compare to the Gilmour incident almost fourteen years earlier, captain Mats Sundin scored what appeared to be a goal off a scramble in front of Isles goalie Rick DiPietro. Standing to the left of the Isles net, Fraser waved it off; Sundin, never one to argue just any call, protested this one profusely.
The scene would have been comical if it wasn’t so utterly infuriating. Sundin, almost a foot taller than Fraser, yanked out his mouthguard and passionately stated his case. Fraser didn’t budge.
The Leafs, it should be said, blew a two-goal lead and should have won even without the disputed goal. But had Sundin’s goal been allowed, it would have restored the Leafs two-goal cushion. Though there was no sure thing in that topsy-turvy season of 2006–07, especially with the unpredictable Andrew Raycroft in goal, Toronto very likely would have won the game had Sundin’s goal counted. Instead, New York tied it up during regulation time and the Isles’ Randy Robitaille scored the lone shootout goal to win it for his team.
The Leafs’ dropped point for losing in a shootout was bad enough. The two points that would have been denied to the Islanders had the Leafs been able to win in regulation time ended up being a killer. That’s because New York was able to mount a late-season charge bolstered by picking up Ryan Smyth at the trade deadline a week after the contentious Fraser-officiated game.
Six weeks and twenty-one games later, the Isles edged out the Leafs for the eighth and final playoff spot in the Eastern Conference. The final margin? A single point.
Blessedly, Fraser was never much of a factor as far as the Leafs were concerned for the three seasons that remained of his NHL officiating career.
About two and a half years later, Fraser was playing out the string in what was his final season as an NHL official. The Leafs hosted the Buffalo Sabres on November 30, a Monday night.
The Leafs had been playing fairly decent hockey to that point. Phil Kessel, acquired in a training camp trade though he was recovering from surgery at the time, had been back for close to a month and was the catalyst for some improved play. In fact, the Leafs were riding a mini two-game win streak when the Sabres made the short trip up to Toronto.
The Leafs dominated in every category except for the score sheet as Sabres goalie Ryan Miller turned away thirty-eight shots in an eventual 3–0 shutout victory by Buffalo. Throughout the game, Fraser seemed almost a bit bored with it all.
By this point, Fraser’s head had been covered by a helmet for almost four full seasons.[1] Never one to let an opportunity slip by to remind Leafs fans who he was, he skated out at the start of the third period with his helmet in his hands. How we wished his head was still in it.
The sight was a perfect reminder of what we had been subjected to for all those years before he was forced to don a helmet. His hair was immaculate, the sheen of gel visible even to those in the 300 level. The mould of his head looked like someone had placed an old Butch Goring helmet and crazy-glued it to his cranium.
Fraser juggled his helmet in his hands — it looked as if he was doing it to the beat of the music playing — before donning his chapeau for the final period.
Fraser was scarcely heard of again as far as the Leafs were concerned, working his final game at the ACC the following April without so much as a peep in the way of official recognition. Not recognizing a long-serving official in his final game in a marquee building was a rarity, but in this case it was completely the right thing, given the anger Fraser still elicits.
But, for me, there was one final indignity. Eleven months later, the Leafs were playing a road game in Philadelphia on October 23, 2010, a Saturday night. The Leafs’ 4–0 start that fall had come crashing down, and they were never really in the game against the Flyers, eventually losing 5–2, their third consecutive setback. With Mrs. Robinson and the kiddies safely tucked in to bed, I’d gone downtown to meet a friend. The scene around Front Street was clearly missing the remnants of the hockey crowd that typically added some spice to the atmosphere.
As I had some time to kill as I waited for my friend, I decide to head up to Fionn MacCools, an Irish bar across the street from the Rogers Centre, to watch the late game on Hockey Night. As I walked along an unusually quiet street — had it been a typical Leafs Saturday night tilt the hockey hordes would have been cramming the sidewalks — I saw a solitary poster that cried out to be read. It was just north of the intersection of Blue Jays Way and Front Street and had been placed across a temporary wall that guarded a building site despite it being clearly marked “Post No Bills.”
As I got closer, I saw it was an advert for Fraser’s upcoming book signing. Now retired, Fraser had written Final Call about his time in the NHL. It turned out that a meet-and-greet and book signing with Fraser had just taken place, about two hundred metres up the street. At Wayne Gretzky’s restaurant. How fitting.
5
Craig Muni’s Ghost
What is Larry Murphy doing hoisting the Stanley Cup? I must still be drunk.
It seems like a lifetime ago, but I will never forget it: Larry Murphy winning the Stanley Cup just months after I had concluded that he was the single most overrated player in the history of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
It was June 1997 and I was in Bangkok, the nerve centre of backpacker travel in Southeast Asia and, as that song from the mid-1980s said, a place that can make you feel really humble. The Hangover Part II later detailed how easy it is to forget what happened the night before in that city.
But there was no forgetting the image in front of me: Murphy clad in a Red Wings jersey celebrating winning hockey’s Holy Grail with surefire Hall of Famer Steve Yzerman having just accepted the trophy for the very first time.
The alcohol was exiting through my pores, helped along by my angst at what I was witnessing on the television screen and accelerated by the crippling Bangkok heat.
I had left the winter chill in Canada in February, when Murphy was still a Toronto Maple Leaf and an increasingly frustrating presence with every game. Two days before leaving for what turned into an eighteen-month around-the-world sojourn, I had taken in one last Leafs game down at Maple Leaf Gardens: a Leafs–Senators tilt that featured, literally, the two worst teams in the NHL at the time. The Leafs were on a slide, with Pat Burns having been fired the season before and Mike Murphy put in charge of a hockey club that was well past its expiry date. A 2–1 loss to the Sens, with Tie Domi of all people scoring the lone Leafs goal, meant the Leafs were dead last in the NHL.
For me, it was a perfect time to be leaving. Travelling in those days meant leaving behind many habits — mine centred on the fate of the Leafs. The Internet was only in its infancy and live streaming and other online technological advances that could have made it possible to track events back home were still well off.
It had been a good run for the Leafs for a while, with two conference final appearances and four straight playoff showings. But obsessing over how they were going to stem the inevitable decline was getting a bit tedious as I was finishing up my university studies. A few weeks in New Zealand and then in Australia was all it took for me to forget about the Leafs and the various machinations that were taking place back home. I was quickly realizing that the world through the bottom of a pint glass and my reflection in it looked pretty much the same in both New Zealand and Australia as it did in Toronto.
Wanting a bit of a different experience, I flew from Australia to Thailand in the second week of June. I hadn’t gone completely cold turkey, though — I had managed to gather very fragmentary information before leaving that the Detroit Red Wings had a 3–0 stranglehold on the Stanley Cup Final over
