Sometimes, He’s Terror of Toronto : Hockey: Even to his own team, Maple Leaf owner Harold Ballard is a master manipulator.

To fully understand what people think about Harold Ballard, owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs, look no further than the team’s media guide.

Last season it introduced Ballard as “one of the most loved and most hated people in Canada.” This season, the guide calls Ballard a “master promoter and manipulator of the media.”

And that is from his own team.

The United States has its George Steinbrenner, the controversial owner of the New York Yankees. Canada, for better or worse, has Harold Ballard.

Once, Ballard was one of the so-called Silver Seven, the directors who managed Maple Leaf Gardens and the wildly successful Maple Leaf hockey team. Now it’s only Ballard, alone and very much in charge. He has delighted in fighting with the newspapers, the business Establishment, even the government. And he has loved nothing more than defying the edicts of the National Hockey League.

He has been caustically and publicly critical of his players and coaches. He once threatened to trade his entire team, said a player’s poor play was because the player was a born-again Christian, and called Czech players who defected traitors. He has defied league orders and refused to allow Soviets to play in his building.

A lifetime of acrimony may have caught up with Ballard, who is 86 and in poor health. He is convinced that his three children are waiting for him to die so they can share his vast wealth. His oldest son was recently convicted of assaulting Ballard’s girlfriend. His youngest son is out on bail after having been arrested for breaking into the Ballard family home.

At the start of the year, Ballard bought out two of his children, who had shares in the team and Maple Leaf Gardens, lest they carry through on a plan to mount a hostile takeover.

Meanwhile the Maple Leafs continue to play the mediocre hockey that has characterized the team since Ballard took control 18 years ago. Today they are 9-10 and in fourth place in the Norris Division, which is not bad, really, considering the nonsense the team has endured since before the start of the season.

In the space of a week in August:

--The general manager resigned.

--Two potential replacements rejected the job.

--The coach, about to be fired, quit.

--The chief scout offered to become general manager.

--The new coach agreed to terms while still under contract to another team.

The Maple Leafs once represented all that was successful and prosperous about a hockey club. The team has won 11 Stanley Cups. It is situated in a city that many consider North America’s hockey mecca.

Yet, under Ballard’s leadership, the team’s record has been better than .500 only five times. He has hired and fired 11 coaches in his 18 years. It has appeared to some that Ballard has viewed the team more as a tool to gain publicity for himself than to regain a Stanley Cup for his team.

Wrote Scott Morrison, a sportswriter for the Toronto Sun, “Other teams have struggled, of course, but there remains no apparent hope for a turnaround with the Leafs, whose constants the past two decades have been losing, turmoil, and Ballard, all of which might actually be redundant.”

PAL HAL AND THE FAMILY

Last month, Bill Ballard, Harold’s oldest child, was convicted of assaulting his father’s female companion. Bill, 42, who is a partner in Concert Productions International, was found to have punched Yolanda Ballard in the face and kicked her in the stomach last year as she was escorting him out of Ballard’s apartment at Maple Leaf Gardens.

Yolanda Ballard is not a relative but has been Ballard’s companion since 1983 and has legally changed her surname from MacMillan.

The trial featured hilarious court antics, including Yolanda’s dentures nearly falling out, crying and histrionics, and almost palpable acrimony from all sides.

Most of the principals made faces during the testimony of others.

Yolanda Ballard, a former telephone operator, in her testimony decribed Ballard’s three children as “maggots and vultures who cannot wait for this man to die.”

For his part, Bill Ballard characterized his father’s girlfriend to the arresting officer as “human garbage.”

Yolanda Ballard has filed a $1-million civil lawsuit against Bill Ballard, claiming serious physical damage from the incident.

The former Yolanda MacMillan, a blonde, 50ish divorcee, came into Ballard’s life in 1982. MacMillan, like Ballard, spent time in prison on a fraud conviction.

In 1981, she pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit fraud and perjury. MacMillan was alleged to have conspired with an attorney to alter the will of a wealthy and aging man. The forged will was valued at $3 million.

She served four months of a three-year prison sentence.

Ballard, who has not given a one-on-one interview in three years, declined to be interviewed for this story. No members of his family could be reached for comment.

At one time, Ballard clearly wanted his children to share in his estate. In 1966, he established H.E Ballard Ltd., a private holding company, and designated each of his children to have a third of the shares of the company’s stock. H.E. Ballard Ltd. controls 70.8% of the Maple Leaf Gardens’ common stock, but Ballard himself holds 9.5% of the common stock and 308,029 shares of preferred stock.

Now, Ballard is fighting to regain control of that Ballard Ltd. stock.

Last June he averted a hostile takeover of the team and building by his son, Bill. To do that, Ballard bought 24% of son Harold Jr.’s shares for $25 million. He had already consolidated his position by buying out his daughter, Mary-Elizabeth, for $15.5 million.

Bill is taking legal action against the sale of Harold Jr.’s stock, saying there existed a contract that gave Bill first option on sales of such stock.

The rise and fall of Maple Leaf stock may be reasonably charted by following Harold Ballard’s health. When Ballard suffered a heart attack in 1988, shares in Maple Leaf Gardens Ltd., the company that owns the hockey team and the arena, jumped $3.50 on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Six months later, when Ballard entered the hospital for a quintuple heart-bypass operation, the stock rose again, by $2.75 a share.

In ghoulish response to Ballard’s returns to good health, the stock falls.

Morton Schulman, a Toronto physician and heavy investor in the stock, said it plainly a few years ago: “We know he has diabetes. We know he doesn’t follow his diet. We know he’s 83. That’s why I started buying stock.”

AS THE LEAFS TURN

Ballard was 68 when he became president of Maple Leaf Gardens, and not much of a hockey man. Wrote biographer William Houston of Ballard’s management prowess:

“Ballard, by taking over the running of the hockey team, had thrust himself into the contemporary world of professional hockey and was in over his head. It was a time when the Leafs needed shrewd and cunning management, but they didn’t get it from Ballard.”

Ballard never adjusted well to criticism about his team in the Toronto papers. In the mid-70s, he banned a Globe and Mail reporter from team flights and the dressing room. Five more Globe reporters were restricted in their access at the Gardens, until, finally, Ballard barred the entire Globe and Mail staff from the press box.

In the early ‘80s, the Globe was not given even the most basic information regarding the team, no media guides or even notification of press conferences.

Frank Orr, a reporter with the Toronto Star for 26 years, has seen both a kind side to Ballard and a vicious one. Orr, who like Ballard rises early, used to go on long walks with Ballard when the team was on the road. One day Orr wrote a column that was mildly critical of Ballard. Orr got the silent treatment from then on.

More than that, Orr said, Ballard spread the rumor that Orr, who is married, was gay.

Ballard for years ignored an NHL rule regarding equal access and barred female sportswriters from the Leafs’ locker room.

“Women will be allowed to go in the locker room if they undress first,” Ballard said.

No one has been spared Ballard’s opinions. He regularly refers to minorities in derogatory terms and seems to enjoy his outrageous comments.

He has also delighted in making fun of NHL President John Ziegler, variously referring to Ziegler as “the little dictator,” a “know-nothing shrimp” and a “twerp.”

Their battles have ranged from significant to trivial.

For instance, when the league required that players’ names appear on the backs of their hockey sweaters, so as to make them easier to identify on television, Ballard refused to comply, saying that it might hurt sales of game programs.

When Ziegler threatened to fine the team, Ballard finally ordered that the names be stitched in blue on the sweaters’ blue background. It was impossible to see them.

Ballard also feuded with the fledgling World Hockey Assn., calling member of the new league “carpetbaggers.”

When Gordie Howe scored his 1,000th goal while playing for the New England Whalers of the WHA, Ballard refused to put the announcement on the Garden scoreboard, saying, “A blind man could score in that league.”

Today, it is only the force of Ballard’s personality that has prevented the Kings from being moved to the Norris Division and the Leafs to the Smythe. That sensible and cost-saving move has the approval of nearly every league official, except Ballard. Privately, King officials say that as long as Ballard is alive, the move will never be approved.

SLIGHTING THE SOVIETS

Ballard is staunchly anti-Communist, calling the Soviets, “Parasites and barnacles who steal our money.”

Yet, in 1972, it was Ballard who sold the television rights to the first Soviet hockey series in Canada.

In the years since, however, Ballard’s position has not softened and he has reveled in the little things he could do to slight the Soviets. In September of 1983, he canceled an appearance of the Moscow Circus at Maple Leaf Gardens. That was in response to the downing by Soviet fighter jets of Korean Air Lines’ Flight 007, in which 269 people died.

Two years later, when a Soviet team played the Canadian Olympic team in the Gardens, this message flashed on the scoreboard: “Remember Korean Air Lines Flight 007 Shot Down By The Russians. Don’t Cheer. Just Boo.” It was signed, “Harold.”

Ballard has bragged that, upon visiting Lenin’s tomb in Moscow, he urinated on the monument and then put a Maple Leaf sticker on it.

In light of recent warmer relations between North American and Soviet hockey interests, Ballard’s stubborn defiance is starting to be less funny and more unacceptable to the NHL, which has signed an agreement that will bring one of four Soviet teams to all NHL cities next month. Ballard must allow the Soviets to play the Leafs on Dec. 31, or contravene league by-laws and run the risk of a lawsuit.

He has not said what he plans to do.

BALLARD GOES TO PRISON

In 1972, Ballard was convicted on 47 of 49 counts of theft and fraud. He was found to have diverted money from the Gardens’ accounts to his own.

The 69-year-old Ballard was sentenced to three years in federal penitentiary and, after several weeks’ assessment at Millhaven Prison, was assigned to the minimum security Bath Institution. There, he spent his days operating a fork lift in the supply department.

All the while, though, he ran Maple Leaf Gardens business affairs from a public phone in the prison’s visitors’ room.

Orr, like other columnists in Canada, had fun with the idea that Ballard was behind bars.

“I called him Millhaven Fats for a while,” Orr said. “Ballard always claimed I didn’t know what prison he was in. He said he was at the prison at Bath. Fine. Then I called him the Bath Tub. He didn’t like that, either.”

H.B., THE PROMOTER

“He sees himself as the great promoter, which is a lot of bull,” Orr said. “He couldn’t promote the second coming with the original cast.”

Just the same, promoting may be the one thing Ballard has done well. Consider his booking of the Beatles concert in the Gardens. The group was by then, in the summer of 1965, a worldwide sensation. The Beatles were booked for one show in the Garden in August right after their triumphant show in Shea Stadium.

Weeks before the show, the lines for tickets wrapped around the building. Ballard watched with amazement and hit on an idea. He would sell tickets to two shows. However, he neglected to tell the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein.

When he found out, Epstein was outraged. But Ballard won. The Beatles did two shows.

Ballard also figured another way to squeeze money out of the shows.

In his book, Houston writes: “It was one of the hottest days of the summer and more than 300 fans fainted from the heat and hysteria as 18,000 jammed the arena for each performance. It was then that another plan went into effect. Ballard purposely delayed each performance . . . the first for 90 minutes and second for 75 minutes. He turned off the fountains in the arena, turned on the heat and told his concessions operators to put away the small cups. By selling large soft drinks to the thirsty fans, a large profit was made.”

THE FUTURE

Ballard has had quintuple heart-bypass surgery. He is a diabetic who injects himself with insulin daily. He spends most of his time in a wheelchair. But he almost single-handedly runs the Maple Leafs.

“They have the smallest front office of any team in the league,” said one NHL general manager.

Why does he do it and for how long will he?

“It keeps him going,” said Roseanne Rocchi, Ballard’s attorney. “He loves being in control. He just loves it all.”

His effectiveness as an owner is simple to chart. The Leafs have been among the worst teams in hockey for years. Trades are made that make general managers stare at their desks in disbelief. Ballard has gone from being an amusing but bellicose figurehead to one who is in a position to irreversibly damage a once-great team.

Canadians have long since lost their patience with Ballard and his rantings. Even though the Gardens sell out every home game, increasingly many seats are empty.

Said a former Canadian columnist, reflecting national opinion of Ballard: “There are a lot of days when Harold Ballard gets up in the morning and he forgets to do up the zipper in his head.”

Whatever else he is, though, he still is the boss. And not his family, the league or public sentiment is likely to force him out.