I don’t have a contact file filled with famous names. There are a few. Some I’ve known for a long time; others only recently. Still, it’s always exciting for me whenever I hear from any of them.

The first time I heard from Scotty Bowman was about five years ago. Phil Pritchard from the Hockey Hall of Fame emailed me to say that Mr. Bowman had pointed out an error I had made in his coaching record for my book Stanley Cup: 120 Years of Hockey Supremacy. It was basically little more than a typo, but I was horrified! Mistakes happen, but this one was pretty sloppy and, well, it was Scotty Bowman, the winningest coach in NHL history. He certainly had a reputation for being pretty tough with some pretty talented hockey players. How was he going to treat me?

I wrote a very apologetic note and got a very nice reply. That was about as far as it went, until a year or so later when I was deeply into working on Art Ross: The Hockey Legend Who Built the Bruins. I had just read a biography of Boston Bruins legend Dit Clapper by Stewart Richardson and Richard LeBlanc, which mentioned that Bowman and Clapper had been close when Bowman was starting out as a coach in Peterborough. So, I wrote again and asked Mr. Bowman if he’d ever heard any interesting stories from Dit Clapper about Art Ross.

Boston’s Bill Cowley was the childhood hero of future Canadiens coach Scotty Bowman.

That evening, Scotty called me at home. (Very exciting!) No, he said, he hadn’t heard any stories from Dit, but when he was working with Lynn Patrick for the St. Louis Blues, Patrick had told him some stories that he was happy to share. I was thrilled to be able to include them in the book. Scotty later read and enjoyed an advanced copy and provided a very nice “blurb” for the back cover. He’s done the same for my upcoming book The Toronto Maple Leafs: The Complete Oral History.

Scotty Bowman celebrated his 84th birthday earlier this week. Dave Stubbs wrote a very entertaining piece with Scotty on the NHL web site for a Q&A feature called Five Questions With… After I read it, I sent Scotty a short email wishing him a happy birthday and saying that I had enjoyed the answer he gave saying that Art Ross was the one hockey person from any era he would like to spend some time with.

Scotty told Dave Stubbs that he had been a Bruins fan as a boy. That might seem strange for a child growing up in the Montreal borough of Verdun, but at the time, the Maroons had just recently folded and the Canadiens were struggling through what was then an unprecedented 13-year Stanley Cup drought from 1931 to 1944. The Bruins were a perennial powerhouse who won the Stanley Cup in 1939 and 1941. In his reply to me – which I share with you here – Mr. Bowman provides a little more detail:

Thanks Eric. As a 6-year-old, I started listening on radio to a strong Boston station I got in my home town of Verdun. A man named Frank Ryan did play by play. I stayed up for the 1st period and my Dad left a note for me to read before School with all the results. Somehow, I had Bill Cowley as my idol. My Mom worked at Eaton’s and she got me a Bruins sweater with Cowley’s #10 for Christmas one year. With World War II breaking out, they used to say about Cowley [a star center]: “HE MADE MORE WINGS THAN BOEING.” 

Regards. Scotty

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, in addition to my usual busy summer working on the NHL Official Guide & Record Book (more on that next week), I’ve been working on a lot of books of my own recently. The biggest one in terms of size, time, and – hopefully! – impact is my new book for Dundurn, The Toronto Maple Leafs: The Complete Oral History.

Some of you reading this will already know about this book. Some will also have seen the original cover. But just last week, my editor, Allison Hirst, sent me the new cover. Here it is:

The original cover was somewhat similar, but had just a generic image of a hockey stick and puck. I never loved it, but it was certainly hard to think about which one player should  be on the cover. A picture of Maple Leaf Gardens struck me as a possibility, but that’s hardly the most dynamic image. This redesign happened without any input from me, but I’m very pleased with it. It’s hard not to like a smiling Bill Barilko!

It was 66 years ago this week, on Friday, August 24, 1951, that Bill Barilko and Dr. Henry Hudson took off on their ill-fated fishing trip. Two days later, on Sunday, August 26, they crashed while returning to their hometown of Timmins, Ontario. A few months earlier, Barilko had scored the Stanley Cup-winning goal against the Montreal Canadiens in overtime. The Leafs would not win the Stanley Cup again until 1962. A few weeks after that, the wreckage of Barilko’s long-lost plane was finally found. If it wasn’t a true story, it would have been too unbelievable for someone to make up.

Bill Barilko was only 24 years old when he died. He’d played just five seasons with the Maple Leafs, but had helped them win the Stanley Cup four times. Many of his former teammates would later say that Barilko had the makings of a perennial all-star or even a future Hall of Famer. He was certainly one of the hardest hitters in the NHL in his day, but despite scoring one of the most famous goals in hockey history, he was a defensive defenseman. Not a lot of those guys get the glory.

It’s impossible to know what would have become of Bill Barilko if he’d never taken that fishing trip. The truth is, when I was researching the 1951 Cup Final for my book, I came across a couple of indications that the Leafs may actually have been thinking about trading Barilko … or at least that the Canadiens might have been considering trading for him:

Globe and Mail, Toronto, April 23, 1951. Page 21.

Toronto Daily Star, April 24, 1951. Page 18.

I don’t actually get into those rumors in my book, but I think that even if you know the history of the Maple Leafs up and down and backwards and forwards, you’ll still find plenty of stories you don’t know. I’m really thrilled with how it’s all come together. It was more like editing a huge documentary film than writing a book. I’ll be posting an even more obvious “commercial” for it in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, the publicists at Dundurn tell me it’s becoming increasingly important these days for books to get a good spike of online pre-order sales before they’re released. Pre-orders signal to bookstores that they need to stock up on the title. This can make a huge difference to overall sales. So if you had already been thinking about recommending or buying The Toronto Maple Leafs: The Complete Oral History, please consider pre-ordering a copy at Amazon or Indigo or wherever you like to buy your books. Oh, and don’t be shy about ordering any of my other books through these links either!

We’re coming up on the anniversary (although the 81st is a little inelegant) of the longest game in NHL history. At 8:30 pm on the evening of March 24, 1936, the Montreal Maroons and the Detroit Red Wings faced off at the Montreal Forum. There wouldn’t be a winner (there wouldn’t even be a goal!) until almost 2:30 am the following morning. Nearly six full hours of hockey were played that night; 176:30 by the game clock, with 116:30 of that coming during six overtime periods. The series was a best-three-of-five, but the Maroons and Red Wings played nearly three full games on that evening alone!

In Montreal, the defending Stanley Cup champion Maroons were favoured to defeat the Red Wings and go on to win the Stanley Cup again. Not surprisingly, Detroit coach and GM Jack Adams felt otherwise. “We were the best team over the regular season and proved it by getting more points than any other club in either [division],” said Adams. “The playoffs will merely confirm this fact. We have the best team Detroit ever had and this year we should be good enough to win the Cup.”

Ad in the Montreal Gazette, March 24, 1936.

It would turn out that Adams was right, but in truth, the Maroons and Detroit were very evenly matched. The teams had nearly identical records (Detroit was 24-16-8; Maroons 22-16-10) and fairly comparable scoring statistics. Still, nobody could have predicted what happened in game one. Detroit goalie Normie Smith turned aside all 90 shots he faced. His Red Wings teammates managed only 68 shots on the Maroons’ Lorne Chabot (some sources say 67), but Mud Bruneteau fired the one that mattered. As Elmer Ferguson wrote in the Montreal Herald the next day:

At twenty-five minutes past two this morning, a bushy-haired blonde veteran of hockey, Hector Kilrea, a sturdy, scarlet-clad form wearing the white emblem of Detroit Red Wings, went pounding tirelessly down the battle-scarred, deep-cut Forum ice, trying to pilot a puck that was bobbling crazily over the rough trail, almost out of control.

It looked like another of the endless unfinished plays – when suddenly, in shot the slim form of a player, who through this long, weary tide of battle that ebbed and flowed had been almost unnoticed. He swung his stick at the bobbling puck, the little black disc straightened away, shot over the foot of Lorne Chabot, bit deeply into the twine of the Montreal Maroon cage. And so Modere Bruneteau, clerk in a Winnipeg grain office, leaped to fame as the player who ended the longest game on professional hockey record.

Story segment and advertisement from the Montreal Gazette, March 25, 1936.

But as of a few days ago, the game between the Maroons and Red Wings has lost its distinction as the longest in professional hockey history. Norwegian pro teams Storhamar Dragons and Sparta Warriors faced off in Hamar, Norway, at 6 pm on March 12 and didn’t have a winner until 2:32 am on Monday the 13th. After eight-and-a-half hours of hockey – 217:42 on the game clock – Joakim Jensen scored to give the Dragons a 2-1 victory in eight overtime periods. The win gave Storhamar a 3-2 lead in the series, but Sparta bounced back to take the series in seven.

Screen shots of the winning goal and celebration from Storhamar’s 2-1 overtime victory.

Still, as marathon hockey games go, the Maroons and Red Wings and Storhamar and Sparta have nothing on the gang of kids I grew up with on Argonne Crescent.

North York Mirror clips from Zweig family photo album. (That’s me inside the oval.)

Despite what the caption on the photo says – we got mentioned on the radio too – our goal was not to raise money for charity (although a few relatives did donate to the United Jewish Appeal in honour of our game). We wanted to get into the Guinness Book of Records!

The story that accompanies the photo says that we’d been told the record for playing road hockey was 8 hours. I do remember that we thought it was … but I have no idea who told us, or why we believed it! As I recall, a few weeks later, there was a story about a group of college kids that played ball hockey in a gym for about 100 hours. But, hey, they had squads of players coming and going throughout those four days. We were just nine kids aged 7 to 11 who all had to go to school the next day.

We made it through 12 straight hours. Kept score and everything. The white team, including my brothers David and Jonathan, our cousin Bobby Freedman, Benji Rusonik and Jeffrey Kirsh, beat the Blue team of me, Alan Rusonik, Joel Kirsh and Howard Hamat 250-228.

As my brother Jonathan once said, “at least we didn’t fall asleep like Bobby and Cindy Brady trying to break the teeter-totter record … and if you look in the Guinness Book of Records you’ll find us there – under dumbest kids who ever thought they’d break a record.”