Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Shoots and Scores (11 page)

BUILDING FINISHED IN 80% OF EXPECTED TIME!

Smythe had acquired a choice piece of downtown land as a site for the building. On June 1, 1931, construction started and, in an incredible feat, Maple Leaf Gardens was completed in approximately five months. On November 12, 1931, the building's glittering opening night attracted a who's who of Toronto society and money to see the Chicago Black Hawks beat the Leafs 2–1. However, the Leafs went on to capture the Stanley Cup in the first season in their new home.

TODAY: SEASON'S TICKETS ON E-BAY FOR $250 G
s

Even from the start, sold-out houses for Leafs games were common and the owners like to boast that from the end of World War II until the demise of the Gardens (it was replaced by the Air Canada Center in 1999), every seat for a Leafs game had been sold. With Hewitt spreading the Maple Leaf gospel across Canada every Saturday night from the “gondola” high above the Gardens' ice, the Leafs filled Smythe's dream of being “Canada's team” (at least to that chunk of Canada that didn't worship Les Habs).

The controversial owner regarded the Gardens as Toronto's entertainment center, the way opera houses are regarded in European cities. The seats closest to the ice were filled with well-dressed folk in the building's first 30 years; old pictures show many women in those seats wearing snazzy hats. When Leaf games were televised in the 1950s, Smythe sent a letter to the box-seat holders,
complaining that standards of dress had slipped and he hoped for an improvement.

THE FAT LADY SINGS…

A week after the first hockey game, the MLG ice was removed and a crowd of 15,000 packed the building to see a professional wrestling match in which Jim “The Golden Greek” Londos defeated Jumpin' Gino Garilbaldi. Pro wrestling became a regular weekly feature of the building. But Smythe also tried to pass off the big barn as a fine arts palace. Extraordinary ballerina Dame Margot Fontaine danced
Sleeping Beauty
in the Gardens, called the place a cavern, and never returned. Paul Robeson in 1942 and Maria Callas in 1958 also battled the building's horrific acoustics. Elvis Presley in 1957 and the Beatles in 1961 packed the place, and with the rock era well underway, the sound system was upgraded and MLG hosted every major pop music group over the next four decades.

Conn Smythe sold his interest in the building to a group led by his son Stafford in the late 1950s and while he kept an office in the building, he often publicly expressed his distaste for the new regime's bids to increase revenue by adding advertising and seats to his sacred palace.

* * * * *

“The top three worst things I've seen in hockey? The invention of the trap. The invention of the morning skate. And the invention of the extremely ugly uniform.”

—Brett Hull, former St. Louis Blues forward

“I don't know if I find Brett Hull funny. But I can tell you this: He sure thinks he is.”

—Craig Ludwig, former Dallas Stars defenceman

Match the brothers with the numbers of goals scored in the NHL
:

 

* * * * *

“Yeah, I'm cocky and I am arrogant. But that doesn't mean I'm not a nice person.”

—Jeremy Roenick, former forward,
Chicago Blackhawks

 

Answers:

1-j, 2-f, 3-a, 4-e, 5-c, 6-b, 7-i, 8-d, 9-h, 10-g

In its 100-plus years of history, stories ring around the Stanley Cup like the strata layers of the Earth. Uncle John would like to share some recent ones with you.

I
t is almost 36 inches high and weighs about 35 pounds. It has a top that bears a remarkable resemblance to a candy bowl (at one point, it was indeed used as a candy bowl, in Montreal in 1910) and below the bowl are silver bands—with hundreds of names engraved on them—that get larger as it grows older. “It,” of course, is the Stanley Cup, awarded annually to the NHL team that wins the most games in a two-to-three-month-long series of playoff games.

LORD STANLEY THE GOOD

Initiated as the Dominion Challenge Cup in 1892, the award later known as the Stanley Cup was created by Governor General Stanley of Preston to be presented annually to the hockey team that won the most games in a season. One of Governor General (later Lord) Stanley's reasons for creating the trophy was to promote hockey as
the
sport of Canada. He has succeeded. Costing Stanley $48.67 in 1892, the first team to get the coveted prize was the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association in 1893.

THE DANGERS OF SKIPPING CHEMISTRY CLASS

Just as there are many chemicals interacting in the Earth's strata, certain chemicals do not mix well with Stanley Cup silver. The Pittsburgh Penguins found this out the hard way. After the Penguins won the Stanley Cup for the second straight year (1992), superstar Mario Lemieux invited his teammates to a party at his home. Booze was flowing freely, and in this alcohol-induced envelope of happiness, jovial Phil Bourque took the Cup to the top of Lemieux's manmade waterfall. When he was done, he pitched the prize into the swimming pool below. Lemieux, Bourque and friends learned quickly that chlorinated water is not good for silver; the Cup was badly tarnished.

WHY HE'S ONE OF THE SMARTEST IN THE GAME

It gets worse: Lemieux had to take the Cup to a victory parade the next day. He later told hockey sportswriters that he simply faced the blemished side of the Cup away from the people. This simple trick worked; nobody noticed that the Stanley Cup was discolored.

PLAYERS NOT TO LEAVE UNSUPERVISED

Lemieux was a two-time winner of the Cup, but goaltender Patrick Roy was a member of four Stanley Cup–winning teams (1986 and 1993 Montreal Canadiens and 1996 and 2001 Colorado Avalanche). The irrepressible Roy couldn't believe what had happened to the Cup a year earlier, so gave it a dip in his own pool in 1993. While conducting more experiments, the perpetually curious Roy wanted to find out what's inside the Cup. So he took a screwdriver, unscrewed the bottom, and found…nothing. The Cup is hollow.

TEAM TRAGEDY

Without question, the most tragic yet inspiring story of recent Stanley Cup memory involves the Detroit Red Wings of the late 1990s. Fans of the Red Wings waited a long time, 15,392 days to be precise, before they won the Cup in 1997. Previous to this—if you haven't made the calculation for yourself yet—the last time they won was 1955. On a celebratory summer day in 1997, some of the players hired a limousine to get them home safely from a golf course. That didn't happen. The limousine driver fell asleep and the car carrying three Russian Red Wings got into a severe accident. Hockey legend Slava Fetisov received a lung injury, team masseur Sergei Mnatsakanov got a brain injury and star defenceman Vladimir Konstantinov became paralyzed, probably for life. The euphoria which had engulfed the Detroit area evaporated.

THIS ONE'S FOR VLADIMIR

Months passed and the Red Wings were determined to get back to the Stanley Cup finals. And they did, against the Washington Capitals. All of the team's personnel had but one goal: to repeat as Stanley Cup champions and devote the win to wheelchair-bound Konstantinov. The Red Wings won the first three games and, with five minutes played in the third period of game four, the attention of everyone during a play stoppage in Washington's MCI Center
was diverted to a luxury box seating Konstantinov and his wife. As Konstantinov was raised to his feet by his wife and a friend, everyone cheered, including Capitals fans and players. After the Red Wings won the game, Konstantinov was brought to the ice and the Cup was placed in his lap. Fellow Russian star Sergei Fedorov, Detroit captain Steve Yzerman, and other Red Wings pushed the smiling Konstantinov around the rink.

CAN THIS THING COLLECT AIR MILES?

During the summer months, each player of the winning team gets the Cup for 24 hours, to do with it whatever they wish. Red Wings Fetisov, center Igor Larionov (once called “the Russian Gretzky” by
The New Yorker
) and Slava Kozlov took the Cup to the Red Army Hockey School in Moscow and to their hometowns after the Red Wings' Cup win in 1997. Later, they took it on the streets of the Russian capital and curious onlookers touched the Cup the way a child first pets a cat—somewhat tentatively, yet with love and affection.

Besides Canada, Russia and the United States, the Cup has gone to the Czech Republic, Sweden, and numerous other countries in Europe. But contrary to popular belief, it has not been on all seven continents: never to Africa, Australia, Antarctica, or South America.

CANADA'S ANSWER TO LINCOLN'S TOMB

Lord Stanley's original Dominion Challenge Cup was retired in 1967. It now sits in a vault in the International Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. The vault door is open during business hours for all Hall of Fame visitors to peer at hockey's holy grail. A Hall of Fame employee is constantly with the Cup, both for its protection and to answer questions. These Stanley Cup guardians tell curious folk such gems as the fact that in 1971 Jean Béliveau of the Montreal Canadiens was the first team captain to circle the rink with the Stanley Cup, and that Wayne Gretzky came up with the idea of the Cup-winning “team photo” (where all players and coaches of the winning club gather at center ice to have their picture taken), after his Edmonton Oilers won it in 1987–88. These are just some of the Stanley Cup strata that will be passed down, from generation to generation, by lovers of hockey.

Organizing the NHL Players' Association was a bitter fight that started with defeat on the first try, but finally found acceptance by the league.

I
N BRIEF

That the NHL Players' Association had the strength to close down the league's operation for half the 1994–95 season and the entire 2004–05 schedule and playoffs was the result of a long, uphill climb over close to five decades—first to gain acceptance, then to acquire the solidarity to engage in labor war with the team owners.

The first try at organizing a players' association—the word “union” seldom was employed in the late 1950s—resulted in a bitter squashing of the workers' efforts by the league's old guard of owners, who operated the NHL as if the feudal system were still in vogue. But a decade later, with Toronto lawyer Alan Eagleson as the catalyst in several minor victories for individual players against the hockey establishment; the bright hope that Eagleson's main client Bobby Orr gave hockey; and the presence of a new group of forward- thinking owners—both with the established teams and the 1967 expansion clubs—the NHL agreed to accept the association.

PENSION PLANNERS

In the 1950s, the NHL governors, led by league president Clarence Campbell, a Rhodes scholar, lawyer and former NHL referee, had boasted frequently about the players having the best pension plan in professional team sports. At the same time, they claimed that the league's profits were, at best, very small. Detroit Red Wings star winger Ted Lindsay, as determined in his off-ice business efforts as he was in his gritty, abrasive playing style, and Doug Harvey, the mighty defenceman of the Montreal Canadiens, were named to the NHL pension board along with Campbell, New York Rangers president John Reed Kilpatrick, and Ian Johnston, a Toronto lawyer and secretary of Maple Leaf Gardens Ltd.

BUM DEAL

The NHL pension was started in 1946 by a few players working with a Detroit insurance agent on injury benefits. Led by Maple Leafs owner Conn Smythe, the NHL quickly took over the pension plan and gave Campbell the job of stripping the players of any control. For ten years from the late 1940s, the players paid $900 per year into the plan, a large stipend considering that the average NHL salary was $5,000 a season. The owners added $600 per player, money gained from the all-star game gate and a surcharge on playoff tickets.

SMALL QUESTIONS, NO ANSWERS

When Lindsay asked pointed questions about the pension fund and its financing—the owners' contributions turned out to be very small—he was brushed aside. Never one to back away from a scrap, Lindsay persisted in his efforts to gain an accurate financial picture of the NHL's operation. Lindsay and Harvey, a lethargic-looking but mentally sharp man, did their own calculations and discovered that the NHL claims of losses or very small profits were false and all clubs made money, and some were very profitable.

CALL IN THE NEW YORK LAWYERS

Frustrated at the lack of answers, Lindsay, at his own expense, recruited the New York lawyers who had helped major league baseball players negotiate their first collective agreement. “I didn't want to start a union; I just wanted a few answers on the financial status of the league in regards to pension and benefits,” Lindsay said. “We only went ahead when we were told that it was none of our business.” The players' association formation was announced in New York in February, 1957, with Lindsay as president and Harvey, Fern Flaman, Bill Gadsby, Gus Mortson, and Jimmy Thomson on the executive.