The Goal of My Life (8 page)

Johnny Bower was both a great player and a great guy. There was nobody else like him. Johnny didn’t even make the
NHL
to stay until he was thirty-four – at least as far as we know, because he lied about his age so often nobody was certain just how old he was! – but, boy, did he ever make up for lost time. He was a tremendous goalie in big games and was an integral part of several Toronto Stanley Cup winners.

Johnny is the kind of guy who is always there to help other people, and he is dearly loved by everyone who knows him. He’s helped so many charitable causes over the years,
and he seldom says no to anybody. Only recently has he slowed down even just a little, and he is always the consummate humble gentleman. But when he was playing goal – man, he couldn’t stand anybody getting the puck past him, even in practices!

The remarkable thing is that Johnny doesn’t have a clue just how great a goalie he was. He was and still is today so humble. You seldom meet a man who is more down to earth than Johnny Bower. Everybody loves Johnny, and with good reason. He is certainly finishing well, as I like to say.

We rebounded to finish fourth in the East Division in 1970–71, with eighty-two points. I played on a line with Norm Ullman and Ron Ellis and enjoyed my best season to date in the
NHL
, with thirty goals and thirty assists. Over the next two seasons, we comprised a solid line that could compete with any in the
NHL
. We were also very good defensively; our two-way game made us that much more effective.

That season also saw Darryl Sittler join our team after being drafted eighth overall in the 1970 draft, and it was easy to see how determined he was to become an
NHL
star – few players worked harder than he did. He developed into an incredible team leader during his career. We were both small-town boys and had a lot in common, and we enjoyed each other’s company, especially when we both bought homes in Mississauga. During the 1972 series against the Soviet Union, Darryl and his wife, Wendy, looked after our three daughters while Eleanor and I were in Moscow. Darryl, of course, went on to become one of the best players in
NHL
history and, in 1989, was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.

We were solid in goal as well. We picked up one of the all-time greats, Jacques Plante, in a trade with St. Louis, and later in 1970–71 we got Bernie Parent, as good a young goalie as there was in the league at that time, in a deal with Philadelphia. Bobby Baun, who had been claimed by California in the 1967 expansion draft, came back to Toronto early in the season. Although he was older, at thirty-four, he
was just as tough as ever and really contributed with his crushing bodychecks. Baun could block shots with the best of them and was a warrior who never backed off when he was on the ice. He was a real help to our younger defencemen on the team too, a real role model for them by the way he played.

Despite those additions, we lost out in the playoffs again, dropping a six-game series to the Rangers. That was a hard-fought series and we competed, but we just didn’t have the depth to beat the better teams in the league. Harold Ballard hated spending money, and if he had, we might have been a much better team. But he didn’t have to spend an extra dime, since the Gardens was filled every night.

I hit another personal best in 1971–72 by scoring thirty-eight goals in seventy-three games. With Boston, New York, and Montreal all cracking the 100-point barrier, the best we could hope for, though, was another fourth-place finish, with eighty points.

McLellan got sick that year and was replaced by King Clancy for a stretch. It was a great run for King, as we went 9–3–3 while under his reign, and even though his time as a top-flight hockey strategist had passed, he was a funny and charming man and kept us loose and winning.

It was another early playoff exit, as the powerful Boston Bruins, led by Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito, took us out in five games. We still didn’t have the depth we needed. But we had a solid core, I was playing some of the best hockey of my career, and there seemed to be a lot to look forward to once the 1972–73 season came around – if Ballard didn’t screw it all up, and believe me, that was always a possibility!

But first, there would be the little matter of taking care of some business with the Soviet Union.

T
HE SUMMER OF
1972
WAS A GOOD TIME IN MY LIFE
. I was coming off a very solid season with the Maple Leafs, and Eleanor and I were looking forward to a trip overseas. An auto parts company,
AP
Parts, that I was doing some work for in the off-season was taking us and twenty-five other couples on a European river cruise down the Rhine River. It sounded like a fun trip, and Eleanor and I were looking forward to it.

Well, we wound up travelling overseas, of course, but to the Soviet Union – and it certainly was no vacation.

I guess I should first provide a little background on how much the Russians were dominating in world hockey at that point.

Canada had always been the power in international hockey, of course, as it was our country’s national game. As the years went on, a few things happened. First, European nations started playing the game a lot more and a lot better. Their game emphasized speed and skill with less focus on
physicality, and playing on the bigger ice surfaces over there certainly helped.

The second thing that happened was that in both the world championships and the Olympics, Canada sent only amateur players, not professionals. The Soviet Union was producing great players, many of whom could – and should – have played in the
NHL
. In the days of the Iron Curtain, however, that wasn’t possible.

So the Russians took over on the international scene, as their top players wound up playing against our amateurs in all the major events, which was hardly fair to Canadian hockey.

The Russians were great players, make no mistake about that, and they were really improving as a hockey nation. That, combined with the fact that Canada didn’t send its best players to international competition, led to the Soviet Union dominating world and Olympic competition from 1956 until 1972.

From 1920 until 1963, Canada usually sent the most recent Allan Cup championship teams. Following the 1963 world championships, Father David Bauer founded the Canadian National Team to take over that role. Canada withdrew from official International Ice Hockey Federation (
IIHF
) events in 1970, and the national team program was suspended after we were refused permission to use even semiprofessional players at the world championship.

It was against this backdrop that hockey officials in Canada and the Soviet Union decided to play a “super series” that would pit the best players Canada had to offer against the best players from Russia in an eight-game series that would take place in September 1972.

So much has been written and said about that series over the years, and justifiably so. It was a huge deal back then, all across the country. As players in the National Hockey League, we knew what was at stake and we knew what an honour it would be to play in that series. It was the first time that the best players in the Soviet Union would play the best players from Canada in an international series, so we were all pretty pumped about it. We really wanted to finally put those Ruskies in their place!

But honestly, I didn’t think it would be much of a series. The best players in the world were from Canada, we all believed that. I certainly did. And it’s not that I thought the Russians weren’t any good. We knew they were good. But I thought we’d win just because of all the firepower we had. I thought we would overwhelm them. There was no way any team was going to beat us. We were all pretty confident of that.

I thought they might tie one game, or maybe win once, but I felt that if we didn’t win at least seven games it would be a travesty. And I wasn’t the only person in the country who was thinking that either.

It was the job of head coach Harry Sinden and his assistant, John Ferguson, to pick the team, and they had a lot of options to choose from. I felt I’d at least get invited to the camp, after scoring thirty-eight goals the year before. I always took care of myself in the summer, was always in shape, and after some initial reservations cancelled our holiday cruise so I could attend Team Canada’s training camp.

Early that summer I got a letter officially inviting me to camp, so I was ready to go. I knew it would be tough to make that team, as almost everybody who was invited was
an all-star. We had incredible firepower up front. Phil Esposito, Jean Ratelle, Stan Mikita, Red Berenson, Gilbert Perreault, Marcel Dionne, and Bobby Clarke were the centres – how is that for depth! Frank Mahovlich, Pete Mahovlich, Rod Gilbert, Yvan Cournoyer, Mickey Redmond, Vic Hadfield, and Rick Martin were all high-scoring wingers, and our defence corps included names like Brad Park, Bill White, Pat Stapleton, Guy Lapointe, Don Awrey, Rod Seiling, Gary Bergman, and Serge Savard. We also had plenty of other solid players on defence and up front who could fill a variety of roles, and Ken Dryden, Tony Esposito, and Eddie Johnston gave us very solid goaltending.

We wouldn’t have such stars as Bobby Hull, J.C. Tremblay, Gerry Cheevers, or Derek Sanderson because they had all jumped to the World Hockey Association, and we were missing the legendary Bobby Orr, who tried to play but couldn’t due to a knee injury. But when players like Johnny Bucyk and Dave Keon couldn’t even merit an invitation to training camp, there was no reason not to think we would have a tremendous team that could beat anybody in the world.

One of the toughest things we had to watch at the Summit Series was Bobby Orr’s attempt to play for Canada. Orr was the greatest defenceman of his era by far, a game-changer. He controlled the pace of hockey games, he could do everything, and we were all hoping against hope that he’d be able to play for us.

He came to training camp, but it became evident pretty quickly that he was in too much pain and couldn’t function after all the crippling knee injuries and surgeries he’d had.

There’s no doubt that Bobby was devastated. And it was tough to see him sitting in the stands, watching us, knowing
that he couldn’t get out there. And after our loss in game one, let me tell you, we were all saying, “Where’s Bobby Orr? We could really use him now!”

It might have been a very different series with him in the lineup – we’ll never know. But we do know what a shame it was that Orr couldn’t have taken part in such a historic event. You had to feel for him – and feel for us for not being able to use him against the Russians.

I was pleased that my teammate and linemate with the Maple Leafs Ron Ellis was also there. We knew how to play together, and when they put us on a line with Bobby Clarke, we seemed to hit it off together as a unit. We were kept as a line right from the very start.

We came to training camp dead serious, and the three of us were ready to play. We worked our tails off and realized very early in the camp that, while we were long shots to form one of the top lines, we were going to make the team and contribute. We felt we were the best line at camp in the early going. We were fast, we could all hurt you offensively, and were responsible defensively as well. We might have started as the fifth, sixth, or even seventh line, but we came there with a purpose and we wanted to prove we could play with the best players in the world.

It was obvious at camp that some of the other guys weren’t as prepared and didn’t take it as seriously as we did. Everybody on Team Canada was a star on his own team, and some of them were being asked to fill roles and do things they weren’t used to doing. And some would be asked to play only sparingly and sit out some games because we had such a large roster. It was management’s feeling that we needed a lot of players because we were playing in the off-season and
some guys wouldn’t be in the greatest shape, so everyone would end up getting a chance to play.

It didn’t work out that way, as some guys didn’t get to play at all. We all had to adapt and learn to play together in a hurry. The only line that played together on a regular basis in the
NHL
was the Rod Gilbert–Vic Hadfield–Jean Ratelle unit, so the rest of us had to find at least one new linemate and try to make it work quickly. Ron and I were really lucky – our line clicked early in the camp, while other combinations struggled.