AI says that the Leafs game in the 1960s never happened but Jim Sugiyama was there with his dad and remembers every goal.
This morning I am thinking about Dad.
Yes, it’s three days after official Father’s Day, but truth be told, there isn’t a day that goes by during which I don’t think of my parents with great fondness. But last night I dreamt of Dad in a context that suggested my deep consciousness saying to me, ‘grow up boy, he’s gone’.
What kind of an Ironist are You?
In my dream, we were pursuing merriment. I never have dreams involving my parents that aren’t full of joy, and last night was no exception. The details are foggy in wakefulness, but I remember presenting Dad with a commemorative baseball cap, to which he said something very Dad-like, ‘Thank you Jim…’ and putting it on backwards, catcher-style. But when I looked up at him, he was a veritable skeleton, with empty orbs, just a skeletal grin, which jolted me into wakefulness.
I find myself thinking about going to my first Maple Leafs’ game. It was sometime in the early 1960s. It was a game at Maple Leaf Gardens, between my beloved Leafs and the New York Rangers. Funny, but when I entered the game and its final score 8-4, a Leafs victory, Artificial Intelligence (AI) came up with nothing, claiming that such a game did not exist! Well, damn it – it happened, I was there!
When I try to frame the actual date, it was before the NHL expanded to twelve teams in 1967. It was after Andy Bathgate was a Leaf, so perhaps after 1965. Or perhaps he was injured and did not play. They had just built the mezzanine seats at the ends of the ice surface. Workers who published the programs for the game were striking against the Toronto Telegram and its owner John Bassett, a member of the Leafs’ Board of Directors. We had to cross their picket lines, and I remember feeling uncomfortable about this, but we did. As we crossed, one of the picketers handed me a mimeographed lineup sheet for the game and said, ‘Enjoy the game kid!’ Dad, respecting the picketers, did not purchase the glossier program being sold in the foyer.
It seemed that we had to climb forever to get to our seats in the new ‘End Blues’ which had appropriated the place of the previous, massive portrait of Queen Elizabeth. The Leaf owners were never sentimental and always put profit before such arcane beliefs as loyalty and history.
When we finally got to our seats, we found ourselves looking down on Johnny Bower from on high. Warm-up was underway, and I marvelled at the sounds, the colours. So incredibly crisp and vivid. Johnny, of course, was maskless, and his protective equipment, by modern standards, was woefully inadequate. He didn’t look like a marshmallow, the way modern goaltenders appear, even after their equipment was reduced.
The Leafs were in their deep blue home sweaters, the Rangers, in their road whites. My Leafs had just won two cups, while the Rangers were not yet into their competitive phase in spite of having many great players, including three that the Leafs had given them in exchange for aging stars Bathgate and Don McKenney- Rod Seiling, Arnie Brown and Bill Collins. They had also given up Bob Nevin and Dick Duff in that fateful trade.
The game was outstanding, especially when you consider the era – that of low scoring, defence and goalie dominated games. The final score was 8-4 in favour of the Leafs. Three things are irrevocably etched in my memory. Sometime during mid-game, Eddie Shack bowled through two Rangers on one of his patented, frenetic rushes. While he didn’t score, he left two Rangers, Phil Goyette and Rod Gilbert unconscious, lying head-to-head, in the circle to the right of Jacques Plante. Three players scored hat-tricks: Earl Ingarfield for the Rangers and Dave Keon and Bob Pulford for the Leafs. When Davey scored his third goal, he tossed his stick high into the Blues at the far end of the rink.
It’s curious, but AI could not provide me with the date of such an epochal game. My dogged pursuit of confirmation, however, landed me on Earl Ingarfield’s biography page, and there it was noted that Earl scored a hat-trick in a game along with Keon and Pulford. The year was 1965. I was ten years old.
I spent most of the time writing this vignette, questioning my memories. I do this frequently, being a survivor of a highly traumatic event at age three. Since that time, I have suffered from severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD although back then, it had not been named or defined as a psychiatric condition). I suffer from frequent terrifying nightmares, and large periods of complete dissociation. I often wonder whether my entire life has been a pre-death premonition of a three-year-old boy being pulled skyward in the lynching tree.
But no, love and hockey pulled me through. Being the beneficiary of unquestioning love and care from Mom and Dad, and my siblings, allowed me to live this life. I often shudder thinking about what could have been the alternative. The corner outdoor ice pad, with its unmistakable sounds-skate cuts, pucks reverberating off rustic boards, the frozen feet, wiping winter snot from my red Asian nose, those were real sensations. I knew that I must be alive, or in heaven to experience them.
And a Dad taking his son to his first Leaf game, remains one of those critical buoys marking the channel of a life lived.
