The Goal of My Life by Paul Henderson Page B

both teams were willing to make a blockbuster deal.
    I found out when Audrey MacGregor, Bruce’s wife, heard it on the radio and then told all of us! What a way to find out that you’ve been uprooted and you are on your way to play in another city. Sid Abel contacted me eventually and apologized, saying they meant to tell us directly, but I was hurt so bad I don’t think I even heard a word he said.
    I was so let down. I had never felt rejection before, and I hated the feeling I had in my gut. I was disappointed andangry; I couldn’t believe that this had happened. I’ll never forget playing Detroit for the first time after the deal, at Maple Leaf Gardens, and winning 5–3. I had a goal and an assist and was the second star of the game that night. That certainly made me feel a lot better about the trade, especially after the way I felt at first.
    But as is often the case in life, things that happen to you that you think are not good for you turn out to be very beneficial for you in the long run. I went on to have some good years in Toronto – good enough, of course, to earn me a spot on what turned out to be the Team of the Century just a few years after that.
    The trade hurt me deeply, as I said, and I wasn’t the least bit happy about going to the Maple Leafs at first. I had nothing against them, I just didn’t want to be traded anywhere; I was naive enough to think that I’d be playing in Detroit my entire playing career.
    But after the shock wore off, I came to enjoy playing at Maple Leaf Gardens. There was something really special about playing in that building, and maybe it had to do with the crowd. Back in the 1960s and 1970s when I was playing, people came to the games in a shirt and tie. And I mean most everybody dressed up. There was a real sense of class about the place on a game night. I guess the fans dressing up like that showed a respect for the game, gave it a certain dignity. It made it feel like something important was going on inside that arena on game night.
    It’s funny, though. I’d never thought too much about playing in Maple Leaf Gardens until I got there. I’d grown up in southern Ontario, and just like everybody else, I always knew what Maple Leaf Gardens represented, but the full impactof playing there on a regular basis didn’t hit me until I became a Toronto Maple Leaf.
    On top of everything else, you knew that half of Canada would be watching you on a Saturday night on
Hockey Night in Canada
. Now
that
was pressure, but it was also the brightest spotlight you could play under. It’s one of the reasons I think that so many players on the visiting teams had their best games in the Gardens: because they knew everybody would be watching, including all their family and friends. And when you combine that with the crowd dressed to the nines, the bright lights – well, how could you not love playing in that building?
    The place suited my personality too. I liked the spotlight, and the pressure, of playing in that place. Maybe when I got older and had lost a step, it was good to be away from such scrutiny, but nothing beat playing in Maple Leaf Gardens, one of the great arenas of all time.
    The Leafs had won the Stanley Cup the year before my arrival, but now the team was going through a remake, as they were an older group. Montreal and Chicago were as strong as ever, while Boston and New York, who had fought over last place for most of the 1960s, were evolving into powerful teams. Meanwhile, we had a strong nucleus in players like Dave Keon, Ron Ellis, Norm Ullman, and Mike Walton, and a group of rising young defenceman like Jim Dorey, Pat Quinn, and Mike Pelyk. Later on, the team added Rick Ley, Brad Selwood, Jim McKenny, and Brian Glennie, so if management did its job, this was a team with a lot of promise for the future.
    I played on a line with Ullman and Smith, two of my former teammates in Detroit, and had eleven points in thethirteen games left in the regular season schedule, but