Offside: The Battle for Control of Maple Leaf Gardens

Duncan McDowall is a professor of history at Carleton University, and
the author of Quick to the Frontier: Canada’s Royal Bank.

Maple Leaf Gardens is the stuff of Canadian nationalism. Conn Smythe,
the Hot Stove Lounge, the rink rats, and the glory of past—long
past—Stanley Cups have fixed the venerable arena on Toronto’s
Carlton Street in Canada’s hockey psyche. Years of lacklustre hockey
from the resident Maple Leafs did much to tarnish the Gardens’ appeal.
But the death in 1990 of Harold Ballard, who held sole ownership of the
sports emporium and its marquee team since 1972, triggered a six-year
legal battle that stripped the Gardens of much of its heroic patina.
What Conn Smythe had founded in 1927 was dragged through the courts, the
press, and the boardrooms of Bay Street with little thought of hockey
and every instinct for profit.

This is a sordid, convoluted tale devoid of heroes and full of the
worst sort of conniving people, a kind of Canadian version of The
Bonfire of the Vanities. For students of late–20th-century business
ethics, it provides a case study in abuses of power ranging from
shareholder rights to executive conflicts of interest. Theresa Tedesco,
a skilled Toronto journalist, has assembled the whole grim tale out of a
thorough culling of the press coverage and exhaustive interviews.

The drama was set in motion by the dying of the mischievous Ballard
himself. Ballard’s paranoia and distrust of his own offspring led to a
will that opened the door to a venal scrum of would-be heirs. Most
persistent was Toronto supermarket mogul Steve Stavro. At the other end
of the spectrum were a coterie of charities designated by Ballard as the
beneficiaries from the sale of the Gardens. In between, there were
public trustees; banks; breweries; Ballard’s brassy girlfriend,
Yolande; and regular shift changes of lawyers.

Tedesco painstakingly builds the narrative of these events. Her sources
are unattributed, but her research has clearly afforded her readers the
best seat in the house for the ugliest game of the season. In the end,
Stavro got his team, squeezing out Ballard’s son Bill and the minority
shareholders of the Gardens and reducing the slice of Ballard’s estate
served to the charities. For all its thoroughness, Tedesco’s
reconstruction of the battle for the Gardens leaves one with the same
numbness brought on by a blow-by-blow account of a friend’s
divorce—too much detail about events that were all predicated on
greed, vindictiveness, and blind passion.