I’ve been trying to untangle how it was that I became a fan of the Celtics and Red Sox, but I can hardly stand the Bruins. It’s an esoteric answer, but here we go. I don’t talk about it much--I bet most of you who know me well don’t even know--but I am pretty much a fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs. It goes back to when I was a kid, and although today I don’t wear the gear, I like to see the Leafs do well because they so seldom do. So now I have to untangle how I, a southern boy first-generation hockey fan, became a fan of one of hockey’s most aristocratic franchises. When I was a kid and had a lot of time on my hands, I read hockey-history books rapidly and endlessly. I read Stan Fischler’s first hockey encyclopedia, cover to cover, twice. In the 1940s the best goaltenders in the NHL were Bill Durnan of Montreal and Turk Broda of Toronto. They competed fiercely with one another yet were good friends, retiring within a year of each other and dying exactly two weeks apart in 1972. They were very opposite though. For years Durnan was the seventh-best goaltender in a six-team league, and it wasn’t until World War II, while the league was decimated of most of its talent that Durnan found his way in. During that time, Broda was off in Europe while Durnan, an English speaker playing on a predominantly French team in a predominantly French city, played hockey. And remember this was during a time when many French Canadians resented fighting what they saw as Britain’s war. Anyway, for me, transported back to this time in books, I found it totally captivating, especially the rivalry between Toronto and Montreal. There was Broda and the gentlemanly Syl Apps, and in the 1940s, they were winners, much the superior of Montreal for much of that decade. Then in the 60s, the Leafs were winners again with the ancient Johnny Bower and another gentleman, Tim Horton. In the 70s, when the team wasn’t so good, they were still owned by a weird dude named Ballard and a captain, Darryl Sittler, who once scored 6 goals and 4 assists in one game, against Boston, by the way. Sure, Montreal had Durnan and they won a lot of cups, but being mostly French speakers in those days—and you have to see that, to me, the current day hardly mattered as I read and read—I could hardly understand the names of those Montreal players. And so, a team that by the time I was born, boasted Wendel Clark and Doug Gilmore, couldn’t help at all but to win my favor. And once you’re a Leafs fan, you can never be either of two things, right? Be a fan of Montreal, or be a fan of Boston.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Jun 2013 03:30:41 +0000
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