Excerpt: The Series for the Ages, f

By 1993 the Montreal Canadiens had fallen on times so hard that they never came up in conversation when it worked around to contenders for the Stanley Cup. “The funeral parlour on St. Catherine” I called the Forum, always to the hearty guffaws of Toronto fans. A little cold-blooded, looking back on it today, but then again it’s a cold game and a cold business.

Th e Canadiens had been in the wilderness during the ’80s, undone by a goaltender just as they had been in the ’70s. It was Bunny Larocque in the previous era, but in the ’80s and into the early ’90s it was a crooked-nosed fellah named Patrick Roy. Crooked-nosed? It looked like Picasso had rendered him in charcoal. “He can tell you how his ear wax smells,” I wrote of him as a rookie. In fact, his nose was so brutally distorted that it had an adverse effect on his ability to see a puck, never mind stop it.

You would think by his princely wages that he would have some type of plastic surgery. On that count he fought the Canadiens’ management who were insisting he get it straightened. “My mother has the same nez as me,” he told me. “I could not do such a thing to disrespect my own family.”

In fact, he was extremely sensitive about his looks — after heavy collisions in his crease or melees on the ice that he jumped into, Roy would unmask in the dressing room and look in the mirror just to make sure that his proboscis wasn’t knocked properly in line by a stray elbow or first. So it was that the Canadiens suffered for yet another generation, this time as a result of the overly proud netminder. Time and time again, with games on the line, a puck would enter Roy’s blind spot and only come into his view when it was tickling the twine.

So it was a complete shock that the Canadiens made the Cup final in 1993, 26 years after the last Toronto-Montreal final and many a year since the rivals even met in a playoff series. Life in Montreal came to a complete standstill. In Toronto, as ever, nothing was budging.

For my readers it evoked my classic work of the early period. For the sports editor it was a reader-

ship driver. Every Toronto Telegram we could print was promptly sold, and there developed a healthy market for second-hand copies. The most delighted of my readers was my sports editor, as Montreal was easily driveable. The junior man on the beat, a photographer and the ancient Ted Reeve were able to pile into my trusty Corvair.

The final came after an arresting semifinal. Literally. The Maple Leafs clinched a berth in the Cup final with an overtime win over the Kings in Game 6 of the third round of the playoffs. Kent Manderville scored the OT winner, keeping alive Toronto’s tradition of unheralded sudden-death heroes. But as memorable was Manderville’s end-to-end dash and his clinical beating of Kelly Hrudey were, the image that a mention of the

game conjures up for fans was Wayne Gretzky, Kerry Fraser and Bruce McNall being led out of the Fabulous Forum in handcuffs by

gendarmes at the conclusion of the night’s hostilities. Gretzky was booked on assault with a deadly weapon for a vicious slash that opened Wendel Clark for three dozen stitches. They often talked about Gretzky’s ability to wield a stick with aplomb, but, truth be told, the most impressive feat of his feats that I witnessed was that night at the scene and moment of the crime. A hush fell over a bunch of season-ticketholding Benihana sushi chefs sitting in

front of my bench in the auxiliary press box — professional envy, I guess. Fraser called no penalty on the play and would later unconvincingly claim that his hair was in his eyes. He was charged with criminal facilitation. For his part, McNall was nabbed by an undercover cop for trying to unload a shoebox full of vintage Honus Wagner baseball cards outside the arena.

The sordid end of the Kings series was behind the Maple Leafs when they arrived home. Game 2 of the Cup final was memorable for Montreal coach Jacques Demers asking for a stick measurement on Wendel Clark’s weapon in the dying minutes, Montreal trailing by a goal. Any shot at tying the game went out the window when the officials determined that the curve was as kosher as Schwartz’s smoked meat. The hockey gods aren’t kind to those who bring the game into disrepute, and so it was in this series. After this embarrassment the Canadiens didn’t score another goal and Demers spent hour after hour talking to himself, mostly because he couldn’t find anyone who’d listen to him. That coach’s fate was a sharp contrast to the Leafs’ maestro. For the sainted Coach Burns the series against the Habs offered a chance to reconnect with the folks in his old home province — indeed, the alumni of his bicycle-safety programs staged an impromptu rally around the Forum when the Leafs (and we, the staff of the Telegram) trekked up the highway. Yolanda and the Bassett kids demonstrated a bit of the venerated Mr. Ballard’s flair with their decision to roll out the Cadillacs for the drive up to Montreal for Game 3. At that point Toronto led the series two games to none and a sweep was a foregone conclusion. So it was that the Leafs took their places in the convertibles and cruised up the 401at a top speed of 15 m.p.h. so that the heroes could wave to the adoring thousands standing on the soft shoulder. Alas, the series was something of a disappointment. The Canadiens, as ever, were thoroughly out-manned. It would have been too much to have expected the likes of Lyle Odelein so much as being able to lay a glove on Doug Gilmour and Wendel when they poured through the Canadiens’ end of the rink. Was there any way that a spent Denis Savard had anything to offer? Plainly no. A duel between Félix Potvin and Patrick Roy? We all knew how that one was going to come out. The Canadiens were an unlikely lot to make it to a final, having a roster of other teams’ castoffs, malcontents, party boys and people whom you wouldn’t want to associate with. Jean Béliveau let everyone know what he thought of this lot of riff- raff — I saw him on the parade route, pulled over to the side of the road in his Citroën, beeping his horn. He arrived at the Forum for Game 3 wearing a Maple Leaf lapel pin. Game 4 he appeared wearing a Maple Leaf tie clip that Yolanda gave to him at a considerable discount.

In the wake of Game 4, I wrote: “It was the series to end all series and if the game of hockey were to cease today then it would have gone out on the highest note. This Toronto team exceeds the sum of all its parts and all its contributors in nearest proximity to its merciless function.

These weary old eyes have seen the glory, once again, but I cannot believe that they will ever see anything quite like the Leafs circa ’93. Ted Reeve upbraided me, saying that the Leafs of ’93 were “just one of the greatest teams ever.” Poor Ted, at 91, he had lost his one last marble. His greatest fault had been that he lived in the past. When I dropped him off at the hospice for elderly sportswriters, my eyes grew damp, I’ll admit. I felt bad asking him for gas money.

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