American sports wasn’t really shown much in the Southern Hemisphere, but I would soon find out that games were, oddly perhaps, widely available in Asia. I arrived in Bangkok between Game 3 and Game 4 and had made the rookie traveller’s mistake of miscalculating the time difference by a few hours while trying to pin down when Game 4 would be showing.
When I awoke in Bangkok that morning, instead of arriving at a Khoa Shan Road bar in time for the game, I got there just as Yzerman was being interviewed by Ron MacLean literally minutes after the Wings had won the Cup by sweeping the Flyers. The camera frame showed Stevie Y and MacLean, with Yzerman offering his condolences to Don Cherry, whose wife, Rose, had just died. Murphy and his trademark angular smile were soon peering out of the screen. He looked a little like someone who had crept out onto the ice from the crowd and slipped on a Red Wings jersey, or maybe it just seemed that way, because a few short months before, Murphy winning the Stanley Cup seemed just as impossible.
Murphy, Jamie Macoun, and Hal Gill all have drawn the ire of Leafs fans over the past fifteen years or so, ranging from white-hot anger to mere grumpiness at the mention of their names. And all were basically run out of town. All three were defencemen, which, given that they were playing on such bad teams when they fell out of favour, likely offers a hint of why they became the focus of everyone’s anger.
But all three also did something else when they left Toronto: they won the Stanley Cup.
It could be that there is a different form of so-called Blue and White disease, the affliction that occurs when certain players suddenly develop a higher opinion of themselves when they end up in Toronto. Perhaps this is a different strain of the same virus, one that paralyzes certain players’ abilities and is cured only when they leave town.
There has to be some explanation. I distinctly recall arriving at Maple Leaf Gardens on April 16, 1996, for a Leafs playoff game against the St. Louis Blues. The Leafs had been through a season of turmoil: Pat Burns had been fired and the little-known Nick Beverly had taken over on an interim basis. The Leafs were at the end of their time as a solid NHL team. Doug Gilmour and Wendel Clark had regressed just a hair, but more importantly their supporting cast wasn’t nearly as adept at stepping up the way they had in the two previous runs to the Campbell Conference finals. The final standings hadn’t been decided until the final game of the season a few nights earlier when the Leafs had beaten the Edmonton Oilers to move all the way up to the conference fourth seed. Heading into that game, there had been some serious questions about whether the Leafs were even going to make the playoffs. Tickets were relatively easy to come by once the final opening-round matchups were set, and I managed to scoop up a pair in the very last row of the greys for the Game 1 opener.
The pall in the arena subsided only briefly when Clark steamrolled over some poor, unfortunate Blues player not long after the puck dropped. But soon after, the Leafs looked to be just a step behind the Blues, who had Wayne Gretzky in their lineup after he had been traded there from the Los Angeles Kings about six weeks before. Gretzky put on a clinic, registering three assists and keying a 3–1 win. The home fans had difficulty accepting the loss because it was hard to face the fact their team simply wasn’t good enough after the previous playoff runs that were still fresh in their minds. And so they began searching for a scapegoat.
“Come on down, Larry Murphy.”
Before leaving on my trip, the last thoughts I had had of Murphy involved imagining trying to inflict pain on his blond head in order to stop the stress he was causing me as I watched him play for the Leafs. Granted, Murphy was a much better player than, say, Macoun, and he had come to the Leafs after winning the Stanley Cup twice with the Pittsburgh Penguins. Previous to that, Canadian hockey fans had fond memories of him because he helped set up Mario Lemieux when he scored the Canada Cup–clinching goal in 1987. But there was something not quite right about Murphy; though he was a local Toronto lad, he appeared to have picked up something oddly American, or foreign, playing in places such as Los Angeles and Washington. Even though he replaced a Russian — Dmitri Mironov — in the Leafs lineup, there was a sense that he was an outsider, an intruder, not long for Toronto. Murphy just didn’t seem to fit with his home city and its fans. It likely had something to do with his salary, as players’ paycheques were starting to grow fatter by the mid-1990s and Murphy was making more than $2-million a year. Murphy’s play during his first season in Toronto, statistically speaking, was fine, and he notched 61 points, only marginally behind his numbers in Pittsburgh, a club that had much more offensive firepower headed up by Lemieux. But there was something missing. He had been touted as a puck-moving defenceman, which the Leafs had needed even during their impressive playoff runs to the conference final. Murphy, as the point totals suggested, had done okay in that role, but there was also the worrying sight of him looking helplessly behind him as speedier opposition forwards blew past. That image tended to stick out more than the still-impressive offensive game he brought to the table.
Worse, on this early spring night when the Leafs needed him to stop up most, Murphy simply wasn’t up to the task, or so it appeared. By the time the Leafs fell behind the Blues, virtually every time he touched the puck, Murphy was booed mightily. I will confess I was not shy in joining in the chorus.
The Murphy–Toronto marriage was destined to not end well. In the next season the Leafs were spiralling out of the playoff race and on their way to the aforementioned cellar. Players such as Gilmour and Dave Andreychuk had already been dealt away before Murphy headed down to Detroit.
And now here I was watching the aftermath in an exotic locale that seemed just as foreign as the thought of Murphy becoming a Stanley Cup champion again. Given that the Leafs were never going to win anything that spring, it just seemed, well, annoying that Murphy got the opportunity to leave Toronto unscathed. Worse, the fact he kind of slid into such a good situation in Detroit after failing to prevent such a bad one in Leafs-land was enough to make you want to punch Murphy’s lights out.
On the other hand, Bob Rouse had joined the Red Wings three years earlier and was long embedded on their blue line, so it was both not surprising and even a bit gratifying to see the dependable former Leaf on the television screen that day in Bangkok.
A year later, both Murphy and Rouse acquired a third member of the former Leafs club: Jamie Macoun. I was back in Southeast Asia, this time in Bali, watching it all unfold on television again. Like Bangkok, Bali’s charms are extensive, not the least of which are the liberal cultural norms and wide abundance of sports (and other things) available. I was in Kuta Beach in an Irish pub watching the Red Wings take control of the Western Conference final over Dallas. (Four years later the same pub was the site of a “diversion” bomb to the massive one that killed more than two hundred people just up the street at the Sari Club.)
Larry Murphy (left) and Jamie Macoun both left the Maple Leafs and immediately won a Stanley Cup with Detroit. This picture seemed unimaginable eighteen months before it was taken in 1998.
Courtesy of Getty Images.
Watching with me was a Kiwi friend, Mark, a car salesman from Wellington who had never been out of New Zealand before. To say he was caught up in the moment of being on the lash in Southeast Asia was like saying I was gobsmacked that Macoun, whom I honestly believed to be the worst defenceman in the NHL when I left Canada eighteen months earlier, was on the verge of winning the Stanley Cup. During the past year, I had gleaned through agate type in Australian newspapers that Macoun had ended up in Detroit. As much as I disliked Murphy, I positively hated Macoun. As I looked up at the screen, it was surreal he could be playing a key role on a team well on its way to another Stanley Cup win. It was him all right, right down to the cookie duster moustache.
“That guy looks like my
