The puck stops here — or does it?
The ever-growing legend of Bill Barilko, his overtime goal in 1951 and that puck
For much of his life, the puck sat on the mantel of his family’s Hamilton home and he had no idea why. It was just a puck.
When dad wasn’t looking, he and his buddies would even grab it and use it for their own games.
We would take it out of the trophy and slapshot it around the basement, ” Dan Donohue says.
At least until the day he decided to ask his father what the big deal was. They sat and listened to the tale of Bill Barilko and the 1951 Stanley Cup and all the other stuff that forged a Toronto Maple Leafs legend and inspired the Tragically Hip’s 50 Mission Cap. And of the puck that ended that game. This puck.
The story he was told goes like this. His grandfather, Jeremiah Donohue, was a hockey fanatic. Every Wednesday and Saturday, he’d take clients or friends or his kids to the Maple Leafs games with his four season tickets where they’d sit 10 or 12 rows up in the reds.
For Game 5 of the finals that year — 69 years ago Tuesday — it was Harry’s turn. Years later, he’d become Dan’s dad. But, that evening, the Cathedral High School student and his own father sat and cheered and watched as the game went into overtime. Then, Barilko chipped the puck past Montreal Canadiens goaltender Gerry McNeil 2:53 into the extra period.
In the bedlam that ensued, a 16year-old Harry turned to Jeremiah with a question.
“He asked, ‘Can I go down and fetch the puck out of the net?’ ” Donohue recounts. “My grandfather said, ‘Yeah, go ahead. Just ask the usher.’ ”
Sounds crazy today, but the usher said go ahead. Harry climbed the boards — there was no glass in that area — retrieved the puck and came running back. Days later, his father had a trophy made to hold it and that’s where it stayed. Until Harry’s death in 2013.
That’s the story as told by Harry, which would have stood as an unchallenged family legend had it stayed there. It didn’t. And that’s where things got complicated.
A few years after his dad passed away in 2013, Donohue started researching the puck. He arranged a visit with Hockey Hall of Fame curator Phil Pritchard and another historian from the place.
“I said, ‘I have the puck,’ ” Donohue told them. “They said, ‘Sorry, we have the puck.’ ”
Long before 1988 when Pritchard joined the hall, referee Bill Chadwick, who’d done the game, apparently gave a puck to then curator Lefty Reid and said it was the one. Having no reason to doubt him, the hall always assumed it was authentic.
“All of a sudden, apparently, there are two pucks,” Pritchard says.
Facing a conundrum, Donohue started digging.
The hall’s puck had a different logo from the one he held. This should be easy, he thought. Find a photo of that moment, see if one matches and there’s your answer.
He didn’t need to go that far. He quickly discovered the one in the hall was a Spalding puck with a white logo. The trouble was, the NHL had stopped using that brand in 1942. His was an Art Ross brand puck with a yellow emblem that was used in the league from ’50 to ’58. Case closed.
Actually, not exactly. Pritchard says there were times the NHL ran out of pucks and used older models. So it was no guarantee of anything.
Fair enough, but the one in the hall was chipped and banged up.
“They were only two minutes into the overtime when that goal was scored,” Donahue says. “You wouldn’t expect it to be that beat up.”
Case closed now? No. Some dings and welts are hardly conclusive evidence of anything. So he kept digging with help from a nephew. And brought Paul Patskou into the search.
Patskou is widely considered the best hockey video historian out there. In this case, he was also a skeptic. He’d never heard of Donohue and certainly had never heard this story.
“Who are you going to believe?” he asks. “The Hall of Fame or some guy who says his dad went on the ice to grab it?”
He decided to check it out anyway. The broadcast reels from that game showed nothing that would bolster the Donohues’ case. But Patskou knew the Leafs had started filming their own games with another camera in 1945. And he had those tapes.
“As the players are going off the ice, I see this figure (in a suit) going the other way,” he says sounding like a man studying the Zapruder Film. “Maybe there is something to this.”
The man on the film fit Donohue’s father’s build at that time. Tall, slim, the right hair cut, the correct hair colour. Suddenly Patskou was intrigued.
There was still one giant problem, though. On the broadcast tapes, what looks like a puck is clearly visible in front of the net after the goal. Yet Donohue’s dad had told him the puck he’d grabbed was inside the net leaning on an angle.
If the puck was in front of the net, dad’s story falls apart. This prompted a desperate trip by Donohue to the City of Toronto archives in search of any photo of the scene from a different angle. Miraculously, one was found. He bought a negative and blew it up.
There, inside the net, was the puck. Leaning on an angle.
“It fit to a T how my dad described it,” he says.
And the logo? Looked the same as the one on his.
Bingo.
Does that all prove it’s the real Bill Barilko puck?
“With everything Paul has done and everything Dan has done ... how do you argue that point?” Pritchard says. “Not that we want to argue that point anyway. We just want to preserve it.”
That’s not an issue. Today the puck sits in a safe-deposit box, coming out only occasionally. Soon it will join an exhibit put on by Leafs super-collector Mark Fera with the fuselage of the plane in which Barilko died shortly after scoring the goal.
Will it ever go up for auction? Heaven knows it would be worth a small fortune.
Donahue says no largely because of some very specific instructions he received from dad while Harry was lying on his deathbed.
“Whatever you do, Dan,” he remembers his dad saying in his final days, “don’t sell that puck.”
Scott Radley is a Hamilton-based sports columnist at the Spectator. Reach him via email at sradley@thespec.com.