey and business ambitions, which Conn achieved less than two months after his father’s cremation. In November, he was named president of Maple Leaf Gardens, with responsibility for overall operations while retaining his titles as managing director of the arena and general manager of the team. Whether Albert would have been impressed is open to question, but for Conn it was a triumphant moment, the victory he’d predicted more than a year earlier when he’d asked Frank Selke to pledge his shares.
It was, said the Globe, “a new pinnacle in a storybook hockey career … What might be termed ‘The Smythe Story’ in the nature of a Horatio Alger Jr. sports saga.”5 Smythe downplayed the change, after having manoeuvred for it so fervently. “It’s nice, but little will be altered except that as president I will be able to undertake anything that Managing Director Conn wishes to do simply by asking Smythe for the presidential okay.”6
In truth, a great deal had changed. It had been twenty years since he’d put together the purchase of the St. Patricks and fifteen since he’d built Maple Leaf Gardens, but Smythe was finally his own boss. Ed Bickle had been pushed from the job, Smythe ally George McCullagh had been installed as vice-president, and Bill MacBrien had been kicked upstairs as chairman of the board. Smythe was the power, in reality as well as perception, at last.
His victory had been delivered by two men. J.P. Bickell, whose stature gave him clout beyond his official position as a director, had used it on Smythe’s behalf once again. And stockbroker Percy Gardiner had sold him thirty thousand shares at $10 each, enough to exercise control. It was an astonishingly generous act: Gardens shares had risen from 50 cents apiece in the mid 1930s to as high as $100 before splitting four-to-one. At the time of the offer they were around $20, which meant Smythe was getting them at 50 per cent off. Even at that price he lacked the required $300,000, so Gardiner took a down payment and let him retire the rest of the debt over time. Not surprisingly, Smythe expressed his deep admiration and gratitude to Gardiner, “for quietly and calmly believing in me. He and Jack Bickell were the best friends I ever had.”7
On the day his elevation was announced, the Gardens reported a profit of $190,000, an increase of $55,000 over the previous year and by far the best year it had ever enjoyed. Net income had doubled in two years and was now four times what it had been a decade earlier. Close to $1 million had been applied to the original mortgage, and Leafs tickets had become such a sought-after commodity not a single seat would go unsold for the next twenty years.
It was the start of a period many considered the greatest in the club’s history. It was certainly the most successful of Smythe’s career and came closest to producing the type of sports colossus he had hoped to build. From 1947 to 1951, the Leafs would win four Stanley Cups. Although they dominated regular-season play only once during that period, Leaf fans came to take for granted the annual march on the championship and the luxury of knowing that, come April, their heroes were almost certain to find a way to have their names inscribed again on the trophy’s silver bands.
They accomplished it, moreover, with teams that more closely reflected Smythe’s personal hockey ideals than any previously had. The great Leaf teams of the 1930s – of Conacher, Clancy, and Jackson – had flash and pizzazz. They were young and colourful and carefree. They piled up scoring records and personal awards, but just a single Stanley Cup. The club he would begin assembling in the summer of 1946 had none of the dazzle or daring of the earlier teams. Its biggest stars – Syl Apps and Ted Kennedy – were modest, hardworking team players who led through example. No one would mistake them for Rocket Richard or Gordie Howe, but they had the kind of grit and gristle that Smythe prized and were surrounded by a diligent supporting crew of crashers and bangers, pluggers and checkers, who rarely threatened the upper reaches of the scoring charts, but had a way of besting teams boasting bigger and brighter stars. Montreal had its Punch Line – Richard, Lach, and Blake – and in 1947 Detroit assembled the Production Line of Howe, Sid Abel, and Ted Lindsay, but only once over the next five years was either team able to halt Toronto’s annual assault on the Stanley Cup.
Both Apps and Kennedy had the “bloodlines” their boss prized. They were cut from the same mould: honest and upright, with old-fashioned values and unflagging loyalty to the team. Neither touched stimulants of any sort. More than once Smythe would introduce Apps proudly as “our captain, who does not smoke or drink.”8 Kennedy was similarly abstemious, avoiding the get-togethers of younger players where beer or cigarettes were likely to be consumed. It seemed almost fanciful that, later in life when he went into politics, Apps was made minister of corrections. He was put in charge of jails and criminals – a man who simply didn’t break rules found himself responsible for dealing with people who broke them regularly and who couldn’t imagine the sort of clean-cut existence he personified.
Other players looked up to them for their natural leadership qualities; when Apps decided to retire – despite appeals from Smythe – it was taken for granted Kennedy would succeed him as captain. Teeder didn’t have Apps’s finesse. He was not a pretty skater – he seemed to struggle up the ice rather than glide the way skilled skaters did. He led the team in scoring just once, got little attention when it came to picking all-stars, and won the Hart Trophy late in his career thanks mainly to Smythe’s fervent arm-twisting. The league’s chronic refusal to recognize the qualities he saw in Kennedy so annoyed Smythe that he introduced his own trophy, the J.P. Bickell Memorial Award, mainly so he could give it to Kennedy.*
With Apps and Kennedy as the foundation – and the ever-reliable Turk Broda in net – what he needed was some bricks to erect around them. A month or so after his blow-up with Selke in 1946, Smythe retreated to his cottage with Hugh to perform his usual autopsy on the season. Hugh Smythe recalls the ensuing weeks as an extended monologue as his father wrestled with himself over the team’s future. There was no debating that the season had been a failure. The issue was what to do about it. An argument could be made for standing pat. Half a dozen players on the roster had just returned from war service and needed time to get their edge back. Kennedy had been hurt most of the season. The uncertainty in goal had left them deep in a hole well before the season was two months old. Pratt’s suspension had been an unfortunate distraction. All in all, Smythe could have written it off as a sub-par season by an above-par team and satisfied himself with a few tweaks and adjustments.
Hugh listened to his father analyze the situation day after day. “His way of solving problems would be to suggest a solution to himself and then argue with himself and talk himself out of it, and do that over and over and over again.”9
Nonetheless, the results caught him by surprise. Smythe had decided to dismantle the team and rebuild it with youth. Sweeney Schriner and Lorne Carr had retired, along with Bob Davidson, a defensive-minded forward who had filled in as captain while Apps was in the military. Mel Hill and Ernie Dickens were demoted to Pittsburgh, Billy Taylor shipped to Detroit for Harry Watson, and Babe Pratt exiled to Boston. The decision to dump Pratt was probably the most difficult, as Smythe still considered him a top-quality defenceman. But Pratt enjoyed life far too much for the staid Maple Leafs – Hap Day had concluded the only way to control his nocturnal activities was to room with Pratt himself – and the betting controversy the previous season had been the kiss of death as far as Smythe was concerned. It seemed to take something out of Pratt too. He played just part of one season with Boston before finishing out his career in the minors.
In place of the veterans, Smythe installed a package of eager young players that included Watson, Bill Ezinicki, Howie Meeker, Gus Mortson, Jimmy Thomson, Bill Barilko, Sid Smith, and Joe Klukay. Watson and Klukay were the eldest of the group, at twenty-three. Meeker was twenty-two, Smith and Mortson twenty-one, while Barilko and Thomson were just nineteen. His father, according to Hugh, hadn’t talked about any of these moves during his one-man debate.
As he had in 1926, he gathered his rookies from all over Canada. They came mostly from small towns, farms, and northern communities where hockey began with the first freeze and didn’t let up until the last, disappointing thaw. Their fathers were mechanics, farmers, gas jockeys, miners. They came from big families – six or seven kids wasn’t unusual – and their schooling was limited.
Barilko was born in a mining camp near Timmins, the son of Polish immigrants, and never wanted to be anything but a hockey player. He learned his game at the McIntyre Arena, built by J.P. Bickell, who made much of his fortune from the nearby McIntyre mine and felt the miners deserved an arena as grand as Maple Leaf Gardens was to Toronto.10 Barilko was such a poor skater as a kid he was forced by the other kids to play goal, just as Charlie Conacher had been as a boy. But he blossomed into both a skilled skater and devastating bodychecker who hammered opponents with enthusiasm.11
Ezinicki came from a family of six kids born to a Winnipeg mechanic and his wife. While Barilko threw himself at anything that moved, Ezinicki treated bodychecking like a science, setting up his crushing collisions with careful calculation. Together he and Barilko terrorized the league, joined by Gus Mortson and Jimmy Thomson, who became known as the “Gold Dust Twins” and gave the Leafs the four most fearsome hitters of the era, all together on one team.
Thomson was also from Winnipeg and was just nineteen when he made the Leafs after two years with the St. Michael’s Majors and a season in Pittsburgh. Mortson also played at St. Mike’s, as did his friend Ted Lindsay. Mortson and Lindsay arrived at the school together from Kirkland Lake, where a friendly priest had organized a scholarship to the Catholic boys’ school so the two could keep playing hockey after they’d exhausted the best local leagues could offer.12
The son of a railway worker, Mortson would run up 1,380 minutes in penalties in 797 games over twelve years, 300 more minutes than “Terrible Ted” would accumulate over seventeen seasons. Although Mortson and Lindsay were friends off the ice, on skates they gave no quarter. Once, in a game against Detroit, Lindsay was heading into the Toronto end with the puck when Mortson clotheslined him. Lindsay went down, but there was no penalty call, and when a Detroit player was called for retaliation moments later all hell broke loose, with even Broda and Detroit goalie Harry Lumley rolling around at centre ice like two big overstuffed bears. Unable to land a blow, Broda bit Lumley on the cheek.13
In the five years up to 1951, Toronto could claim the most penalized player in the league every season. Twice Mortson led the list, twice Ezinicki, and once Barilko They were as fearsome a group as was ever assembled in the NHL, regularly going up against the biggest and meanest players on the opposing teams. Barilko was once responsible for two opposing players being carted off the ice on stretchers in a single game.14 In a match in New York, Meeker and Mortson got into a punching match with Rangers coach Lynn Patrick in a corridor, which ended with fans and players alike in the brawl.15
Meeker was one of five boys born to Charlie Meeker and his wife, Kitty, a war bride Charlie met while serving in England. Charlie owned a truck and sold soda pop and ice cream around the Kitchener area. Howie, like other boys, played hockey all the time, working his way through teams in Brantford, Kitchener, and Stratford before joining the army and almost losing his life when someone tossed a live grenade between his legs during a training exercise. Not only did he survive the explosion but he worked his way back into such excellent shape he was able to return to hockey after the war and was playing for the Stratford Indians in the senior OHA when the Leafs signed him to a free agent contract in 1946.16
Sid Smith was the city boy in the group, raised in Toronto’s Christie Pits neighbourhood. NHL teams weren’t required to notify players they had placed on their negotiating list, and often didn’t bother, so Smith had no idea the Leafs had their eye on him. He rose from the Oshawa Generals to the Hershey Bears in the AHL, and later joined the Quebec Aces, where he got drunk one night with teammate Punch Imlach, stunk the joint out the next night in a 9–0 loss, and was promptly signed by the Leafs.17 His first two years were divided between Toronto and Pittsburgh. Called up for a couple of games in the playoffs in 1948, he tore his knee ligaments, but returned to the game after Smythe ignored the doctor’s protests and ordered the knee frozen. Smythe got his way, but it cost Smith a summer of rehabilitation and a season in the minors before he got another chance with the Leafs.18
He didn’t protest, of course. The players never protested. They could be benched, traded, released, or sent back to the minors in the blink of an eye, and there was nothing they could do about it. They called their boss “Mr. Smythe” or “the Major” – then and later – and they didn’t argue with him. They could be disciplined for so much as a pleasant comment to an opposing player – that would be “fraternizing” and was a mortal sin. They could be sent down if they caught the flu and had a few bad games. They could be disciplined if overheard making snide remarks or failing to accept the Major’s criticism in the approved manner, which meant keeping their mouths shut and doing what they were told.
Not only did they not complain, many admired Smythe for his passion and will to win. Kennedy considered Smythe a great Canadian. Ezinicki welcomed the intense discipline of the Leafs, which began in training camp and continued right through the season. To him, it was the mark of a team that took the game seriously. Joe Klukay, who joined the Leafs that year and stayed through all four Stanley Cups, was eventually traded away by Smythe, but wrote him an admiring letter a few years afterwards: “I realize now, looking back over the years, that the decisions you made regarding my hockey future were to my advantage and I am convinced now that on … one occasion you were solely responsible for keeping me in the NHL.”19
Looking over his team of rookies, Smythe calculated they were two to three years from being competitive. He guessed wrong. The Leafs lost just one game in their first eleven, put together a six-game win streak in December, pummelled Chicago 11–0 in one game and 12–4 in another, then survived a mid-season slump to finish the regular season in second place, just six points back of Montreal. Despite Hap Day’s defensive focus, they led the league in scoring.
They defeated Detroit handily in the semifinals, advancing to the finals against Montreal, which had won the previous year’s Cup and topped the league in the regular season thanks to the miserly goaltending of Bill Durnan, who allowed thirty-five fewer goals than the next best team. Toronto was blown away 6–0 in the first game, after which someone claimed Durnan had made a slighting remark, wondering what a team as bad as the Leafs was doing in the playoffs. Durnan insisted he never said it, but Smythe didn’t care – it was just the ammunition he needed to build a fire under his team.
He was famed for his locker-room tirades, which consisted of furious harangues designed to send the players to the ice determined to prove him wrong. He’d performed his act any number of times – King Clancy and Dick Irvin both had memories of Smythe blasting players mercilessly before games or between periods – and he pulled it out of his repertoire again as his team prepared for Game Two. Meeker recalled him marching in, only the second time that season he’d made a dressing-room appearance. Hands on his hips, eyes burning, he proceeded to dress them down, one at a time. He started with Apps and Kennedy, the men he admired most, tearing a strip off them for their failure to perform as Toronto Maple Leafs were meant to perform. Then he went around the room subjecting each player in turn to a menu of their failures.
As usual, it worked. While a later generation of players might have been texting protests to their agents, the Leafs took it as an assault on their pride and could barely wait to get out the door.20 They were leading by two goals before the first shift had ended and even a fevered effort by Rocket Richard – he felled two Leafs with sticks to the head, earning himself a one-game suspension and $250 fine – couldn’t save Montreal from a 4–0 loss and critical shift in momentum. Toronto won the next two games at home, lost one in Montreal, and then won the sixth and deciding game at home, with Day sending out five of his youngest players in the final moments to face a team of seasoned Montreal sharpshooters.21 Oddly, there was no Cup to present to the winners. It was still in Montreal, where it had been on hand for the previous game. Smythe had insisted it be left behind for fear that moving it would give the papers an excuse to accuse him of overconfidence and provide a lift to the Habs.22
The victory was especially enjoyable, in a vindictive sort of way, because it pitted the Leafs’ new management against its old, Smythe and Day emerging triumphant over Selke and Irvin. Selke, as he was the first to admit, had learned a great deal by understudying Smythe for so long, and he had put it into immediate practice after taking over the Canadiens. He made dramatic changes to the Forum, transforming it from a dank, dour, depressing old pit into something resembling a hockey arena. The day he walked in to discuss his contract, he related, the first thing he noticed was the smell of urine. He cleaned up the toilets, ripped out the cheap seats that ensured even a full house barely produced a profit, and expanded and upgraded the seating. “You’d hardly know the Forum today,” marvelled one of the Toronto reporters. “Posh box seats done in leather for the nicest people, extra seats hung from the ceiling beams, cheery, polite and efficient ushers; plexiglas back of both goals, no bums biting you in the alleyways …”23 He went on a Smythe-like painting binge, covering up the monotonous brown paint the previous management had slathered on everything. He came up with a novel plan for selling tickets, offering six-game packages that included at least one game against every other team in the league, and, along with Irvin, suggested a plan to introduce a two-referee system that would eventually be adopted … about six decades later. He also managed to re-sign all the major players from the previous year’s Stanley Cup team with minimal drama, demonstrating a capacity for winning over players that would mark his years with the Habs.
Before the season started he was already being hailed for his innovations. “This city is hockey crazy again,” noted a Montreal columnist, adding, “His old Toronto buddies who were prone to discount him have found a foeman worthy of their steel.”24
Selke had long admired Smythe’s capacity for theatrics and had a stab at turning it against the master himself. He started a needling contest before the season even began, accusing his old boss of training his rookies as goons. “Conny Smythe has those young fellows on the Leafs all pepped up to go out and roughhouse,” he complained.25 “They’re banging other players into the boards, holding, and charging after play has stopped. They’re being turned into ‘killers’ on order.” He threatened to film games to produce evidence of the Leafs’ “crude wrestling tactics.”
Smythe wasn’t about to fall for guff like that from his former assistant. He brushed off Selke’s charges as “piffle,”26 but both Selke and Irvin kept at it. When Elmer Lach suffered a fractured skull after a collision with Don Metz near the end of the season, Irvin sought to turn it into a crusade on behalf of the wounded Hab, claiming on the first night of the playoffs that “the boys were playing this one – and the rest of the series – for Elmer Lach.”27
The tactic didn’t work. Toronto papers dismissed it as “malarkey,” and criticized Irvin for running up the score in the first game. “He wasn’t satisfied merely to win – he wanted to win by 20,” Joe Perlove wrote.28 Richard’s stick attacks on Vic Lynn and Bill Ezinicki only succeeded in forcing his team to play the third game without him. Lynn was especially badly wounded and had been carried off the ice “leaving a trail of blood from the scene of the crime.”29
Satisfying as the Cup victory had been, Smythe wasn’t finished with his reconstruction project. Early the next season, Gaye Stewart, one of the team’s best goal scorers, was sitting in his car at Toronto’s old Malton airport, waiting for his wife and their ten-week-old son to arrive from Port Arthur. It was a new car, and Stewart was taking his young family to a new apartment, having finally managed to find one in the tough postwar housing market.
Stewart already had his name on the Stanley Cup twice as a Leaf, plus a Calder Trophy as the league’s best rookie. In their unhappy 1945 season he had led the team, and the league, in goals with thirty-seven, still the last Toronto Maple Leaf to accomplish that feat. He played on a line with Gus Bodnar and Bud Poile, who, like him, were from Fort William and were therefore known as the “Flying Forts,” or, when they were off their game, the “Flying Farts.” Listening to the radio as he killed time at the airport, Stewart learned he’d been traded to Chicago. Smythe, in fact, had traded the entire line, plus two defencemen, for Chicago’s Max Bentley and one other player. Stewart had spent the afternoon getting the new apartment shipshape, and now he had to explain to his wife that she’d be going back to Port Arthur – which she did the next day – while he tried to get his deposit back from the landlady.30
There was some question about the wisdom of trading a thirty-seven-goal scorer, but Smythe pulled out his array of statistics to argue that Stewart’s goals weren’t the right kind. For some time he had been filming games and compiling the kind of records that wouldn’t become commonplace for another generation or more, and he insisted that Stewart scored too many goals against teams that weren’t a threat or in games that weren’t in doubt. Stewart, of course, didn’t argue. He was making $3,500 and the team only paid one fare to Chicago. His family’s fare was his problem.
The trade wasn’t a surprise to everyone. Just the week before, Smythe and Chicago’s Bill Tobin had confirmed they’d been discussing a deal. “I offered Tobin five, not four, players for one of the Bentleys and as I cannot tell the brothers apart I told Hap Day to pick,” Smythe had joked.31 Tobin confirmed Smythe’s offer, but wasn’t sure whether he was serious – at one point the Leafs boss declared he’d trade Tobin a whole team for Max Bentley.
There was no dispute that Bentley was a prize catch. He’d led the league in scoring two years in a row and Tobin had promised him a new Cadillac if he could make it three (sportingly pledging to keep his promise even if Bentley ended up doing it for the Leafs.) Adding him to Apps and Kennedy gave the Leafs a depth no other team could match. Bentley had won the Hart Trophy the previous season, but Toronto was so strong up the middle he was named to centre the third line. Just five-foot-nine and less than 160 pounds, Bentley was from Delisle, Saskatchewan, and was never really at home anywhere else. The Bentleys had thirteen kids, and Max and his equally talented brother Doug were the youngest.
Bentley didn’t look like a star. Even in his official photographs he never looked robust. During a tryout with the Canadiens as a sixteen-year-old he was sent to see a doctor, who told him he was in no condition for a hockey career and should go home if he wanted a long life.32 In Toronto he was plagued by mysterious ailments and sometimes had to be talked into playing. Though well paid, he lived in a room under a stairway in a nearby hotel, which was owned by a Leafs enthusiast who offered its use for free. “It was a sordid existence, it was awful,” said Hugh Smythe. “If you had any tendency toward depression, then this would make it worse.”33 But he was a whirlwind on the ice, and for the next four years Bentley was a reliable offensive force as the Leafs racked up Cup after Cup.
Bentley’s addition cemented the lineup, the core of which remained largely the same over the next four years, other than the addition of Cal Gardner when Apps retired and the emergence of Sid Smith and Tod Sloan as solid offensive threats. It wasn’t an all-star lineup. In the five years the Leafs dominated the league, only Broda and Mortson were ever named to the first all-star team – once each. Broda and Al Rollins each won a Vezina, but the only other individual award was Meeker’s rookie-of-the-year nod in 1947. Only in penalty minutes did the Leafs consistently stand out. The all-star selections in those years were the private domain of Montreal and Detroit, yet it was the Leafs who usually walked away the winners. Twice each they faced Detroit and Montreal in the finals, emerging with the Cup each time. Only once, against Detroit in the semifinals in 1950, did they come up short.
They kept finding different ways to win. In 1947, it had been the Year of the Rookies. In 1948, it was the March of the Champions, as the Leafs placed first in the regular-season standings and lost just one game out of nine as they swept through Boston and Detroit. It was Apps’s last season, and with him, Kennedy, and Bentley all enjoying excellent seasons, 1948 may have been the finest Leafs team ever to take the ice.
The next spring they barely made the playoffs, losing more games than they won, giving up more goals than they scored, and finishing fourth, eighteen points behind first-place Detroit. Fortunately something – fear of Smythe, perhaps – woke them up in the playoffs, and once again they polished off Boston and Detroit in efficient order, winning eight out of nine and sweeping the finals in four straight.
The one season they failed to win, in 1949–50, was in many ways the most eventful of all. Over the summer Smythe had all but bludgeoned the other NHL owners into agreeing to add ten games to the sixty-game schedule, facing down protests that the additional workload would be too much of a strain on players, weakening play and adding to injuries.
He had also faced down a complaint by a Toronto city politician who was upset when he shifted the city’s supply of free tickets from the expensive red seats to the less expensive blues. “If the controller doesn’t appreciate a free blue seat, it’s not only possible, it’s quite probable, he won’t get any free seats at all,” Smythe snapped.34
In January he was declared the most dominant personality in Canadian sports, a title awarded after a poll of sports editors by Canadian Press. It was the first time the editors had been asked to pick a single person who topped the sports world “in any capacity,” and Smythe won handily over Montreal’s Grey Cup–winning quarterback Frankie Filchock and third-place Rocket Richard.
But perhaps best of all, Smythe had captivated the city for a week, and provided its sports editors with the kind of fun they rarely enjoyed, when he declared in November he was fed up with running “a fat man’s team” and gave a handful of players a week to shed some pounds.
It proved to be one of his most successful publicity stunts ever, simultaneously shaking up the team, delighting headline writers, galvanizing fans, and diverting attention from the team’s sorry record. The Gardens sold every seat to every game anyway, but if Smythe could have doubled capacity for that week he would have had little trouble filling them.
The main focus of attention was Turk Broda, the cheerful, easygoing, and chronically chubby goaltender. Broda blithely ignored Smythe’s dislike of alcohol and tobacco. He liked to smoke and drink, sneaking a smoke before the game and drinking too much after. Once during a night out with Max Bentley he got so drunk he fell down some stairs and spent the next week pretending to have the flu to explain away the aches and pains.35 Smythe tolerated his lapses because Broda played nerveless goal, always coming up big when the season was on the line.
In late November, however, the Leafs were floundering around aimlessly, and Smythe set out to shake them from their stupor. “SMYTHE READS THE RIOT ACT,” the paper said. “BRODA BENCHED IN FAVOR OF MAYER; OTHER OVERWEIGHT PLAYERS WARNED.”36 “The fiery [Smythe], in a history-making action, blasted ‘the fat men on the team,’ benched goalie Turk Broda, and issued a conditioning ultimatum to four others,” the story read. “Besides hockey’s fabulous fat man [Broda], Smythe’s ‘reduce and produce’ blast was aimed at Harry Watson, Garth Boesch, Vic Lynn and Sid Smith.”
The story was accompanied by a photo of a furtive-looking Broda at a lunch counter, tucking into a sandwich despite the ultimatum.
He was ordered to lose seven of his 197 pounds and told he wouldn’t play another game until he did. It was a harsh blow: since taking over from George Hainsworth in 1936, Broda had played every game but one, other than during the war years when he was in uniform. Smythe called up a nineteen-year-old from Pittsburgh, Gil Mayer, to face the Red Wings the next night, and acquired Al Rollins, yet another netminder, from the Cleveland Barons.
Broda’s genial nature made him a natural newspaper target: he was more than willing to go along with a gag, even if he was the butt of it. The newspapers didn’t spell it out, but Broda wasn’t considered the brightest of Leafs. He had no more than a grade school education, and when not playing hockey held down menial jobs, filling his summers labouring at Smythe’s sand pit, having bought a house nearby. He often performed poorly in warm-ups and unimportant games, finding it difficult to muster the focus required. Unless the contest meant something he could appear lethargic and uninterested, coming to life when money or a championship was on the line. He was always at his best in the playoffs, no matter how mediocre the season had been. The excitement, Smythe joked, “moves him all the way up to normal.”37
Reporters took full advantage, treating Broda’s humiliation as front page news. The Star interviewed his petite, pretty blonde wife, Betty – or “Mrs. Turk,” as they identified her – on his eating habits and revealed that he wasn’t much of a chowhound to begin with. “He hardly eats a darn thing,” she lamented. Seldom ate breakfast, no desserts, not keen on potatoes. “He likes milk, and I guess we’ll have to cut that off, or get skim.”38
Both papers followed him to the gym, the Star devoting the better part of a page to a gallery of photos showing “the Turkey” touching his toes, riding a bike, getting a massage, sweating it out in a sauna swathed in towels, and stretching the telltale measuring tape around his middle. Mrs. Turk reported he was surviving on a boiled egg and coffee, no milk. Reporters consulted local experts for dietary advice. Reporter Joe Perlove confessed that after due consideration he’d concluded that Turk’s best bet was amputation. The Globe approached a “prominent Toronto nutritionist” who disclosed solemnly that “overweight is caused solely by eating more food than is needed.” Exercise would be futile, he added, as it only increased the appetite.39 Shopsy’s Deli took out an ad with the tagline “For that ‘Old Broda’ look, Eat at Shopsy’s.”
Young Gil Mayer went down to a 2–0 defeat in his single game as fill-in. He played well enough, but got little help as the Leafs directed just eighteen shots at Detroit’s Harry Lumley, who newsmen delighted in noting was a fairly chubby fellow himself.
The next day Broda survived an official weigh-in, and the Star rushed out an afternoon edition with the headline “BRODA GETS DOWN TO 189 POUNDS.” The story was picked up across the country, the ever-cooperative netminder agreeing to pose, wearing only his white boxer underwear, seated cross-legged on a scale. The Star reported that Broda, “proprietor of the most famous fast since Gandhi,” would be back for Saturday’s game.40 “EMACIATED BRODA RETURNS TO NETS AGAINST RANGERS,” joked the Globe.41
Smythe’s stunt was a spectacular success, no matter how you looked at it. The crowd for the single Broda-less game was 14,015, well over the official capacity, for a mid-week game featuring a team playing mediocre hockey with an unknown goalie. Back on the job, Broda unrolled a four-game winning streak, then eased off again before ending the year with a strong finish.
With their vigour renewed, Leafs players fully expected to add another Cup to the trophy case. They worked their way up to third place in the final standings and faced Detroit in the semifinals, confident they could once again spoil the Red Wings’ season for them.
They almost did, and Ted Kennedy remained convinced ever after that they would have succeeded if not for an incident involving him and Gordie Howe that gave the Wings an extra burst of determination.
Labouring up the wing in his usual style in game one, Kennedy spotted Howe barrelling at him with nothing pleasant in mind. According to Kennedy, the referee already had his hand up to call a penalty, whether for charging or boarding would depend on exactly where Kennedy was located when Howe pulverized him. The Leafs captain managed to pull up short, though, and Howe went headfirst into the boards, fracturing his skull and breaking his nose and cheekbone. Howe lay in hospital in critical condition for days, his life and career both in jeopardy. The Leafs won the game, but Wings manager Jack Adams used Howe’s injury just the way Smythe would have, falsely accusing Kennedy of deliberately trying to injure his star.
The next game deteriorated into a three-period brawl that produced a warning from new league president Clarence Campbell to tone things down. Even with the Wings all worked up over the injury, the Leafs almost pulled it off. The series went seven games and Toronto led 3–2 going into the sixth, but lost both that game and the next, surrendering the Cup in a match in which the only goal was scored in overtime.
They made up for the disappointment the next season, the year in which Barilko scored the Cup-winning goal in one of the most storied moments in the team’s history.
In terms of team performance it was a better season all-around. Smythe promoted Day to assistant general manager and lured Joe Primeau into replacing him as coach. The team started strong, and by the new year had twenty wins and just nine losses. Tod Sloan, Sid Smith, Ted Kennedy, and Max Bentley all cracked the league’s top-ten scorers, with Sloan and Smith both notching more than thirty goals. Only Gordie Howe and Rocket Richard scored more.
The Leafs were a close-knit team, the young players getting together regularly for drinks, dinner, and sometimes dancing with their wives and girlfriends. They favoured the Orchard Park Tavern across from the Greenwood racetrack for drinks42 or the Old Mill in Etobicoke for more elegant evenings. After one of their Stanley Cup victories, Howie Meeker threw a legendary party at his apartment that ended with police fetching more cases of beer at dawn when the supply had run out.
Barilko was popular, cheerful, good-looking, and outgoing. He had a passion for clothes that his budget couldn’t keep up with. In 1949, he and his brother had opened a store on the Danforth, the grand opening thick with fellow Maple Leafs. The Smythe family bought their first television set from Barilko Brothers Appliances.43 Smythe liked Barilko, even though he constantly broke Primeau’s demands that he stay in position. To Smythe he had all the flair and excitement of Busher Jackson, without the personal problems.44
He struggled during the early part of the season, though, and Smythe shook up the cozy atmosphere when he sent Ezinicki to Boston in return for Fern Flaman, in a deal that traded one of the league’s fiercest checkers for a player who was, if anything, even more violent. For the next two seasons Flaman joined the coterie of the NHL’s highest-penalized players, which the Leafs had been dominating for years. Smythe jolted the players further when he demoted utility centre Johnny McCormack to the minors for the crime of getting married in mid-season. McCormack and his bride were wed on a Tuesday morning in January; when McCormack showed up for practice the next day, Primeau told him to be on the next train to Pittsburgh.*
Naturally, he didn’t argue. He just phoned his wife at their new apartment and told her to pack. “What could I say but tell John I was going with him?” she said.45†
McCormack claimed he didn’t know there was a team rule against mid-season weddings. Obligingly, the Star’s Milt Dunnell laid out the facts of life in Leafland:
The rules are simple. Aside from what you wear, what you say, what you eat, what you drink, who you’re with, where you’re going, how much you weigh and what you think, the club has little, if any, interest in the hired help, outside working hours. There’s one thing about it: The pay is good, and it’s always on time. There’s more civil liberty in digging a ditch. But most of these guys are in a rut. They still seem to prefer hockey.”46
Barilko, who feared he was headed to the minors with McCormack, picked up his play and Toronto finished with forty-one wins in seventy games. Montreal knocked off first place Detroit in the semifinals, while Toronto defeated Boston. The finals pitted the Leafs against the Canadiens in a series Toronto won four games to one, but which was much tighter than the numbers suggest. Every game went to overtime. In the third period of the fifth game, Montreal was leading by a goal when Toronto pulled Al Rollins from the net for an extra attacker and tied the game with thirty-two seconds left. That set up one final overtime, the one in which Barilko – his awed mother watching from the stands – lifted a backhand over a stumbling Gerry McNeil in the Montreal net at 2:53 of the first sudden death period. The moment – flash-frozen in a famous photo of Barilko in mid-air and McNeil falling backwards – won the Leafs one more Stanley Cup.47
It was, of course, Barilko’s last game. When his plane went down in Ontario’s rugged northern bush country that summer a massive search was organized, but it was eleven years before his body was found, and eleven years before the Leafs won another Stanley Cup.
* Smythe felt Syl Apps’s retirement at age thirty-three cost Kennedy several years off his career. He played twelve full seasons, all with Toronto, but retired at thirty, “worn down” by his responsibilities and the intensity of his work ethic.
* Only two players would ever have their numbers “retired” by the Leafs, as opposed to “honoured” – Ace Bailey and Bill Barilko. Significantly, neither was recognized strictly for their hockey performance but for events Smythe viewed as having a larger significance. Bailey almost gave his life on the ice; Barilko lost his after delivering a Stanley Cup to the team.
† Although he had enormous control over the players’ lives, Smythe didn’t always treat them cavalierly. When he traded Wally Stanowski for Cal Gardner, just weeks after declaring that Stanowski was a fixture with the team, he announced that under the circumstances Stanowski should have the option of rejecting the trade. Stanowski welcomed the opportunity to go to New York, and Smythe let him negotiate his own agreement with the Rangers (Globe and Mail, April 27, 1948).