I don’t think he cared if we won a Stanley Cup or not.”īallard was born of privilege, and after drifting through a series of ventures and maneuvers, he took full control of the Leafs in 1972, which was also the year he was sentenced to three years in prison on charges of theft and fraud. “I think all he cared about was having people in the seats and making money. “I don’t think he gave a shit about the team,” Vaive says at one point. He fired a coach, then invited him to wear a paper bag on his head when he made a surprise return to the bench. Late in his life, he moved into an apartment inside the Gardens, where he would roam the halls at all hours, and pop up without notice. He hired a boat mechanic he liked as team trainer. When he relented, he only met the league part way at first: Making sure the names appeared on the player’s back in the same colour as the jersey they were wearing, rendering them unreadable. (If fans could plainly see the names on the back, he reasoned, they wouldn’t need a list of names and corresponding numbers.) He resisted the NHL’s directive to include names on the back of player jerseys because he believed it would impact the sales of game programs inside the arena. He pulled a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II from the upper reaches of Maple Leaf Gardens to make room for more seats, and thus more revenue. Old stories, some almost too unusual to believe, are resurfaced for the benefit of younger viewers who would not have living memory of Ballard’s tenure. 16 - and will debut on CBC/CBC Gem in January. 3 - it will stream for a limited time starting Dec. The film is set to debut at the Whistler Film Festival on Dec. The result is an 87-minute exploration through the lens of archival video, audio and fresh interviews with former players, executives and journalists who covered Ballard’s two-decade reign of error. “He would say one thing and do something entirely different.” “The guy was such a larger-than-life character and was, in so many facets of his life, such a walking contradiction. “A lot of people had done very brief stories on Ballard, but no one had ever tackled a feature-length documentary on a man whose story we felt was worth a deep dive,” Priestley said during a Zoom call with The Athletic on Wednesday. With “Offside: The Harold Ballard Story,” Canadian director Jason Priestley, a veteran of both shinny and television, makes a convincing argument that echoes of the late owner’s misdeeds can still be heard in an NHL city that has not hosted a Stanley Cup parade since 1967.
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