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Book: Maple Leaf Legends:
75 Years Of Toronto's Hockey Heroes
Written By Mike Leonetti (Raincoast Books)
Reviewed by Erick Mertz
While communities throughout North America struggle to support their sports franchises, others thrive and witness a rise to a degree of synonymy. Yankees not only means baseball, it drums up images of New York as the Cowboys do Dallas and the great lone star at the fifty yard line. The anatomy of this tight knit relationship between city and franchise is more complicated than sports marketing and product tie-ins, lying beyond easy research and explanation.
How have the Cubs come to be revered as an integral piece of Chicago history while the White Sox struggle to sell seats on the South Side?
Mike Leonetti's book Maple Leaf Legends begins to answer that question of a team's successful placement in community. Drawing on the 75 years of names and on-ice moments, Leonetti creates a language uniquely that of Toronto hockey fans. This is more than a stale historical recitation of the Maple Leafs; it is a recollection of deeply embedded relationships. The character of George "Punch" Imlach isn't just the bombastic former Coach and General Manager, he is the vengeful hand whose return in 1979 brought pestilence to the people of Toronto. Names like Bob Baun and Dave Keon aren't so much hockey players in this telling - they are Herculean, community owned figures. Where some teams change logos with regularity, hoping to capitalize on fashion and marketing trends, the Leafs have allowed theirs to age and become a badge to place over a fan's heart.
After a reading Leonetti's book, there is no doubt as to how Toronto became synonymous with hockey; it becomes a question of how that legacy can ever be unseated.
In presentation, Maple Leaf Legends is an exciting attractive book, filled with literally hundreds of action pictures, wondrously laid out. Statistics are spared for a select few players in favor of stories, told with both oral and visual totality. Leonetti has created that just perfect combination of reference book and love letter. There is a great deal of attention paid to the furthest reaches of Maple Leaf history, in the early century when the seeds of legend were planted in the Garden. Haunting black and white pictures of Irvine "Ace" Bailey's removal from the ice on a stretcher and the earnest stares of Conn Smythe are persuasive in recalling formative times.
As far as sports books go Maple Leaf Legends is as complete and lavish as they come; its story, an architectural blue print on how to build a storied franchise.
© 2003 - Erick Mertz