Legends Of the Leafs
Toronto's 200 Greatest Hockey Heroes
by
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"Eight minutes and forty-three seconds remain and the puck is sailing down the ice. Savard...and Peter Stastny back for it...Potvin takes it, ahead to Lanny McDonald, to Marcel Dionne, to Sittler! Sittler with a drive!!...Right in on goal, a shot!...SCORES!!!" bellowed play-by-play announcer Bill Hewitt into millions of TV sets across North America and indeed the world as Team Canada laid claim to the inaugural Canada Cup championship in September of 1976. Darryl Sittler had faked a slap shot on a partial breakaway, skated around the fallen netminder Vladimir Dzurilla, who had gone for the deke, and deposited the puck into the open cage. All that could be heard for many minutes after that was the bedlam of the Montreal Forum.
Those were heady days for hockey fans all around the globe as the top six hockey nations had sent all their best players to Montreal and Ottawa to prove just who was the top hockey country for once and for all. The debate had raged ever since Canada's narrow escape from the 1972 Summit Series with its reputation somewhat tarnished but still intact. Next to that showdown with the Soviets four years earlier, this Canada Cup remains the most important international hockey tournament ever played. After the historic goal at 11:33 of overtime broke the 4-4 tie to sweep the Cup final 2-0 from Czechoslovakia, it was a time of national pride and euphoria for all Canadian hockey fans. For fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs, it was especially nice to see one of their team's stars emerge the hero after suffering through the lean years of the early 1970s.
Teamed up with such luminaries as Dionne, Bobby Orr, Bobby Hull, Phil Esposito, Guy Lafleur, Denis Potvin, Gilbert Perreault and many others, it is still amazing that it was the famed # 27 of the Toronto Maple Leafs, previously worn by the great Frank Mahovlich, that provided the margin of victory.
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About the Book
This book probably never would have been written without the owners' lockout which led to the cancelled 2004-05 season. Missing the fastest game in the world and my team, the Maple Leafs, I instead spent many cold and quiet winter nights last season wondering just who were the greatest Leaf players of all-time. What started out as a search for a method of ranking the players evolved into a need to justify the results by organizing all the biographical and statistical data into one place and this is what came out of the research. Interlacing many action segments with the facts, this is an attempt to make sports bios more entertaining and scintillating, as well as to illuminate the great moments in the history of the team. Dating back to 1927, Toronto's team has a rich history integral to that of the NHL and this epistle is a must for all hockey fans, not just fans of the Leafs. So come read about the legendary names of both the past and the present such as Johnny Bower, Busher Jackson, Dave Keon, The Big M, Ed Belfour, Bill Barilko and many, many more.
About the Author
I grew up in rural southwesten Ontario a huge fan of the Maple Leafs since 1960. After studying mathematics and attending the University of Waterloo, I lived and worked in Kitchener for ten years. In the early 1980s I moved to British Columbia and lived in Kelowna, in the beautiful Okanagan Valley, for almost 20 years and earned a diploma at Okanagan University. I now live in Calgary where I work in the oil exploration industry. Like all hockey fans, I was relieved that the new CBA was finally settled and can't wait for the 2005-06 season to start.