Jackie McLeod of the New York Rangers autographs a hockey stick for fans during the 1950-51 NHL season in Toronto.Imperial Oil-Turofsky/Hockey Hall of Fame
In the final game of the 1961 world hockey championship, Jackie McLeod fired two goals and assisted on another as Canada defeated the Soviet Union, 5-1.
Mr. McLeod, a right-winger described as “a little package of dynamite,” led all goal scorers in the tournament with 10 goals in seven games and was named to the All-Star team.
Though no one knew it at the time, the triumph by the amateur Smoke Eaters of Trail, B.C., would be Canada’s last world championship for 33 years.
The slight forward had spent the season training with a Moose Jaw team in his home province of Saskatchewan. His scoring prowess so impressed the Smoke Eaters that he was a last-minute addition to their overseas roster.
In the pandemonium of the dressing room after the game, Mr. McLeod declared the win to be “by far the greatest thrill of my life, bar none.”
Seven years later, he coached the Canadian team to a bronze medal at the Winter Olympics.
Despite his achievements, Mr. McLeod, who has died at 92, was an overlooked figure in Canadian hockey. The Soviet domination over amateur teams in the 1960s was seen at the time as an embarrassment to Canada. It was only following the 1972 Summit Series, during which Canada’s best professionals just barely defeated the Soviets, that the gritty accomplishments of Mr. McLeod and his teammates could be appreciated.
His success on the international stage came as a second act to his hockey career. He had earlier broken into the National Hockey League as a 19-year-old rookie with the New York Rangers.
That he became a professional athlete at all was the more remarkable for his having survived a childhood bout with polio.
Robert John McLeod was born with a twin sister, Violet Jean, on April 30, 1930, in Regina to the former Avis Rosetta Magee and William Henry McLeod. The twins were raised in Hazlet, a village 300 kilometres west of the provincial capital. The family ran a general store.
At age seven, the boy contracted polio, spending a half-year bedridden with chest paralysis. He recovered, though his build was always slight. As an adult, he stood five-foot-nine and weighed just 150 pounds. When he bent over to tie his skate laces, his upper body shook like a chill, a lingering effect from his childhood ailment. A teammate nicknamed him Shaky.
(He was not the only McLeod to have survived a close scrape. An older brother serving as a wartime navigator in the air force was forced to ditch his Sunderland on the choppy waters of the Atlantic during a gale before being towed for three days to safety in Gibraltar. Darcy Garth McLeod later shared credit for sinking a German submarine.)
As a teenager, the boy joined the Notre Dame Hounds in Wilcox under the guidance of Monsignor Athol Murray followed by three seasons of junior hockey with the Moose Jaw Canucks.
After cracking a vertebra in his back while playing football in high school, he spent the hockey season in a cast from his hips to his armpits.
The forward was a fragile rookie in the NHL, as he suffered a concussion, a groin pull and a broken nose.
Six games into his second season, Mr. McLeod was viciously checked from behind by Toronto’s burly Bill Barilko in the final minute of play.
“The kid, crushed against the boards, fell writhing to the ice,” reported Al Nickleson of The Globe and Mail. “He was removed by stretcher and taken to hospital by ambulance.”
The sophomore suffered a broken collarbone and a minor head injury, missing 10 weeks as he recuperated at home in Hazlet. No penalty was called on the play.
His small size and brittleness made it hard to stick with the Rangers. In 106 NHL games over five seasons, he scored 14 goals and recorded 23 assists.
“I couldn’t stay out of the hospital half the time,” he told the Regina Leader-Post in 1987. “I broke my shoulder, my collarbone, my cheekbone, my ankle – everything I think.”
Mr. McLeod bounced between the Rangers and minor professional teams such as the Cincinnati Mohawks, Saskatoon Quakers, Calgary Stampeders, and the original Vancouver Canucks. Before the start of the 1960-61 season, Calgary sold him to the Victoria Cougars. Mr. McLeod declined to report and was suspended. At 29, the part-time amateur pilot was prepared to provide for his family with a job as a salesman for an aircraft company.
Still, he was not ready to abandon hockey. Just before Christmas in 1960, he was reinstated as an amateur so he could play for the senior Moose Jaw Pla-Mors. He was also fortuitously recruited by the Smoke Eaters, a team named for the smelter at which most of the players worked. The crafty forward was needed for European exhibition games as a warm-up to the world championships in Switzerland.
“We did the tour on rickety old airplanes and buses,” Mr. McLeod told James Christie of the Globe on the 50th anniversary in 2011. “Everybody knew European hockey was getting better – and we wouldn’t be world champions again for more than 30 years. I recall that maybe 3,000 of our servicemen were at the last game. And when we won it was something else.”
Mr. McLeod also competed at the 1962 world championships as a roster addition with the Galt (Ont.) Terriers, winning a silver medal as a runner-up to Sweden. He again skated with the Smoke Eaters at the 1964 world championships, the team finishing fourth.
In 1965, Mr. McLeod was named coach of Canada’s national team, which had been founded by Father David Bauer, a Basilian priest, a few years earlier as a replacement for senior amateur teams. Still in good condition and not much older than his players, the new coach took part in spirited practices. At the 1966 world championships in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, Mr. McLeod played wing on a line with Regina-born centre Fran Huck, 20, and Morris Mott, a 19-year-old history student from Creelman, Sask. The playing coach scored four goals in seven games, as the Canadians took the bronze medal.
“He was not a strong skater,” Mr. Mott said recently. “If you’re small and slow, you’re at a disadvantage. But John was a good scorer, a sniper without a sniper’s shot. He got rid of the puck nice and quick.”
At the 1968 Olympics in Grenoble, France, he stayed behind the bench in guiding Canada to a 5-2 record for the bronze. It would be Canada’s last Olympic hockey medal until 1992.
He served as coach and general manager of the Saskatoon Blades for most of nine seasons in the 1970s, during which his team lost the Western Canadian Hockey League championship series three times.
Away from the arena, Mr. McLeod was a notable amateur baseball player in Saskatchewan as a left-handed pitcher, first baseman and outfielder for teams in Eston, Gull Lake, North Battleford and Swift Current. Later, as coach of the Swift Current Indians, he handled a 15-year-old pitching phenom named Reggie Cleveland who would spend 13 seasons in the major leagues.
Volatile in temperament, he was the scourge of referees and umpires, whose incompetence he readily pointed out.
In 1984, Mr. McLeod was inducted into the Saskatchewan Sports Hall of Fame in Regina. He was inducted as a player into the International Ice Hockey Federation Hall of Fame in Switzerland in 1999.
Mr. McLeod died on Dec. 8 at St. Paul’s Hospital in Saskatoon. He leaves a son, a daughter, four grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. He was predeceased by his wife of 62 years, Beverly Joan (née Evans), who died in 2012 at age 83. He was also predeceased by his twin sister, Jean DesHarnais, who died in 2011, as well as by another sister and two brothers.
While the Smoke Eaters returned to British Columbia as conquering heroes with a parade and banquets in 1961, Mr. McLeod’s overnight celebration of the world title was followed by a gruelling solo sojourn from Geneva to Lausanne to Montreal to Toronto to Regina. When a reporter caught him at the airport there, just before he took the final leg to his home in Swift Current, he was asked how he wanted to be honoured. “I’d like to sleep for 48 hours,” he replied.