But, for me, there was one final indignity. Eleven months later, the Leafs were playing a road game in Philadelphia on October 23, 2010, a Saturday night. The Leafs’ 4–0 start that fall had come crashing down, and they were never really in the game against the Flyers, eventually losing 5–2, their third consecutive setback. With Mrs. Robinson and the kiddies safely tucked in to bed, I’d gone downtown to meet a friend. The scene around Front Street was clearly missing the remnants of the hockey crowd that typically added some spice to the atmosphere.
As I had some time to kill as I waited for my friend, I decide to head up to Fionn MacCools, an Irish bar across the street from the Rogers Centre, to watch the late game on Hockey Night. As I walked along an unusually quiet street — had it been a typical Leafs Saturday night tilt the hockey hordes would have been cramming the sidewalks — I saw a solitary poster that cried out to be read. It was just north of the intersection of Blue Jays Way and Front Street and had been placed across a temporary wall that guarded a building site despite it being clearly marked “Post No Bills.”
As I got closer, I saw it was an advert for Fraser’s upcoming book signing. Now retired, Fraser had written Final Call about his time in the NHL. It turned out that a meet-and-greet and book signing with Fraser had just taken place, about two hundred metres up the street. At Wayne Gretzky’s restaurant. How fitting.
5
Craig Muni’s Ghost
What is Larry Murphy doing hoisting the Stanley Cup? I must still be drunk.
It seems like a lifetime ago, but I will never forget it: Larry Murphy winning the Stanley Cup just months after I had concluded that he was the single most overrated player in the history of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
It was June 1997 and I was in Bangkok, the nerve centre of backpacker travel in Southeast Asia and, as that song from the mid-1980s said, a place that can make you feel really humble. The Hangover Part II later detailed how easy it is to forget what happened the night before in that city.
But there was no forgetting the image in front of me: Murphy clad in a Red Wings jersey celebrating winning hockey’s Holy Grail with surefire Hall of Famer Steve Yzerman having just accepted the trophy for the very first time.
The alcohol was exiting through my pores, helped along by my angst at what I was witnessing on the television screen and accelerated by the crippling Bangkok heat.
I had left the winter chill in Canada in February, when Murphy was still a Toronto Maple Leaf and an increasingly frustrating presence with every game. Two days before leaving for what turned into an eighteen-month around-the-world sojourn, I had taken in one last Leafs game down at Maple Leaf Gardens: a Leafs–Senators tilt that featured, literally, the two worst teams in the NHL at the time. The Leafs were on a slide, with Pat Burns having been fired the season before and Mike Murphy put in charge of a hockey club that was well past its expiry date. A 2–1 loss to the Sens, with Tie Domi of all people scoring the lone Leafs goal, meant the Leafs were dead last in the NHL.
For me, it was a perfect time to be leaving. Travelling in those days meant leaving behind many habits — mine centred on the fate of the Leafs. The Internet was only in its infancy and live streaming and other online technological advances that could have made it possible to track events back home were still well off.
It had been a good run for the Leafs for a while, with two conference final appearances and four straight playoff showings. But obsessing over how they were going to stem the inevitable decline was getting a bit tedious as I was finishing up my university studies. A few weeks in New Zealand and then in Australia was all it took for me to forget about the Leafs and the various machinations that were taking place back home. I was quickly realizing that the world through the bottom of a pint glass and my reflection in it looked pretty much the same in both New Zealand and Australia as it did in Toronto.
Wanting a bit of a different experience, I flew from Australia to Thailand in the second week of June. I hadn’t gone completely cold turkey, though — I had managed to gather very fragmentary information before leaving that the Detroit Red Wings had a 3–0 stranglehold on the Stanley Cup Final over the Philadelphia Flyers. To that point, North American sports wasn’t really shown much in the Southern Hemisphere, but I would soon find out that games were, oddly perhaps, widely available in Asia. I arrived in Bangkok between Game 3 and Game 4 and had made the rookie traveller’s mistake of miscalculating the time difference by a few hours while trying to pin down when Game 4 would be showing.
When I awoke in Bangkok that morning, instead of arriving at a Khoa Shan Road bar in time for the game, I got there just as Yzerman was being interviewed by Ron MacLean literally minutes after the Wings had won the Cup by sweeping the Flyers. The camera frame showed Stevie Y and MacLean, with Yzerman offering his condolences to Don Cherry, whose wife, Rose, had just died. Murphy and his trademark angular smile were soon peering out of the screen. He looked a little like someone who had crept out onto the ice from the crowd and slipped on a Red Wings jersey, or maybe it just seemed that way, because a few short months before, Murphy winning the Stanley Cup seemed just as impossible.
Murphy, Jamie Macoun, and Hal Gill all have drawn the ire of Leafs fans over the past fifteen years or so, ranging from white-hot anger to mere grumpiness at the mention of their names. And all were basically run out of town. All three were defencemen, which, given that they were playing on such bad teams when they fell out of favour, likely offers a hint of why they became the focus of everyone’s anger.
But all three also did something else when they left Toronto: they won the Stanley Cup.
It could be that there is a different form of so-called Blue and White disease, the affliction that occurs when certain players suddenly develop a higher opinion of themselves when they end up in Toronto. Perhaps this is a different strain of the same virus, one that paralyzes certain players’ abilities and is cured only when they leave town.
There has to be some explanation. I distinctly recall arriving at Maple Leaf Gardens on April 16, 1996, for a Leafs playoff game against the St. Louis Blues. The Leafs had been through a season of turmoil: Pat Burns had been fired and the little-known Nick Beverly had taken over on an interim basis. The Leafs were at the end of their time as a solid NHL team. Doug Gilmour and Wendel Clark had regressed just a hair, but more importantly their supporting cast wasn’t nearly as adept at stepping up the way they had in the two previous runs to the Campbell Conference finals. The final standings hadn’t been decided until the final game of the season a few nights earlier when the Leafs had beaten the Edmonton Oilers to move all the way up to the conference fourth seed. Heading into that game, there had been some serious questions about whether the Leafs were even going to make the playoffs. Tickets were relatively easy to come by once the final opening-round matchups were set, and I managed to scoop up a pair in the very last row of the greys for the Game 1 opener.
The pall in the arena subsided only briefly when Clark steamrolled over some poor, unfortunate Blues player not long after the puck dropped. But soon after, the Leafs looked to be just a step behind the Blues, who had Wayne Gretzky in their lineup after he had been traded there from the Los Angeles Kings about six weeks before. Gretzky put on a clinic, registering three assists and keying a 3–1 win. The home fans had difficulty accepting the loss because it was hard to face the fact their team simply wasn’t good enough after the previous playoff runs that were still fresh in their minds. And so they began searching for a scapegoat.
“Come on down, Larry Murphy.”
Before leaving on my trip, the last thoughts I had had of Murphy involved imagining trying to inflict pain on his blond head in order to stop the stress he was causing me as I watched him play for the Leafs. Granted, Murphy was