The Multiple Curses on the Toronto Maple Leafs

Could black magic be the cause of all the failures in Toronto Maple Leafs history? It turns out they have been a cursed franchise for decades.

The Toronto Maple Leafs have been waiting far too long to update their trophy case.

After 53 years without winning hockey’s biggest prize, they own the NHL’s longest championship drought. There are many reasons for the lack of success but many like to point to the possibility that the franchise is cursed.

There are multiple variations of a potential curse. We explore all the permutations of these dark clouds.

The Curse of Larry Hillman

Larry Hillman is a former defenseman from Kirkland Lake, Ontario who won the Stanley Cup six times including four of them with Toronto. He played for 15 different teams in his 22 seasons as a professional hockey player.

Hillman holds the record as the youngest player to have their name etched into Lord Stanley’s Mug at 18 years, 2 months, and 9 days old. He has also been long suspected of putting a hex on the Maple Leafs.

As a player who struggled to maintain his spot fulltime in the NHL, Hillman was furious with the Maple Leafs following their Stanley Cup victory in 1967. After an excellent showing against the Montreal Canadiens in the Cup Finals, Hillman asked the coach and general manager, Punch Imlach, for a $5000 raise in order to bring his salary to $20,000.

Imlach refused, which prompted Hillman to holdout from joining the team the following season until he was given the raise he believed he earned.

In retribution, Imlach fined Hillman $100 for each day of his 24-day holdout. Hillman was forced to pay the team $2,400 but after doing so, he hexed the franchise until the day they repaid him with interest.

Interestingly, Hillman chose to lift the curse in 2017. Leafs president Brendan Shanahan then repaid Hillman the $2,400 plus interest.

The Curse of the Bill Barilko

William “Bashin’ Bill” Barilko got the call that he was needed in the NHL in February of 1947. The defenseman who was then playing for the Hollywood Wolves in the PCHL was told he’d get to live out his dream to play for the Maple Leafs. It was the only NHL club he’d ever compete for, as he remained with the team until the time of his death.

Barilko played five seasons in Toronto and won the Stanley Cup four times. In his fifth and final season, wearing the number five on the back of his sweater, he scored an overtime goal in Game Five of the Stanley Cup Finals. As remembered in The Tragically Hip song, “Fifty-Mission Cap“, the goal “won the Leafs the Cup.”

That summer, during Barilko’s offseason, he and his dentist friend, Henry Hudson, flew to Northern Quebec for a weekend fishing trip. They never made it back. The plane disappeared on the return flight and its passengers went missing. This brought about the curse of Bill Barilko.

While Barilko’s body remained missing, the Toronto Maple Leafs were unable to win another title. The curse on the team saw them get as close as the Finals, but they were unable to win those series without the curse being lifted.

Things changed when Ron Boyd, a helicopter pilot was able to re-discover the wreckage site that bush pilot Gary Fields had spotted a week prior. Along with the wreckage, Barilko’s remains were found.

It was June 7, 1962, less than two months after the Toronto Maple Leafs finally won another championship. It took 11 years for the Leafs to win a cup since Barilko’s legendary overtime goal and it happened the same year that Barilko was discovered.

Many believe that the tragic death and disappearance of Barilko was a curse on the franchise. The Maple Leafs weren’t able to win hockey’s biggest prize again until he was found.

Unfortunately, that is a misunderstanding of the curse. It’s actually the Leafs who had cursed Barilko. It wasn’t until they were able to change their fortunes and win another cup for there to be closure for the Barilko family, thus breaking the 11-year curse.

The Curse of Harold Ballard

A popular belief is that the team was cursed by their former owner, Harold Ballard. He was the principal franchise owner from 1972-1990. This curse isn’t connected to any specific event but rather a tenure filled with abhorrent behaviour.

This is a man who once called his own daughter a “reptile”. In fact, Ballard referred to his children as “the three reptiles” and he cut them out of his will, keeping them from inheriting any of the $100 million in value he had accrued.

Ballard’s son, Bill Ballard, gave the best explanation as to how his father cursed the Maple Leafs. “My dad once told me that he would run the club from his grave,” Bill explained. “And that’s what he’s doing.”

Ballard was a meddlesome owner who hired and fired 13 coaches and six general managers over the duration of his tenure. He was so disliked that when Paul Henderson phoned his former teammate, Frank Mahovlich, to ask for career advice, he was told to “get away from Toronto because with Harold Ballard, the Maple Leafs will never win the cup again.” It’s why Henderson left for the WHA and told Ballard to take an offer for a new Leafs contract and “shove it up [his] arse.”

Ballard may have been the worst owner professional sports has ever seen. He is responsible for the severed relationship between the Toronto Maple Leafs and their best ever player, the man at the top of the franchise’s very own greatest 100 players list. Ballard would chide his team’s captain, Dave Keon, through the media and refused to give him a well-deserved raise.

Ballard’s most dastardly acts were ensuring that the club did not re-sign Keon after his contract expired and demanding such an exorbitant compensation for another team signing him, that the other NHL clubs couldn’t touch the highly talented forward.

This forced Keon to leave the NHL and play in the WHA. He finally found his way back to the NHL when the Hartford Whalers were absorbed by the league as a part of the WHA-NHL merger years later.

This poor treatment wasn’t unique to Keon. The irascible owner called Darryl Sittler “a cancer” and tried to trade him despite the captain being the franchise’s all-time leading scorer. Since Sittler had a no-trade clause in his contract, Ballard had GM Punch Imlach ship away Sittler’s best friend, Lanny McDonald.

Ballard was equally terrible to other staff. His treatment of Hall of Fame coach Roger Neilson might have been the worst. Ballard fired Neilson during the 1978-79 season but brought him back just days later after hearing complaints from his players.

Ballard told reporters that a “mystery man” would be coaching the team and directed Neilson to wear a paper bag over his head before the start of his first game back behind the bench. The coach refused and he was fired for a second time at the end of that season.

In case there was any question about Ballard’s character, a criminal court made clear that he was not a great person. In 1969 he was charged and in 1972, at age 69, Ballard was convicted on 48 out of the 50 charges brought against him for tax evasion and fraud.

He had misused $205,000, which included taking $82,000 from the Gardens in order to remodel his home. Facing up to 20 years in prison, Ballard was sentenced to three consecutive three-year terms in Millhaven prison. He ended up serving just one year there.

Stories about Ballard can last for days. He trapped Ted Hough, the executive producer of Hockey Night in Canada in a sauna until the Maple Leafs were given an extra million dollars for tv rights. Ballard sold tickets to two Beatles shows even though their agent had only agreed to one.

In doing so, he forced the band to play a second show. During the event, Ballard had the water fountains and air conditioning turned off so that he could sell more drinks at the concession stands.

Even now in 2020, there are some who believe that Ballard’s ownership was a curse and have acted to try and reverse it. Unfortunately, the franchise’s results remain the same. No matter what the excuse, after dropping their entry round to the Columbus Blue Jackets, Toronto hasn’t won hockey’s biggest prize in over 50 years.

The Curse of the Retired Numbers

The Toronto Maple Leafs have a long and unique history with retiring sweater numbers.

They were the first NHL club to ever retire a player’s number, the catalyst to what became the curse of the Leafs retired numbers. This is a curse that lasted until October of 2016 when Shanahan and the Leafs took action to try and break it.

On Valentines Day of 1934, the Leafs retired Ace Bailey’s number six. The winger’s career was cut short when he was targeted for a vicious hit from behind from Eddie Shore.

On December 12, 1933, the Leafs played a heated contest against the Boston Bruins. The game came to a screeching halt when, in retaliation to a hit from Bailey’s teammate, Red Horner, Shore violently hit Bailey.

The impact was so hard that Bailey flipped in the air before his head bounced off the ice. He was busted open with blood pouring out of his head while he lay there unconscious.

Horner was so upset by the sight of his now convulsing teammate that he punched out Shore, rendering him unconscious as well. Both teams’ players had to carry their respective teammate off the ice to be seen by medical personnel. Shore needed seven stitches while Bailey fought just to survive the night.

Bailey was taken to Audubon Hospital in Boston where he was diagnosed with a cerebral hemorrhage. He required surgery to save his life.

Luckily, it was conducted by Dr. Donald Munro, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, and a man known for saving patients who were considered “hopeless”. Munro performed a pair of operations on Bailey before a priest was called to read the player his last rites. It took approximately two weeks before the medical professionals tending to Bailey felt as though he was going to live.

Though Bailey recovered, he wasn’t able to play hockey ever again. Having his livelihood cut short meant that he no longer had the means to support his family. To help, the Bruins collected $8000 from a game with the Montreal Maroons.

The NHL organized a benefit game at Maple Leaf Gardens between the Buds and league All-Stars. It raised $20,909.40 for Bailey and became the first NHL All-Star Game to ever be played.

Bailey went on to work for the Leafs as a timekeeper at the Gardens from 1938 to 1984. He was eventually dismissed from the position at age 81 by Ballard, the owner at the time.

Though Bailey was the first to have his sweater retired by the Maple Leafs, he wasn’t the only one. There was one other retirement. It was the number five belonging to Barilko. This meant that the only numbers off-limits to future players were those mired in career-ending events.

The Leafs refused to retire any other numbers. Instead, they “honoured” great players. The circumstances needed to retire a sweater were so terrible that it was believed to have cast a spell on the organization.

Ahead of the Maple Leafs’ Centennial Anniversary home opener, they made a change to their longstanding practice. Just like Shanahan did with the Hillman Curse, he tried to reverse the Curse of the Retired Numbers.

Instead of continuing to honour players, the team held a ceremony to retire the numbers of the 16 already honoured men and also retired Keon’s number 14. Shanahan revealed the plan to the players or their families shortly before the start of that ceremony.