The eminence conveyed by his selection as the country’s most dominant sportsman seemed to set off a new phase in Smythe’s public persona. The Toronto Maple Leafs were now a legitimate phenomenon: winners of four Stanley Cups in five years, a national passion that kept Canadians glued to their radios every Saturday night, and an overwhelming commercial success that sold out every game and had a lengthening backlog of applicants for its subscribers’ list.
The list of season ticket holders had grown to more than ten thousand, meaning 75 per cent of the seats were gone by opening day. The Gardens was the league’s most profitable rink, though far from the biggest. It was debt-free, and, from 1950, was in a position to begin paying regular dividends to shareholders, of which Smythe was the biggest.
A profile in Life magazine as the Leafs closed out the 1951 season labelled him “Puck’s Bad Boy,” the “boisterous boss of hockey’s Maple Leafs” who overshadowed his players and dominated the league.
For 23 years, without ever putting on a pair of skates, he has been the Toronto Maple Leafs’ star attraction. Certainly no hockey player could begin to compete with him. He is an obstreperous little (5 feet, 7 inches) man whose actions clash violently with his attire. At a hockey game he feels undressed without his spats and pearl grey fedora imported especially from Italy. He wears a toothbrush moustache and sometimes carries a cane. Some critics describe him as ‘a conglomeration of opposites, he is more a dead-end kid dressed up as Little Lord Fauntleroy.1
Other profilers offered similar glimpses of his many contradictions. He could be the prickliest man in hockey, or the most sentimental. “Conn Smythe never forgets an old friend. His gifts to the underprivileged are his personal affair, but there isn’t a day passes by that he doesn’t ‘dig deep’ to help somebody along the road of life,” wrote Bunny Morganson at The Hockey News. “His outstanding charity is the Ontario Society for Crippled Children, which he serves as Honorary Treasurer. We have seen Smythe carry a crippled child into a banquet hall to receive a cheque for the Society, with tears streaming from his eyes.”2
Trent Frayne, in a two-part feature in Maclean’s magazine, dismantled the myth of Smythe as impulsive and impetuous. “Behind everything he does is a meticulous and calculating mind and away from public view, in the confines of his richly, though conservatively, appointed office on the second floor of the Gardens, he becomes as fussily efficient as a bookkeeper.”3
Fans were told of his painstaking collection of player statistics, his charts and films, and his ability to keep a snapshot in his head of every goal, so he could recount later who was where, how the play had developed, and who had made the mistake. His employees feared but respected him. He liked golf, but didn’t like a lot of idle chitchat on the course, and he personally tested the Gardens’ hot dogs, even though he hated hot dogs.4
He also came in for harsh criticism. Saturday Night noted “a duality that no one has explained satisfactorily” in Smythe’s attitude. Smythe “does as much as any other individual in Canada for unfortunate children and handicapped adults,” it said, yet happily signed naive seventeen-year-olds to professional contracts that made them virtual wards of the Leafs, subject to arbitrary discipline or banishment.
It noted disapprovingly Smythe’s pursuit of “monetary gain.” Players earned more than they could outside hockey, but not nearly what they were worth. He pushed around the league with the same ease he bossed his players: “If Conn Smythe doesn’t want to change the rules, it’s a good bet that the rules won’t be changed because while he is but one of six owners in the all-powerful NHL, he is certainly the most influential.”5 Ralph Allen, his one-time battery mate, wrote: “Most of Smythe’s fellow magnates fear him as a competitor and dislike him personally, but in matters of league policy he is almost invariably able to carry their judgment.”6
In general his treatment in the press was admiring but wary, noting that he was the kind of boss who could exile a player for getting married while demanding “loyalty” from those who remained. He was cold-hearted and calculating when it came to hockey, but his approach had produced a team that had missed the playoffs just once in eighteen years and was in the midst of an unprecedented run of Stanley Cups.
His work for the Crippled Children Society, as it was then known, began at the end of the 1946 season. He had promised himself, while lying injured in Europe, to do more to benefit the community, and the opportunity arose when an old friend invited him to serve as treasurer of the charity, figuring he could not only raise money but put its finances on a sounder footing. He did both with the usual Smythe fervour. At his first meeting, surveying the free lunch for out-of-town members, he informed them they could pay for their own food in the future.7 He recruited many of the biggest names in Toronto business circles, organizing fundraising drives that brought in millions of dollars to what had been a fairly sleepy little charity. He posed with many of the children, though he admitted he didn’t like the task. Tough in so many ways, he grew queasy in the presence of people, children or adults, with physical afflictions.
In 1948, with the support of Smythe and the Ontario Athletics Commission, the province introduced a 2 per cent charge on professional sports, with the revenue going to agencies “responsible for the care and training of crippled children.” The fee would be charged against the gross receipts of any professional event. The bill also provided for a three-week vacation at camps to be set up around the province for “every crippled child in Ontario.” An editorial in the Globe and Mail commended Smythe for pushing through the new plan.
“In a very real sense it is a recognition of the energetic leadership which Mr. Conn Smythe, as financial chairman of the Ontario Society for Crippled Children, has given to the acceleration and expansion of the work among handicapped children,” it said. The Globe, of course, was owned by Smythe’s friend George McCullagh, who was also a Gardens director and owned a big block of shares. The premier was Smythe’s other conservative ally, George Drew. And the chairman of the Ontario Athletics Commission happened to be Syl Apps.
Nonetheless, his enthusiasm was authentic and his charitable activities ballooned over the next decade, as he raised large sums of money, and gave away a healthy share of his own, to an expanding list of charities. Thanks to the postwar economic expansion, he had more money than ever to give. When he became president of the Gardens in 1947, his salary was raised to $25,000. His thirty-six thousand Maple Leaf Gardens shares, which grew to about fifty thousand by the decade’s end, drew annual dividends that increased through the 1950s from 50 cents a share to $1.50. In 1947, Smythe had a plan drawn up under which he sold his shares to C. Smythe Ltd. in an arrangement that provided him an annual payment, but cut down on taxes. He also continued to receive an annual salary from C. Smythe. Both his major businesses, the Gardens and C. Smythe, increased markedly in value through the decade as both construction and hockey flourished. In November 1950, he announced the Gardens had made the final payment on all its loans, and “for the first time since its inception, the company is clear of debt.” From then on, any profits it made, it got to keep, and profits were healthy, rising from $165,000 in 1950 to as high as $289,000 in 1956. Smythe had also been building an investment portfolio for years and had a healthy array of stocks and bonds, as did the Gardens.8
In addition to his vow to do good works, his brush with death had convinced him he should enjoy his wealth. The cottage where Patricia died was replaced by a bigger, more comfortable summer home not far away. He began buying up farmland in Caledon, a bucolic rural community in hilly terrain northwest of the city. He had no immediate plans for the land, though it was rich in aggregates and held obvious potential for expansion of his sand and gravel business or replacement of older pits. Through the late 1940s and 1950s he continued to buy, eventually assembling a block of 1,750 acres. It coincided with a renewed interest in horse breeding and racing, which developed through his friendship with Larkin Maloney.
Maloney had continued buying horses when Smythe temporarily shelved his activities during the war, including part ownership of a horse that won the 1955 Queen’s Plate. Smythe began investing in horses purchased by Maloney, then branched out and began buying on his own. Together they soon owned more than a dozen horses, including a number bought from James D. Norris, who had inherited part of his father’s sports empire when “Big Jim” died in 1952. Smythe set up a stable on some of his land in Caledon, where one of the horses he bought from Norris produced a colt Smythe named Caledon Beau. In 1958, Caledon Beau won Smythe a Queen’s Plate of his own. His admiration for horses hadn’t diminished. If anything it grew stronger as he wearied of the increasingly complicated world of hockey. Horses, as any number of Smythe critics were willing to point out, didn’t argue back and didn’t complain at the Olympian standards he set for them.
He loved spending time in the stables and with the working people who ran Woodbine racetrack, though he hated the grand “new” Woodbine built north of Toronto by E.P. Taylor, the emerging giant of Canadian business. He complained frequently – and directly to Taylor – that it had been built to park cars rather than serve horses. He bought a personal box, but complained it was too exposed to wind and cold because Taylor hadn’t put in a roof. Sitting outside on cool days aggravated the pain in his leg. Nonetheless, as his equestrian activities increased he built a small but highly successful stable, a fraction of the size of Taylor’s, but for a time considered one of the best in the country.
Even Smythe’s travel took on a grander air. In 1954, he took Irene on a month-long trip to England, where he revisited wartime haunts and looked up people he had known. Extensive preparations were made by Gardens staff and an array of friends called into service to set up appropriate appointments. They sailed on the Queen Elizabeth and spent two weeks at Claridge’s, among the toniest of London’s tony hotels. Officials at Ontario House, the government office in London, put themselves at his service and arranged a number of business appointments on his behalf. Charlie Conacher, sharing Smythe’s affinity for horses, wrote to Frank More O’Ferrall, a friend at the Anglo-Irish Agency Ltd., which exported thoroughbreds. “We will get the red carpet out and give him the full treatment,” O’Ferrall promised.9
Another friend, John H. Harris, contacted Michael Parker, equerry to the Duke of Edinburgh, angling for a little Royal face time for Smythe, who had met the Duke and then–Princess Elizabeth during their Royal tour in 1951. Smythe remained the ultimate anglophile, praising the “class” and quiet courage of the English, their perseverance, and the beauty of the country. The weather was something else, though, and Smythe’s wounds suffered terribly in the cold and damp. Britain was still a country very much in recovery from the war, with meat rationing in place and limits on many important foodstuffs only recently ended. The Smythes were not fancy eaters, but Harris nonetheless arranged for temporary access to two “very good eating clubs.”10
The expansion of his other activities coincided with a reduction in his workload with the Leafs and a parallel decline in the fortunes of the team. Whether the two were related remains a matter of debate. Many of Smythe’s detractors maintained his micromanagement of the team had long been a hindrance. Both Dick Irvin and Hap Day were superlative coaches and would have been even more successful if Smythe had left them alone, they argued. Howie Meeker, who served as a Leafs player, coach, and manager in the 1950s until an unhappy break-up, insisted Day was the chief reason for the team’s on-ice success. Smythe “had a fair eye for talent, but, compared to Day, what he knew about playing the game of hockey you could write on the head of a pin.”11
Whatever the reason, the glory years ended with Barilko’s final goal. Smythe said he saw it coming, and his expectations were met in full: the team fell to third place in Primeau’s second year and fifth place in his third. Smythe replaced him with King Clancy in 1953 to little effect – they placed fourth, third, and fourth again over the next three years. The slide coincided with the rise of two great dynasties, first Detroit, which won four Cups in five years, then Montreal, which won six in eight years. On February 1, 1955 – his sixtieth birthday – Smythe acknowledged the inevitable and stepped down as general manager, giving the job to Day. In 1956, Clancy was replaced as coach with Meeker, who had retired as a player in 1954 and built a successful coaching record with the Pittsburgh Hornets. In his first year they missed the playoffs, and then, the next year, came the final ignominy: for the first time since 1927, the Leafs placed dead last in the standings.
In two books written years later, Meeker argued that Smythe deliberately let the team deteriorate as a means of easing out Day and paving the way for Stafford to take over the team. As evidence, he pointed to a number of trades that weakened the already aging gang of Cup champions. In 1950, he sent Ezinicki and low-scoring left-winger Vic Lynn to Boston. In 1952, he sent Al Rollins to Chicago, just a year after he’d won the Vezina Trophy, along with Cal Gardner and Gus Mortson, in return for veteran netminder Harry Lumley. He sent Joe Klukay, a steady if unspectacular point-getter, to Boston, where he spent three years before returning to Toronto for two final seasons. “He had to make life so miserable for Hap Day that he would retire,” Meeker said. “Look what Conn Smythe gave away for nothing in return.”12
There’s no question it was the Leafs’ sorriest decade until the lowest depths of Harold Ballard twenty years later. And Smythe was spending less and less time on the job. He and Irene had begun spending winters in Florida, departing at Christmas and returning around the time of the playoffs. He racked up enormous telephone bills trying to manage from afar, but the results were predictable. He seldom travelled with the team anymore and was less of a presence around the Gardens, where once he had seemed to fill the place.
Unable to walk without pain, he moved his theatre of operations to a small section set aside for him in the front-row greens – well up and behind the expensive red and blue seats – where he could take in the play from a better angle. The sportswriters nicknamed it “Berchtesgaden” after Hitler’s mountain lair, and Smythe would sit up there with son Hugh or King Clancy and a changing cast of rookies, injured players, or invited guests, using whomever was available as a runner to speed orders, observations, and other “suggestions” to the coach behind the bench. He was no less intense about the game than he’d ever been. Photographers looking for an angry, red-faced shot of Smythe could readily obtain one by staking out Berchtesgaden and waiting for him to get worked up.
He knew his effectiveness was eroding. He found it harder to freeze a play in his mind and identify the mistakes. When played at its highest level, hockey, like any sport, requires intense focus and constant exposure. Smythe wasn’t giving it that any more. In the public mind he was still the all-powerful boss-of-all-bosses, pronouncing opinions from on high, but players knew him more as a distant figure filtering messages through Primeau, Day, or Clancy, often by phone from Florida.
His influence within the league, in contrast, had never been greater. While Montreal, Toronto, and Detroit took turns winning the Stanley Cup, New York, Boston, and Chicago were annual disasters. The Rangers had never recovered from the devastation the war wreaked on their lineup and blundered from one season to the next with a sense of hopelessness that had almost become second nature. Boston endured a decade of similar horrors, though neither team, arguably, reached the levels of ineptitude of the Black Hawks, where nominal owner Bill Tobin, in Smythe’s words, “wouldn’t pay ten cents to see the Statue of Liberty take a swan dive into New York harbour.”13
Smythe’s regular sparring partners of the pre-war period were gone: Art Ross and Lester Patrick were retired, while Charles Adams, “Big Jim” Norris, and Frank Calder were all dead. The Red Wings were still run by Jack “Jolly Jawn” Adams – whose nickname was a play on the fact he wasn’t jolly at all – but Norris’s death had split up his empire and ignited a family feud that served to diminish the clout of any one member. Only Smythe and Selke were around from the old days and still kicking. As the rancour of their split faded and their interests as hockey men merged, the two men found themselves working more often in concert – though with regular flare-ups – to direct the league’s activities. When Montreal won the 1953 Stanley Cup, Smythe wired his congratulations. Selke responded with a gracious and typically conciliatory letter, though evidence of their estrangement could be found not far from the surface.
As you say it has taken a long time for Dick and me to win the Stanley Cup, and I know that Dick sometimes annoys you with his publicity releases, but it should give cause for gratification to know that when we were alone the morning after our victory he said that he felt that we both owed a lot to you; that we learned a lot from you even when you were most severe in your criticisms and that hockey can ill afford the loss of a fellow like yourself.
This sounds like a mutual admiration society and possibly at the next meeting we will be arguing about some fool thing again, but I can only repeat what I have told you on more than one occasion – that our trips to Saratoga, our trip to the Coast and many other individual instances are still the happiest moments of my life.
Undoubtedly you did better after I left your organization and I’m doing allright here, so everybody should be happy.14
Smythe never would be able to order around Selke again, but he made up for it by dictating to Clarence Campbell. The league president was a former NHL referee, a Rhodes scholar, and a distinguished lawyer with an impressive war record. Campbell joined the army as a private in 1940 and rose to command the 4th Armoured Division. After the war he was named prosecutor of the Canadian War Crimes Commission and led the prosecution of a Nazi leader who had executed Canadian prisoners of war. He was awarded the Order of the British Empire, a sign of British favour Smythe must have envied. Despite championing Campbell to replace Dutton, Smythe often treated him with the same offhandedness to which he’d subjected Selke. Campbell, he said, served the owners well “because he would do what he was told.… Every time I told him what to do and he did it perfectly he was confirming what I had said when I turned down the job [as NHL president] … that I was not good for it, because I would not take orders; and Campbell was the right man, because he would.”15
In 1951, he set off a lengthy squabble with Campbell over ownership of the Black Hawks, which had become even more opaque since Major McLaughlin’s death in 1944. “I do not know who owns the club and I am beginning to think that the lethargic manner in which things are being run in Chicago is part of a plan,” he said.16 “[It] looks as though someone is waiting to step in and buy the club at a bargain.”
The Norris family controlled the club, a fact Smythe was likely well aware of. But he professed ignorance and pestered Campbell to clear up the situation. Campbell insisted there was nothing he could do, thanks to the imprecision of league rules. No owner could control more than one club, but an “owner” could be any company or corporation with an independent identity. So by setting up separate companies for each of his franchises, Norris could disguise his ownership. And until Smythe started squawking, the league had been careful not to ask too many questions.
Campbell explained as much in his response to Smythe’s queries, which produced a series of acerbic communications between the two. Campbell promised a full investigation, which came to the nebulous conclusion that Bill Tobin appeared to be in charge of the club, as far as anyone could tell. The report was raised at a meeting of NHL governors in April, which Smythe seems not to have attended. Art Ross inquired whether Campbell had the report, producing a response Smythe would hardly have sat still for if he’d been there: “Yes, and I may add that the information is of such a character that it would allay a lot of unfavourable comment and snide remarks if it was made known generally, because to me the set-up was so generally satisfactory.”
The governors decided not to make the report widely known. In fact, they decided not to make it known at all, unless someone asked, at which time the answers would be provided verbally. “If they want to know, they can ask you,” Tobin told Campbell.17 Smythe reacted with a letter so bristling in anger that Campbell responded that “if [the letter] has any sinister implications so far as I am concerned I appreciate the warning.”18
Smythe’s concern was bona fide. He was worried once again about the viability of the league, as he had been before the war when doubts about the future of the Canadiens and New York Americans threatened to leave the NHL with just five teams. Although the Gardens had little trouble selling tickets, the situation could easily change if the three clubs at the bottom of the heap fell too far behind the three at the top, and Tobin’s feeble leadership threatened to make that danger a reality. His efforts eventually bore fruit, and the league took two steps to shore up the weaker clubs. An interleague draft was introduced, to ensure that talent-rich teams couldn’t bury NHL-calibre players in their minor-league affiliates while weaker teams like Chicago went wanting. And Smythe proposed a plan under which the league would subsidize the less fortunate, guaranteeing a minimum annual return so teams with poor box-office returns could continue to operate nonetheless.
Even after stepping down as general manager, Smythe retained his titles as president and managing director. There was considerable questioning about just how “retired” he would be, but on the appointed day he duly handed over the reins to Day, who had been holidaying with Conn and Irene in Palm Beach.19
In preparing for the moment, he had written Day a note with some parting advice. “I know when you first take over a job you want to have it all done at once and this is impossible. Build a good foundation … so that the team as a team is a good one, and then try to improve the individuals, without taking away any of the good things which they have.”20
Neither he nor Day may have realized how bleak the next few years would be. But it was not without hope. The “perpetual” player machine Smythe had promised when he returned from the war was in place and working better than either could then appreciate. In 1949, a pair of nineteen-year-olds, Tim Horton and George Armstrong, were called up briefly from Pittsburgh, Armstrong playing two games and Horton one. It would be a couple more years before they would make the team full-time, but in 1953 they were joined by Ron Stewart, a product of the Barrie Flyers and the Toronto Marlboros. Dick Duff was a regular by 1955, at age nineteen. Billy Harris, twenty, played all seventy games in 1955–56. The next season Bob Baun, nineteen, was brought up for twenty games, the beginning of eighteen years in the NHL. And the season after that a much talked-about young left winger, Frank Mahovlich, was called up for his first three games as a Leaf.
Most were products of the team’s two main junior affiliates, the Marlboros, run by Stafford Smythe and Harold Ballard, and the St. Michael’s Majors, run by the Basilian Fathers of St. Michael’s College.
The Marlies had been assembling and shipping ready-made NHLers since Frank Selke reorganized the team in the 1920s. Its list of NHL alumnae includes more than two hundred players, seven of whom made the Hall of Fame. Toronto was by far the greatest benefactor, scooping up juniors from Marlboros squads and wrapping them in Leafs uniforms throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Conacher, Jackson, and Horner all joined the Leafs via Selke’s Marlies. Joe Primeau spent short periods with both St. Michael’s and the Marlboros, as did Busher Jackson’s brother Art, who played twelve years with the Leafs, Americans, and Bruins. Alex Levinsky, Bob Goldham, Bob Davidson, Gaye Stewart, Ron Stewart, and Bill Thoms were all Leafs with the Marlboros stamp on them, followed by a particularly productive 1950s crop that included Armstrong, Carl Brewer, Billy Harris, Bob Baun, Ron Ellis, Bob Nevin, Eric Nesterenko, and Bob Pulford. The coaching staff was equally impressive, from Selke, to Bill Thoms, Turk Broda, Jim Gregory, and George Armstrong.
The Marlies ascendancy worked largely to the credit of Stafford Smythe, who began arguing after the war that the Leafs were under-utilizing the Marlboros in spite of the team’s productiveness. Toronto by then could draw players from across the country almost at will, easily luring away hotshot young phenoms from small towns and farming communities, eager to do just about anything for the privilege of wearing a Maple Leafs uniform. Conn Smythe felt the system, in tandem with farm teams and U.S. affiliates, worked just fine, but Stafford insisted Toronto was rich with players who could be drawn into the Leafs orbit at a younger age. For once, he won an argument with his father and, together with Ballard, began setting up a network of teams that extended the Leafs’ grasp to players as young as nine. Kids would join the Marlboros peewee team and work their way up the chain to the junior A club, where they’d jockey for a shot at making the Leafs. Although he struggled with other demons, Stafford proved to have a first-rate hockey mind. While Ballard would take care of the numbers and run the business end of the operation – showing up to have his picture taken when the team began winning Memorial Cups – it was evident even to people who disliked Stafford that he had a talent for spotting and developing players.
In competing for the eye of Leafs management, Marlboros players were up against a similar pool of talent at St. Michael’s. Like the Marlies, St. Mike’s already had an enviable record of forging NHL talent. According to a history of the school published in 2008, 184 St. Mike’s students have played in the NHL, including fourteen Hall of Famers, an astonishing record for a school that supplied its teams entirely from its own the student body.21
Few people missed the irony of the outspokenly anti-Catholic Smythe working so closely with the Basilian Fathers. The link was based entirely on mutual self-benefit. Smythe got hockey players, while the school got students and money. When the arrangement was finally put on paper in 1954, Smythe promised Father Ted Flanagan, the school’s director of athletics, that the Leafs would pay $10,000 a year, in return for which the priests would keep an eye out for talent. It stipulated that players would be made aware of who was paying their bills and “second to school spirit should be indoctrinated with the Maple Leaf spirit and will sign with us, with your assistance, when requested.”22
St. Mike’s gave the Leafs a unique advantage in recruiting players. It allowed chief scout Bob Davidson to sit down with working-class parents in mining towns and farm communities and offer a first-class education in return for their son’s signature. Few prospects realized it, but the negotiations that took place at kitchen tables across the country were their greatest moment of leverage – once a hot teen prospect signed a C form tying him to a team he became, to all intents, an indentured employee subject to the whims of management. Once signed, it was all but impossible to jump teams, and anyone who tried was likely to be labelled a troublemaker and shunned by the other owners. So the quiet talks and promises that Davidson engaged in with wary parents and their excited sons were critical to everything that came after, and no other team had the ability to throw a decent education into the mix.
Dick Duff was spotted on the rinks around Kirkland Lake and invited to a Leafs prospects’ camp at age fourteen. A year later he got a telegram inviting him to board at St. Mike’s at the team’s expense. Duff’s father was making $1.08 an hour and had thirteen children,23 so there wasn’t much argument over whether to accept. He gave his son $2 – “I don’t know where he got it from,” Duff says – and put him on a train to Toronto at age fifteen. It cost Duff $1.75 of his small fortune to get a cab to the school, where he walked in and told the first priest he bumped into that he was there to play hockey.24
Davidson spent so much time wooing the Mahovlich family in Schumacher, Ontario, that he and Peter Mahovlich, Frank’s father, became friends. Davidson knew he wasn’t the first scout in the Mahovlich kitchen – Detroit, Chicago, New York, and Montreal had all been there before him. Young Frank was such a hot prospect that Rudy Pilous, manager of the popular junior A team in St. Catharines, offered to buy his dad a farm if he’d sign to play there.25 But the Mahovliches were staunch Catholics and Davidson could dangle the prospect of several years at St. Mike’s as part of the bargain. After his initial presentation, Davidson returned for another accompanied by Father Flanagan, who extolled the virtues of the school, its high academic standards, and the promise of Catholic discipline.
The Leafs offered to pay tuition, room and board, and provide spending money. It took months of work, but Davidson finally got Mahovlich’s signature on a junior B form. (Mahovlich got $1,000 to sign and another $1,000 when he later signed a C form. Leafs lawyers advised Smythe the second bonus was illegal, as rules allowed a maximum $100 for a C form. They got around it by giving the money to Mahovlich’s uncle “as scouting expenses.”)26
The St. Mike’s star-making machinery churned out plenty of others – Ted Lindsay, Red Kelly, and Dave Keon among them, though they didn’t all end up in Toronto uniforms. It was a lucrative business for Smythe. He paid the juniors on a sliding scale depending on their talent and negotiating skills – Mahovlich made $80 a week as a junior B player and expected a raise to $130 when he jumped to junior A but instead took a $20 cut when junior payments were slashed.27 But even with a few of the players making substantial amounts, Smythe could fill the Gardens for a junior hockey clash while icing teams that cost him a fraction of the payroll of the Leafs.
His relationship with St. Mike’s demonstrated just another of his many contradictions. He was open with his anti-Catholic rhetoric and had made life temporarily miserable for Stafford and Dorothea over their interfaith marriage. Yet for all his harsh verbiage, many of his closest relationships had been with devout Catholics. Joe Primeau and King Clancy were both firm believers who often attended mass together. There were few, if any, people Smythe liked and admired more than Primeau or Clancy. Selke, despite their other quarrels, insisted Smythe never brought his religion into the mix.28
Now Smythe found himself in a close alliance with the Basilians and discovered he liked and respected them. He never lost his taste for poking fun at the religion, but his experience with St. Mike’s considerably reduced the frequency and ferocity of his assaults. When Father Don Faught, who had managed the school team, left in July 1954, Smythe wrote him a warm letter noting how difficult it was to say goodbye “to someone for whom you have a great deal of respect and confidence,” and that he “even enjoyed being taken by you on several deals.”29 When the school eventually elected to drop the hockey program, feeling it was intruding too much on academics, he sent another letter noting that “in my association with your school through your Sports Directors, and knowing the way you have treated the Protestants who have attended your school, [I] have gained a knowledge of your religion which, at least, has made me respect your whole organization very much.”30
The evidence suggests he was sincere in his appreciation of the professionalism he discovered in the Basilians. His willingness to say so is all the more noteworthy given that it was a St. Michael’s graduate – and one of the best players the school ever produced – who created one of the lowest moments in the lowest year of Smythe’s career.
Ted Lindsay wasn’t aiming specifically at the Toronto Maple Leafs when he announced the formation of an NHL Players’ Association in early 1957. And it was Smythe’s own bitter reaction that helped turn Lindsay’s well-meant foray into a league-wide crisis. But the birth of the Players’ Association happened to coincide with an internal bloodletting at the Gardens that would, in itself, have left Smythe with a battered reputation and some seriously damaged relationships. The simultaneous quarrel with the players turned two bad situations into one unholy mess.