Syl Apps
fast times at maple leaf gardens
From all over the (seven-team) NHL they came on a Friday night in January of 1942, joining together in Toronto for the benefit of a late, beloved local sportsman, raising money in a good cause and racing the rink in a show of speedy skating.
A crowd of 13,563 fans jammed Maple Leaf Gardens for the Robert (Moose) Ecclestone Memorial Night on January 30 of that wartime winter, raising some $11,000 (something like $200,000 in 2024 terms) to help the family of a popular former manager of senior hockey teams who’d died at 33 in an automobile accident in 1941.
The evening festivities featured a 20-minute exhibition game in which a collection of former NHL stars took on the Maple Leafs. The all-stars included former New York Rangers’ goaltender Dave Kerr along with former Leafs Red Horner, Hap Day (now the team’s coach), and King Clancy (who, in retirement, had taken up as an NHL referee). They were bolstered by four members of Art Ross’s Boston Bruins, in town to play the Leafs the following night: Bruins’ captain Dit Clapper, Jack Crawford, Busher Jackson and his brother Art Jackson had all been friends of the Moose.
The Leafs ran up a quick 3-0 lead on goals from Gordie Drillon (a pair) and Sweeney Schriner before 36-year-old Joe Primeau replied for the oldsters, set up by his old Leaf linemate Busher Jackson. The game ended in a 3-3 tie following two more goals from 44-year-old George Hay, a former NHL left winger with Chicago and Detroit and future Hall-of-Famer who was by then working a new job with the RCAF as a pilot officer.
Primeau was deemed the player of the game: he got a gold wristwatch for his efforts.
King Clancy, 39, was a casualty, suffering cut ankle tendons in a collision with Leaf defenceman Bob Goldham. He would recover, but not for a while, and not in time to referee the Leafs-Bruins game the next night, as scheduled. Norm Lamport had to sub in for Clancy in that game, which saw Milt Schmidt score in overtime to give Boston the 3-2 win.
As for the racing, each NHL team sent a speedy representative to compete in Toronto to determine who could get around the MLG ice fastest with a puck on his stick. The Montreal Canadiens had gone through a couple of round of sprints to pick their speedster. In the first, both Toe Blake and Cliff Goupille completed their turns of the Forum in 16 2/5 seconds. When they tried again a few days later, it was their biggest defenceman, Jack Portland (6’2” and 185 lbs.) who dashed to the win in 15 2/5 seconds.
In Toronto, each player took two whirls, with a flying start. They wore their NHL uniforms but not all of their regular padding. Another RCAF flyer/future Hall-of-Famer took care of the timing, Squadron Leader Harry (Punch) Broadbent.
Toronto’s captain Syl Apps and New York’s Lynn Patrick clocked the best times once everybody had taken a turn, with each stopping the watch at 14 4/5 seconds. In a skate-off, Patrick slowed to 15 seconds while Apps matched his earlier time for the overall victory, much to the delight of the Leaf crowd.
Speediest of the also-rans were Flash Hollett (Boston), and Sid Abel (Detroit), both of whose best times were 15 seconds. Jack Portland and Max Bentley (Chicago) both went around in 15 1/5 seconds, while Tommy Anderson of the Brooklyn Americans came in at 15 2/5.
This night of showy racing is sometimes cited as the NHL’s original skills competition, but in fact something similar had been tried before, across several seasons in the late 1920s, when Montreal’s Howie Morenz and Ottawa’s Hec Kilrea were the pick of the rink.
contriving five
The Toronto Maple Leafs made history tonight in their 6-3 win over the Sabres in Buffalo, even if they did let their guard drop in the third period. Milestone #1: for the first time in the club’s 106-year history, three players registered three points apiece in the first period of a game, as new Leaf Ryan O’Reilly (2 goals + 1 assist), John Tavares (1+2), and Mitch Marner (0-3) went to town. O’Reilly completed his hattrick in the third period with a goal into an empty net, while Tavares added a second-period assist to his total.
Marner, meanwhile, collected five assists in all, the first time he’s done that in his sterling seven-year career as a Leaf.
Prior to that, the last Leaf to helped himself to five assists was Doug Gilmour, 26 years ago, against the Calgary Flames on January 22, 1997. Gilmour had another six-assist game against the Minnesota North Stars in February of 1993, a feat that Babe Pratt pulled off, too, against the Boston Bruins in January of 1944.
Other Leafs to have collected five assists in a game are Börje Salming (vs. Minnesota in December of 177); Babe Pratt, again (vs. Montreal Canadiens in December of 1942); and Pep Kelly (vs. Canadiens in March of 1940).
The first to do it was Syl Apps, on January 30, 1937, on a night when the Leafs flummoxed the Montreal Maroons at Maple Leaf Gardens by a score of 7-4.
Apps, 22, would end up winning the Calder Trophy that season as the NHL’s top rookie. A centreman, he had a pair of formidable wingers in Gordie Drillon (on the right) and Busher Jackson (playing left). Drillon and Jackson scored three apiece on the night, with Art Jackson, Busher’s younger brother, finishing off the scoring. Apps assisted on all three of Drillon’s goals and along with Busher Jackson’s second and third.
together forever
dave dryden, 1941—2022
Very sorry to be seeing the news that Dave Dryden died this past Tuesday at the age of 81. He was a goaltender, because that’s what the boys in that family did: his younger brother, of course, Hall-of-Famer Ken, followed him into puckstopping. Born in Hamilton in 1941, Dave played 205 games in the NHL, working the nets in his time for the New York Rangers, Chicago Black Hawks, Buffalo Sabres, and Edmonton Oilers. He played 260 WHA games, too, starting with the Chicago Cougars before joining the Oilers; in 1979, he won both the Ben Hatskin Trophy as the WHA’s top goaltender and the Gordie How Trophy as league MVP.
“I don’t know where we went wrong,” Murray Dryden wrote, wryly, in a 1972 account of his hockey-playing sons, Playing The Shots At Both Ends. “The two boys both graduated from university, but they ended up as goaltenders.”
Murray himself never played hockey, though he could boast some NHL pedigree (and did) insofar as he counted former Leafs Syl Apps and Andy Blair as well as New York Rangers’ ironman Murray Murdoch as cousins.
The family moved from Hamilton to Islington, a suburb of Toronto, in 1949. It was there that young Dave found his future, his father recalled:
One Saturday morning, when he was ten years old, we went to a lumber yard and bought some two-by-fours. Then we got some chicken wire at a hardware store and brought it home, and made a hockey net. It was the first and last thing I ever constructed in my life. The total cost was $6.60.
We set it up in the driveway in front of the garage door and the boys peppered a tennis ball at it for hours on end. And from that moment there didn’t seem much doubt that Dave was going to play hockey and he was going to be a goaltender.
When the two Drydens famously skated out on Forum ice in Montreal on March 20, 1971, it was the first time in NHL history that brothers had faced one another as goaltenders. Ken’s Canadiens prevailed that night over Dave’s Sabres by a score of 5-2.
When the two met again at the Forum the following season, the Canadiens fired 54 shots at the Buffalo net on their way to a 9-3 win. Writing in the Montreal Star, Red Fisher nominated Dave Dryden as “a candidate for the first Purple Heart of the 1971-72 season. Never has one man stopped so much for a team which deserved less. Dryden, who shook hands at game’s end with his only friend in the rink — his brother, Ken — was brilliant on many, many occasions.”
All told, the brothers met eight times in the NHL, with Ken’s Canadiens prevailing on five occasions. Dave’s only win came in December 10, 1972, when the Sabres beat Montreal 4-2 at the Forum. Two other games ended in ties.
The photograph here dates to another brotherly meeting, this one on April 4, 1973, as the Sabres opened their first-round series of the Stanley Cup playoffs against Canadiens at the Forum. Montreal won that one by a score of 2-1, with Ken taking honours as the game’s first star, Dave as the second. The brothers faced off again the following night, with Montreal winning that one 7-3. That was all the goaltending Dave Dryden did that year, with Roger Crozier taking over the Buffalo net as Montreal went on to take the series in six games.
adventures in leafland
prize guys
collateral damage: a faceful of rocket richard’s stick, and gloves, and other adventures with an nhl whistle
The Toronto Maple Leafs won the game, but it was this photograph of stickstruck referee George Hayes that ended up making the front page of the Globe and Mail on the morning after, 75 years ago this week.
Welcome to life as an NHL official in the late 1940s. Well, the turbulent times of Hayes, anyway, whose start in the league was auspicious for all the wrong reasons, and whose temperament, — and/or lifestyle — and/or suspicion of doctors — didn’t seem to promise much in the way of a long career.
And yet, and yet: in the course of a 19-year career, Hayes would become the first NHL linesman to work 1,000 games. All told, he skated in 1,549 NHL games, regular-season, playoff, and all-star.
The scene above? On Wednesday, January 15, 1947, just months into that tenure, Hayes was working the whistle in Toronto as the Leafs entertained the Montreal Canadiens. Syl Apps and Gaye Stewart got the goals Toronto needed, but (said the Globe’s Jim Vipond) goaltender Turk Broda was “the main factor” in Toronto’s 2-1 win. It cemented the Leafs’ hold on first overall in the NHL, with Montreal standing second.
Here’s Vipond on the mishap depicted here, which Hayes suffered in third period:
Five stitches were necessary to close the gash which split open his left eyebrow. He returned to finish his job after being patched up in the Gardens hospital. Hayes was struck by Maurice (The Rocket) Richard’s stick which accidentally flew out of the Montreal player’s hands. A fraction of an inch lower and the referee might have lost an eye.
Fans at Maple Leaf Gardens booed the very notion of the 32-year-old referee as it was announced that he’d been hurt. For Vipond, that was a “new low for sportsmanship” in Toronto sporting annals. “And the mild clapping when he returned stitched up only partly atoned for the misdemeanor.”
Born in 1914 in Montreal, Hayes grew up in Ingersoll, Ontario. “I could skate before I could walk,” he told a newspaper reporter in 1975. He learned his officiating chops in the OHA and AHL. In 1946, he was considered one of the top amateur referees in Canada. He was, no question, of the busiest: through the 1945-46 season, he officiated 105 games, including the Memorial Cup final, travelling some 32,000 kilometres that year as he attended to his duties.
It was interim NHL President Red Dutton who signed him to a big-league contract in April of ’46. The salary was $2,000 a year, with a bonus of $25 paid for each game he refereed.
By the time Hayes started his new job that fall, former NHL referee Clarence Campbell had taken the helm of the NHL. The six-team league, which played a 60-game schedule, employed just four referees that year: Hayes joined King Clancy, Bill Chadwick, and Georges Gravel on the whistle-blowing staff, who were supported by a dozen or so linesmen.
It was as a linesman that Campbell first eased Hayes into his new job, through October and November of ’46. He got his first assignment as a referee in Boston, where on a Wednesday night, November 27, he adjudicated a 5-2 Bruins’ win over the New York Rangers. He seems to have done just fine, which is to say he managed to stay out of the papers. Let the record show that the very first infraction he whistled was committed by Bruins’ centre Milt Schmidt, a cross-check.
It was one of only two penalties Hayes called on the night, which presumably pleased Campbell who, to start the season and his regime, had declared that he’d told his referees to err on the side of silence. “There’ll be a full 60 minutes of action,” he promised. “I’ve instructed all officials to keep the game moving and to lay off the whistle unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
The first blood Hayes spilled in his NHL career would seem to have been on New Year’s day of 1947, when he was reffing Leafs and Red Wings in Toronto. “Gorgeous George essayed to wrestle [Leaf] Bud Poile and [Wing] Pete Horeck — both at the same time — and finished up counting his teeth carefully,” Jim Coleman wrote in the Globe and Mail. Actually, he got a stick in the nose in the melee and the game was delayed while he went in search of patchwork.
The encounter with Richard’s stick came next, which had Coleman calling him “a scarred hireling.” Following in quickish succession was another game featuring Montreal, this one in Detroit, in which Canadiens’ Ken Mosdell was so irked by a penalty that Hayes had assessed him that the centreman (as the Gazette described it) skated hard against Hayes’ leg and had him stumbling” Hayes stayed up; Mosdell got a 10-minute misconduct for his efforts.
Around this same time, it was reported that Campbell had taken the league’s newest referee aside for a chat in the wake of criticism (notably from the Detroit Red Wings) that Hayes was letting too much go in the games he was overseeing.
If so, Hayes seems to have got the message: at the end of the next game he reffed, a torrid one between Toronto and Chicago, he announced that he was augmenting the penalties he’d assessed with $25 fines to four players who’d been brawling. (His accounting, as it turned out, was slightly off: one of those punished was Leaf left winger Nick Metz, though it was his teammate and younger brother, right winger Don Metz, who’d been in the melee.)
George Hayes’ rookie season didn’t end quietly. That February, in another fractious game between Toronto and Montreal, he gave the notoriously peaceable Leaf captain Syl Apps a 10-minute misconduct. Here’s the Globe and Mail’s Al Nickleson describing what happened:
Apps, who had only one minor penalty up to Sunday, received his misconduct after a shoving and high-sticking bee in the Canadien end. Not on the ice at the time the fracas began, Apps said that as team captain, he skated out to talk to the referee after the whistle had blown. Hayes, he said, told him the penalty was for having too many men on the ice. No penalties were given participants in the fracas.
According to Jim Coleman, as Apps skated to the penalty box, Montreal’s designated rankler Murph Chamberlain followed along to apply his needle: “There goes the Byng trophy, Syl, old boy.”
Maybe so, maybe not: what’s true is that when the post-season votes were tallied that year, Apps was second to Boston winger Bobby Bauer. Hayes’ iffy misconduct was, by then, missing from Apps’ charge-sheet: upon review, Clarence Campbell deemed that Hayes had erred and so erased the penalty from the league’s records. That was an NHL first at the time and, as far as I know, it hasn’t happened again.
March of 1947 had its own trials for Hayes. After a playoff game between Montreal and Boston, Canadiens’ GM Frank Selke declared his officiating “the worst I’ve seen in my life.”
Rocket Richard again figured in the narrative, though this time he was the one who was cut, in a clash at the boards with Boston’s Ken Smith. The former felt the latter deserved a major, but Hayes called a minor, and when Richard slapped his stick on the ice in disgust, Hayes drew one his 10-minute misconducts from his quiver. Asked about Hayes after the game, Selke said, “Clarence Campbell shouldn’t have sent out a child to do a man’s job.”
Campbell came out in defence of Hayes on that occasion: he had “handled the game quite competently.” But the following season, Hayes was back working as an NHL linesman, mostly, his reffing assignments much reduced. Not that he was, on the lines, protected from further harm: in the first weeks of the 1947-48 season, he was either pushed or punched by Montreal defenceman Butch Bouchard, who was duly fined $50.
In 1954, Hayes got to rekindle his relationship with Rocket Richard. This was late December, just three months before Richard punched another linesman, Cliff Thompson, in the face on the way to a match penalty and the suspension that exploded in an eponymous riot. It was Leafs and Canadiens again, in Toronto, and Richard was sparring with Leaf centre Bob Bailey who, as the Rocket later told it, gouged at his eyes. Here’s Richard’s account of what happened next, from his 1971 Stan-Fischler-assisted memoir:
When I got up I was madder’n hell. But I couldn’t see very well. George Hayes, the linesman, was trying told hold me off, and that got me even angrier, because all I wanted to do was get back at Bailey. Hayes didn’t mean any harm to me but I was furious over anybody trying to hold me so I went after Hayes. I didn’t hit him with my fist; just my gloves with a sort of “get away, man, you’re bothering me” kind of push. I just didn’t want to see anybody around me. But Hayes was big and strong and he managed to keep me away. I got fined good for that one and, even worse, I didn’t catch up with Bailey.
“Molesting an official” was the charge entered by Clarence Campbell in fining Richard a total of $250 for that incident.
Hayes was an imposing figure on the ice in his day, 6’3’’, 200+ pounds. “Ox-like” was a description invoked at the time of his death, in 1987. “He used to smell trouble,” NHL referee Art Skov said then. “He’d step between players. He knew how to talk to guys like the Rocket and calm them down. He saved me and a lot of other referees a lot of trouble.”
Skov, who started as a linesman in the later 1950s, remembered Hayes telling him and his fledgling colleagues never to touch Richard, no matter what. “Talk to him, talk about anything,” Skov recalled Hayes saying, “the weather, the news, anything, but never handle him. When the Rocket was mad, he was mad. He might do anything.”
Obituaries would, eventually, cite Hayes’ individualism, hot temper, his stubbornness, love of argument, his drinking.
There was the story of his days as a talented amateur baseball player playing for the Tillsonburg Pandrieds in southern Ontario. Those came to an abrupt halt in 1940 when he took exception to the effrontery of an Aylmer second baseman. “I hauled off and broke his nose,” Hayes later recalled. In the ruckus that ensued, Hayes picked up an umpire and (as he told it) threw him over a fence.
Lionel Conacher was chairman of the Ontario Athletic Commission at the time, and it was the former NHLer who banned Hayes from playing any sports. By the time he was re-instated, he’d taken up as a hockey official.
The episode, Hayes said, taught him “tolerance for the player’s point of view.”
“I wanted to treat them the same as I’d like to be treated.”
Whisky (Canadian Club) and beer (Molson’s) were his drinks. There was the story that when Hayes started working the lines in the NHL, Campbell and referee-in-chief Carl Voss thought that putting him under King Clancy’s wing might regulate his intake. “Campbell knew King didn’t drink,” Hayes had once recalled,” and I did. But he didn’t know that King would sit up with me until five in the morning and drink ginger ale.”
“Hayes makes no secret of his drinking,” a 1965 profile reported, adding Hayes’ own disclaimer. “Sure, I took drinks after a game,” he said. “Who doesn’t? The players do, the officials do. This is a tough racket. But I’ve never taken a drink before a game. I’ve never been in a bar before a game.”
Hayes was fined, apparently, for having a friendly post-game drink with a couple Chicago Black Hawks, Pierre Pilote and Frank Sullivan: $50.
He got into trouble in 1961 for his travel habits: Campbell suspended him for two weeks for going coach on trains to games instead of riding first class while still charging the NHL for the more expensive ticket. At the time, Hayes insisted it wasn’t about the money. “I just can’t sleep in a sleeper, but I can sleep in a day coach.”
That may have been so; he also later said that all the officials were doing it. “the league only allowed us $10 a day and that was supposed to pay for the hotel, meals, taxis, and our laundry. We went in the hole every day. That’s why I rode day coaches — to make up the losses.”
“It would make you $20 or $30 per trip.”
Campbell said that NHL officials had no choice in the matter: they needed a good night’s sleep before a game. “We want officials who are fit and in proper condition to work,” he said.
In 1963, Carl Voss docked Hayes $50 for taking the ice unshaven for an afternoon game.
If it doesn’t sound like a sustainable relationship that Hayes and his employers had, well, no, it wasn’t. It came to its professional end in 1965 when Campbell required all NHL officials to undergo an eye test and Hayes refused.
“Hell,” he protested, “I’ve tested my eyes for years in bars reading the labels on whisky bottles. I can still do it, so who needs an eye test? A guy is an inch or two offside and I can call it from 85 feet away. There’s nothing wrong with my eyesight and there never has been.”
“We all took the test, except George,” Art Skov said in 1987, “and nobody could talk him into it. The part of it is, the guy doing the test was a war buddy of referee Eddie Powers and, even if you were blind as a bat, he was going to give you a good report.”
Campbell wasn’t backing down, either. Again, Hayes was suspended, though this time there was no going back. He never worked another NHL game.
“My name was mud,” he said. “They were going to get me one way or another.”
Nineteen years he’d worked the NHL ice. Towards the end, the job that had started at a base salary of $2,000 was paying him $4,000 a year for working 80 games. Linesmen were by then getting $50 for any additional games they toiled at, $100 for a playoff game. For 1963-64, Hayes made about $6,300 all in.
In his exile, Hayes returned to the family farm in Beachville, in the Ingersoll area. He refereed benefit and oldtimers’ games. He became a sports columnist for the Sentinel-Review in nearby Woodstock, Ontario, weighing in regularly to barrack Voss and Campbell. A 1967 profile said that he walked ten miles a day while noting that it was five miles from his gate to the Ingersoll Inn, his favourite pub, and that he didn’t drive.
He was bitter but not surprised at being overlooked year after year by the Hockey Hall of Fame. “I’ve been blackballed,” he told a reporter in the spring of 1987 when Matt Pavelich became the first NHL linesman to be inducted. “You don’t get any money for it,” Hayes said, “so I don’t really care if I ever get elected. But I’m not bragging when I say I should be in it.”
Georges Hayes died that year, in November. He was 73, though he insisted until the end that he was 67. He had circulation problems in his legs, and had developed gangrene, but he refused to see a doctor, let alone visit a hospital. “George was just as stubborn as always,” his widow, Judy, told a reporter in the wake of his death.
“George just didn’t believe in doctors,” Art Skov said. “We had a tough time getting him sewed up when he’d get cut during games.”
“Nobody could ever tell George what to do,” Matt Pavelich said. “He had no faith in doctors or hospitals. He wanted things in his own hands and that was that, his way or no way.”
No-one from the NHL showed up for Hayes’ funeral, or sent a condoling word, though a phalanx of veteran officials was on hand: Skov and Pavelich, Bruce Hood, John D’Amico, Scotty Morrison, Ron Wicks.
A year later, George Hayes did find his way into the Hall of Fame, a member of the class of 1988 that also included Guy Lafleur, Tony Esposito, Brad Park, Buddy O’Connor, and Philadelphia Flyers’ owner Ed Snider.
Today, if you look him up in the Hall’s register of honoured members, you’ll find Hayes remembered as a “controversial, colourful, proud, and competitive” character who “loved hockey with his every breath.” He’s credited there, too, as a trailblazer in collegial politesse: he was, apparently, the first official to hand-deliver pucks to his colleagues for face-offs, rather than toss or slide them over.
smokey smith at centre ice
War over, time for some hockey.
Not that the NHL had paused any of its winter maneuvers during the early 1940s as the Second World War roiled, though there were annual discussions, early on, about whether it might be right for the league to suspend operations for the duration.
Now, hostilities among nations having ceased, there was, in 1945, a sense that real hockey was back for the first time in years.
“We’re in for our greatest season,” NHL president Red Dutton was enthusing 76 years ago this very week.” The boys are playing for keeps this season. It’s something we’ve never experienced before. You have a rugged bunch of boys back from the services, bent on proving they’re still the best hockey players in the world. You have another bunch of wartime-developed boys battling to prove they’re as good as the veterans. And you have some ambitious youngsters that don’t see any reason why they can’t keep pace with the older ones.”
On a Saturday of this date that October, Boston’s Bruins were in Toronto to open the first season of the new peace at Maple Leaf Gardens. It ended up a good one, for the Leafs, the season: the following April, they were Stanley Cup champions again, claiming their first title since 1942.
For opening night, along with the traditional appearance by the massed brass and pipes of the 48th Highlanders, Conn Smythe’s Maple Leafs had arranged to host six of the 16 Canadian servicemen to have been recognized during the war with the Victoria Cross, the British Empire’s highest military honour, conferred for extraordinary courage and devotion to duty.
That’s one of the distinguished guests here, the man who dropped a ceremonial to kick off the new season: 30-year-old Private Ernest “Smokey” Smith, a son of New Westminster, B.C., the only Canadian enlisted soldier to have won a V.C. during the Second World War. (More on Smith and his colleagues at MLG here.)
With Smith here, from the right, that’s Boston Bruins’ captain Jack Crawford (last seen in yesterday’s post) and Leafs’ chairman J.P. Bickell. Bob Davidson is the Leaf at left. In 1943, when Toronto captain Syl Apps went to war, Davidson assumed command of the hockey team. After two years, Apps was back with the Leafs, and early that October week, the Globe reported Davidson’s greeting to the team’s star centreman: “Welcome back, Syl, and I’m officially turning the team captaincy back to you.”
Apps was excused, however, from this Leafs’ opener. During one of the final preparatory scrimmages that week, he’d suffered a broken nose and a bad cut. The Toronto Daily Star’s Joe Perlove filed a report from the Gardens:
He was the same cyclonic Apps of pre-war days, if slightly breathless. He was still hammering away three minutes before game’s end when hit on the nose by Gaye Stewart’s stick which flew out of the latter’s hand as he was heavily bodied by Elwyn Morris.
X-rays disclose Apps suffered a broken nose. He needed a stitch to close a slash under his right eye. The classic Appsian schnozzle was not badly dented and he will still take fine pictures from either side.
Without him, the Leafs skated to a 1-1 tie. A crowd of 14,608 saw Bill Shill score for Boston; Davidson countered for the Leafs.
(Image: City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 7084)
the waiting is the hardest part: the leafs won in 1947, but the stanley cup took its time getting to toronto
“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.
leafs + canadiens, 1938: laying on a licking, avoiding a sand trap
The Maple Leafs meet the Canadiens in Montreal tonight, which is as good a prompt as any to cast back to a Sunday night in 1938, March 6, to revisit another meeting of the two old rivals.
The NHL was an eight-team affair then. That year, like this one, there was a Canadian division, though for balance it included the New York Americans as well as the Leafs, Canadiens, and Montreal Maroons. Toronto was top of the section at that late-season juncture, with Montreal in second. Saturday night the Leafs beat the Maroons 2-0 at the Forum, with Turk Broda getting the shutout. The goals came from rookie winger George Parsons and centre Syl Apps.
Sunday night the Leafs and Canadiens played to the biggest crowd to gather that season at the Forum: “11,000 fans banked solidly up the Forum’s sloping sides,” the Gazette’s Marc McNeil reported, and as seen in the photographs here.
McNeil wasn’t so impressed by the Canadiens. To his eye, they came up with “one of their shoddiest and most impotent displays of the campaign.” The Leafs licked them 6-3, in the end; “to make matters worse they didn’t even score a goal until the game had been hopelessly lost, 6-0.”
The Leafs were led by winger Gordie Drillon, who scored a pair of goals, and would end up as the NHL’s top scorer by season’s end. App, who finished second in league scoring, had a goal on the night, along with Bob Davidson, Busher Jackson, and Buzz Boll. Scoring for Montreal were Toe Blake, Pit Lepine, and Don Wilson. Wilf Cude was in the Canadiens’ net.
Other highlights of the night:
• Toronto scored four goals in the second period to pad their lead, but the game was also delayed four times while (as Marc McNeil told it) “sand, thrown on the ice in small bags which burst, was scraped from the surface.”
• A Montreal fan tried to make his way to the ice. Identified as “head of the Millionaires,” the devoted followers who occupied the rush seats in the Forum’s north end, this would-be interloper was apparently intent on making a case to referees John Mitchell and Mickey Ion. He was stopped before he got to the ice — by none other than Frank Calder, who was aided by several ushers in apprehending him as he passed near the NHL president’s rinkside seat.
• Late in the third period, Montreal’s Georges Mantha lost his helmet in the Toronto end. “He finished the contest without it,” McNeil noted, “because Turk Broda picked it up and wore it for the rest of the game. Afterwards, the Toronto goalie returned it to the speedy left-winger.”
legends woe
The Toronto Maple Leafs are paying tribute today to former captain George Armstrong, following the announcement of his death early on Sunday at the age of 90. With the modern-day edition of the team in action in Calgary, Armstrong’s likeness is fronting Scotiabank Arena in Toronto this afternoon, and the team laid flowers in front of his likeness on Legends Row. Nobody has played more games for the Leafs than Armstrong, who captained the team for 12 years and led them to four Stanley Cups.