GOODBYE GARDENS

Back in April 1933, from a radio booth perched high over the ice of Maple Leaf Gardens, broadcaster Foster Hewitt first uttered hockey’s most enduring words: “He shoots! He scores!”

The booth was torn down in 1979 to make room for private boxes. And now the NHL is bidding farewell to the Gardens itself--the last of the legendary arenas used by the league’s Original Six before expansion changed the face of the sport.

The Toronto Maple Leafs play the Chicago Blackhawks on Feb. 13 in the final NHL game at the Gardens. The teams also played in the arena’s first game in 1931.

The Leafs inaugurate the Air Canada Centre on Feb. 20 against the Montreal Canadiens, about a mile away near Toronto’s lakefront.

One by one, the old arenas have been abandoned--the old Madison Square Garden in 1968, Detroit’s Olympia Stadium in 1979, Chicago Stadium in 1994, Boston Garden in 1995 and the Montreal Forum in 1996.

Now, with the Leafs leaving the Gardens, the oldest venue in the NHL will be Pittsburgh’s Civic Arena, built in 1961.

“You don’t replace a Maple Leaf Gardens,” said Wayne Gretzky, who grew up within a two-hour drive of Toronto. “It’s a special place, sacred. We’ll never recapture the atmosphere we had in those places. We’ll have to create new excitement, new history, I suppose.”

The fate of the Gardens is uncertain. It will accommodate junior hockey, concerts and other events for the next two years while the owners ponder its fate.

Built in just six months for a Depression-era bargain price of $1.5 million, the yellow-brick, 15,746-seat arena has been the no-frills venue for more than 2,300 Leafs games and 19 Stanley Cup finals.

There have been rodeos, dog races and a 1957 concert by Elvis Presley. The Beatles played in the Gardens on each of their three North American tours.

Over the past two years, a sex scandal has tarnished the arena. Police determined that at least two Gardens workers had lured dozens of boys into sex with offers of free tickets and other enticements during the 1970s and ‘80s.

The case, however, could not erase the countless great hockey memories at the Gardens, perhaps topped by the seventh game of the 1942 Stanley Cup finals. Toronto became the first major league team in North America to rally from an 0-3 deficit in a championship series, coming from behind in the third period of Game 7 against Detroit to win only the second Stanley Cup for the franchise.

In all, the Leafs have won 11 Stanley Cups, but none since 1967, when they beat Montreal with the NHL’s oldest championship team--average age 31.

The team went downhill thereafter under the ownership of Harold Ballard, who lived in the Gardens and was a notorious penny-pincher.

In the 1970s, he removed a prominent portrait of Queen Elizabeth, which the players used to face during the national anthem, to make room for extra seats. In 1977, when the league ordered teams to put players’ names on the backs of their jerseys, Ballard objected because he feared program sales would decline and he briefly protested by having blue letters sewn on blue jerseys.

Despite the recent lack of titles, the Leafs have sold out virtually every home game in the past half-century. Hardcore fans grew accustomed to the Gardens’ narrow, unpadded seats and cramped restrooms.

For decades, Torontonians not at games and hockey fans across Canada imagined themselves inside the Gardens thanks to the radio play-by-play of Foster Hewitt.

Hewitt broadcast the opening game at the Gardens in 1931, and first proclaimed “He shoots! He scores!” on April 4, 1933, when Ken Doraty scored in a sixth overtime period to give the Leafs a 1-0 Stanley Cup semifinal victory over Boston.

“We watched games on radio,” recalled Toronto Star sportswriter Frank Orr. “Kids today can’t understand that, but we could picture the plays in our imagination. We had pictures that we sent away for so we knew what the players looked like.”

The Leafs’ owners have tried to ensure that ordinary fans had a crack at seeing the farewell game without paying scalper prices as high as $2,000 (U.S.) a ticket. The team set aside 1,000 tickets in the upper sections to be distributed in a lottery for the regular price of $17.50.

“We knew that if we put them on public sale, scalpers were going to get them,” said president and general manager Ken Dryden. “We wanted to do as much as we could to see that the real fan has a chance of getting into the building.”

Also invited to the finale are former Leafs--anyone who played 50 or more games for the team.

While the Leafs sometimes lacked superstars, other big-name players loved playing at the Gardens, especially Gretzky.

He made a specialty of ricochet passes off the rink’s lively boards and had one of his best-ever performances when he amassed four points while leading the Kings to a 5-4 victory over the Leafs in Game 7 of the 1993 Stanley Cup semifinals.

“Any youngster who has ever grown up in that area or any of us who have been fortunate to play there can understand that arena is so special,” Gretzky said. “The easiest thing in the world is to get up for a hockey game in Maple Leaf Gardens.”