Lance Abel - Welcome to Maple Leaf Gardens: Photographs and Memories from Canada’s Most Famous Arena

This book is dedicated to my wife, Jane.

For years, I worked two jobs, leaving the house at 5:30 a.m. for Chas Abel Photo. Many weeknights and weekends, Id shoot my sports photography, not getting home until late. Jane spent many nights at home with our children, Dave and Katie, including nearly every Saturday night during the hockey season. When friends were going to parties on weekends, and I was shooting, Jane was at home. Never a complaint. She knew I loved my job.

For the last six years it has been Janes time. Despite major cancer surgery, she has pursued her love of triathlon, and we have spent many weekends on the circuit during the summer. Her pinnacle to date has been the World Sprint Triathlon Championship in Auckland, New Zealand, where we went in October 2012 . She placed seventh in her age group and was the top Canadian. We are off to the World Championships in London, England, in September 2013 .

From surgery seven years ago, she has accomplished a great deal and, best of all, we are doing it together. I am so proud of her!

Graig Abel

To Katie

The wait is always worth it and the best is yet to come.

Lance Hornby

FOREWORD

The very first time I walked into Maple Leaf Gardens was in 1967 and I couldnt stop looking up.

Our London Knights bus had pulled into the side entrance for a Sunday game against the junior Marlies, in the same building where all my heroes played. Id grown up in St. Jacobs, Ontario, watching the Leafs on Hockey Night in Canada, when the telecast for p.m. games didnt start until almost the second period.

I thought I knew the place so well from TV, but it was much different when I was actually inside. The vastness to the roofabout storeys at its highest pointand how far the rows of red, blue, green and grey seats extended was stunning. I had never been in a place that big. We had to dress in a small, cold roomit was later converted to the players wives loungebut as hockey players we didnt care. We had made it to Maple Leaf Gardens.

I loved it there, and one Saturday night I joined a bunch of London teammates just to watch the Leafs and see the building with the stands full. We were in the standing room area behind the reds. It was incredible to see a game from that vantage point, with all the bright TV lights, the vivid colours of the sweaters and to be right among the fans. No one would have recognized me back then with my brush cut.

I was fortunate to be drafted by the Leafs eighth overall in 1970 and will always remember my first training camp at the Gardens. General manager Jim Gregory took me into the Leafs dressing room, which was an experience in itself, and showed me my stall. Hanging there was a No. sweater. I felt so flattered, knowing right away the history of that number, worn by one of the most famous Leafs, Frank Mahovlich.

It took me a few games to score at the Gardens, but my first goal was on November , 1970 , against Don Smokey MacLeod of the Red Wings. Earlier in that game was my first Hockey Night in Canada interview in the studio right across the hall from our dressing room. They brought you right in off the ice, sweating and panting. Someone tossed me a towel, just like Id seen on TV as a boy. Here was my big moment: at the Gardens, on camera.

Host Ward Cornell welcomed me and joked that good things sometimes happened to rookies when they came on the show with him. Later in the game, I scored, with assists from Mike Walton and Jim McKenny. You can see me on the old highlight, going straight to the net afterward to collect the puck. I later went to the Hockey Hall of Fame and was able to get a copy of the game sheet from that night, which I framed along with the puck.

There was no other place youd want to play than the Gardens. From the traditional opening ceremonies when the th Highlanders came out with their bagpipes, to the team family Christmas parties with Johnny Bower as Santa Claus, to the excitement of playoff time, you were thrilled to come through the doors.

The great thing about the Gardens was that we practised there a lot, too. I watched it change from the inside so many times through my seasons with the Leafs. There were concerts, wrestling cards, roller derby and many other events. When they were adding more seats and private boxes, wed be on the ice while workers were hammering and welding. It seemed that life around there never stopped moving.

But it was also the people, the characters, who made it such an interesting place. Smitty the dressing room helper, Cigar Freddie the maintenance man, the workers who sold popcorn, Bill Woan in the special ticket office, the guys in the parking lot, the ladies who ran the dinerand Graig Abel with his camera.

And, of course, there was the owner, Harold Ballard. When you were playing, you could sense him watching from his bunker, usually with King Clancy beside him. Everyone had this impression of him as a mean owner, but he was very good to me. In appreciation of my -point night against Boston in 1976 , he presented my family and me with a beautiful antique silver tea service.

I also had the honour of meeting Conn Smythe, who built the Gardens and had put the motto Defeat Does Not Rest Lightly On Their Shoulders in our dressing room.

Before the Gardens closed in 1999 , I was able to get some of the seats from the reds, greens and golds and put them in my cottage, along with a few pictures of the place. Im happy the exterior of the building has been preserved and part of it is still being used for hockey. I know many people from out of town still want to go there when they visit Toronto.

Enjoy this trip back to those memorable days at Church and Carlton.

Darryl Sittler

Toronto, November 2012

INTRODUCTION by Graig Abel

Whenever Im at my cottage and were raising a beer or two as the sun sets, someone asks me to tell a story about Maple Leaf Gardens.

People figure that as the official photographer of the Maple Leafs for years, I must have great memories of their Carlton Street years.

And because so many people grew up with the Gardens, the tales flow easily. Everyone relates, everyone can identify with the characters and the settingand usually have a personal experience to add.

It makes me think how fortunate I am to have spent almost three decades in the middle of the action, with a camera to record the story. What made it the best job in the world was that I was a Leafs fan, paid to be at every game with a front-row view. I also had free run of their home, the most famous entertainment arena in Canada. Talk about lucky.

Every aspiring Leaf has to start somewhere. For me, it was the Clarkson Paperweights team in Mississauga.

My parents signed me up as a five-year-old in the mid 1950 s, with practices in the old Oakville Arena at on Wednesdays. Thankfully that was p.m., not a.m., as it was a fair drive to get there. By about the second practice, Id been sent to the equivalent of the minors on the Paperweights B team. I wasnt very good, but I sure loved getting on the ice and kept trying to get better. Eventually, I would make it as high as Junior B, as a left winger with the Streetsville Derbys, and later playing coach of my own senior team.