Retirement goals
Leafs superfan Mike Wilson is determined to be in the stands for every regular season game this year, home or away. While he’s at it, he wants to find out: Why are the team’s fans so loyal?
For Toronto Maple Leafs superfan Mike Wilson, it’s all about sharing the story.
In San Jose, Calif., there was the father and son from New Brunswick who were on a multi-year quest to visit every arena in which the Leafs play while they’re on the road. Then there was the young Vancouver woman in Winnipeg who decided to go to every rink the Leafs play on but could only afford to go to one every year. Her tally so far: three.
Just two of the hundreds of stories from Leafs fans that Wilson has collected during his quest to watch, in person, all 82 regular season games the team plays this year across the continent.
“What I want to find out is, what is it about this team that hasn’t won the Stanley Cup for over 50 years that makes fans so passionate,” said Wilson, 64, seated in his breathtaking 1,000square-foot museum of Maple Leafs memorabilia in the basement of his Toronto home.
Surrounded by cabinets displaying dozens of game-worn jerseys, sticks, autographs, programs and other Leafs ephemera — now a much smaller collection following a recent sale of more than 2,000 items to the Museum of Canadian History in Ottawa — that he collected over 55 years from across the continent, Wilson says his love of hockey started when he was a boy in the ’50s and ’60s on his local ice rinks. Growing up in Scarborough near Pharmacy and Lawrence Aves. meant no shortage of both hockey and pleasure-skating rinks.
“I became obsessed with the game of hockey. It was everything,” recalled Wilson, who has been dubbed the “ultimate Leafs fan” by ESPN.
Like many kids at the time, that obsession grew to include all things Maple Leafs — cards, pictures, posters, programs and newspaper articles — thanks in part to the Saturday night ritual of sitting down with his father to watch Hockey Night in Canada.
“There was hockey, watching the Leafs and school. That was it.”
But unlike most of his peers, Wilson never lost the collector gene. In the ensuing years, he scoured classified ads, auctions and magazines, took out ads in newspapers and attended countless collector shows to amass a collection that would make any serious Blue and White fan teary-eyed — or green with envy. In 2006, he completed his basement shrine, complete with two turnstiles from Maple Leaf Gardens and the team’s dressing room door from the same venue, not to mention a bar, home theatre seating, four TVs and a screen for watching games. Wilson calls it “the Room.”
“All I wanted was just a place to enjoy my pieces, have a TV, a beer fridge and invite friends over and watch games, whether it was baseball, football or hockey,” Wilson said. “Quite frankly, when I did the room, I didn’t think anybody cared.”
But as word spread about what the Room contained, Wilson and his wife, Debra Thuet, began receiving calls from charitable groups hoping to use the space for events. (The couple has helped raise millions of dollars for charity over the past decade.)
Wilson also heard from collectors — some hoping to sell an item, some inquiring about the value of a piece of merchandise. But Wilson noticed that most people who reached out had a personal story about the Leafs or hockey in general.
“They’d tell me a hockey story, they’d try to offer me something for sale, they’d tell me about something they’ve seen or something they’ve collected,” Wilson said. “It’s just fans engaging. We’re just all trading stories.”
The idea of following the team to every arena to watch every game, no matter the city, nor the team’s standings, came to Wilson several years ago, he says, but due to work commitments it was simply too difficult to plan. He retired almost three years ago from a career in investment banking and decided last March that this was the season.
“There was never going to be a perfect season,” he said.
Now, at every game, Wilson has his mobile phone camera at the ready to record interviews with Leafs fans he encounters. He’s calling it the Ultimate Road Trip.
He says he views the collecting of these stories as a third phase of his life. First, there was the accumulation of his Leafs memorabilia.
Then there was the use of the collection to raise money for charity. Now he wants to find out what the love for this team is all about.
“There’s no better way than to go out and speak to people in Leafs Nation and find out their stories,” he said.
Wilson said he is currently de- ciding what to do with the interview footage he’s filmed and is planning a book of the stories he’s collecting.
The most inspiring tale he’s come across so far? Wilson recounts being at Scotiabank Arena for opening night when he met a man in his 40s who was attending his first game ever.
The man, also named Mike, recounted that he and his father used to watch Leafs games together on TV. If one of them missed the game, he would call the other the next morning to ask the score. When Mike’s father died, his last words to his son were, “What was the score?”
“Here is this big guy telling this wonderful story, tears streaming down his face, and I’m holding the little phone on the other side and you’re trying not to cry yourself,” Wilson recalled. “(Deb and I) came home and I said, ‘how do we top that story?’ I mean, that’s as good as it gets.”