Harold Ballard Documentary

[JT AM da real deal]

I will watch it .. today I don't get worked up about it anymore .. same as I don't have hate for my grandpa anymore .. those guys were last generation of A holes of da worst moral character .. what bothers me more is NOBODY ever said a word to put those guys in line .. it was a terrible time in history .. good news is we made it threw those bad days in both society and hockey

 

[Gary Nylund]

I will watch it .. today I don't get worked up about it anymore .. same as I don't have hate for my grandpa anymore .. those guys were last generation of A holes of da worst moral character .. what bothers me more is NOBODY ever said a word to put those guys in line .. it was a terrible time in history .. good news is we made it threw those bad days in both society and hockey

I don't get as worked up about it anymore either. But damn, it took several decades for me to calm down.

 

[Rants Mulliniks]

Can’t wait to see this. I was born in the 90’s so I never lived through this. I’ve heard of the nightmare stories.

I'd burn it before ever watching it. Complete scumbag of a human. I can only think of two positives involving Ballard:

1) When they first came out with curved sticks, during practise they were seeing what they could do with them. Apparently Bobby Hull bet someone if he could hit Ballard in the box up top. As the story goes, Bobby succeeded and knocked him right out of his chair.

2) A big part of why we landed Salming was done to spite Ballard while he was (if memory serves) in jail.

 

[Rants Mulliniks]

I can't defend Ballard as everyone, even at the time, knew he knew nothing about hockey.

For those 60- who never lived in Toronto during that time there are a few things you need to understand. I can almost guarantee it won't come out in documentary but I hope I am wrong. But perspective from back in those days you kids will never truly understand. In a lot of ways it is completely 180 degrees backwards to TODAYS culture in almost every way possible. I saw it in my grandpa who was a little older than Ballard. These were days where white anglo saxon sexist racist people owned and ran most of businesses in TO (except for a few Jews) and my grandpa was one of those guys who owned a car dealer and 3 repair shops in city and lived on Montgomery a few homes north of Ballard near Bloor. He never gave a red cent to his sons or daughter. These guys all believed you had to make your own way in world by yourself like they did. Those days kids were kicked out of house by 17 or 18 and fending for themselves. Completely unlike today where we are giving to our kids like crazy. These were days when women did not work. It was 1 income families. And tickets at Gardens for golds were 15 and reds 10. It was never a family friendly place from time I was a boy. But it was a place where grandads, dads and their sons went to games. It was not a corporate event like TODAY.

Hockey back then was survival of da fittest in every sense of da words. It was an old boys club of owners who were cheaper than cheap and abused da players on fair wages. All of them and I mean every owner both at junior and pro levels, every single owner with no exceptions, looked at hockey as a way to profit for themselves. It was a fight between players and owners for extra compensation. Like $200 a win, $100 a draw and nothing is you lost kind pay structures in minor pro. Even when I played it was a fight to get beer money on bus after a loss. It was a completely different world in terms of making da show too. It was mostly who you knew and who supported you on how draft worked. Nothing like TODAY where hockey deweebs have all da stats and details. And drafting is more of a science.

Back to Ballard as I was a Marlboro and played for him as owner of da team. He had some good things he did. He gave up Gardens ice for us kids to skate before big club and we got to talk, get sticks and autographs from Leafs like my Henderson stick and jersey signed which i still have today. He lived 2 blocks from my grandpa/Ballard on lyngrove. We lived in Mimico.

Ballard gave away most of his money to charity. He was da original Marlie sponsor. He sponsored boys and girls clubs including YMCA. He was biggest funder of original Etobicoke food bank. He helped out quite a few Marlie families who lost a father by funding their incomes. He was a huge donor to Toronto General and Toronto Western hospitals.

Again I can't condone da language and behavior as I saw/heard it myself at hot stove where i was told little boys are to be seen but never heard. these guys were foul mouthed dirty old b*stards. Ballard thought he was funny but it was truly disgusting watching them grab waitresses *sses and telling them to get under table and do their thing and then serve them quickly with more beer. But what I saw as a boy was NO ONE STOOD UP to these guys. and my dad was a cop and he did not say anything either. It was accepted by society back then. And it was not hidden away in a corner. It was every Saturday night after almost every game. These guys got drunk as skunks. No wonder so many bad sexual things happened at old Gardens. Da carlton street money box as Ballard called it. And then all these guys got in their Caddies and drive home intoxicated.

The bolded is a troublesome statement given what happened to boys at Maple Leaf Gardens in the period it was his watch.

 

[Niagara Bill]

Sure thing Dr. Phil

Watch the doc Niagara Bill - if it's an honest and comprehensive piece, you'll see what a POS Ballard was, why not celebrate the death of a bastard? Spare me the pearl clutching

As far as ruining part of my life - yes it sounds all so dramatic, I'm just saying as a young boy, a SC win as a Leaf fan would have been amazing - instead I got to see great Leafs like Sittler, McDonald etc, run out of town and suffered through the dreadful eighties.

Shove it Polly Anna

Of course he was an ass...PT Barnum clone, and today in woke culture a dinosaur.
But celebrating a death, that is sick. But by your words you do need help...
So trading Mahovlich, Duff, Nevin, Horton, etc wasn't fair too.
It is a professional sport..
Now we don't run anyone out if town and we still don't win.
Cannot even imagine what you would do if Dubas traded MM or AM.
40 years later and you are still crying....over a hockey team, glad you were not a Bills fan at the same time, you may not have made it out of the decade.

 

[slozo]

I hope they include this hilarious clip in the documentary

I am for sure going to watch it when it comes out, Harold died a few months before I was born so I was fortunate enough not to be around when he had ownership of the leafs

Wow . . . just . . . wow.
That's a real taste of his personality and thinking, geez . . . the reporters laughing about it is also a bit alarming, but that's the power structure of the day there.

Might be an interesting watch (for the documentary), it's not like he'll get the proceeds from the grave or anything.

 

[the squared circle]

Of course he was an ass...PT Barnum clone, and today in woke culture a dinosaur.
But celebrating a death, that is sick. But by your words you do need help...
So trading Mahovlich, Duff, Nevin, Horton, etc wasn't fair too.
It is a professional sport..
Now we don't run anyone out if town and we still don't win.
Cannot even imagine what you would do if Dubas traded MM or AM.
40 years later and you are still crying....over a hockey team, glad you were not a Bills fan at the same time, you may not have made it out of the decade.

I am a Leafs fan and a Bills fan - God help me

 

[Gary Nylund]

I am a Leafs fan and a Bills fan - God help me

Me too. But I'm also a Raptor fan so that's something anyway. And the Bills are still the favorites as of now so who knows, this could be their year.

 

[Damisoph]

Ballard was the reason my father stopped watching the Leafs from the early 80s up until the Gilmour/Clark final four years. He couldn't stand watching a team decimated by Ballard's penny pinching ways

 

[cupcrazyman2]

He use to shut off the public water fountains at the arena so people would by expensive pop.

 

[Maple Leaf]

Sorry it has been cancelled

 

[Macman]

No thanks. Living through that hell in real time was bad enough.

 

[hockeywiz542]

Opinion | The life of longtime Maple Leafs owner Harold Ballard and the curse he left behind

A 90-minute production premiering on CBC on Sunday at 8 p.m. revisits a character who, 30 years after he died, seems too buffoonish to have been real.

www.thestar.com

Jason Priestley grew up in Vancouver, so he’s a Canucks fan at heart. But in directing the new documentary about Harold Ballard, Priestley said he got an “incredible educational experience” on the life and times of the longtime owner of the Maple Leafs.

To Priestley’s way of thinking, Ballard isn’t simply the skinflint of a convicted fraudster who ran the Leafs like a circus, cast out star players to more make room for himself in the spotlight, and basked in vast fortune while operating the team like a shoestring mom-and-pop shop. Ballard isn’t simply a fascinating historical figure more than worthy of a 90-minute production premiering on CBC on Sunday at 8 p.m. Ballard is, to Priestley, also the only logical explanation for the Leafs’ ongoing failure to win a game when it matters.

“Is the Ballard Curse a real thing?” Priestley said in a recent interview from his home in Nashville. “It seems to be.”

Much like baseball’s Curse of the Bambino once haunted Boston, embedding in the local sporting culture the notion that the mortal sin of trading away the great Babe Ruth to the rival New York Yankees in 1920 led to most of a century of misery for the Red Sox, so goes a theory espoused in Priestley’s documentary. It’s the notion that the devilish misdeeds of Ballard — a list too long to enumerate here that included egregious acts of misogyny, racism and narcissism, not to mention a miserly aversion to parting with money that helped turn one of the richest franchises in the sport into a punchline — have condemned the franchise to its ongoing run of perennial post-season failure.

“I mean, there’s no reason why the Toronto Maple Leafs are such a good team in the regular season, and yet they can’t seem to progress past the first round in the Stanley Cup playoffs,” Priestley said. “And there seems to be no reason for that beyond the Ballard Curse.”

The stories woven together by Priestley and his team in “Offside: The Harold Ballard Story” are familiar ground to Toronto hockey fans of a certain age. But executive producer Michael Geddes said that since it’s been more than 30 years since Ballard died — and since sports ownership in Toronto has gone decidedly corporate (and comparatively silent) in the ensuing decades — it was time to revisit a character who, seen in retrospect, sometimes seems too buffoonish to have been real.

“He’d kind of been forgotten. It was time to bring the story, for a whole new generation, right back to the surface,” Geddes said. “It was very simple: I thought there was really nobody like him in this country, let alone Toronto, in the ‘70s and ‘80s. He stood out. He grabbed headlines. I was surprised nobody had done a documentary.”

 

[Enga Olly]

Geez Jason, maybe use your talents to do a doc on whatever Vancouver's curse is. That drought is right there along with Toronto's and by the looks of things, ain't ending anytime soon

 

[BallardEra]

Here is the documentary:

CBC Gem

 

[meefer]

The man was toxic. I wouldn't watch it if you paid me.

 

[Mr_Fun]

He use to shut off the public water fountains at the arena so people would by expensive pop.

I think that was for a summer time Beatles concert, IIRC.

 

[al secord]

Does Brandon Walsh play a young Harold?

 

[Gilmour1996]

Saw it and although I found it interesting, it kind of left me with an unsettled feeling after watching. What a poor excuse for a person he was. Glad he wasn't a relative of mine!

 

[JT AM da real deal]

Opinion | The life of longtime Maple Leafs owner Harold Ballard and the curse he left behind

A 90-minute production premiering on CBC on Sunday at 8 p.m. revisits a character who, 30 years after he died, seems too buffoonish to have been real.

www.thestar.com

Jason Priestley grew up in Vancouver, so he’s a Canucks fan at heart. But in directing the new documentary about Harold Ballard, Priestley said he got an “incredible educational experience” on the life and times of the longtime owner of the Maple Leafs.

To Priestley’s way of thinking, Ballard isn’t simply the skinflint of a convicted fraudster who ran the Leafs like a circus, cast out star players to more make room for himself in the spotlight, and basked in vast fortune while operating the team like a shoestring mom-and-pop shop. Ballard isn’t simply a fascinating historical figure more than worthy of a 90-minute production premiering on CBC on Sunday at 8 p.m. Ballard is, to Priestley, also the only logical explanation for the Leafs’ ongoing failure to win a game when it matters.

“Is the Ballard Curse a real thing?” Priestley said in a recent interview from his home in Nashville. “It seems to be.”

Much like baseball’s Curse of the Bambino once haunted Boston, embedding in the local sporting culture the notion that the mortal sin of trading away the great Babe Ruth to the rival New York Yankees in 1920 led to most of a century of misery for the Red Sox, so goes a theory espoused in Priestley’s documentary. It’s the notion that the devilish misdeeds of Ballard — a list too long to enumerate here that included egregious acts of misogyny, racism and narcissism, not to mention a miserly aversion to parting with money that helped turn one of the richest franchises in the sport into a punchline — have condemned the franchise to its ongoing run of perennial post-season failure.

“I mean, there’s no reason why the Toronto Maple Leafs are such a good team in the regular season, and yet they can’t seem to progress past the first round in the Stanley Cup playoffs,” Priestley said. “And there seems to be no reason for that beyond the Ballard Curse.”

The stories woven together by Priestley and his team in “Offside: The Harold Ballard Story” are familiar ground to Toronto hockey fans of a certain age. But executive producer Michael Geddes said that since it’s been more than 30 years since Ballard died — and since sports ownership in Toronto has gone decidedly corporate (and comparatively silent) in the ensuing decades — it was time to revisit a character who, seen in retrospect, sometimes seems too buffoonish to have been real.

“He’d kind of been forgotten. It was time to bring the story, for a whole new generation, right back to the surface,” Geddes said. “It was very simple: I thought there was really nobody like him in this country, let alone Toronto, in the ‘70s and ‘80s. He stood out. He grabbed headlines. I was surprised nobody had done a documentary.”

There were far more Ballard's out there in Toronto then anyone even realizes .. in fact he was only 1 out of hundreds of Toronto business owners who were very similar .. I am shocked they did not research all Harold's friends from Hot Stove .. I would put it around 100 at Hot stove who I saw who all had season tickets .. wealthy guys who would screw a hostess and then pop a stewardess da night before driving home to their families drunk as skunks

 

[Voodoo Child]

Directed by Jason Priestly? That guy that was on that show almost thirty years ago because he was attractive, and is making this for the CBC because he couldn’t hack it in the States?

This is going to suck.

…

As much as I despise the whole posthumous canceling of people 50+ years ago because they didn’t adhere to our 2023 mores, there’s no way in hell someone as micromanaging and cutthroat as Harold Ballard didn’t know that someone was diddling little boys in MLG for over 20 years.

 

[ToneDog]

Why would anybody want to give this POS another 15 minutes of fame? If there is a hell, hope he is enjoying the view.

 

[therealkoho]

Just what I need, to relive that nightmare era. A lot of good talent wasted and treated like crap. I saw him coming out from City Hall underground parking once, threw him my middle finger. F you Harold.

I met him and Eddie Shack at a TiCat game and had a coffee with them. The crazy thing was he seemed like a pretty good guy and he really wanted to win quite badly actually. I think though the least little thing could tick him off and once that happened the crazy came out.

I'd always heard he treated Wendel like a grandson and was always fair with him on contracts.

 

[therealkoho]

I will watch it .. today I don't get worked up about it anymore .. same as I don't have hate for my grandpa anymore .. those guys were last generation of A holes of da worst moral character .. what bothers me more is NOBODY ever said a word to put those guys in line .. it was a terrible time in history .. good news is we made it threw those bad days in both society and hockey

I just saw Albie deliver this soliloquy in s2 of White Lotus

What did F Murray Abrahm say

"We used to respect the old and now we're just an embarrassment"

 

[cupcrazyman2]

I think that was for a summer time Beatles concert, IIRC.

I was just reading what happened on another site.It was 2 Beatles concerts on different years.Aug & Sept.He turned on the heat,turned off the the publc water drinking fountains,only sold large size drinks,triple the price & delayed the concerts by an hour.