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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 the Philadelphia Flyers. To that point, North 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 dad’s mate,” said Mark, when I pointed out Macoun and the reason for my disbelief. “And I say his mate because my mom would have never let my dad wear a moustache like that.”

Back before I had left on my trip, Macoun’s tendency to cross-check the living daylights out of opposing forwards had become even more painful for Leafs fans than it was for the unfortunate players on the receiving end of them. A good stay-at-home defenceman since arriving as part of the Gilmour trade in 1992, Macoun appeared to have made the decision to wear flippers instead of skates — he slowed down almost overnight. His laying the lumber on opponents was no longer oddly endearing. That’s because the cross-checks seemed to be coming more and more frequently just as the soon-to-be-injured opposition forward was scoring a goal.

The cross-checking just topped it all off. Back in Macoun’s time with the Leafs, a defenceman had to know the black art of using his stick for something other than shooting or passing. Macoun learned the craft perhaps better than any defenceman in the NHL and it was a central feature of his more than 1,100 games. It was an amazing run for a kid who grew up just north of Toronto and didn’t even get drafted by an NHL team.

By that point in his career, Macoun was so stay-at-home he barely crossed over centre ice into the opposition zone. It was also long before Movember made it acceptable for thirty days a year to adorn your upper lip with hair, especially when it lacked the charm of Lanny McDonald’s legendary ’tache. Despite winning a Stanley Cup with the Calgary Flames in 1989, Macoun was not an agreeable sight on the ice either, as his natural skating stride made him look like a disabled car heading for the exits of a demolition derby.

Your typical hockey fan, especially in Toronto, is generally not interested in the folly of blaming defencemen for all things bad when teams start to slip. That’s especially true when you’re talking about a man who isn’t exactly easy on the eyes. In fact, Macoun had the faint appearance of dressing up for Halloween but being caught equidistant between Tom Selleck and Ned Flanders.

That Macoun and Murphy became lightning rods for criticism was understandable, because fans tend to want to apportion blame when things aren’t going well. But the fact that so many out-of-favour Leafs moved on and often did very well when they appeared to be on their last legs in Toronto is a phenomenon that has had me screaming Craig Muni’s name since the late 1980s.

“Jamie Macoun is the worst defenceman in the NHL,” said a young kid of about seventeen beside me during my last game at the Gardens before I left on my trip. It was just one of thousands of comments I’ve heard from people around me in my time attending Leafs games. Most are instantly forgotten, but I’ve always remembered this particular barb because I had attempted to defend Macoun before the young man convinced me otherwise. That sentiment stuck with me and the negative thoughts never left me after watching live that night how much Macoun struggled to keep up with an Ottawa team that wasn’t exactly flush with talent.

Bali’s famous Arak drink tends to blur the lines between reality and fiction. That afternoon, watching the grainy television pictures of the three former Leafs well on their way to winning the Stanley Cup, I poured back the Arak to keep myself from crying. I was spurred on by the liberal amounts of beverage, the game, and Murphy, Macoun, and Rouse’s presence in it, and so I decided it was time for a mental overview of what had happened to the Leafs over the past two seasons since I had been away.

Burns’s long-ago firing had confirmed that the jig was up for that wonderful group of Leafs players that had gotten to two conference finals, even if I was still in denial before I left Canada. It’s perhaps logical that a few players are suddenly cast in the role of heel, as Macoun and Murphy were by the frustrated masses. But for one of the game’s greatest coaches, Scotty Bowman, to find a use for them, and then go on to win the Stanley Cup? Had you told the average Maple Leafs fan that night at the Gardens in 1996 that Macoun and Murphy were going to be hoisting hockey’s premier trophy over their heads, you would have been asked where you bought such effective medicinal enhancements, something far more powerful than Arak.

Holy, shit, this guy thinks both Murphy and Macoun are going to win the Stanley Cup — where in the hell is he getting his gear from?

Not only did it happen, it happened twice for Murphy.

Sitting in that sweltering Bali bar in the midday heat, I allowed myself dark moments of anger just recalling their names. At the time they were still two playoff rounds away from sipping champagne together out of the Stanley Cup, but the foreboding was thick in my mind.

It remains one of the great confounding mysteries how two men were so despised in the centre of the hockey universe where they both grew up, only to travel a relatively short distance down Highway 401, over the Ambassador Bridge, and suddenly ceased being, well, useless.

Scotty Bowman really is a genius.

Bowman was not involved in what followed a little more than a decade later, but Hal Gill also offered an interesting study in how a guy can spend large amounts of time in Toronto looking, well, like a taller version of Macoun sans moustache. Gill was a likable enough guy. Towering over everyone — 6’7”, 250ish pounds — he moved precisely as you would expect someone of those dimensions would. Brought in by John Ferguson Jr. in 2006 to try to upgrade a team that had missed the playoffs the previous year for the first time since the fire sale that saw both Murphy and then Macoun leave, there was no way the lumbering Gill was going to somehow transform himself into something he had never been up to that point in his almost decade-long NHL career. But don’t tell that to Leafs fans. Gill wasn’t so much disliked in Toronto as he was discounted. When you’re playing for a bad team — and this precise point could have applied to Macoun ten years earlier — steady, yeoman’s work at the back end isn’t appreciated. It’s especially not appreciated when your one enduring image is that of a hulking beast helplessly chasing faster opposition forwards in your own zone. Gill was a taller version of Macoun without the cross-checks.

To be fair, Gill did okay killing penalties and taking a regular shift, but he sometimes handled the puck as though it was a hand grenade. Though even the very best defencemen are bound to make the occasional bobble in their own zone, Gill’s share of them seemed to come only in the games that the Leafs desperately needed to win — like the one on December 5, 2006, against the Atlanta Thrashers, when Gill wore the goat horns in a game that the Leafs should have won easily. The Leafs were up 2–0 heading into the third period against a team that was showing signs of slowly breaking out of its expansion funk but certainly wasn’t there yet. The Thrashers scored five third-period goals, taking a pin to the fragile air of anticipation inside the Air Canada Centre. The eventual 5–2 loss saw Gill managing a gaggle of giveaways and ill-timed penalties. From my seat in the first row of the greens, my despair was broken up by a little boy of about seven or eight nudging me out of the way in order to lean over the balcony with two thumbs down while booing the Leafs.

The lumbering Gill continued to trudge around his own zone for little more than a year before he was dealt by Cliff Fletcher to the Pittsburgh Penguins for a second-round pick. Gill looked every bit as awkward in Pittsburgh but strangely was much more competent than in Toronto. He filled a solid depth role for the Penguins for the remaining season-plus he played there. His forty-four playoff appearances in Pittsburgh were two more than he had to that point in his career and exceeded by forty-four how many post-season games he played for the Leafs. Gill, like Macoun and Murphy before him, soon hoisted the Stanley Cup. For Gill, it came after his second season in Pittsburgh, and he’d even played a key role in the Pens getting to the final the previous year.

Where does Craig Muni fit into this? Well, the Toronto native grew up around the same time as Macoun and Murphy. A year younger than those two, he was drafted by the Leafs twenty-fifth overall in 1980, twenty-one picks after Murphy was taken by the Los Angeles Kings (Macoun was passed over in the same draft). He never broke in with the Leafs, who instead were concentrating their efforts on ruining the careers of young defencemen Jim Benning and Fred Boimistruck, while others such as Jim Korn, Bob McGill, and Gary Nylund barely managed to escape Harold Ballard’s zoo with their careers intact. Lucky for Muni he played just nineteen games for the Leafs and was signed by the Edmonton Oilers in 1986. When he got to Edmonton he stepped right into a lineup that included Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier, and Paul Coffey and which had just won its second consecutive Stanley Cup. Muni was part of the Oilers third and fourth straight triumphs and stayed on when Edmonton won another in 1990 without Gretzky, who had been traded to Los Angeles by that time.

Muni, of course, wasn’t good enough to play for the Leafs in the 1980s, a time when they were one of the NHL’s worst teams. They let him go to Edmonton for nothing.

And what did the Leafs get in return for dealing Murphy, Macoun, and Gill many years later? Alex Ponikarovsky is the only prospect or draft pick that even played for the team.