The Goal of My Life (15 page)

He was adamant about that. And his words turned out to be prophetic. His advice strongly influenced my decision to sign with the Toros. I put Bassett in touch with Eagleson, and we came to an agreement that I would play with the Toros in 1974–75.

While this was going on, I was still playing with the Leafs, and as you can imagine, the news didn’t go over very well with owner Harold Ballard – especially after Bassett let it slip at a party that they were both attending.

Like many people in hockey over the years, I’d had my share of run-ins with Ballard. Today’s younger hockey fans may not remember him, but anyone who was around Maple Leaf Gardens in Ballard’s heyday will tell you he could be impossible to deal with at times. He was one of a kind, to be sure.

Anyway, Ballard asked for a meeting with Eagleson and me, so we met him at the Hot Stove Lounge in Maple Leaf Gardens. With his typical arrogance, he tossed a contract at
me for the same length and same money as the Toros were offering but with no signing bonus.

“Sign here!” he growled, probably thinking he was making a supreme sacrifice on my behalf. He had vowed he wasn’t going to lose any more players to “the @&$@
WHA
,” and so he grudgingly offered the contract. But he was in for a surprise. I was tired of the way he had treated me and other players on our team, so I looked him right in the eye and gave it back to him.

“Harold, you take that contract and shove it!”

I’ll never forget the look of rage in his face. He tossed over his chair and stormed out of the Hot Stove Lounge, and that signalled the end of my relationship – such as it was – with Harold Ballard, as well as my playing career as a Maple Leaf.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have done the deal while still under contract to the Leafs; it showed a lack of character and integrity on my part. And the Toros contract contained bonus clauses that were tied to my upcoming season with the Leafs. That wasn’t right either, and in retrospect it should have never happened.

After my career ended, I tried to make up with Ballard several times, but he always refused to see me or communicate with me. I wrote him a letter apologizing for what I had said and done and asked him if we could make a fresh start. My spiritual mentor had told me I should not be offside with anyone, and I was farther offside with Ballard than with anyone, so I tried to reach out to him. He never replied.

Once, after I retired, I went into the Gardens to see a practice, but he wanted me out of the building. He even told Gord Stellick, the general manager at the time, to ask me to
leave the building when I went to the Leafs dressing room to visit with coach John Brophy. Poor Gord felt really bad about that. He was apologetic and embarassed over the whole incident.

To top it all off, in 1981, Ballard sabotaged a job offer I’d received from Telemedia to do colour commentary on their radio broadcasts of Leafs games. After I retired, I had considered several different avenues, with broadcasting always at the back of mind, and this offer sounded like a good start. But Ballard would have no part of it, telling the radio people I wasn’t allowed inside the building and that there was no way I was going to be a part of any broadcast from Maple Leaf Gardens involving the Toronto Maple Leafs.

I couldn’t stand Harold Ballard back then, but I’m not proud of the way I acted during the contract hassles either. I certainly would have done things differently if I had the opportunity now – I didn’t become a Christian until 1975 and didn’t understand the concept of forgiveness. But that parting of the ways probably resulted, indirectly, in my going on to start my ministry later on because the broadcasting option was no longer open to me. Ballard blocking my progress turned out for the best. Though it really disappointed me at the time, I’ve learned a lot since then. Life is a journey – you learn as you go. I’ve learned far more in my life from failure and setbacks than I ever have from being successful – it’s through adversity that you learn whether your faith is real. I now feel that God’s hand played a part in everything that happened to me over the years. I also know that I have grown and matured over the years, and understand things from a different perspective today.

Knowing that – and knowing how it all worked out – well,
how could I still be bitter about what Harold Ballard did? Or what anyone else has done, either?

In fairness to Ballard, who acted in truly bizarre ways at times, he was never the same after his wife died in 1969. Without her stabilizing effect and wisdom, he lost his way and became a buffoon. It was really sad the way things turned out for him and I actually felt sorry for him.

I stayed healthier in 1973–74, appearing in sixty-nine games, and I had twenty-four goals and thirty-one assists for fifty-five points. The team bounced back too, finishing fourth in the East Division with eighty-six points under our new head coach, Red Kelly.

The last part of that season saw my ice time get reduced to much less than my usual time. It was quite frustrating as I had some good bonuses in my contract that I wouldn’t be able to get as a result, and I always wondered why Kelly wasn’t using me more.

I believe that Ballard was really forcing Kelly’s hand when it came to decisions like this. One time, Kelly told me my problem was that my wrists weren’t strong enough and that I should work on that instead of playing that night. My wrists weren’t strong enough? That’s how ridiculous the entire situation was at that point.

It was a truly frustrating time in a lot of ways. We made the playoffs that year but were eliminated by the Boston Bruins in four games, ending another season quite early. We were a decent team, but we lacked depth, so we were finished … and I was finished with the Leafs, and with the
NHL
, for that matter, until much later in my career.

It was time for a change, and that change came the next season.

S
O MUCH HAS BEEN SAID ABOUT THE
W
ORLD
H
OCKEY
Association and the kind of league it was, and a lot of the stories about the league are pretty colourful. And there is no doubt about it, the
WHA
was a very colourful place.

I enjoyed playing in the
WHA
. It allowed me to get away from the stress of playing with the Leafs and, perhaps just as importantly, to get away from Harold Ballard.

Those last two seasons I spent with the Leafs after the Summit Series were tough on me, to the point that I developed an ulcer. I had more attention paid to me and was under as bright a spotlight as you can imagine during and after that series, so it was great to get away from that glare and get a chance to enjoy hockey again.

By 1974–75, the league was in its third season and had garnered a lot more credibility, having attracted such bigname
NHL
talent as Bobby Hull, J.C. Tremblay, Rejean Houle, Gerry Cheevers, Marc Tardif, Frank Mahovlich, and Gordie Howe. It was beginning to develop stars of its
own too, like Ulf Nilsson, Anders Hedberg, and Gordie’s sons, Mark and Marty Howe. The Toros played their home games at Maple Leaf Gardens, which obviously made me very comfortable. It really was an ideal situation for me at this time.

My first assignment in the new league was to play the Russians again, as the
WHA
had scheduled its own eight-game series for September 1974. I felt it was important to help the
WHA
showcase its talents, and I was really going to enjoy it this time around because I’d been through the experience before, and there wasn’t nearly as much pressure on us this time. I even got to play tourist this time and visit some of the great historical museums in Moscow in between games.

The
WHA
was not on a par with the
NHL
by any stretch, but we showed it was a pretty solid league by the way we performed in that series. We battled the Russians very hard, and although the emotions and the stakes weren’t as high as in 1972, it was a pretty good series and a watershed moment as far as the
WHA’S
credibility was concerned.

I thought I played as well as I did in 1972, but this time I just couldn’t seem to generate the goals like I did two years prior. Tretiak definitely had the upper hand this time around and was more familiar with my moves. I only managed to beat him twice. We opened the series with a 3–3 tie in Montreal, and followed with a 4–1 win in Toronto, but as it turned out, that would be the only victory we’d get in the series.

Our coach, Billy Harris, decided that everybody would play during the series, and I knew that cost us in game three in Winnipeg. He inserted eight new guys into the lineup for
that game, and quite frankly that was a disaster. Everyone wound up playing in the series as promised, but it really took the edge off our game and we never did seem to hit our stride after that. Once again, we had likely invited too many players, and the guys who didn’t play or were in and out of the lineup weren’t very happy about it. It’s so hard to get into a flow when you don’t play all the time.

I played on a line with my old friend from the Detroit days, Bruce MacGregor, and Mike Walton, another good friend and former Leafs teammate. We had a lot of fun and scored a few goals, and MacGregor and I were killing penalties, something we had done for years.

We tied game four 5–5 in Vancouver, but the best we could do in the four games in Moscow was a 4–4 tie in game seven. We lost the other three games there, as the Soviets won the series 4–1–3.

The 1974–75 Toronto Toros were a pretty solid team. We finished in second place in the Canadian Division with eighty-eight points, trailing only the Quebec Nordiques. I played on a line with Wayne Dillon and “Shotgun” Tom Simpson, and I scored thirty goals and had thirty-three assists for sixty-three points in fifty-eight games. Frank Mahovlich was a star, of course, and the big Czech, Vaclav Nedomansky, was a forty-goal scorer with enormous talent. Our goalie was Gilles Gratton, one of the great all-time characters in hockey. Gilles believed that he was reincarnated, and his antics kept the mood nice and light all season long. The atmosphere was so laidback compared to the
NHL
, and there was really a great bunch of guys on that team and throughout the league.

In the playoffs, we were ousted by the San Diego Mariners in six games in the opening round, but my season ended well
before then. A freak accident during a regular-season game forced me to the sidelines, as I collided with a Phoenix Roadrunner player who was headed to the bench during a game. We banged knees and I wound up tearing knee ligaments, which required season-ending surgery.

Billy Harris, the former Leaf who’d coached Team Canada ‘74, was the coach that year, and he was a terrific guy. He knew the game very well and we respected him, but we weren’t nearly as strong as some of the better teams in the league, and he didn’t finish the season as our coach.

I looked at the schedule at the start of the season and noticed that there were five times when we played home games on a Friday night, followed by Sunday night. The Leafs owned Saturday nights, of course, so we scheduled around them. At the time, we had a family home near Goderich, so I approached Harris with a proposal. If we won those Friday night games and I was the first star, I asked, would it be possible for me to skip the Saturday and Sunday morning skates so I could have more time off with my family over the weekend? Harris agreed. Well, talk about some good motivation for me: we won four of those five games and I was the first star in all four of the wins! So Eleanor and I would bundle up the kids into the car at, say, 11:00 p.m. on Friday and drive up to Goderich to enjoy some family time. We’d spend the weekend with our horse and cutter and snowmobiles, and I wouldn’t have to be back until game time Sunday. It was such a treat to be able to have that kind of time to spend with your family on a weekend during hockey season! I remember saying to Eleanor several times, “Can you believe I get paid to do this?”

For the 1975–76 season, we had a new coach behind the bench: former Leaf Bobby Baun. We lost a few players to the
NHL
, including goalie Gilles Gratton, and we once again didn’t have that strong a team as the season began, compared to some of the
WHA’S
better clubs.

Baun was an honest and straightforward guy, but we just couldn’t seem to get going that year and he wound up being fired before the season’s end, which was a real shame. Gilles Leger replaced him, but that didn’t help as we still wound up finishing in last place in the Canadian Division.

I had a decent year with twenty-six goals and twenty-nine assists for fifty-five points in sixty-five games, but we really didn’t do much at all that season, which turned out to be the swan song for the
WHA
in Toronto. There was just no way we could compete with the Maple Leafs; even though we were playing in the same building, we might as well have been a million miles away from them in terms of popularity and attention. It’s all Leafs, all the time, in Toronto today, and it was really the same back then.