The Goal of My Life (7 page)

We really had nothing in Lucknow, and now I had everything in Detroit. I’d be sitting in the dressing room and we’d be talking back and forth during intermissions, and Gordie Howe might say to me, “Nice play there, Henny. Way to go!” Just imagine how good that would make a kid like me feel. Whenever somebody said that to me, I’d always think, “Where’s my dad? He should be hearing this,” and wished I had a tape recorder so I could have him listen to it! It was such a fantastic time for me.

Detroit was a great sports town, and a winning sports town. Since the 1930s, it has been known as the City of Champions. The baseball Tigers were doing well, and would win the World Series in 1968. The Lions had won three National Football League championships in the 1950s and had a fiercely loyal following. The University of Michigan, in nearby Ann Arbor, won the Rose Bowl one year. It could also be a tough city, and it was going through a difficult time with all the violence and the riots in the summer of 1967, but inside the Olympia the fans were great. It really was a great environment.

Outside the arena was something else, though! After practice, we would always stop by a convenience store on the corner where the Olympia was. We’d get a pop or whatever, and one day, Gary Bergman left his brand-new
Chevy running while he went inside. Sure enough, while he was in the store, some kid just came along and drove off with that new car!

But for a kid coming into the
NHL
from a place like Lucknow, stuff like that didn’t matter. I was just happy to be in the
NHL
, and I was very happy being a Detroit Red Wing.

Then, on March 3, 1968, the unthinkable happened. The Red Wings dealt me to the Toronto Maple Leafs, along with centre Norm Ullman and right-winger Floyd Smith. In exchange, the Wings got left-winger Frank Mahovlich, centre Peter Stemkowski, rookie Garry Unger, and the
NHL
rights to former Leafs defenceman Carl Brewer, who had joined the Canadian National Team and by now was playing in the International Hockey League with Muskegon. It was, at the time – and probably still is when you think about it – one of the biggest trades in hockey history.

That deal is still talked about to this day, as it involved a lot of prime-time players. Imlach was always fond of veteran players, but when you fell out of favour with him, you were quite often on the way out of town. Mahovlich clearly needed a change of scenery, and the Wings wanted to shake things up as well, so both teams were willing to make a blockbuster deal.

I found out when Audrey MacGregor, Bruce’s wife, heard it on the radio and then told all of us! What a way to find out that you’ve been uprooted and you are on your way to play in another city. Sid Abel contacted me eventually and apologized, saying they meant to tell us directly, but I was hurt so bad I don’t think I even heard a word he said.

I was so let down. I had never felt rejection before, and I hated the feeling I had in my gut. I was disappointed and
angry; I couldn’t believe that this had happened. I’ll never forget playing Detroit for the first time after the deal, at Maple Leaf Gardens, and winning 5–3. I had a goal and an assist and was the second star of the game that night. That certainly made me feel a lot better about the trade, especially after the way I felt at first.

But as is often the case in life, things that happen to you that you think are not good for you turn out to be very beneficial for you in the long run. I went on to have some good years in Toronto – good enough, of course, to earn me a spot on what turned out to be the Team of the Century just a few years after that.

The trade hurt me deeply, as I said, and I wasn’t the least bit happy about going to the Maple Leafs at first. I had nothing against them, I just didn’t want to be traded anywhere; I was naive enough to think that I’d be playing in Detroit my entire playing career.

But after the shock wore off, I came to enjoy playing at Maple Leaf Gardens. There was something really special about playing in that building, and maybe it had to do with the crowd. Back in the 1960s and 1970s when I was playing, people came to the games in a shirt and tie. And I mean most everybody dressed up. There was a real sense of class about the place on a game night. I guess the fans dressing up like that showed a respect for the game, gave it a certain dignity. It made it feel like something important was going on inside that arena on game night.

It’s funny, though. I’d never thought too much about playing in Maple Leaf Gardens until I got there. I’d grown up in southern Ontario, and just like everybody else, I always knew what Maple Leaf Gardens represented, but the full impact
of playing there on a regular basis didn’t hit me until I became a Toronto Maple Leaf.

On top of everything else, you knew that half of Canada would be watching you on a Saturday night on
Hockey Night in Canada
. Now
that
was pressure, but it was also the brightest spotlight you could play under. It’s one of the reasons I think that so many players on the visiting teams had their best games in the Gardens: because they knew everybody would be watching, including all their family and friends. And when you combine that with the crowd dressed to the nines, the bright lights – well, how could you not love playing in that building?

The place suited my personality too. I liked the spotlight, and the pressure, of playing in that place. Maybe when I got older and had lost a step, it was good to be away from such scrutiny, but nothing beat playing in Maple Leaf Gardens, one of the great arenas of all time.

The Leafs had won the Stanley Cup the year before my arrival, but now the team was going through a remake, as they were an older group. Montreal and Chicago were as strong as ever, while Boston and New York, who had fought over last place for most of the 1960s, were evolving into powerful teams. Meanwhile, we had a strong nucleus in players like Dave Keon, Ron Ellis, Norm Ullman, and Mike Walton, and a group of rising young defenceman like Jim Dorey, Pat Quinn, and Mike Pelyk. Later on, the team added Rick Ley, Brad Selwood, Jim McKenny, and Brian Glennie, so if management did its job, this was a team with a lot of promise for the future.

I played on a line with Ullman and Smith, two of my former teammates in Detroit, and had eleven points in the
thirteen games left in the regular season schedule, but we still missed the playoffs.

In 1968–69, we bounced back to grab a playoff spot with eighty-five points, ending up fourth in the East Division. But the playoffs were a disaster, as we were swept by the Bruins with Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito in four straight games, losing the first two games in Boston 10–0 and 7–0. We were no match for the Bruins in that series, which featured the monstrous hit on Orr by Pat Quinn in Boston Garden. Right after the final game, Punch Imlach, who had been with the team since 1958, was fired as general manager and coach.

Imlach’s firing was so sudden. It was a bit of a shock the way they did it. However, I have to say we weren’t terribly surprised that Punch lost his job. He had a tough situation going on with the Leafs at that time. The team was rebuilding, and the roster was in transition, so it wasn’t the best place to be for any general manager and coach right about then. In the dressing room, we all knew there was no way we could compete against the better teams in the league, as we had shown in that series against Boston.

I didn’t wind up playing very long for Imlach, but he was certainly a very different coach than Abel was in Detroit. You just couldn’t challenge Imlach; he couldn’t stand anyone challenging him at any time. He was in total control of his teams, and you had better listen to him – or else. Abel was the opposite in that respect; he didn’t have an ego problem and was easier to talk to.

However, there was no doubt that Imlach had his strengths. He understood hockey, and he was a very good strategist. He was sharp at matching lines during a game, and was a very good tactician. He got more out of that 1967 Stanley
Cup Leafs team than anyone else could have, as that team probably shouldn’t have won a Stanley Cup. The Leafs really shouldn’t have beaten us (the Red Wings) back in 1963 either, but he did another good job with that team. But he got the most out of many of his players.

I remember that when I came to the team, he gave me Norman Vincent Peale’s famous book
The Power of Positive Thinking –
he really believed in it. I did too – some people kidded me that I could have written that book. That was Imlach’s upside: the positive thinking really came through when some of his teams won despite not being as talented as the opponents they beat.

His downside was his arrogance and his superstition. He had one flavour for everybody – he just couldn’t deal with players who were more idiosyncratic. He couldn’t understand them. Players like Frank Mahovlich, Carl Brewer, and Mike “Shaky” Walton, for instance – they just weren’t Imlach’s kind of players. If he had been a little wiser and a little more of a communicator, he would have been an even better coach.

And he was superstitious – very superstitious. That really drove me crazy, and a lot of other players wondered what he was up to as well. He’d wear the same hat because it was lucky, send players down to Rochester on a gut feeling, and make some hockey decisions based on superstition. When you operate like that, you lose a lot of respect in some quarters, and I think that really hurt Punch.

By the end of that 1969 playoff series, the writing was on the wall, and most of us knew it. He didn’t deserve to be fired in such a quick and heartless way, but as I said, he was in a very tough spot and we really weren’t shocked that they made a coaching change.

The 1969–70 season was very disappointing for us. Johnny McLellan took over as coach of the Leafs, and was as nice a man as you’d ever meet, but was probably too nice to be a coach in the
NHL
. People often took advantage of his kind nature, and that made a tough job even tougher. He was in a difficult spot, as he didn’t inherit a very good team, especially after we dealt Tim Horton – who had turned forty, but had been a first-team all-star in 1968–69 – to the New York Rangers. New general manager Jim Gregory put his mark on the team right away, but it wasn’t enough to salvage the season. We finished last in the East Division with seventy-one points, and I managed twenty goals and twenty-two assists for forty-two points. I was severely hampered by a groin problem that season. It was so bad that by the end of the year my right thigh was an inch and a half bigger than my left because I was essentially skating on one leg all year. I shouldn’t have been in the lineup, but I wanted to play so badly that I didn’t take the time off to heal properly, and the Leafs really wanted me to stay in the lineup. That would never happen today –
NHL
trainers and players now realize how damaging it can be to any player to play through an injury that needs time to heal, but at that time there was a lot of pressure to keep on playing.

That off-season meant time for a new contract, which certainly wasn’t the best timing for me, and the Leafs management knew it. They sent me a contract offer in the mail that had a raise of just $1,500.

Jim Gregory and King Clancy called me after they sent it and basically said they didn’t think I should get much of a raise since my offensive numbers were down. That got me steaming! I reminded them that I had played hurt all year
with the groin injury and shouldn’t even have been playing. I really couldn’t believe that they would overlook such an obvious reason for my decline in production and offer me such a small raise.

They apologized and came back with a better offer, but I never forgot the slight. It convinced me beyond a doubt that hockey was just a business and management would only look after me if it was in their best interests. From then on, I realized that only Paul Henderson would look after Paul Henderson.

The Leafs were basically turning over completely from the team that had won four Stanley Cups in six years. George Armstrong, “The Chief,” was the captain of those great teams, Dave Keon was a huge star, and the incomparable Johnny Bower was in goal. We still had Armstrong and Keon, but they were all that remained from the dynasty days.

There have been a lot of great captains and leaders in the history of the Toronto Maple Leafs over the years, and George Armstrong was our very capable captain during this time. His “Chief” nickname came from his native roots, but it also described what a presence he was in the locker room and on the ice for more than two decades in the
NHL
, a good portion of that as Leafs captain.

I always respected George on the ice when I played against him. He was a battler who played the game hard but fairly. When I got to Toronto, though, I was impressed to discover just how competitive he was. He sure came to play every night and had no patience for those players who didn’t.

But George was certainly a different cat. I saw him not that long ago at a Toronto Maple Leafs game, and he was as colourful as always. I asked him, “George, how is Betty
[his wife] doing?” And he said, “I can’t get her to die! I keep saying to her, ‘When are you going to die?’ ” I know how much George loves his wife, so I just laugh at comments like that, but that’s George. I mean, who says that about his wife?! He’s a very different character, that’s for sure.

And oddly enough, even though he’s so outgoing and friendly when you see him in a press box, scouting, or wherever, he never gives interviews and has never even been to the Hall of Fame – and he’s a member! He just doesn’t think he truly belongs there and he stays away. Like I said, he’s different in a lot of ways, but a good man and a capable captain.

Dave Keon was one of the most finicky people I’ve ever seen, especially when it came to his equipment. He couldn’t stand anything not being exactly as he wanted it to be, and he wouldn’t play until everything was just right for him. But he was a leader by example, with an impeccable work ethic, and maybe one of the best forecheckers of his era. He literally danced on his skates with what appeared to be complete ease and effortlessness, and that drove us crazy, wondering how he could be so light on his skates.