Bench Boss: King Clancy was a Hall-of-Fame NHL defenceman before he took up a whistle as an NHL referee. He’s pictured here in 1953, the year he was hired to coach the Toronto Maple Leafs. He served three middling seasons behind the Toronto bench before he was succeeded by Howie Meeker, whereupon he took a job as assistant GM for the Leafs. Clancy died on a Saturday of this date in 1986, at the age of 84. Meeker, it so happens, was 97 when he died on November 8, 2020, a Sunday.
The Cup Shows Up: The new Cup champions pose on Monday, April 21, 1947. Back row, from left, they are: Howie Meeker, Vic Lynn, Jim Thomson, Garth Boesch, Gus Mortson, Joe Klukay, Bill Barilko. Middle row, left to right: Cliff Keyland (assistant trainer), Bill Ezinicki, Wally Stanowski, Harry Watson, Turk Broda, Bob Goldham, Bud Poile, Gus Bodnar, Tim Daly (trainer). Front, from the left: Gaye Stewart, Ted Kennedy, Conn Smythe (GM), Hap Day (coach), Syl Apps (captain), E.W. Bickle (president). W.A.H MacBrien (vice-president), Nick Metz, Don Metz.
“We want the Cup,” the crowd of 14,546 chanted at Maple Leaf Gardens on a Saturday night of this date in 1947, as was their due: their hometown team had just beaten the Montreal Canadiens by a score of 2-1 to relieve the defending champions of Lord Stanley’s famous trophy in six games. Montreal’s Buddy O’Connor opened the scoring, but the Leafs sealed the deal with goals from Vic Lynn and Ted Kennedy, backed by Turk Broda’s superior goaltending.
Montreal’s Gazette eyed the immediate aftermath: “the big crowd went into a delirium of noisy jubilation and refused to leave the rink.” But their chanting was in vain. The Stanley Cup wasn’t in the city that night, 74 years ago, let alone the building: instead of whooping it up with the Leafs, the Cup spent a lonely Saturday night in Montreal. It was Monday before it arrived in Toronto, just in time to be included in the photograph above, which the Leafs posed for on Monday at noon.
“Canadiens did not, as many thought, leave the Cup behind intentionally,” Jim Vipond clarified in The Globe and Mail. “It was the Toronto club’s idea. Conn Smythe, revealing a superstitious nature, asked NHL prexy [Clarence] Campbell to leave the Cup where it was until it was won.”
There was no parade that year for the champions. After Nat Turofsky got his photos Monday midday, Maple Leaf players and staff gathered in the press room at the Gardens for speeches and celebrations.
Tuesday, the Leafs ate.
First up, the team was rewarded with a turkey lunch by restaurateur Sam Shopsowitz at his famous delicatessen at 295 Spadina Avenue, just north of Dundas Street West.
That same evening the champions were fêted at a supper hosted by Ontario Premier George Drew. Toronto Mayor Robert Saunders was on hand, along with 125 invited guests. The premier was particular in his praise of the Leafs’ sportsmanship. “What you have accomplished is a demonstration of what Canadians really stand for in a sport that is essentially Canadian,” he said. The venue as the old Toronto Normal School, downtown on Gould Street, which had been revamped as a “training and re-establishment centre” for war veterans. Some of them cooked the meal; afterwards (as the Globe reported), “three veterans stepped forward and presented Syl Apps with a cake they had baked. It represented a hockey rink with goal nets at each end and a puck and crossed hockey sticks in the centre.”
In between meals, Leafs left winger Harry Watson went on a mercy mission to Toronto General Hospital. He’d played the previous season for the Detroit Red Wings, and a couple of his former teammates were registered there, Hal Jackson and a 19-year-old rookie by the name of Gordon Howe. Both were having post-season work done on damaged cartilage, so Watson stopped by to deliver some turkey leftovers from Shopsy’s.
Keep Your Eye On The Puck: Harry Lumley guards the Detroit goal at Maple Leaf Gardens on Saturday, March 20, 1948. The home team beat the Red Wings 5-3 on the night to clinch first place in the NHL. The foreground Leaf is Vic Lynn, with Howie Meeker cruising out near the blueline. Detroit’s skaters are, from the left, Red Kelly and Bill Quackenbush in the distance, Ted Lindsay and Gordie Howe closer to the camera. Detroit and Toronto would meet again later in April for Stanley Cup, with the Leafs prevailing in four straight games.
Born in 1926 in Owen Sound, Ontario, on a Thursday of this date, Harry Lumley was — and remains — the youngest goaltender ever to have started an NHL game: he was just 17 when he made his debut in net for the Detroit Red Wings in December of 1943. As he got older, the man they called Apple Cheeks won a Stanley Cup with the Wings (in 1950) along with a Vézina Trophy in ’54. He was a Leaf in Toronto by then; Lumley also skated, in the course his 14-year NHL career, for the New York Rangers, Chicago Black Hawks, and Boston Bruins. Inducted in the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1980, Harry Lumley died in 1998, aged 71.
(Image: Turofsky/Imperial Oil, from A Century of NHL Memories: Rare Photos from the Hockey Hall of Fame, used with permission)
Sorry to hear the news today that, just days after his 97th birthday, Howie Meeker has died. Born in Kitchener, Ontario, in 1923, Meeker broke into the NHL with the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1946. He won the Calder Trophy that season as the league’s top rookie, just three years after he’d been injured in a training accident involving a grenade while he was serving in the Canadian Army. Meeker went on to play eight seasons on the Toronto right wing, winning four Stanley Cups for his efforts. He was elected to Canada’s Parliament in 1951, while he was still skating for the Leafs, and served two years the Progressive Conservative MP representing the southern Ontario riding of Waterloo South.
Meeker’s tenure as coach of the Leafs lasted just a single season, 1956-57, and when the team fell short of the playoffs, Billy Reay replaced him as he took on duties as Toronto’s GM. He started job with a bang, signing 19-year-old Frank Mahovlich to a contract on his very first day in office. The thrill didn’t last: Meeker was dismissed before the pucks dropped to start the new season. He upped skates, next, for Newfoundland: Premier Joey Smallwood wanted him to come and help develop the province’s youth hockey program, so he did that.
As a player, the adjectives that adhered to Meeker were speedyand pugnacious. If you’re of an age to recall his fervent years at the Telestrator on CBC’s Hockey Night In Canada, you might remember that his style as a broadcaster was much the same, and how he shook the nation weekly with his barky sermonizing. His enthusiasm for teaching hockey fundamentals extended to summer skills camps as well as to books.
Howie Meeker’s Hockey Basics (1973) was influential enough to have been the only hockey-minded volume to be included in The Literary Review of Canada’s 2006 listing of Canada’s all-time Most Important Books. The author himself professed some shock that his modest 1973 paperback was mingling in the company of Margaret Atwood, Stephen Leacock, Jacques Cartier, and Lucy Maud Montgomery. “You’re kidding,” Meeker said when he heard the news. “That’s sensational.”
Strategy Sesh: He was born in Kitchener, Ontario, on a Sunday of this date in 1923, so Howie Meeker turns 97 today, which makes him the second-oldest living NHLer, after Steve Wochy, who’ll be 98 next month. Happy returns are in order to Meeker, then, along with (why not) a photo from the middle (though possibly late-ish) 1940s. Meeker (left) shares a coffee and a laugh with Leaf teammates Vic Lynn (middle) and Joe Klukay. Friday is the anniversary of Klukay’s birth, in Sault Ste. Marie, in 1922; he died at the age of 83 in 2006. Both Meeker and Klukay won four Stanley Cups with those mighty Leaf teams of the 1940s, while Lynn was aboard for three of those championships. More immediately, let’s take a moment to study the cups on the table: is it possible that Klukay’s is harbouring a frothy latte? On the menu behind, a Sirloin Steak is a pricey $1.20. Pie and Ice Cream? A very reasonable 20 cents.
North Star: March 25 was a Friday in 1927, the day that iconic Toronto Maple Leafs defenceman Bill Barilko was born in Timmins, Ontario. He played just five NHL seasons before he scored the goal that Gord Downie would come to immortalize in song, beating Montreal goaltender Gerry McNeil in overtime on Saturday, April 21, 1951 to win the Leafs their ninth Stanley Cup. Barilko died later that summer in a plane crash. He was 24. Hoisting the hero in the moments following his heroics are Leafs (left) Cal Gardner and Bill Juzda. To their right, that’s Howie Meeker alongside Ray Timgren, whose stick partly obscures … Jimmy Thomson? Joe Klukay is farthest to the back.
(Image: Michael Burns, from A Century of NHL Memories: Rare Photos from the Hockey Hall of Fame, used with permission)
Born in Winnipeg on a Wednesday of this date in 1927, Jim Thomson was starting his 12thseason working the Toronto Maple Leafs blueline when he was named captain of the team in the fall of 1956. At 30, he was a four-time Stanley Cup-winner by then, and twice he’d been named to the NHL’s Second All-Star Team. Coach Howie Meeker recommended his promotion to the captaincy ahead of the new season, succeeding Sid Smith. “This being a young team,” Meeker wrote to Leafs’ supremo Conn Smythe, “I think more than ever we should have a captain who can set an example on and off the ice for the kids.” Thomson had proved himself to be the Leafs’ best defenceman at training camp, the coach continued. And: “He is the only one of the possible captain candidates working for the honour on and off the ice.”
And so it was that Thomson, pictured here with his wife, June, proudly showing off his C’d sweater, took up as the Leafs’ on-ice leader. The season, unfortunately, didn’t go so well: the team stumbled from the start, and ended up out of the playoffs. By time it was all over, Smythe had accepted responsibility for what he called “a year of failure” — while summarily axing Meeker and long-serving GM Hap Day. As for Thomson, he signed on during the season as secretary for and Leafs’ representative to Ted Lindsay’s fledgling players’ association. When the players went public in February of 1957, Thomson soon found out what his boss thought of the whole business. Benched and stripped of his captaincy, Thomson was soon sold into exile, joining Lindsay and others on the NHL’s island of Broken Toys, a.k.a. the Chicago Black Hawks. “I find it very difficult to imagine,” Smythe railed, “that the captain of my club should find time during the hockey season to influence young hockey players to join an association that has no specific plans to benefit or improve hockey.”
Thomson played a year for the Black Hawks for he hung up his skates in 1958. He died in 1991 at the age of 64.
Sew, Now: Toronto Maple Leafs trainer Tim Daly takes pre-game needle-and-thread to captain Teeder Kennedy’s hockey pants in this 1951 Franklin Arbuckle painting that adorned the cover of Maclean’s magazine in March of that year. A little over a month later, a memorable overtime goal by Bill Barilko dismissed the Montreal Canadiens and won the Leafs the Stanley Cup. Also seen here: right wing Howie Meeker takes a seat while, and next to him (number 20), that’s centre John McCormack. I’d say it’s left winger Sid Smith beside him, watching Daly’s handiwork. (Image: Franklin Arbuckle)
“Guts, goals, and glamour” was the slogan that GM Hap Day Toronto Maple Leafs draped on his team in the mid-1950s and it was one that his coach Howie Meeker gladly took up when he took charge of the team for the 1956-57 campaign. But halfway through the season, with the Leafs cruising closer to the bottom of the NHL standings than the top, another not so melodious g-word was crowding into the phrasing: groins.
Toronto had gone nearly six years without winning a Stanley Cup, and ’56-57 wouldn’t be their year again. That March, not long after the team missed the playoffs, Day resigned his post, and while Meeker hung around for a little longer, Leafs president and managing director Conn Smythe fired him before the spring had turned to summer. Smythe himself was retiring that year after a lively 30 years helming the Leafs, though not before naming a new coach (Billy Reay) and installing a committee of GMs (it included his son Stafford and Harold Ballard, among others) to steer the team into the future.
Whatever the particular lacks and flaws of the ’56-57 Leafs might have been, injuries did play a significant part in their failure to launch. Hap Day was talking about that in a story that appeared on this very January day in 1957 in The Globe and Mail. “I can recall some pretty rough seasons but never one to equal the present campaign,” he told Red Burnett. “I don’t believe we’ve been able to put a full-strength team on the ice since the season started.”
Injured Leafs had by that point missed a total of 124 games — and they still had 27 games to play. Over the entirety of the previous season, they’d lost a total 66 man-games to injuries. (As of today, this year’s Mike Babcock-led edition of the Leafs have lost 50 man-games.)
Among the ’56-57 wounded were defenceman Hugh Bolton, who’d been out 27 games with a broken leg, and forward George Armstrong, 16 games on the shelf with torn ligaments. Bob Pulford (strained back), Gerry James (battered shoulder), Barry Cullen (charley horse + fractured hand), Marc Reaume (gammy foot), and Tod Sloan (shoulder separation) had all been absent.
For all that pain and damage, it was the ubiquity of one particular ailment that seems to have concerned Conn Smythe most. Defencemen Jim Thomson, Tim Horton, and Jim Morrison had all at some point gone down with groin injuries that season, along with forwards Rudy Migay and Ted Kennedy.
As the pair of memos shown here memorialize, Conn Smythe was on the case. Could his team of highly tuned professional athletes be failing to stretch properly before they threw themselves into the fray? And what about these nefarious stops and starts? Were they to blame? Not sure that we’ll ever get to the bottom of this whole uncomfortable business, but it is the case that on this day 62 years ago, Smythe started his investigation with a phone message to GM Day, who duly answered.
Head Leaf honcho Conn Smythe liked the look of the young left winger he was watching at Toronto’s training camp in September of 1949. Eighteen-year-old Danny Lewicki was fast, impossible to hit, a great stickhandler. “He looks to me,” the Leafs’ managing director said, “more like Aurèle Joliat than anybody I’ve ever seen.”
Born in what was then Fort William, Lewicki died in Toronto on Monday. He was 87. His NHL career, which spanned nine seasons, included stints with the Leafs, the New York Rangers, and Chicago’s Black Hawks. There’s memorial news of that here and here, though not all of it entirely accurate. The assertion that Lewicki was the last surviving member of the Toronto team that won the 1951 Stanley Cup will be news to 95-year-old Howie Meeker. (Update, September 26: CBC.ca has amended its story to acknowledge Meeker’s survival.)
Working on a training-camp line, in 1949, with another young junior star, George Armstrong, Lewicki had Smythe thinking of some great old Leafs, too. “They’re the best pair I’ve seen together since Charlie Conacher and Harvey Jackson,” he said.
All of which boded well for the here-and-now Leafs, but for one small catch: Lewicki had no interest in playing for the Leafs. He had, it’s true, signed a contract as a 16-year-old indenturing himself to the team, but as he wrote in his 2006 autobiography, From The Coal Docks To The NHL, Lewicki felt he’d been duped. Rather than report to the Toronto’s Junior-A Marlboros as the Leafs wanted, Lewicki preferred to return to the team in Stratford where he’d played previously. “I don’t like Toronto,” he told reporters. “It’s too big.”
Smythe stood fast: Lewicki could either play in Toronto or he could play nowhere at all. He eventually did join the Marlboros in time to help them win the 1950 Allan Cup.
Graduating to the Leafs the following year, he skated on a line with Joe Klukay and centre Max Bentley. Bentley told him that it was the second-best line he ever played on, next to the so-called Pony Line on which Bentley had previously prospered in Chicago alongside brother Doug and Bill Mosienko. Lewicki finished third in the voting that year for the Calder Trophy for best newcomer, behind Detroit’s Terry Sawchuk and teammate Al Rollins. And then there was, too, of that Stanley Cup the Leafs won in the spring of ’51, beating Montreal in five games. Not a bad way to start an NHL career in the city he’d done his best to shun.
No Go: As this (slightly gleeful?) headline from Winnipeg recalls, Lewicki’s dispute with the Leafs was national news in September of 1949.
Won The Leafs The Cup? Barilko looks to see if he’s scored in this view by Globe and Mail photographer Michael Burns.
Bill Barilko still hadn’t disappeared on April 21, 1951, and there was no mourning for his memory, yet, just as there were no songs about him and (for a few more hours at least) no famous photographs of him falling to ice as he scored the goal that won the Toronto Maple Leafs their seventh Stanley Cup.
They were close-fought, those Finals, that year: “five consecutive sudden-death overtime heart buster” is how The Globe and Mail’s Jim Vipond wrote it. This last one, the Leafs’ Tod Sloan tied the score at twos with 32 seconds remaining in the third period, goaltender Al Rollins on the bench.
Barilko’s goal came at 2.53 of overtime. You can hear Foster Hewitt’s frantic call at CBC’s Digital Archives, here. James Marsh, founding editor of The Canadian Encyclopedia, attended the game as a seven-year-old, deciding early on, before the goal, that Barilko was going to be his favourite player — I’d read about that, if I were you, here.
Referee Bill Chadwick supervises in the 1951-52 Parkhurst card based Turofsky’s famous photo.
As for the songs, I’ll leave you to spin, repeatedly, The Tragically Hip’s “Fifty Mission Cap” at your leisure — but have a listen, too, to “The Bill Barilko Song” by (NDP MP) Charlie Angus and The Grievous Angels. You’ll find it here.
As for the photographs, the best-known is the Turofsky, snapped (most likely by Nat rather than Lou) from behind, with the puck already in the net though Barilko is still falling. “It’s a flawless image, of course,” Andrew Podnieks writes in Portraits of the Game (1997), his fond celebration of the Turofskys’ rich hockey archive, though I have to say I prefer the view from the front, as caught by Globe and Mail photographer Michael Burns from the opposite side. (At first glance, I thought that must be one or other of the Turofskys in the corner, but of course it can’t be, the sightline isn’t right.) I like the handsome hopeful look on Barilko’s face that I’m glad to see in the Burns. In the Turofsky, as Podnieks notes, none of the spectators has realized yet that it’s a goal. They’re still in a time before the Leafs have won.
Montreal goaltender Gerry McNeil knows, though, I think, even though he’s got his eyes closed.
This is another Burns, below, I’m assuming. It shows the moment of Barilko’s arising from the ice, just before he’s mobbed by teammates.
Game Over: A few fans have begun to celebrate. On the ice we see, from the right, referee Bill Chadwick. Behind the net, Habs’ defenceman Tom Johnson (10) tussles at Howie Meeker. Gerry McNeil sits while Bill Barilko arises. Butch Bouchard stands in front, looking lost, while Leaf Harry Watson (4) makes for the goalscorer. In the far corner, Cal Gardner (17) lifts his stick while Maurice Richard mimics Barilko’s heroic moment. Hard to say who the fifth Hab is, far left.
Danny Lewicki was a 19-year-old rookie for the Leafs that year. He recalls the aftermath in his 2006 autobiography, From The Coal Docks to the NHL: A Hockey Life:
The roar of the crowd was deafening. I have never heard, nor probably will ever hear such pandemonium. What an unbelievable series! …
The next hour was a blur. We skated around the ice in glee. We posed for pictures. I hugged so many people and shook so many hands that I was sore. But I felt no pain. We went into the dressing room to change into civies [sic] and the Stanley Cup was carried by Ted Kennedy into the Maple Leafs’ dressing room. They brought the Cup in and then they just whisked it out. I didn’t even get the chance to touch it.
Kevin Shea later collected Gerry McNeil’s unhappy view of things for Barilko: Without A Trace (2004). “It’s been my claim to fame,” the old goalie said before his death in 2004. “I still get a lot of mail from that goal — people asking me to autograph their picture of the Barilko goal.”
It wasn’t a hard shot, he said.
“I just simply missed it. You have a sense on most goals of the puck coming and you get ready, but on this one, I don’t know what happened. I had to look at pictures after. It surprised me — I don’t know how the puck got in. At the time, I didn’t even know who shot it — I never knew who scored most of the goals that were scored against me. But there was Barilko. He was right at the face-off circle.”
“It was just a shocker. It was an awful disappointment.”
Toronto Maple Leafs president Brendan Shanahan delivered his verdict on the year just ended on Sunday, when he fired GM Dave Nonis, coach Peter Horachek, and nearly 20 other members of the team’s hockey staff. Yesterday, winger Joffrey Lupul called it “a wasted season,” while captain Dion Phaneuf said it was “the toughest year” of his career. In a press conference, Shanahan looked to the future. “We need to have a team with more character and one that represents this city the way it deserves,” he said. If you were looking for cruel vituperative fun on an altogether sombre day in and around the Air Canada Centre, there was always Rosie DiManno’s column in The Toronto Star, which I’ll just boil down here to a dozen or so key words and phrases she used to describe the team and its effort:
unlamented, unloved, misery, big whoop, defunct, blighted, arse-over-teakettle, implode, benumbed, laughable, how many times and how many ways can you say: Oh. My. God. irrelevant, plague of inertia, ignominy, moribund, the team’s loutish character, comedia del hockey.
This isn’t the first time the Leafs have missed the playoffs, of course, even if it is among the ugliest cases in recent memory. Counting back to 1917 and the dawn of the franchise, Toronto teams have avoided the playoffs about a third of the time, 32 of 97 seasons, or more than twice as often as they’ve won Stanley Cups. Actually, in fact, Toronto is the playoffs-missingest team in the history of the NHL: no team has fallen short more than they have — though the New York Rangers are a close second, with 31 futile campaigns to their credit.
With that in mind, before Shanahan’s future takes hold, there’s just time to review what lies behind, in the past, in the Leafs’ forlorn history of not being good enough.
In 1957, Leafs’ majordomo Conn Smythe took sole responsibility for his team’s — I don’t know what you want to call it, demise? downfall? collapse? Anyway, Toronto missed the playoffs that year for the first time in four years, and just the fourth in 27 seasons. “A year of failure,” Smythe called it at a “flamboyant” press conference he felt the need to hold in New York, where the NHL governors were meeting while the Leafs played out their season.
They still had a couple of games left, but Smythe wanted to get a headstart on the post-season turmoil. He’d already left his captain at home in Toronto, defenceman Jim Thomson, because treachery: he’d had the gall to be trying to help organize a players’ association.
“Next year,” Smythe thundered in New York, “our players will have to understand that they owe 100 per cent loyalty to the team.”
He didn’t fire his rookie coach that day, Howie Meeker, nor the GM, Hap Day, though many of the newspapermen had come expecting one or both to be sacrificed.
Smythe was willing to say that just maybe the Leafs would have to change the way they played. “We have a Spartan system,” he mused, “and we may be out of date. We prefer the body … we have stressed the defensive and not the offensive … Our system may be open to question.”
The very first year the Leafs were Leafs, they missed the playoffs. That was 1926-27, the year Conn Smythe took control of the team with a group of investors and in mid-season exchanged an old name (St. Patricks) and colour (green) for news. The team had three coaches that year and ended up bottom of the Canadian Division. They played their final game at home, hosting Montreal. Only a small crowd showed up, most of whom had come to see Howie Morenz and the Canadiens. But the Leafs played as if life depended on it, The Daily Star said, and ended up winning by a score of 2-1, with Bill Carson playing a prominent role along with, on the Leaf defence, Hap Day.
So that’s a plus.
In 1930, the club wanted to send the players off to their summers in style once the games were over, with a banquet, but it was hard to organize. Charlie Conacher, Red Horner, Ace Bailey, and Busher Jackson were off in Montreal, watching the Maroons and Bruins in their playoff series as guests of a “Toronto hockey enthusiast,” while back in Toronto, the rest of the team was packing up for home. I don’t know whether they ever got their meal, but the Leafs returned to the playoffs the following year. The year after that, they won the Stanley Cup.
Just to be keeping it positive.
It was 14 years before they ended their season early again and while there’s no good reason, really, to be ranking the years of disappointment one above another, dropping out the year after you’ve won a Stanley Cup would have to smart, wouldn’t? 1946 Toronto did that with Hap Day now presiding as coach. (It happened again, though not until 1968.)
If only, wrote Jim Coleman in The Globe and Mail in ’46, the Leafs had a goaltender like Durnan, and defencemen of Reardon’s and Bouchard’s quality, maybe a front line resembling the likes of Lach, Blake, and Richard — well, then they’d be the Canadiens, of course, who did indeed end up winning that spring.
For solace, at least, the Leafs triumphed in the last two games they played that season, whupping Detroit 7-3 and 11-7. And that had to have felt pretty good.
Still, it was time to clean out the old, sweep in the new. It was a particularly poignant day, once the whupping was over, for a couple of long-serving Leafs who’d scored a bunch of goals over the years. Sweeney Schriner and Lorne Carr were retiring — though they did mention as they prepared to head home to Calgary that they’d be happy to listen to any other NHL teams who might be willing to make them an offer. (None were.)
As the spring playoffs went ahead without his team, Conn Smythe was feeling — surprisingly? — peppy. If nothing else, he noted for anyone who wanted to hear, the Leafs had rights to and/or options on a veritable mass of hockey talent for the year coming up, 82 players.
“We’re definitely,” he advised, “on the upswing.”
True enough: the Leafs did take home four of the next five Stanley Cups.
I’m not going to trudge through every season the team failed — where’s the fun in that? But back to 1957 for a minute. It is, if nothing else, a bit of a watershed. Teeder Kennedy, 31, retired that year for a second and final time, having returned to the ice midway through the year before deciding that it was time to make way for the next generation. Former Leafs captain Sid Smith, also 31, decided he was quitting, too, until Smythe talked him into returning for one more year. Continue reading
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