Toronto Maple Leafs

Today, it is a source of derision as much as pride. The Maple Leafs haven't won a Stanley Cup since 1967?

If the prairies knew a drought like this, there would be no farms left in the country.

Fourteen different organizations have been crowned during those 40 dry years in Toronto, including such alien hockey destinations as Carolina and Tampa Bay.

Carolina and Tampa? In 1967, when those good ol' crew-cut boys in blue raised the Cup for the fourth time in the '60s, champions from the planet Mars would have seemed as likely as Lord Stanley's bowl on Tobacco Road or the Tampa beaches.

Tonight, though, the Leafs jokes subside.

Tonight the pride wins out in a celebration of faded Leafs glory and lost innocence.

Tonight, across the nation, goosebumps will run down spines when Dave Keon, the mighty little centre who played his heart out for the Leafs, and had his heart broken by the Leafs, joins his 1967 teammates and steps onto the Air Canada Centre ice to mend a feud that has simmered for three decades.

No one represented the Leafs better than Keon, at home, on the road or in the vivid imagination of a child. Legendary Toronto hockey writer Frank Orr used to joke that in a Leafs road game, the three star selections were set in advance -- Keon and the two opposing goalies, in whatever order.

Hardly an imposing figure at 5-9 and 165 pounds from Noranda, Que., Keon could skate a river, his head up, his posture perfect. Though never a prolific scorer, Keon was once considered by many in Toronto to be the quintessential Maple Leaf; the one Leaf who played in a young fan's dreams. Typical of his style, he scored just three goals and five assists in Toronto's 12 playoff games in 1967, and yet Keon deservedly won the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP for his relentless checking and ultimate presence.

Months later, Keon had a contract disagreement with a shark named Harold Ballard, just beginning to wrestle the club ownership from the Smythe family.

After he played out his career in the World Hockey Association and with the NHL Hartford Whalers, Keon and the Leafs made some attempts at reconciliation, but he couldn't get over the hurt caused when Toronto declined to follow the Montreal Canadiens' example of retiring the sweater numbers of their stars.

Ace Bailey (6) and Bill Barilko (5) are the only Leafs with retired numbers.

In the Damien Cox and Gord Stellick book '67: The Maple Leafs, Their Sensational Victory and the End of an Empire, Keon called the Leafs' system of "honouring" numbers "a chickenshit way to do things."

Keon said he was embarrassed for legends like Syl Apps and Ted Kennedy who went before him, and had to see their numbers remain in circulation.

"I'm embarrassed for them all," Keon said. "I confronted (then Leafs president) Ken Dryden and said, 'Do you think the Montreal Canadiens would just honour the Rocket's number?'"

Dryden's own No. 29 was recently retired by the Habs.

Keon's number has not yet been "honoured" by Toronto. Perhaps tonight's ceremony will be the first step in having No. 14 properly retired.

Even though the Leafs roster was creaking with age, the demarcation point wasn't as obvious then as it would soon become -- that the franchise would so rapidly decline and decay. This was, after all, the Leafs' fourth Stanley Cup of the 1960s, including three straight from 1962-64.

The assumption was that there would be plenty more, if not immediately, then soon enough. In the days of the NHL's Original Six teams, the Cup had generally alternated between Toronto and Montreal, in a two-for-the Habs, one-for-the-Leafs kind of way, with an occasional detour to Detroit.

No one knew what to make of this new animal called expansion, a doubling of the league to 12 teams from six, on the horizon for 1967-68.

If only Leaf Nation had envisioned how precious an event the 1967 Cup season was to become, it might have celebrated more heartily.

"I think there was some sense in the city that this was just another Cup," says winger Ron Ellis, at 22 one of the few youngsters in the 1967 lineup.

"Leaf fans were a little spoiled at that time. It was their fourth Cup in six years, and so it didn't spark quite the same celebration as the first Cup in the '60s.

"But we knew it was special because it was the end of an era," says Ellis.

"Whoever won that Cup was going to have a place in history as the last champion of the six-team league."

A director of public affairs at the Hockey Hall of Fame, Ellis points with pride to the fact that 10 of those '67 Leafs have been enshrined in the Hall.

And yet, most were declared over the hill in the spring of '67.

"We weren't expected to win," Ellis says. "We had a lot of adversity during the season.

"It was a miracle win by a chiselled, veteran team with a few kids following along."

The hockey story alone makes the '67 Stanley Cup special. The story beyond the action makes it stand alone as the last season of hockey innocence.

The average salary of the 1967 Leafs, with such names as Keon, Frank Mahovlich, Terry Sawchuk, Johnny Bower, Allan Stanley and Tim Horton, was $20,000. Canadian currency. Mahovlich, the one true superstar of the group, earned $32,000. The heroes of the day were paid ordinary sums and had lives much like the fans who adored them.

Ten years after he joined the team, Leafs captain George Armstrong bought a $22,000 home in Leaside and needed two mortgages to pay if off.

Today's NHL rooms are a United Nations of millionaires.

The '67 Leafs roster was 100- per-cent Canadian.

Change came hard.

Expansion upon expansion, a new WHA league and a feisty group called the NHL Players' Association would turn Canada's game into a cold business, with a strike in the 1990s and a lockout a decade later.

All the while, the fairytale that was the Leafs' image under Conn Smythe was being exposed and eradicated in the Ballard era. Within seven years of the 1967 Cup win, two of its biggest stars, goaltender Terry Sawchuk and the powerful defenceman, Horton, would be dead, under terrible circumstances. Ballard went to jail on fraud charges, and laughed about his fancy dinners while incarcerated.

Stories would also develop, though they took decades to be fully disclosed, about a sex abuse scandal inside a Maple Leaf Gardens arena that was a hockey shrine to millions of fans in Canada, with Foster Hewitt giving the weekly sermon.

In 1999, the Gardens was closed, and Keon declined to attend the ceremony to mark its passing.

Of Toronto's 13 Cup wins, second only to Montreal's 23, the 1967 championship was perhaps the least likely.

The '67 Leafs were an old team; the average age was 31, ancient in the years before modern nutrition and training. Players routinely retired by the age of 35. Some of the '67 Leafs were just getting going by then.

Like so many other years in the 1960s and '70s, this should have been Chicago's time.

When fans talk of Toronto's miracle run of '67, it is usually with the archrival Canadiens in mind -- the team Toronto vanquished in the final.

The bigger upset took place in the semifinals, against the loaded, first-place Chicago Black Hawks. Their slick centre, Stan Mikita, was in his prime, having just won his third scoring title in four years. The year he didn't win, in 1965-66, he came second to teammate Bobby Hull. Mikita had Kenny Wharram and Doug Mohns on his wings to form the top scoring line in the game. Not far behind was the trio of Hull with Chico Maki and centre Phil Esposito, before he popped off and went on to fame and fortune in Boston.

The Hawks, Cup winners in 1961 (and still awaiting an encore), scored the most goals in the NHL in 1966-67 and yielded the fewest.

"They were looking to create their own dynasty," Ellis says.

By comparison, the third-place Leafs had mediocrity stamped all over them like baggage ink. They gave up more goals than they scored during the regular season, with 204 for and 211 against. During one horrible stretch, they lost 10 straight games. Five different goaltenders tended Toronto's net that season, before 42-year-old Bower and the 37-year-old Sawchuk settled in, brilliantly, for the serious games.

Sawchuk carried the load while Bower suffered through a painful groin injury, playing in just four games.

Remarkable little twists of circumstance guided the Leafs to the their destiny.

The Black Hawks, easily the more skilled and fluid team, were sabotaged in their own rink by a figure skating show that left puddles on the slushy Stadium ice -- like an extra player for Toronto.

Punch Imlach, the Leafs' fiery head coach, fell ill during the latter part of the season and his assistant, King Clancy, lightheartedly carried the team to a 7-1-2 record in Punch's absence.

(Imlach returned to close out the season with a more modest 6-5 record over the final games).

One of Clancy's strokes of genius as interim coach was to assemble a line of Pete Stemkowski between Jim Pappin and Bob Pulford. The trio contributed 13 goals and 38 combined points in the two playoff rounds, and the big Stemkowski ran roughshod over defencemen.

Another set of underdogs, Larry Hillman and Marcel Pronovost, were pillars on Toronto's defence in the 12 games.

The Leafs shut down the high-powered Hawks to win in six, before doing the same to Jean Beliveau and the Canadiens. Habs coach Toe Blake had predicted a seven-game series after Montreal lost on home ice in Game 5.

Not this time. On May 2, 1967, it was all over. In another classic finale by Sawchuk, the Leafs finished the Canadiens 3-1 as Armstrong scored into an empty net.

Leafs fans, dressed in shirts, ties and jackets, having paid $1.50 to $7 for Game 6 tickets, looked on as the Leafs' bench emptied in joy. Stemkowski grabbed the famous fedora off the head of coach Imlach and threw it in the air.

Armstrong was handed the Cup, and nearly dropped it tripping over a TV cord. That he didn't, was the final Leafs miracle of 1967.

Seven-day subscribers can read previous columns by Wayne Scanlan at www.ottawacitizen.com . We welcome your comments on this column or any other sports topic. e-mail us at sportsletters@thecitizen.canwest.com . The Ottawa Citizen 2007

At the end of the regular season, only 5 points separated the second through fourth place finishers: Montreal with 77 points, Toronto with 75 and New York with 72. But the highly-touted Chicago Black Hawks ran away from the pack, finishing first with 94 points. The Hawks placed four players in the top ten scoring leaders, including Stan Mikita and Bobby Hull who were one and two. Toronto's leading regular season scorer was Davey Keon, who with 52 points, fell just outside the top ten.

In the Semi-Finals, Toronto met Chicago, and if you listened to the media, the Leafs might as well have started polishing their golfclubs right then. But shock of shocks, Toronto dumped the Hawks in six games. The series took its toll on the Leafs though. Larry Jeffrey tore the cartilage in his right knee in Game 6 and was gone for the remainder of the playoffs. George Armstrong injured his left knee in Game 2 but later returned and Tim Horton broke his nose in Game 4.

Shining stars for Toronto included Frank Mahovlich, who scored 3 goals and 5 assists, Dave Keon with 2 goals and 4 assists and the Pulford-Pappin-Stemkowski line, which contributed 7 goals and 17 scoring points to eliminate the hopeful Black Hawks.

Montreal swept New York in the semi-final to set up a dream Stanley Cup Final. To celebrate Canada's 100 th birthday, the two Canadian franchises met for the bragging rights to the Stanley Cup championship.

Game 1 saw a dominant Canadiens squad spank Toronto 6-2, with Jimmy Pappin in on both Leaf markers. But Toronto rebounded with a 3-0 blanking of Montreal in Game 2, with Johnny Bower earning the shutout and the Stemkowski-Pappin-Pulford line contributing to all three goals. Bob Pulford scored the deciding tally at 8:26 of the second overtime to give the Leafs an exhausting 3-2 Game 3 win. Again, the prolific trio of Pulford, Pappin and Stemkowski was in on each of Toronto's three goals.

The Canadiens returned with a vengeance in Game 4, dumping the Leafs 6-2 with Sawchuk in goal. Yet, in the next game, Terry was on fire, holding Montreal to one goal in a 4-1 Toronto win that saw the Canadiens yank netminder Rogie Vachon after two periods, inserting the veteran Gump Worsley in his place.

Then, on May 2, 1967, with 15,977 in attendance at Maple Leaf Gardens, the Toronto Maple Leafs earned the Stanley Cup with a 3-1 victory. Ellis opened the scoring at 6:25 of the second, with Pappin adding a second goal at 19:24 of that same frame. Former Leaf Dickie Duff brought Montreal close with a goal at 5:28 of the third but Toronto did everything to deflect the advances of the Canadiens.

At 19:05 of the third stanza, coach Punch Imlach sent out Allan Stanley to take the faceoff in his own end. Stanley did his job, tying up Beliveau, while Red Kelly collected the puck, dished it off to Pulford who then fed the captain, George Armstrong, skating down the right wing. With Beliveau and Backstrom scurrying back to protect their zone, Armstrong slid the puck into an empty net to give Toronto the insurance marker needed to hold the game, the series and ultimately, the Stanley Cup.

It was the end of an era. By the next autumn, the NHL had expanded to 12 teams, and the team that had won the Stanley Cup just months before, had taken on a different complexion. The Oakland Seals looked as much like the Leafs as Toronto did itself, with Bobby Baun, Kent Douglas, Aut Erickson, John Brenneman and Gary Smith from the '67 championship squad joining other former Leafs Wally Boyer, Larry Cahan, Terry Clancy, Gerry Ehman, Ted Hampson, Billy Harris and former Marlboro Charlie Burns. Terry Sawchuk was drafted by Los Angeles, where he'd play for former teammate Red Kelly, who retired to accept the Kings' coaching position. Brit Selby was drafted by Philadelphia and Milan Marcetta by Minnesota.

Eddie Shack was dealt to Boston and Larry Jeffrey to the Rangers. And then, in one of the great blockbuster trades, Frank Mahovlich, Peter Stemkowski, Garry Unger and the rights to retired Carl Brewer were packaged to the Red Wings for Norm Ullman, Paul Henderson, Floyd Smith and Doug Barrie on March 3, 1968. The team that battled to win the 11 th Stanley Cup championship during the spring of 1967 was now but a distant memory.

Since May of 1967, fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs have longingly embraced the team's last Stanley Cup championship. The participants have taken on almost mythic proportions - and with good reason. Since then, no fewer than 10 members of the 1967 Stanley Cup champions have been elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame.

You know the names: Bower, Sawchuk, Armstrong, Horton, Kelly, Keon, Mahovlich, Pronovost, Pulford and Stanley. Add coach Punch Imlach, a member of the Hall of Fame in the Builder Category. All legends. All integral components of a legendary spring.

Quite a story. Quite a team.

THINGS THAT HAPPENED IN 1967

- Indira Ghandi elected
- Microwave oven is introduced
- Green Bay Packers win Super Bowl I - the first Super Bowl!
- Summer of Love
- 300,000 flower children gather in Haight-Asbury

- Thurgood Marshall - First Black appointee to U.S. Supreme Court
- Elvis marries Priscilla in Vegas
- Jack Ruby dies of cancer
- U.S. population reaches 200 million
- Muhammad Ali refuses his draft order for Vietnam
- Rolling Stone magazine debuts
- Dr. Christiaan Barnard performs world's first successful human heart transplant

- Best Picture - In the Heat of the Night
- Best Actor - Rod Steiger (In the Heat of the Night)
- Best Actress - Katherine Hepburn (Guess Who's Coming to Dinner)
- Top Songs - Ruby Tuesday, Up, Up, and Away, Penny Lane
- Top Album - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
- Emmy Awards - Mission Impossible, The Monkees
- Top Television Program - The Andy Griffith Show

- Indy 500 Winner - A.J. Foyt
- U.S. Open Winner - Jack Nicklaus
- Heavyweight Boxing Champion - Cassius Clay

- U.S. President - Lyndon B. Johnson
- Canadian Prime Minister - Lester Pearson
- Minimum wage - $1.40
- Average Income - $7,305
- New home cost - $14,425
- New car cost - $2,724
- Gallon of gas - $0.33
- Gold - per ounce - $35
- Silver - per ounce - $1.55
- Cost of a first-class stamp - $0.05

HNIC - HOCKEY NIGHT IN CANADA in case anyone is wondering :)