First, a couple of personal reflections on Johnny Bower.
First, I never saw him play live or on television. By the time I was clueing into NHL hockey, he had essentially retired, and the Maple Leafs net was manned by goalies like Bruce Gamble and Marv Edwards, and then by a young Bernie Parent and an old Jacques Plante. So it was all old tapes of old games with Bower for me, yet like many Leaf fans who came along after his splendid career was finished, you still felt like you understand who he was, how he played the game and why he mattered so much as an iconic figure in Leaf history.
Bobby Orr. Gordie Howe. Bobby Hull. And Johnny Bower. These were the near-mythical names of my youth, names that seemed as though they were invented specifically so they could become attached to hockey stars and printed on hockey cards.
Second, one of the greatest honours of my career in journalism was in 2008, when Bower asked me to ask him questions as part of a Q&A session at the Queen’s Park book festival known as Word on the Street. Bower had produced a book on his life and his career, and why he asked me, I couldn’t tell you. I only knew him a little bit. Probably Gord Stellick was busy. But to be asked by a living legend to give him a hand was a wonderful thing, particularly since I knew how many helping hands Bower had given so many people over the years.
So those were my personal angles on Bower’s life. For me, news of his death produced great sadness, but at the same time, a sense of wonder and appreciation for a life well-lived and a person well-loved.
"If you don’t like Johnny Bower," hockey executive Lynn Patrick once said, "there’s not much hope for you."
He had his own special place on those Leafs Cup winners of the 1960s. He wasn’t like Red Kelly, Andy Bathgate and Terry Sawchuk, who came along to the Leafs after already having nearly full Hall of Fame careers elsewhere, and wasn’t a designated leader like George Armstrong or a young star like Dave Keon who had come up through the Leafs system. He wasn’t an unsung hero like Jim Pappin, who led the Leafs in playoff scoring the last time they won the Cup.
Bower was simply the soul of the Leafs. He did win two Vezina trophies in 1961 and ’65, but the elite goaltenders of that decade were generally thought to be Plante, Glenn Hall and Sawchuk. Most of the awards Bower won were during his American Hockey League days.
Bower also wasn’t a tortured talent like Sawchuk, Frank Mahovlich or Carl Brewer. Brewer’s great line was "I loved hockey, it just didn’t love me back," and that told you all about his difficult relationship with Punch Imlach and the restrictive environment of pro hockey.
Bower was the opposite. You could tell he loved the game, and my goodness, it loved him back with a massive bear hug.
Bower was fun. Today, because of the money and the training and the attention, there are very few NHLers you could describe as being fun. Brent Burns. P.K. Subban, perhaps. But Bower was fun because of who he was and where he’d come from. Nobody knew exactly how old he was – he claimed all the records had been destroyed in his Saskatchewan home town – and he loved to play along with that story, adding a little mystery to his personal tale. It wasn’t until 1978, when he was still putting on the pads to serve as a Leafs practice goalie, that he admitted to being at least two years older than he had previously claimed to be.
"I changed the story so much over the years I got mixed up," he told Stellick for our book ’67: The Maple Leafs, their Sensational Victory and the End of an Empire.
"But people seemed to get a kick out of it and so did I. The only time I regretted it was when I’d sit down to negotiate and Punch Imlach would say he’d be crazy to give a long-term contract to an old codger who might fall apart on him at any time. Then I’d try to convince him I was really younger than I’d been letting on."
He was 34 when he joined the Leafs, but his face looked even older. Imlach got him from the AHL Cleveland squad, and Bower was initially reluctant to agree to join Toronto because he wasn’t inclined to move his family again. Until he retired, finally, in the 1969-70 season, he was a fixture with the Leafs, even though injuries limited his participation in his final seasons.
Even in the 1966-67 championship season, the Leafs used Bower, Sawchuk and three other goalies because the older netminders kept getting hurt. In the Cup final against Montreal, Bower played superbly to win Games 2 and 3, but was injured for Game 4 and didn’t play again.
In Game 6, it was Sawchuk in the net, with Bower playing one final trick. He actually sat on the bench in full equipment to give the Canadiens the impression he was available to play, but if Sawchuk had been injured, No. 3 goalie Al Smith was actually dressed in a room under the stands and would have been the one to go in.
These were the stories of Johnny Bower. The late date with stardom, the mystery age, the immense popularity, the voice behind "Honky the Christmas Goose." The fun of it all. No Leaf was more beloved, and the ovations Bower received in recent years at the Air Canada Centre from people who mostly had only limited knowledge of his playing days was an extraordinary thing.
After starting as a Ranger, he became a Leaf, and then for decades, he was the Leafs. As the decades passed, he became a symbol of the club’s championship past and unique connection to the city.
For most of his playing career as a Leaf, he was terribly underpaid. Exploited, really. But he would have to have been hockey’s first million dollar player to adequately compensate him for what he gave to the Leafs and the City of Toronto.
He was a living legend for the final 50 years of his life but he never behaved as though that was the case. He was having too much fun just being Johnny Bower.
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