Phil Esposito

From the spring of 2008...

Although the Montreal Canadiens won the Stanley Cup in the year of Power Players, another team, the Boston Bruins, was slithering in the background and dramatically struck the following season by winning the Cup. If the term glamourous could be applied to any team during this period, it would be to the Bruins. Bobby Orr, perhaps the greatest defenseman in league history, revolutionized the way the position was played. Matinee idol Derek Sanderson was emerging as a star, and a supporting cast of players, some prominent, some merely there to play specific roles all gelled to create a fearsome machine who collectively came to be known as The Big Bad Bruins.

Most hockey experts would agree that Orr was the team's best player.  An unassuming superstar from Parry Sound who let his play do the talking for him, in person Orr was shy and reserved, with a workmanlike personal typical of small-town Ontario. As a counterpoint, the team's other star was a big, flamboyant center from Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Phil Esposito had quite simply evolved into a hockey celebrity of unprecedented proportions. In that one season, Esposito single-handedly smashed the NHL record for goals in one season. In the 1968/1969 campaign, Bobby Hull of the Chicago Black Hawks potted 58 goals - a record may believed was unassailable. Just two years later, Esposito, who used to center for Hull before being cast off by the Blackhawks in a trade to the Bruins, did the unthinkable and scored 76 goals.

The magnitude of the feat instantly propelled Esposito to super-stardom becoming the game's most recognizable face, a role he relished. With his swarthy good looks and a persona matching his on-ice stature, he instantly became a media darling. On the ice, he instilled fear in his opponents; every time he touched the puck in the offensive zone, opponents and their fans collectively held their breaths hoping he wouldn't do what had become customary - putting the puck in the net. Wherever he went, he was surrounded by bright lights with microphones with long cords thrust toward him. This was no meek and polite Canadian - Esposito exuded confidence, flair and a zip of panache, ingredients that formed the foundation of something called media savvy. Phil Esposito relished every moment of his fame.

No matter where the Bruins played, arenas sold out just so those fortunate enough to get tickets could catch a glimpse of this mega-hockey star. Kids everywhere who followed hockey now looked to Espo as the man, and tried to copy every little move or gesture they might pick up on television. Of course I wasn't immune, as I soon was caught in his spell. My second season of Don Mills Civitan house league hockey began in the fall of 1972,  and came just weeks after the conclusion of the Canada/Russia series. Next to the star of the series, Paul Henderson of the Toronto Maple Leafs, the second most important fixture for the Canadians was Phil Esposito who balanced the team's offensive attack.

Hockey is a game built on a rich tradition, so if a date or an occasion is particularly significant, it is often marked with a pre-game ceremony. Usually, such ceremonies occur at center ice when each team lines up on their respective blue lines to participate. During the Russia series, a memorable moment occurred prior to the start of game five in Moscow. This was the first of four games played in the Soviet Union, and to welcome the Canadians, the Russians pulled out all the stops. The festivities began when Olga Barinova, a star from the Moscow Ice Ballet skated onto the ice to offer the Canadian team a traditional gesture of hospitality to guests of the Soviet Union - a loaf of bread with salt on top. This was followed by the presentation of flowers by 44 figure skaters who presented one flower to each player on both sides. Once the teams returned to their respective blue lines cordially faced each other, the PA announcer began player introductions. With each introduction, the player whose name was just called skated a few strides forward, acknowledged the crowd with a simple nod and moved back. The sixth player called out was Phil Esposito - remember, the entire Soviet Union and all of Canada were glued to their television sets; Esposito made a few strides forward, but suddenly lost his footing and fell right on his behind.

Always the showman, Esposito added his own brand of improvisational flair to his live pratfall. As he landed, he extended his legs skyward in an exaggerated V, and as he got up, bowed to the crowd, including a sweep of the hand holding the flower that had just been presented to him that was befitting of a Shakespearean actor asking a maiden for her hand in matrimony. The crowd ate it up. It was magic, and at that moment, the only person in the world who could have pulled it off was Phil Esposito.

Fast forward to the following spring, and I found myself on a house league team that burned up the entire season posting win after win. The team, Peck Jewellers, was so good in that we made it all the way to the league finals. The only thing standing between us and a great big trophy was a team sponsored by a local radio station called CHUM-FM. This was a team led by a superstar player who by all rights was way too good for this league named Brett Lawrence, a multi-sport wizard in our neighbourhood, and any hopes that our team had of tasting glory were dashed by his superior play. When we lost, we had our own centre ice ceremony following the game.  Members of the winning side were presented with gleaming trophies while we had to settle for some nicely embroidered crests. After our teams lined up and my name was called, I skated over to collect my consolation prize, but as I was reaching to receive it, fell down right at center. I pulled a Phil Esposito only a few weeks after the maneuver had been invented. When I got back up, I tried to do my own Esposito-like bow - unfortunately, I lacked the requisite amount of gravitas required to pull it off, and all I heard was pin-drop silence. All these years later, memories of that incident still make me squirm.


Big Phil Esposito's impact extended to our home too.  On one particular Saturday afternoon during the season following the big series, my older brother received a call from a friend asking if he would be interested in attending the Leafs/Bruins game that evening at Maple Leaf Gardens. Getting tickets to a Leaf game was next to impossible under the best of circumstances, but on the a night when the Bruins came to town?  Forget it - absolutely the hottest ticket in town.  Though not really a hockey fan, my brother accepted on the spot, and used the opportunity to rub his good fortune in my face. That evening I watched the game knowing full-well that my brother had great seats and was watching the Bruins live and close-up. I'd have to wait until the next day to get the details.

When morning arrived, and we gathered at our pale yellow linolium table designed at the height of the jet age when anything was possible, and our mom served us up a stack of pancakes. "You're not going to believe what happened last night at the game" he started, as he stuffed a triangular morsel of six pancake layers that had been stabbed by his fork into his mouth. "What? What?" I implored. He was deliberate in taking his time chewing and swallowing, wiping his face with his sleeve, and taking a big gulp of milk.

"So our tickets last night were almost at ice level but beside one of those tunnels that takes you under the Gardens, and that tunnel led to the Bruins dressing room (hockey players stopped using the term "dressing room" in around 2004, and replaced it with the term "locker room", thus erasing a small vestage of its gentlemanly roots). Just before warm-ups started, you could tell the players were about to come out onto the ice. Our whole section didn't even seem to be paying attention, but then all of a sudden, guess who walked out of the tunnel and just stood there beside us?"

"Okay, I know, but who?" I said.

"Big Phil Esposito." By this point, he was dripping with smugness and continued.  "Yup, Espo was standing there, and it was like one of the Beatles had come out. Everyone in the whole section just stopped what they were doing and just began staring at him. Of course he was loving it, but pretending that he didn't notice. So then, guess what I did."

"Tell me, tell me!"

"With a bunch of people looking, I looked right at him and said 'Hey...Phil'"

"You said 'Hey Phil' to Phil Esposito? No way! What did he do then."

"He looked at me, and nodded."

"Phil Esposito nodded at you?" I couldn't believe my ears, this was even more significant that Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, or seeing one of the Toronto Maple Leafs in person.

"Oh yeah." He said. From the way he described the entire scene I could just see how this one guy could just lasso an entire crowd through the aura he radiated. It was like that proverbial person who they say lights up a room when they walk in. No matter the importance of any other event. That person just showing freezes everyone else. Phil Esposito was that unstoppable force of nature who had the world on a string in the 1970's.

Tim Horton's Donuts & Hockey - 4.93

This piece was originally written in 2005, but published in 2019...

I don't think a weekend ever passes by without my daughter asking if we can go to Tim Hortons. Like many children, a Tim Hortons is a ubiquitous site on the Canadian landscape, but more significantly, if I ever ask her what she thinks about when I say "Tim Horton" she says it is a place where she gets donuts and her parents buy coffee. At one point, she also asked me why the place was called Tim Hortons in the first place, so I decided to give her as many details as I could.

The first time I encountered Tim Horton was actually through Power Players, but about a day after getting the Horton stamp for my album, Murdo Campbell, the father of my childhood friend Mike Campbell (who himself would go on to have a successful career in the CFL) and lived behind our house in Don Mills said that Horton may have been a Ranger now, but he would always be remembered as a great Maple Leaf. He stood about 5'11", but was one of the toughest players to ever have laced on a pair of skates.

As tough as he may have been on the Leaf blueline, Horton was really boxed into the same circumstances as any other player of the day. At that time, a player effectively was the property of the team that drafted him (remember, this was at a time long before free agency), and the earning potential of that player was limited. An average player made about the same amount of money as a guy who managed a parts factory in any part of Canada. It is fundamenatlly for this reason that the degree of connection was so strong between players and their fans: if they were any good, they were assured of playing for the same team year after year; and, because they lived in the same socio-economic bracket, the common man could relate to these kinds of guys; hell, they could even be one of your neighbors.

The downside risk of this kind of arrangement, was that there were no mechanisms in place to protect a player were he to be injured. There were no players unions to provide insurance, and whether or not a team opted to pay a player in his absence was purely at the discretion of the club. In an era with flimsy equipment and no helmets, the risks were often so great that the players would often take summer jobs to maintain their cash flow, or build up a nest egg for the time they would leave the game.

Players would routinely spend their summers in their hometowns working construction or in sales. Early in Tim Horton's career, he would go back to his home in Timmins Ontario which was 10-12 hours north of Toronto where he would work construction. Given the physical demands of the work, he decided that a better way to make money and manage a business at the same time would be to open his first restaurant, a hamburger stand in Timmins called Tim Horton's hamburgers. After some time, Horton had to close the business given the slow volume of traffic in a remote Ontario town, but clearly, he had been bitten by the restaurant bug.

In the early 60's, Horton sustained a serious shoulder injury and this affected his cashflow with the Leafs and their stingy owners. The only way to maintain his lifestyle was to find a sustainable side business, and the opportunity he had been looking for came about when he entered into partnership with a cop from Hamilton Ontario named Ron Joyce to open a single donut shop. Well before The Simpsons of television fame lampooned the idea of cops hanging around donut shops, Joyce knew from his own experiences that this was potentially a winner. They opened their first shop in Hamilton - Joyce would do the legwork, and Horton would largely lend the name. The shop was a hit, so they undertook a modest expansion.

Horton would recover from his injury and remain a stalwart on the Leaf blueline, but the age of expansion brought about change. Soon, Horton found himself in unfamiliar territory, as a member of the New York Rangers but still his reputation as a team leader was so well known, that he was immediately named as an alternate captain to the team. He would eventually end up playing close to Toronto again, this time with the Buffalo Sabres.

After Power Players initiated me into the great game, I developed a much greater awareness of who the players were. In 1973, our family moved from Don Mills to York Mills (about 2 miles north), and within no time, I got my first job as a paperboy for the Toronto Star. On my first day on the job, I was given my route sheet that showed that I had 63 customers - 62 of them were spread out over 3 streets, and one outlier lived a little further away. In those days, the only ways in which a paperboy got paid was to physically go out in the evening every second week and collect money for their subscriptions. In the case of this one outlier the good news was that I didn't have to collect from them, as they "paid to the office." I had no idea who these people were until the fall of that year when one of my friends who lived close to that mystery house called me, told me to drop whatever I was doing and ride my bike to his house. By the time I arrived, three more members of our gang were already there. We got on our bikes, and within two minutes, we had all parked our bikes across the street from house number 63 on my paper route.

We marveled as the owner of the house was buffing up his brand new Ford Pantera - a rare German-built sportscar that was only 44 inches high . He was a big strong guy, who was completely focussed on making his new car look as good as it possibily could. He was Tim Horton - and he lived in that house at the corner of Stubbs and Woodsworth. I also seem to recall that maybe at Halloween, or around then, Tim Horton was at his house handing out candy to kids with a smile - somehow, we all felt a little star struck on that day.

During a routine practice in early February of 1974, Horton took a slapshot from Sabres forward Rene Robert square in the jaw. Given the composition of a hockey puck - roughly 3 inches in diameter and 1 inch thick of concentrated vulcanized rubber, and the speed the puck must have been travelling - let's say 90 miles an hour - to say the pain must have been excruciating would almost be an understatement. Regardless of the injury, and true to his form as one of the toughest players who ever played the game, Horton would not miss a game. He did, however, have a noticably swollen jaw, and to treat the pain began taking strong pain killers

In later part of the month the snow had already gone through a few thaws. The Sabres played a game against the Leafs on a Wednesday night. On this night, I stayed up and saw that Tim Horton was named one of the stars of the game. At the end of the game, instead of boarding the team bus, Horton was granted permission to go back to Buffalo on his own, as he had to tend to business matters with Ron Joyce at their office in nearby Oakville, Ontario - a point between Toronto and Buffalo. Although he only had a little to drink on that evening, when he got in his Pantera after the meeting with Joyce ended, the painkillers started to react with the alcohol. A police cruiser clocked him going well over the speed limit on the Queen Elizabeth Way, a four lane stretch of highway that connects Toronto to Buffalo. A chase ensued, but Horton thought he could outrun the cruiser. When the chase reached St. Catherines, Ontario, only a few miles short of Buffalo, Horton lost control of the Pantera.

The next morning when I arrived at school before the 9 o'clock bell, I heard the news that seemed unthinkable: Tim Horton - the same guy who I delivered papers to, who I watched buff up his new Pantera, and who was named one of the stars of the night before had died in a single car accident on the Queen Elizabeth Way on his way back to Buffalo.

A week ago, I took my daughter to a birthday party and one of the parents I bumped into moved to the same neighborhood where Tim Horton lived so many years ago. She was introduced to me by the birthday girl's mother Helen, who introduced me by saying "Tony used to live in the neighborhood, and he's the guy I told you about who used to deliver papers to Tim Horton." The woman immediately said "Oh my God, you have to meet my husband, he learned that that was once where Tim Horton lived, so every day he passes the house, he crosses himself because he considers it a shrine.

"What is a little suprising," she continued "was that that little house was supposed to be Tim Horton's dream house. Does that seem like a dream house to you?" I decided not to get into my rant about the time when players who played the game, did so for the love of the sport, and their idea of a dream home was very much like what our own expectations would be. Tim Horton had indeed purchased his dream house, a dark brick bungalow built on street corner that was on a gentle hill. His backyard had a huge bay window upstairs that faced south and the walkout basement below opened up to a pool that was nestled just above a small ravine. Prior to his death, this was indeed the scale of a house that consituted the extent of an athlete's dream, long before a time when the notion of an athlete's home has taken on cartoonish proportions often containing indoor bowling alleys, discos and compounds in the back designed for super-secret activities. When Tim Horton died, his chain of donut stores was very modest and it would be Ron Joyce who would transform the idea into an empire. Based on the simple comments made by this woman, who was approximately my own age, Tim Horton was more an iconic chain of Canadian donut shops than he was a hockey player, and the thought that professonal athletes could be just like us was probably foreign. To my daughter, however, Tim Horton will just be a place where she gets her donuts.

I've often heard it said that one of the great generational divides that has emerged if you're a Canadian is simply measured by what one thinks of if they hear the name Tim Horton. So true indeed - for my daughter and her generation, the name Tim Hortons is simply a great donut shop. To me, Tim Horton is not only the name of a hockey player, but is a name associated with the loss of innocence on that cool February morning before the bell rang.