Jim Pappin, Toronto Maple Leafs hockey player, c. September, 1966.Handout
Jim Pappin scored the game-winning goal the last time the Toronto Maple Leafs won the Stanley Cup.
Or maybe he only deserved credit for an assist.
In the 55 years since, grainy tape of the play has been analysed like a hockey Zapruder film. Late in the second period of Game 6 of the 1967 finals, Mr. Pappin shovelled a backhand pass toward the slot in front of the Montreal goal, where two players battled for position. The puck deflected into the net behind a desperately sprawling Lorne (Gump) Worsley, the Montreal goaltender.
The goal gave Toronto a 2-0 lead in a game in which they would claim the Stanley Cup with a 3-1 victory. The Leafs have not won a championship since, giving the goal, as ordinary as it was, a mythic quality.
Had the puck bounced in off Montreal defenceman Terry Harper? If so, Mr. Pappin deserved credit. Or had the puck been redirected by Pete Stemkowski, a teammate who has been perhaps denied a half-century of glory?
In any case, Mr. Pappin, who died at 82 on June 29th, was soon after estranged from the team.
The forward chafed under the unsympathetic rule of Toronto coach and general manager Punch Imlach, who considered Mr. Pappin a skater more eager for the glory of scoring than in the less glamorous demands of checking an opponent. For several seasons, the player bounced back and forth between the parent club and its minor-league affiliate, the Rochester Americans.
Even after Mr. Pappin led all playoff scorers in 1967 with seven goals and eight assists in just 12 games, his reward was to be sent down to the minors the following season. He balked at the demotion. “I won’t go to the minors again,” he said. He went skiing with his family while considering taking a job in his father-in-law’s lease-holding business. He eventually rejoined the Americans.
One day soon after the end of the season, he was traded to the Chicago Black Hawks. His wife reached him with the trade news by telephone at the clubhouse of a golf course.
Mr. Pappin, left, and Arnie Brown in September, 1963.Handout
“Honey, don’t cook dinner,” Mr. Pappin replied, according to Sports Illustrated magazine. “We’re going out to celebrate. I’m the happiest guy in the world.”
He was so disgruntled by his treatment in Toronto, he gave his Stanley Cup ring to his father-in-law as a gift.
“I hated Imlach and he didn’t like me,” Mr. Pappin once told the CBC’s Tim Wharnsby.
The six-foot, 190-pound player was rejuvenated in Chicago, enjoying seven productive seasons, including career highs in goals (41) and assists (51) in 1972-73. Mr. Pappin was best known as the “P” in the team’s lauded “MPH” line, comprised of Pit Martin, himself, and Dennis Hull. When the 1974 All-Star Game was held in Chicago, the trio were introduced as a unit, not as individuals, a rare tribute.
“What was first and foremost is that we were friends,” Mr. Pappin said in 2009. “Everything else was secondary. Our chemistry on the ice reflected what we shared off of it.”
Chicago played a firewagon style of offensive hockey that better suited Mr. Pappin’s game. When he first returned to Maple Leaf Gardens in a Chicago uniform, he told Globe and Mail columnist Dick Beddoes why he preferred being a Hawk.
“I look around the dressing room and there, on one side of me, (Stan) Mikita is lacing his skates,” he said. “I look the other way, and there’s (Bobby) Hull lacing his.”
The Hawks appeared in the Stanley Cup finals against Montreal in 1971. In 18 playoff games, Mr. Pappin scored a remarkable 10 goals, including one in double overtime to win the first game of the best-of-seven series, but he is remembered for the one he did not score.
In Game 7, Montreal was nursing a 3-2 lead when, with about four minutes left, a rebound landed on Mr. Pappin’s stick in front of the open Montreal goal. He shovelled the puck toward the net and began lifting his stick in the air to celebrate what seemed a sure goal. Instead, goalie Ken Dryden stretched his right leg out to make what he later called the greatest save in his career.
Montreal Canadiens goaltender Gump Worsley lies slumped on the ice as Toronto Maple Leafs celebrate the winning goal of the 1967 Stanley Cup game on May 2 in Toronto.Fred Ross/The Globe and Mail
“What I remember, vividly,” Mr. Dryden told hockey writer Dave Stubbs, “was the strangled sound, first of, ‘Yeah …’ and seeing his arms go up in the air — and then his arms and voice stop.”
Montreal hung on to the lead to claim the Stanley Cup.
The goaltender recounted being told by a laughing Mr. Pappin many years later, “I’ve had to talk about that shot and that save all my life.”
In 1975, the forward was shocked when Chicago traded him to the Oakland-based California Golden Seals, where a bad back hampered his play. The troubled franchise became the Cleveland Barons the following season, and Mr. Pappin quit just before Christmas after scoring just two goals in 24 games.
“I just lost it,” he said at the time. “I couldn’t get myself motivated enough to help the team.”
His 278 career goals placed him upon his retirement as 32nd on the all-time list of National Hockey League goal scorers. He had 295 assists. In 92 playoff games, he scored 33 goals with 34 assists.
He made his NHL debut with the Maple Leafs in the 1963-64 season, winning the Stanley Cup in his rookie campaign.
The Maple Leafs placed him at No. 89 on a list of the club’s top 100 players to mark its centennial in 2017.
Mr. Pappin, right, and Toronto Maple Leafs' captain George Armstrong struggle with the Stanley Cup as happy Leafs rush to their aid on May 2.Fred Ross/The Globe and Mail
The two Stanley Cups in 1964 and 1967, combined with three Calder Cup trophies as American Hockey League champions with Rochester in 1965, 1966 and 1968, gave Mr. Pappin five consecutive league championships.
James Joseph Pappin was born in Copper Cliff, now part of Sudbury, Ont., to Geraldine Fitzgerald and Joseph Gerard Pappin, who worked as a fitter for a mining company. By coincidence, Canada declared war on Nazi Germany on the day of his birth, Sept. 10, 1939.
In summer during his playing career, he operated Jim Pappin’s Hockey Ranch in Pickering, about 50 kilometres from downtown Toronto, where boys swam, rode horses, and played hockey under the guidance of NHL players including Eddie Shack, Doug Jarrett, and the Hull brothers.
He also owned thoroughbred racehorses. An investment in a luxury tennis complex in his hometown failed after workers at mining company Inco, the city’s largest employer, went on strike. He returned to hockey, building a long career as a scout for Chicago, the St. Louis Blues, and the Anaheim Ducks.
Mr. Pappin, who was recently diagnosed with cancer, died at his home in Palm Desert, Calif. He leaves his wife, Peggy. He also leaves a son, Arne Pappin, and daughters Merrill Young and Mary Jessica Pappin from his first marriage. Other survivors include four grandchildren, a brother and a sister.
Mr. Pappin’s 1967 Stanley Cup ring was lost by his father-in-law while on holiday in Florida in the 1970s. After divers he hired failed to find it, he borrowed Mr. Shack’s ring and ordered an exact replica from Birks jewellers.
Incredibly, a treasure hunter found the ring in the waters of the Gulf of Florida in 2007. Mr. Pappin paid a reported $10,000 US for its return. The 1967 ring is now held by his son, while his eldest daughter has the 1964 ring.