Busher Jackson finally made it into the Hall of Fame in June 1971, almost five years to the day after he died. Selke, still chairman of the selection committee, fumbled awkwardly in making the announcement, knowing it would cause controversy.1
Two days later Smythe quit his position as chairman of the governing committee of the Hall itself, complaining that “standards are going down everywhere today.”2
He would have less and less to do with hockey as his years dwindled toward a close. He wasn’t impressed with the calibre of play, which had suffered with expansion. Just as he’d predicted, there weren’t enough players to go around, especially after the NHL added to the first round of new teams with a second, third, and fourth round. Other than the Montreal Canadiens, there wasn’t a team he considered worth watching.
He became a convenient curmudgeon, someone that writers could go to when they needed a feature with some salty opinions and a few well-aimed insults. Selling the Gardens had been “a lousy deal,” he said, and Ballard was a buccaneer who would storm any boat he thought contained gold. The world was going to hell in a handbasket, filled with fast-buck artists who were in everything for themselves. Bobby Hull was a great player, but a loner and disloyal for turning his back on the NHL for a bigger cheque from the upstart World Hockey Association. He didn’t think “contract-breakers” should be allowed on Team Canada.
He was still angry at Pearson over the flag controversy: “It was one of the worst acts that any man ever did in his life. He gave us a label instead of an emblem and divided the country.”3 In any case, he said, democracy needed to be “revamped.” There were too many politicians and not enough businessmen running things. Everyone was competing to spend money and not enough to make it. “You should get exactly what you worked for. Take care of the maimed and the sick, those people that need help. The rest, as far as I’m concerned, can have soup kitchens if they want them.”4
He’d been on an anti-French tear since the rise of Quebec nationalism and the advent of federal bilingualism programs. At a ceremony to award the Hart Trophy to Bobby Orr in May 1971, he began his address, “Gentlemen and Frenchmen …”
If French was any good as a language, he argued, it wouldn’t need to be protected. “Nobody has a higher respect for Frenchmen than I have, but I will not stand for anyone telling me that I have to listen to something in French or I don’t count.”5 While Montreal had some great hockey teams, “they always had to have some English on the team, [Doug] Harvey and Elmer Lach and this Dryden fella today. Know why that is? Because the English may not be able to rise as high as the French, but they never sink as low, either.”6
He didn’t like René Lévesque, the separatist leader who had been involved in a fatal road accident that killed a homeless man. “I don’t want to live next door to a province that’s got a guy at the head of it who can’t drive his own car.”7 Yet he thought Quebec had produced the best prime ministers, and all of them Liberals – Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Louis St. Laurent, and even Pierre Trudeau, who had failed to join the volunteer army when he had the chance in the 1940s but won Smythe’s respect with his no-nonsense treatment of separatists. “He’s a wily Frenchman and if you get a wily Frenchman there’s nothing wilier. We’re lucky to have him as the head of our government. He’s the best thing that’s happened to Canada for a long time.”8
His relations with Harold Ballard were hard to decipher. He called Ballard an “old friend,” but added, “I wouldn’t give him a job at 10 cents a week.” Ballard was a pirate and a rogue, typical of the money-grubbing attitude of the times, he said, while simultaneously criticizing the newspapers for treating Ballard harshly when he got out of prison.
In 1974, he wrote Ballard a letter suggesting he should be named “president of the year” even though the Leafs had placed fourth in their eight-team division, lost in the quarter finals of the playoffs, and traded the rights to Bernie Parent, the league’s best goalie, to Philadelphia. A year later he supported Ballard as a candidate for the Hall of Fame, attesting, “I know of nobody who has done more legwork for hockey.” By then Ballard was well into his campaign to drive Tommy Smythe from the Gardens. Ballard sent him his first eviction notice three weeks after Stafford’s funeral and a few months later fired him from his job as manager of the Marlboros.9 But Conn – perhaps to protect Tommy – made a determined effort to coexist peacefully with Ballard, and when he needed a wealthy donor to help achieve one of his last great charitable campaigns, construction of the Ontario Community Centre for the Deaf, he went to Ballard and showed him the floor plan. “Here’s a chance for you to do good,” Smythe told him. Ballard “just reached for a cheque.”
Smythe became involved with the deaf after meeting a charismatic Baptist preacher and former athlete named Rev. Bob Rumball. Smythe arranged a meeting, intent on talking Rumball into joining the Crippled Children’s Society and ended up a convert to Rumball’s own campaign to build a combination school, residence, and community centre for the deaf. “I came to think of him as about the closest thing I have ever met to a true apostle,” Smythe said.10
Rumball wanted to buy an estate across the street from the Granite Club, an exclusive haunt for upper-class Torontonians. Smythe, at age eighty-one, threw himself into the effort. The estate could be had for $900,000; transforming it would be another $5 million. Smythe tapped his extensive file of wealthy friends and contacts, approached various foundations, and helped wheedle money out of the provincial government. But Canada’s economy had been hit by the twin forces of inflation and stagnation, and individual donors proved hard to come by. In April 1977, he was stewing over the situation while driving with Margaret Grose, who had been Irene’s night nurse and became Smythe’s nurse and companion a few years after Irene’s death, when he became violently ill. They pulled over to a restaurant, where Grose realized he was suffering a heart attack. She quickly contacted a hospital in nearby Brampton, where he spent most of the next two weeks before being transferred downtown to Wellesley Hospital.
The possibility that the builder of Maple Leaf Gardens might be dying galvanized attention. Cards and letters poured in. He used the attention to plump for the community centre. “We only need $400,000 to meet our goal and we can begin,” he said. “There is a lot more Christianity in this world than people think.… There are more good people than bad, but the bad ones get all the publicity. It’s time the good ones got some attention.”11 It helped, though it would still be two years before ground was broken.
Smythe had been hunting for some time for someone to tell the story of his life. In 1970, he reached a handshake agreement with columnist Dick Beddoes, who shared his enthusiasm for the racetrack. He wanted a book that told “the true story of how a young, poor Canadian kid can make it all the way if he takes advantage of all the good people and all the good teachings of his parents, and the great country we live in.”12
Beddoes conducted a series of interviews and wrote up some notes in the form of individual features. But the project lagged, and in 1972 Smythe suggested they cancel the plan. He came back to it several years later, telling Beddoes, “Kids are desperately looking for somewhere to get strength from, with the critics so openly castigating everything good, like the worthy teachings of Jesus Christ, and the parables.”13
But Beddoes declined and Smythe found an alternative, coming to a more formal agreement with Scott Young, the author and sportswriter who had followed his activities since the 1950s. Young suggested the book should be in the form of an autobiography narrated by Smythe. “A man writing his autobiography is entitled to say whatever he thinks is right, whereas in a biography there is an obligation on the author (for instance, me) to broaden the field of fire, even to make judgments.”14 It was a canny suggestion, enabling Smythe to put both his story and his personality into the pages they produced.
Young threw himself into the project with enthusiasm, noting that “time is of the essence.” Smythe was eighty-five and ailing; the project would require lengthy sessions in which he relived his life for Young’s microphone. Young put other projects on hold and reduced his newspaper workload. His goal was to finish within a year, in time for the fiftieth anniversary of Maple Leaf Gardens in 1981. Smythe would pay him $50,000 plus expenses; all royalties were to go to a personal charitable foundation Smythe had established.
There was less time than either appreciated. Smythe was in near constant pain, his legs aching, his energy slipping away. He weighed less than 130 pounds and railed at the endless supply of pills the doctors insisted he take. Smythe would record his thoughts on tapes and give them to Young, or rise in the night and scribble down episodes from the past. His voice on the tapes was sometimes strong, especially as he rehashed old quarrels or roused himself into indignation at the inequities of the world. He was an old man and he had an old man’s complaints: people didn’t work hard enough, there was too much concern for the lazy, people didn’t appreciate how easy they had it and how hard earlier generations had worked. When he spoke of Irene he could be bombastic – “We didn’t argue. I went ahead. We made a deal, I was the boss and she was the wife” – or meek, almost tearful. “She was a lovely little lady. She gave me all the love she could give.” There was a time, he confessed, when Irene lost interest in their love life and he had looked elsewhere, though as usual he had standards: no married women, no smokers, no drinkers, no prostitutes. Young asked if he wanted that in the book; Smythe said do whatever you want. He left it out.
He was often harsh, dragging up the old quarrels with Selke and denouncing him anew as disloyal. (In his 1962 memoirs, Selke revealed using a lithograph of King George VI to line one of his chicken pens, an offence Smythe would have considered treasonous.) He treated Harold Ballard more charitably than he did Clarence Campbell, who had served his interests patiently for two decades. But he was also honest about himself, acknowledging the difficulties he had created for many of the people closest to him. He emphasized how lucky he had been, and how overwhelmed he was at the extent he had benefited from the help and faith of others. He declared himself a committed theosophist, a conclusion he had come to in the latter part of his life. He believed in “The Man Upstairs,” “as ye sow, so shall ye reap,” and “cast your bread upon the waters.” He told Young at one session: “I guess I’m like everybody else, I’m a good guy if I get my own way. The reason I like to get my own way is that I’ve found I’m right more than the other guy.”15
Young admired Smythe and wrote to the Governor-General nominating him for the Order of Canada. An aide wrote back enthusiastically, noting that others had also put his name forward. But Smythe, unyielding as ever, wrote Trudeau: “I hear I have been nominated for the Order of Canada. I suppose this letter will blow my chances …” and went on to complain about bilingualism. He didn’t get the medal.16
In late August, he returned to Caledon one day and, despite feeling weak, decided to go for a swim. Jessie Watson, still keeping house and caring for him after fifty years, watched from the house as he splashed toward the deep end, then slowly began to sink. One arm stopped moving, then the other. She managed to reach the pool before he drowned, plunged in, and struggled to haul him to the edge, though she was in her seventies herself and he had all the weight of the inert. His eyes fluttered and he seemed to see her, but he had no strength and once they reached the ladder was unable to climb out. She put her head against his backside and pushed, then dragged him to his feet and to a pole, ordering him to hold on while she got help. As she ran for assistance she heard him yell and looked back to see him vomiting violently while simultaneously losing control of his bowels.17
He faded slowly through the fall, spending more and more time in bed. Tommy visited frequently, and one day steeled himself to ask if there were any plans he would like made. “I guess I’m not going to get better this time, am I?” his grandfather responded. They planned his funeral, his pallbearers, and where the memorial service should be held. He felt so good afterwards he asked for champagne.
Young continued to visit and transcribe the results of their talks, hurrying to finish. Sometimes, when he read back what he’d written, Smythe seemed not to hear. On his notes of the sessions, there is a final scribble on a scrap of paper: “Went back in November twice, but he was not well enough to talk, although he listened to last two chapters with enjoyment.”
Smythe died at Baby Point on November 18, 1980, just a week after Remembrance Day.*
* Smythe was buried at Park Lawn Cemetery. Also buried at Park Lawn are Busher Jackson, Lou Marsh, Gordon Sinclair, and Harold Ballard, none of whom he liked very much (www.findagrave.com).