2. The First Pick

The inaugural NHL Amateur Draft was held at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal on June 5, 1963. It was created by NHL president Clarence Campbell to eliminate the sponsorship system and level the playing field for recruitment. Only 16-year-olds (players who turned 17 between August 1, 1963 and July 31, 1964) were eligible.

From 1963 until 1967, when sponsored teams were officially eliminated, sponsored players could not be picked, and the Leafs got to retain the rights to the top prospects on their farm teams. There were just four rounds and 24 picks in the first amateur draft, though teams were given the option to defer selections and just 21 players were selected in total in 1963. To determine the draft order, the league’s six teams got to choose their slot according to how low they finished in the 1962–63 standings. But the standings would not establish the order every year. Instead, teams would move up one slot in each consecutive draft. That meant that if the last-place team wanted to pick first overall in the 1963 draft, it would slide to the bottom of the first round and pick sixth in 1964. The Bruins, who’d just finished at the bottom in 1962–63, elected to pick third, guaranteeing a top-three pick at each of the first three drafts. The Leafs, who’d just won the 1963 Stanley Cup in five games over the Red Wings, were given whichever slot remained after the other five teams had chosen theirs. Predictably, they got the last pick of each round.

Walt McKechnie, the team’s sixth overall selection, was living in an apartment building at 1011 Adelaide Street North in London, Ontario, when the call came.

“Walt McKechnie?” said the unfamiliar voice of Bob Davidson, the Leafs’ chief scout, at the other end of the line.

“Yeah?” Walt replied.

“I just wanted to let you know that the Toronto Maple Leafs have made you our first-round draft choice. We would like to meet with you to go over the details.”

“Well, sure, I guess, tell me when.”

“Can I talk to your parents?”

“Well, it’s only my mother,” Walt said, passing off the phone.

Until that moment, Walt had no idea what the draft was and no clue that the Leafs had ever even watched him play.

He was raised by his single mother, Kay; his grandmother, Edith; and his aunt, Helen, after his parents separated when he was four years old. He fell in love with hockey while sitting on the floor in the apartment with a cup of tea and toast with peanut butter, staying up until the second intermission to watch the Leafs on the family’s black-and-white TV before bed. He fell in love with playing the sport on the pond across from the apartment complex, which he and other kids from the building would chop a hole in, scrape, and flood themselves.

In the early 1950s, when Walt began playing organized Peewee hockey, there were four rinks in London (North, South, East, and West), one house league team per rink and age group, and travelling teams that picked the best players from all four rinks for games against nearby towns like Lucan and St. Mary’s. Walt practically lived at the North Rink, an open-air arena a few blocks from his apartment. As a young boy, he drove his mother crazy sneaking out at night to play.

“You’re not going out tonight,” Kay would tell him.

And each night he would smirk when she went down to do laundry, grab his stick and skates, and tell Edith or his sister, Kathy, that they knew where to find him as he left to a familiar warning.

“You’re going to get in trouble,” Edith or Kathy would tell him.

A couple hours later, Kay would show up at the rink to shout at him and the other kids, all much older, who still lingered on the ice.

In time, Walt became the North Rink’s ringer. Each week, the house league games were scheduled so that the Peewees (ages 11 and 12) played first, the Bantams (ages 13 and 14) played second, and the Midgets (ages 15 and 16) played last, and the coach for the Bantam team would walk down the hall after the Peewees played to throw a jersey over Walt’s shoulders so that he could play again, followed an hour later by the Midget coach with the same idea. At 12, Walt was playing on five teams: the North’s house league teams for all three age groups and London’s Peewee and Bantam travel teams.

Kay, who worked a full-time job at local printing company Wright Lithographing and couldn’t afford to own a car, didn’t have the time or the means to attend many of Walt’s games.

Instead, Jack Webb, who owned Webb’s Variety nearby the McKechnie apartment and whose sons Mike and Tom played hockey with Walt on those older North teams, became his father figure, offering to load his gear into his Chevrolet station wagon and drive him to games.

Kay also couldn’t afford to buy her son new skates, so he wore used skates that were several sizes too big for him as he grew into them for most of his childhood. It wasn’t until he was 12 and spending all his nights and weekends at the rink playing on those five teams that he got his first new pair of skates on a visit to see Helen at her job at London’s Eaton’s department store.

After arriving at the store, Helen, who worked in the fur department, told Walt to go down to the sporting department. There, Walt was greeted by a surprise she’d lined up.

“You’re Walt McKechnie, Helen’s nephew, aren’t you?” said a stranger as he stepped into the sporting goods area.

“Yes?” Walt answered, confused.

“Sit down, son.”

“Why?”

“I’m going to fit you with brand-new Tackaberry skates,” the man said, hinting at an arrangement Helen had made to pay for them and fitting him with a pair of what are today known as CCM Tacks.

A few minutes later, the skates were his and the man handed him a jar of Dubbin (a wax product for leather that was commonly used to soften and waterproof skates) and told him he better take good care of them.

As he became a teenager, those skates lived under his bed and Helen promised to replace them whenever they wore down so long as he promised to behave.

Walt didn’t always live up to his end of the bargain. He was mouthy and full of attitude, two things that today he thinks link back to his father’s absence in his life and the strong sense of independence he had from a very young age. He was quicker to rebel than to obey authority and didn’t take much in his life seriously.

It wasn’t until he was 14 that his attitude began to change. He was still technically supposed to be a Bantam-aged player, but he’d seen an ad in the newspaper calling on “all local homebrews” to try out for the London Nationals, the local Junior B team. Walt decided on a whim to audition for the team. When the tryouts were over and he was on his way out of the rink, Art Lawson, the team’s general manager, pulled him aside and told him that he’d set up a meeting with his mother to discuss the potential of him playing on the team.

That night, Lawson showed up at their apartment door and joined them at their kitchen table.

“Well, Mrs. McKechnie, we’d like your son to play Junior B hockey for us,” Lawson said. “But there’s one problem.”

“What’s the problem?” Kay asked.

“Well, he’s going to be playing against guys that are 18, 19, and 20 years old, and he could get hurt,” Lawson answered.

“Well, what do you think?” Kay said, turning to her son.

“I want to play, Mom,” Walt answered.

The following season, while playing for the Nationals as a 15-year-old in advance of a draft day that he didn’t even know was possible, Walt got his act together at the rink and began to take hockey more seriously. He struggled to humble himself away from the rink, though.

At Beal Tech, his high school, he had trouble concentrating and rarely handed in assignments. Though he was never violent, the school eventually expelled him for bad behaviour and poor grades. On his way out of the school and down the steps with Kay, she cried and screamed at him with a different tone than she ever had before.

“Mom, don’t worry about a thing; I’m going to make it to the NHL someday,” he told her.

“There’s six teams! Do you know how many players there are!?” she yelled back between breaths.

So when he picked up that phone call from the Leafs a few months later, passing off Davidson to his mom so that they could make arrangements to meet and go over what it meant, Walt was a high school dropout and hockey was his only path forward.

Within a week, Davidson made the two-hour trip from Toronto to London to meet with Kay and Walt. There, back in that apartment at their kitchen table, Davidson told Walt that he would have to stop playing football and baseball (he was a pitcher in the local Eager Beaver Baseball Association and a quarterback on the high school football team before he was expelled).

After Walt signed over his rights to the Maple Leafs, Davidson gave Kay $100 and told them they’d be in touch once he was 18 if they were interested in inviting him to camp.

The following season, when the Leafs were without a second sponsored team after they amalgamated the Neil McNeil Maroons into the Marlboros, they decided to sponsor the Nationals, hoping their involvement with the team could facilitate a move to the newly constructed London Gardens and a promotion into the OHA to play at the Junior A level. Though the OHA refused at first, the Leafs sponsored the Nationals to two Junior B titles in 1964 and 1965. When the Nationals were finally admitted into the Junior A level for the 1965–66 OHA season, Walt stayed to play Junior A while the Junior B team moved to nearby Ingersoll. In Walt’s second year in the OHA and fifth year on the Nationals, the Leafs then sent legendary goalie Turk Broda to London to serve as the farm team’s head coach.

Broda became Walt’s mentor, the first hockey coach to understand what made him tick and push him and his top teammates Jim Dorey (a fourth-round pick of the Leafs in 1964) and Garry Unger. In a time when the role of a coach was to motivate and there was little to no attention paid to systems or tactics, Broda was the ultimate motivator. In Walt, Broda recognized that the only way he was going to be able to rein in his top player’s outspoken nature was to be harder on him than everyone else.

One night in Montreal in a game between the Nationals and the Jr. Canadiens at the Montreal Forum, Walt came to the bench sulking after a handful of bad shifts to start the game, and Broda wouldn’t let him off the ice.

“You get back out there you big, lazy son of a bitch!” Broda yelled at him when he arrived at the door, leaving him on for the final 10 minutes of the period.

Walt took to that approach, never complaining again. And when the season was over, his game had reached a new level under Broda’s guidance, with 59 points in 48 games as the team’s second-leading scorer to Unger as a 19-year-old.

The following season, after the Leafs won the 1967 Stanley Cup, Walt, Unger, and Dorey were each invited to their 1967–68 training camp in Peterborough, Ontario. Walt attended thinking he still had a year of junior left and found himself in awe when he walked into a dressing room full of his idols, joining a group that included Tim Horton, George Armstrong, Bob Pulford, Ron Ellis, Dave Keon, Frank Mahovlich, and Johnny Bower.

Though Walt woke up each morning expecting to be sent home by the Leafs, they called him in at the end of the camp intent on signing him. Walt spent most of the meeting in shock, stumbling over his words until they eventually gave him an offer, presenting him with a C form, the most restrictive of three standard agreements young players could sign at the time. (A forms required the player attend a tryout, B forms allowed teams to sign a player for a bonus, and C forms could only be signed at 18 and tied a player’s rights to their team.) The offer stipulated that the Leafs would pay him $3,000 to sign, $5,000 to play in the minors, and $10,000 to play in the NHL. All C forms also stipulated that while the team was only making a one-year commitment to the player, the terms of the contract were binding in perpetuity. So players were required to show up to training camp and play wherever they were assigned under the agreement, but there was no free market for their services and the team could trade the player or re-sign him at the previously agreed upon cash payment for each new season.

After asking for some time to think about it, Walt convened with Bower, Pulford, and Armstrong at Peterborough’s Empress Hotel, where the team was staying, to ask their advice.

Armstrong was the first to speak up when Walt was done explaining the offer, insisting the Leafs were trying to swindle him out of a few thousand dollars because he was a London kid and he didn’t come up as a Marlboro.

“Kid, you’re going to play in this league. You’re a good player, you’ve had a good camp, and they’re screwing you for money. Don’t sign for that money,” Armstrong said. “They’re paying the Marlies guys $5,000 to sign, $7,000 to play in the minors, and $12,000 to play in the NHL, and you’re every bit as good as them.”

When Pulford and Bower agreed, Walt set out to ask for what the Marlboros were apparently getting. The next day, when he gave the Leafs his demands, general manager Punch Imlach’s response was swift.

“No,” Imlach said.

“OK, then what are my choices?” Walt asked

“Go home and play junior,” Imlach answered plainly.

Unwilling to back down, Walt told Imlach he’d do just that, packed his bags, called Broda to tell him he was coming back to London, and left Peterborough on the first bus south to Kitchener.

After driving up from London to pick up Walt in Kitchener, Broda spent the car ride back admonishing him for rejecting the offer.

“I can’t teach you anything. You’ve got to play pro hockey; you’ve got to play against men if you’re going to become a hockey player. Down here you’re going to get frustrated,” Broda warned.

After a couple of weeks of practicing and one game with the Nationals, which was exactly as frustrating as Broda told him it would be, Lawson then followed up with Walt to deliver the same message.

“You’ve got to turn pro,” Lawson told him. “I could call Bob Davidson and the Leafs and they could be down here tomorrow and you could sign that form.”

Reluctantly, Walt eventually caved, asking Broda and Lawson to set up a meeting.

A few days later they all gathered—Walt, Kay, Broda, Lawson, and Davidson—at a nearby Holiday Inn. When it was over, Walt, still bitter about the offer, threw his pen down on the table.

“I’ll show you you’re wrong. I’m going to show you that I can play in the NHL,” he told Davidson with his usual bravado.

He stood up and turned to Kay.

“Let’s go,” he said as they left for the bus stop.

Unimpressed by Walt’s attitude, Davidson and the Leafs called the next morning to deliver a message of their own, telling him he had to report to the Phoenix Roadrunners in the WHL, then a top minor professional league. A Phoenix-based ownership group had purchased the Leafs’ professional farm team, the Victoria Maple Leafs, and as part of their plans to relocate the team from British Columbia to Arizona, they were travelling down the West Coast of the United States playing exhibition games. Davidson told Walt that he had to get to Toronto to catch a flight to Seattle to meet the team.

“Well, fuck,” Walt said, pulling the phone away from his ear. “Mom, did you hear that?”

Early on with the Roadrunners, Walt was extremely unhappy. The team’s coach, Alf Pike, was nothing like Broda and offered virtually no guidance to the team, leaving the players to run it themselves. The older players were tough on Walt, constantly yelling at him to move the puck. Walt, who had better hands than his peers after growing up on the pond, wasn’t used to that style, preferring to hang onto the puck. One day, after the players had been particularly hard on him, Walt debated quitting and called Webb for advice.

“These guys are picking on me,” Walt complained. “They’re always yelling at me and treating me like shit.”

“You shut up and listen,” Webb quickly answered. “They’re trying to help you. When they quit talking to you, then you’re in trouble. They can see that you’ve got talent and they’re trying to show you how to play a pro game.”

Once he realized that was their approach, Walt became a sponge, and his outgoing personality came back out. Bob Kabel, his linemate, took a special interest in him.

“Hey, kid, just give me the puck for a second. I’ll give it back to you. Don’t worry, I know you want it. It’s your puck,” Kabel would joke with him.

Tom Polanic, the team’s goon, became Walt’s protector, knowing that Walt was a better talker than fighter.

A couple of months into his first season with the Roadrunners, Walt had become one of the team’s best players when Pike pulled him aside to let him know that he had to call Wren Blair, the head coach and general manager of the Minnesota North Stars, one of six new NHL expansion teams during the 1967–68 season, because they’d given the Maple Leafs three minor league players for his rights. Because Walt didn’t have an agent until much later in his career, he called Blair himself.

“Yeah, Walt, you’re now a member of the Minnesota North Stars and we’re going to bring you up here soon to play a game and introduce you to the new players, but you’ll probably finish the year in Phoenix,” Blair told him, before he’d ever played a game for the Leafs.

Walt won the WHL’s rookie of the year award that season, finishing with 54 points in 67 games. Like Blair promised, he was then promoted to the North Stars, making his NHL debut late in their regular season and playing in the entirety of their nine-game playoff run. In the semifinals, after the North Stars had upset the higher-seeded Los Angeles Kings in the first round, Walt scored with 3:11 left in Game 7 against the St. Louis Blues to give Minnesota a 1–0 lead, putting them on the brink of the Stanley Cup Final until Dickie Moore scored 31 seconds later and the Blues won in double overtime.

In the years that followed, after bouncing between pro levels with the North Stars, Walt established himself as valuable centreman in the league. But he never really stayed put in one place, in large part due to his attitude. After the North Stars, he played three seasons as a top player with the California Golden Seals. Then he was traded to the Boston Bruins by way of the New York Rangers and the intra-league draft process, playing less than a full season there under head coach Don Cherry before he was dealt to the Detroit Red Wings. In Detroit, he became a star, putting together back-to-back 25-goal seasons and leading the team in scoring with 82 points in 1975–76. In April 1977, he represented Canada at the Ice Hockey World Championships in Vienna, Austria, scoring seven points in 10 games en route to a bronze medal loss to the Soviet Union on a team that featured Hall of Famers like Ellis, who he’d met all those years earlier at Leafs camp, and Phil and Tony Esposito.

Though he didn’t make his NHL debut with the Leafs, Walt eventually found his way back to the team that made him its first ever draft choice.

The series of events that led to his return to Toronto started in the off-season after the 1977 World Championships, when he was dealt from the Red Wings to the Washington Capitals. In Washington, Walt got off on the wrong foot with head coach Tom McVie, who he thought was incompetent and frequently expressed as much. The Capitals, then in their fourth season, were dreadful, at one point going 20 games without a win. McVie blamed Walt for his disrespectful attitude and the toxic culture that had developed through him and close friends and teammates Gary “Axe” Smith and Garnet “Ace” Bailey, who’d helped him speak up. Twenty-six games into the season, after starting with a 3–18–5 record, McVie had Walt traded to the Cleveland Barons, a team in an even worse spot and in the midst of its second and final season in the league.

In Cleveland, there were many nights when the Barons hardly had enough players to dress a lineup. At the end of the season, the team’s owners, George and Gord Gunn, managed to merge the Barons with the North Stars and the two rosters were combined. The following year, after showing up to North Stars camp to compete for one roster with two rosters’ worth of players, Walt found himself playing under a familiar face in head coach and general manager Lou Nanne, who’d broken into the NHL as a player with the North Stars a decade earlier in 1967–68, the same year Walt had.

Realizing that the North Stars had depth down the middle and knowing that friends Don Maloney, Darryl Sittler, Dave Hutchinson, and Pat Boutette were in Leafs general manager Jim Gregory’s ear about trading for him as a second or third line centre, Walt approached Nanne in training camp to ask if he would do him a favour and send him home. Though Nanne said he wouldn’t guarantee a trade, he vowed to look into it and eventually worked out a deal with the Leafs just a couple of days before the start of the 1978–79 season.

After getting the call while staying at a hotel in Bloomington, Minnesota, where the North Stars played, Walt got on a flight to Buffalo and played in the Leafs’ last exhibition game the following night, surrounded by some of his best friends in the sport.

In Toronto, a 31-year-old Walt arrived as the team’s second-oldest player, fitting in perfectly under Gregory and head coach Roger Neilson, with whom he clicked instantly. He finished fifth on the team in scoring, rejuvenating his career with a third 25-goal season and 61 points in 79 games. Every time he bumped into Gregory around the rink, he thanked him for making him a Leaf. That 1978–79 Leafs team had better chemistry than any he’d ever been a part of. Even Harold Ballard, the team’s notoriously hard-nosed owner, developed a good bond with the team and was nothing but friendly to Walt, often sitting next to him on team flights, joining the players in the sauna after games, or circling through the dressing room to stir the pot and poke fun at the team’s toughest player, Tiger Williams, while the players were getting dressed.

“You know boys, we’d have a pretty good hockey team if we had some toughness on the left side,” Ballard once said to Williams, prompting a wrestling match between the owner and his player on the dressing room floor.

Though the Leafs got swept by the titanic Canadiens (who went on to win their fourth consecutive Stanley Cup) in the first round of the playoffs, they lost the final two games of the series in overtime and Canadiens star Larry Robinson told each of them in the handshake line that he thought they were the second-best team in the league.

When the season was over, though, Ballard fired Gregory and Neilson, hiring Floyd Smith as head coach and his longtime friend Punch Imlach as the new general manager. Under Imlach, everything changed and the talented Leafs team that had shown so much promise a year earlier was dismantled. By the time Walt showed up to training camp for his second season with the Leafs, the roster looked significantly different. Imlach had removed the team’s ping pong table and juice fridge from the dressing room, instituted a suit-and-tie dress code, and banned beer from team flights and bus rides after the game. Imlach and Sittler, then the team’s captain, quickly butted heads over Imlach’s public criticisms of players and, later, Imlach’s decision to place Sittler’s best friend Lanny McDonald on waivers, eventually trading him to the Colorado Rockies in a move all the players agreed was meant to undermine Sittler’s role on the team—and one that prompted Sittler to rip the captain’s C off of his jersey.

In time, Walt, as he always had before, began to speak up about the way the team was being mismanaged. Things came to a head at a practice in early February that season. After surrendering a combined 24 goals in four consecutive losses to open the month, Smith decided the players were going to run 3-on-0 rushes for the entire hour. Forty-five minutes into it, knowing that goalies Paul Harrison and Mike Palmateer were exhausted, Walt skated by his coach and challenged his approach.

“This is really interesting,” he said sarcastically.

“Why’s that?” Smith barked back at him.

“I’ve been in this league for over a decade, and I haven’t experienced a 3-on-0,” Walt answered.

“Oh, so you know everything, huh?” Smith asked again.

“I know one thing: we couldn’t get the puck out of our own end if we picked it up and threw it into the stands or tried to carry it out with a basket,” Walt said. Smith turned to face him mid-sentence and yelled, “Get off the ice, you asshole! Get off the ice!”

A few minutes later, while Walt got undressed in the room and Smith punished the players by skating them for the remainder of the practice, he heard a stick smashing against a garbage can. Maloney sauntered into the dressing room.

“What’s going on now, Dan?” Walt asked his friend.

“I told Floyd you were right and that we should be practicing coming out of our own zone and he kicked me off the ice,” Maloney said.

A couple of days later, when the Leafs left for a six-game road trip through New York, Chicago, Winnipeg, St. Louis, and Colorado, the team left Walt in Toronto without communicating to him what to do. He spent the next two weeks skating with the Marlies, who were nice enough to allow him to practice after his agent at the time, Bill Watters, had asked. He knew, though, that his days were numbered. When the team returned from the road trip, Smith pulled him aside at practice in advance of a back-to-back against the Flyers and the Red Wings to tell him that he was going to play but that he would only play on the penalty kill and power play. After picking up assists in both games and being named third star in one of them, Walt thought he might get to stick around. The day after the back-to-back, March 3, 1980, Walt spent the afternoon of the team’s day off at a pub the players frequented in nearby Oakville when Maloney, who lived in the area, showed up with some news.

“Where the hell have you been all day? You’ve been traded to Colorado,” Maloney told him.

The next morning, Watters told Walt, who was a little hungover, to go to Maple Leaf Gardens to collect his gear and fly to Colorado, ending his two-season run with his childhood team. Walt finished that season with the Rockies and played three more in the NHL. He finished his career on a second stint with the Red Wings, registering 43 points in 64 games at the age of 35 in 1982–83. Though he’d finished fourth on the team in scoring and he wanted desperately to play one last season so that he could reach 1,000 NHL games, Watters couldn’t find Walt an NHL contract that summer and he played his final year of professional hockey with the minor pro Central Hockey League’s Salt Lake Golden Eagles before retiring at the age of 37.

Today, Walt has a home on Eagle Lake in Haliburton, Ontario, three hours north of Toronto. He was introduced to the area by Blair at the end of that very first playoff run with the North Stars in 1968, when his coach offered to put up him and his wife Suzanne in a cottage if he would spend his summer teaching at the Haliburton Hockey Haven, a camp started by Blair and Gregory that has famously welcomed Bobby Orr, Johnny Bower, Red Kelly and others as instructors over the years. Walt raised his four daughters, Katie, Shannon, Hunter, and Tatum in the area. In 1986, he opened McKeck’s, a family restaurant on Highland Street in Haliburton’s downtown. He owned and operated the restaurant for nearly two and a half decades, expanding it from 65 seats to 245 seats before selling it in 2009. He is now serving his third term on Haliburton’s town council, a position he has held since 2010. McKeck’s persists, a staple of the town.

Now in his seventies, Walt credits his mother as his biggest fan and realizes how she and his sister stuck with him even though he was an “asshole.” He remembers thinking, He must care about me when Broda left him out there for that final 10 minutes at the Forum. He remembers the unbelievable—and confused—feeling he had when Davidson told him the Leafs had selected him sixth overall. He still can’t believe the things McVie did in Washington. He recognizes the role his mouthiness played in his winding career path but still doesn’t shy away from speaking his mind in his role as a councillor for Haliburton’s Ward 5. He glows about that first season under Neilson, a coach he says taught him as much as any other. He laughs about how the Leafs have traded him twice but to this day have never told him so. He still can’t believe Ballard “lost his mind and hired Punch back,” insisting the game had passed Punch by and describing his tactics as “barbaric.” He remembers fondly living in downtown Toronto and bumming rides to and from the rink in the back of the van used by the team’s trainers.

Only five of the 21 players selected in the inaugural 1963 draft went on to play in NHL games. The Leafs did well, drafting three of those players. Walt accumulated 606 points in 955 career NHL games, finishing second in the draft class in scoring to Pete Mahovolich, taken second overall by the Red Wings.

Though Walt didn’t play for the Leafs until later in his career, he’ll never forget those two seasons.

“It was the highlight of my career. Being a Leaf? Are you kidding?” he said. “Once you’re a Leaf, you’re always a Leaf. It’s not the same with other teams. Never does a day go by where someone doesn’t notice, even if you were just a journeyman like me.”