Each day from now until the Winter Classic, Sportsnet will count down the greatest Toronto Maple Leafs of all time.
Francis Michael Clancy was three years into a 10-year contract when we had lunch. He was 83, and we dined at the Hot Stove Lounge at Maple Leaf Gardens, where he played and coached, refereed and regaled, and laughed for more than half a century.
He didn’t have a title. His job entailed being King Clancy, house leprechaun and sidekick to Harold Ballard. He and the Leafs proprietor seemed an unlikely pair, complete counterpoints in temperament — the former always extracting laughs, the latter constantly raging and inviting scorn. Their friendship captured the Leafs’ yin and yang.
It was the last spring of King Clancy’s life when I sat across the table from him. He had toast, an order that wouldn’t slow his progress to Woodbine’s pari-mutuel windows. I wouldn’t be working against the clock in the gargantuan task of researching the history of his hockey life. I just had to do it in a period no longer than it took him to savour two slices of white bread.
His life had been intertwined with the history of the game. The NHL was a four-team league when he started, and the big names were Newsy Lalonde, Sprague Cleghorn and Joe Malone. In Clancy’s rookie season with the Ottawa Senators he roomed with Frank Nighbor, the man who invented the poke check. Clancy was a veteran, one of the top defencemen in the league, when the Gardens opened in 1931. He was on the ice the night that Eddie Shore ended Ace Bailey’s career. Out in the halls you’d find him in the gallery of photos of the Leafs’ first cup champions in ’32 and the last in ’67. If anything had been Leafs history, he had been in the middle of it or witnessed it. I never heard how Clancy made out at the track that day, but he gave everyone the impression he led a charmed life.
Luck played a lead role in the Leafs landing Clancy after his best year with the Senators, when he scored 17 goals and registered 40 points in 44 games, impressive numbers for anybody but especially for a 150-lb. blueliner. As legend has it, Conn Smythe was struggling to drum up money to buy Clancy from the Senators until he laid a hefty wager on a horse named Rare Jewel. The horse came in and a cheque was written to the Senators for $35,000.
Clancy didn’t need a lot of luck on the ice: In his first four years in Toronto he made two NHL first all-star teams and two second teams. When I asked Clancy what it was like to be a player in his day, he decided to extend my time and ordered soup. He said he didn’t envy players who came along as the years wore on and the money grew. They made more money but were immeasurably poorer for the experience.
"When I played with Ottawa I lived with my folks and worked as a customs officer," he said. "In my first year in Toronto I stayed at the Royal York Hotel, the best hotel in North America. It cost me $1.33 a day. A bunch of us stayed there. We thought [we’d] died and gone to heaven. I was making $8,500 a year plus a bonus of $1,500."
Maybe you’ll say it’s sloppy sentimentalism to place Clancy so prominently on this list, but it is sentimentalism — it’s supposed to be sloppy. By the age of 83 Clancy had a chronic and incurable case.
"Never in Gawd’s world did I imagine I’d be in the game so long," he said. "It’s been good to me. Toronto’s been good to me. I quit playin’ when it quit bein’ fun."
The game ceased to bring Clancy any joy in his seventh season in Toronto, but going to the Gardens never did.