Springtime in Boston Garden

Hockey fans, like the game they yell at, are not polite. All season in Toronto, they had grumbled about mild-mannered Harry Watson. He seemed backward about parting the enemy's hair with his hockey stick. He was too gentlemanly--a bad thing in present-day hockey, and especially during the Stanley Cup playoffs, when the players are tearing one another limb from limb. Last week in Boston Garden, Harry squared himself with Toronto fans, anyway. With seven or eight piston-like punches, he broke the nose of Boston Bruins Murray Henderson.

Roughest & Readiest. Stanley Cup tempers were flaring. The Bruins, two games down to the Maple Leafs and faced with elimination, were playing rough. The vaultlike arena rumbled with the noise of battle. Fist fights broke out on the ice, and fans started another by jumping three Toronto players and their coach at the end of the game (which Toronto won, 5 to 1). When Weston Adams, Bruins president, entered the Toronto dressing room to see if the players were injured, he was pelted with profanity by Connie Smythe, Maple Leafs managing director, and ordered out of the room.

Connie Smythe could hardly complain about rough hockey. He tells his Maple Leafs: "If you don't try, you don't make mistakes. And the guy who doesn't make mistakes is not worth a damn." Smythe's definition of a mistake is being clapped into the penalty box. His Maple Leafs, the rowdiest team on ice, last year broke a National Hockey League record by spending 669 minutes in the penalty box, and broke their own record again this season--by nearly 100 minutes. The Leafs also happen to be about the best hockey team on skates this season.

Brains & Short Bursts. Toronto's strength, over & above brawling brawn, lies in its fast, brainy centers (the quarterbacks of hockey). One is Syl Apps, 34, who once thought of becoming a clergyman. This season, afraid that Apps was slowing down, the Leafs traded five good men to the Chicago Black Hawks for pint-sized (150 Ibs.) Max Bentley, one of the most skilled stick-handlers in the game. But Apps, the playmaker, could still show dazzling speed in short bursts; and the Leafs had Bentley, too, and a young bulldog-type center called Teeder Kennedy.

In the dressing room after beating Boston last week, however, it was not Apps or Bentley who got acclaim from fellow Maple Leafs as they loosened skates and climbed out of their pads. "There's our champ," said Boss Smythe, pointing at mild Harry Watson, "enter him in the heavyweight class." Boss Smythe knows that pandemonium on skates is good for business. Four nights later, Toronto dumped Boston from the playoffs, got ready to buck Detroit in the finals.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.