A Letter From "Ultimate Road Trip" Co-Author, Lance Hornby

When having a beer with Joe Bowen, Paul Hendrick or Bill Watters and the Stellick brothers in their executive days, hockey talk usually segued into a few war stories about life on the road.

While Sun, Star and Globe scribes do our fair bit of travel, no one was with the team 24/7 as the aforementioned group. They had the best tales of flight foul-ups, customs calamity, bad weather, dizzy drivers or some other sudden turn. That contrasted what happened in games themselves at famous old arenas, where a multitude of Leaf fans from near and far endured close games, blowouts and overtime. 

For this road crew, it was trying to make sense of it all, laugh about it back to the hotel and do it all again next day in a new city. But you end up wondering ‘could I survive doing that a whole Leafs season? With home games and playoffs included.’?

So when Mike first shared his ambitious plan to hang with the team all year and document it every day from first light to last call, myself and others certainly had our doubts. This was no longer a six-team league linked by rail who played 70 games, but a 31-club behemoth spread across four time zones with an 82-game schedule through the darkest of winter months. Sometimes there were three games in four nights.  

No one, at least any getting paid for it, ever had the gumption or the money to stick it out with the Leafs that long. I’m very content to share the Leafs beat at the Toronto Sun with one and sometimes two other writers in the course of a long season.

But ESPN didn’t anoint Mike ‘The Ultimate Leafs Fan’ lightly. He’d been ‘covering’ this team in his unique way since he was a wide-eyed kid the 1950s, through his father and grandfather. He had season’s tickets and dedicated years to painstakingly putting together the largest private collection of Leafs artifacts for his basement museum.

What’s a straight-up seven-month journey following them around compared to that? And who better than the uber-organized Deb to map it all out for him?

When he asked my help in assembling it all for a book, there was a strong pull of mutual curiosity. He needed to know some characteristics of each arena and city, hotel logistics and maybe some notable sports history and hockey bars.

I’d always been fascinated by those party animals in Leafs sweaters on TV, who massed outside before puck drop and sat beneath my press box location during the game. Who were they? How did they get here? How much did it cost them? Some were younger fans who clearly resided in those cities where the home team had one or more Stanley Cups and not been kept waiting half a century. 

The most interesting stops for me have always been were Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver. How was it fans who’d had Gretzky, Hawerchuk, Selanne, MacInnis and the Sedins not changed allegiance? I knew that gregarious Mike was the one to find them and get their stories.

As I proof-read his own adventures around the circuit and the poignant stories of people who came from a long line of blue bloods, it answered many of my queries and confirmed there’s no breed quite like a Leafs’ fan. And being a sports nut in general, you couldn’t keep Mike away from Fenway Park, the Dallas Cowboys practice field, the site of Ebbets Field and some of the oldest rinks in the world now used for practice.

He also gained new perspectives about the Leafs interviewing rival coaches, managers and fans, the latter of which sometimes didn’t hide their disdain for Toronto.

For example, the night of John Tavares’s first game back in New York, I was full of trepidation making the short walk from the Long Island Marriott to Nassau Coliseum through the gauntlet of angry well-oiled tail gaters. An out-of-towner was easy to spot, so I didn’t even make eye contact, but Mike went right into the belly of the beast with his ULF hat to get quotes and even found a brave Leaf fan gladly returning the insults of Isles’ supporters.

There are no recent Leaf Cups to celebrate, but the historian in myself and others were to be rewarded when Mike turned on his video camera and old-timers served up several nuggets from 1967 and the glory years before that. 

And while there hasn’t been a lot of May and June hockey since that time, it’s clear the collective memories of seeing Sittler, Gilmour and Sundin remain a big part of Leafs Nation. Perhaps the 2020’s will one day bring the same reverence for Matthews, Marner and the rest if they finally win a Cup.

That will be another book I wouldn’t mind helping Mike write.

Lance Hornby