TORONTO (Apr. 2) — It ranks among the most appalling playoff efforts in the history of the franchise, but a moment from the game at the Boston Garden 40 years ago tonight remains an unassailable part of Maple Leafs’ lore.
It was Apr, 2, 1969, and the Leafs of George (Punch) Imlach were being demolished in Game 1 of an East Division quarterfinal series by the fast-rising Boston Bruins, led by Phil Esposito, Bobby Orr, Derek Sanderson, Johnny McKenzie and Gerry Cheevers. The “Big Bad Bruins” — as they were known — would win the Stanley Cup the following year, but they began to bare their playoff teeth against the hapless Torontonians, laying a 10-0 whipping on the boys in blue and white. It was all too much for Imlach to stomach, though he probably felt a wee bit of consolation at the 18:03 mark of the second period, when his rookie defenseman, Pat Quinn, annihilated the greatest player in the game with a savage bodycheck along the boards. The sight of Bobby Orr laying motionless in the middle of the Garden ice is still an iconic image all these years later.
During the winter of 1993-94, I wrote a book called “Maple Leaf Moments” and I devoted a full chapter to the Quinn/Orr incident, which preceded one of the wildest pier-6 brawls in the history of the hockey club. Quinn, who would later coach the Leafs for eight seasons beginning in 1998, had no trouble recalling his destruction of Orr.
“Bobby was great at wheeling back behind his own net and picking up the puck, especially on shoot-ins,” Quinn said. “He was then able to skate past opposing forecheckers because of his incredible speed. On that particular rush, [teammate] Brit Selby caught up to Bobby and directed him on an angle toward the right-wing boards. As a result, Orr was paying more attention to Brit than he was to me, and it was the perfect set-up… a forward putting his defenseman in a position to step up and hit. Bobby never saw me coming.”
Quinn left his feet and launched all of his 215 pounds at Orr, sending both men catapulting through the air in opposite directions. Orr crash-landed on his back and his body went limp. Referee John Ashley’s arm immedaitely shot up and he assessed Quinn a five-minute major for elbowing. Bruins’ winger Ken Hodge quickly skated over and propped Orr’s head on one of his hockey gloves. Quinn went directly to the visitors’ penalty box, which proved to be a mistake. Back then, NHL rinks did not have the mandatory glass protection in vogue today around team and penalty benches.
“A number of the [fans] surged down and tried to get at me,” Quinn recalled. “Someone smacked me in the back of the head with something — I don’t know what — and I turned around to protect myself with my stick. One of Boston’s finest was trying to contain the mob of spectators, which had surrounded me on all sides. I swung my stick and accidentally smashed the small pane of glass behind the penalty box. Unfortunately, the policeman caught the brunt of the glass exploding and was cut rather badly on his forehead. At that point, I realized I had to get the hell out of the box and I skated back onto the relative safety of the ice.
“I remember feeling a bit frightened by that entire scene,” the big Irishman continued, recalling that fans in the Garden began a loud chant of “We want Quinn! We want Quinn!”
"It’s kind of different when you’re standing in the middle of a hockey rink and thousands of people are screaming that they want to kill you. The fans were littering the ice and yelling threats at me. I was more than happy to get out of there and to the dressing room.”
That game is also remembered for a little-known Leafs’ pugilist named Forbes Kennedy, who sparked an all-out war in the third period. With less than four minutes remaining in the lop-sided match, Imlach sent Kennedy onto the ice to cause some havoc, which is a broad way to understate what he actually did. Kennedy went wild, fighting seperately with goalie Cheevers, defenseman Ted Green and truculent winger McKenzie. While bobbing and weaving to avoid Bruins players coming at him from all sides, Kennedy instinctively threw a right-handed punch, only to have it land squarely on the jaw of linesman George Ashley, who tumbled over backwards at the feet of his disbelieving partner Matt Pavelich.
Kennedy never played another game in the NHL, and Imlach was fired by Leafs’ owner Stafford Smythe at Maple Leaf Gardens moments after the Bruins completed a four-game series sweep.
I remember watching the Quinn/Orr incident, and the Kennedy hysterics, as a 10-year-old on my parents’ ADMIRAL colour-TV console in the basement of our North York home. As you get older, memories obviously date further in time, but it’s incredible to think that four decades has now passed since that wild game.
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