Clear the Track...here comes Shack..

On a Maple Leafs team far removed from the Original Six era, Eddie Shack can’t teach Auston Matthews to shoot, Mitch Marner to fight, or Morgan Rielly to wrap up foes in the Tim Horton Hug.

But as frustrated as he is watching Toronto’s title drought go beyond 50 years, there’s a trait he thinks can transcend his lunch-pail Leafs to the mega-millionaires now in blue and white.

“Togetherness,” the 82-year-old Shack said Monday at the Steelcase Grill House where fellow NHL Old-timers toasted his new coffee-table book. “You protected each other because you’re not perfect. If someone gets into a fight, everyone gets into a fight. If something happened, you get in trouble away from the ice, you stick behind the person.

“If No. 34 (Matthews) was the captain, if he did something that wasn’t right, had a couple of cocktails, got aggravated (a case now playing out in court in Scottsdale, Ariz.,) that’s what you did for him.”

Shack said there was little choice for teams other than to bond in an austere NHL.

“There was no money (to fall back on). Yeah, we drank much more than the kids now, went to a bar and played bulls**t poker. But if we had a problem, we solved it right there. We weren’t in good shape as today, but we also stayed on the ice three minutes sometimes. We had a lot of fun. If Johnny Bower let one in short-side, we’d said ‘Hey, that’s a minor-league goal, you’re being sent down.’ Hell, I’d get sent down for misbehaving.

“But with the Leafs and Canadiens, it was ‘Hey s**thead, you gotta win that Cup.’”          

Shack, like Dave Keon and others, has come back into the Leafs’ orbit after many in the 1960s dynasty felt alienated, first by Harold Ballard and then years of failed rebuilds.

But that only made their stars shine brighter among nostalgic fans. No one could forget Shack, ‘The Entertainer’, who fought the toughest hombres on other teams or at least knocked ’em down and gave ‘em a whack, like the lyrics in a 1966 hit single Clear The Track by Douglas Rankine With The Secrets. The novelty song was No. 1 in Toronto until Nancy Sinatra bumped it with These Boots Are Made For Walking.

" Clear the track, here comes Shack
He’ll knock you down and he’ll give you a whack
He can score goals, he’s got a knack
Eddy, Eddy Shack

They call him a great entertainer
Ah, but Ed is no clown
It couldn’t be made any plainer
Great to have Ed in town

So clear the track, here comes Shack
He’ll knock you down and he’ll give you a whack
He can score goals, he’s got a knack
Eddy, Eddy Shack

He started year in the minors
And almost gave up the game
Boom is back with the big club
And the leagues just haven’t been the same

 So clear the track, here comes Shack
He’ll knock you down and he’ll give you a whack
You can’t score goals, he’s got a knack
Eddy, Eddy Shack "

There was the famous shot of Shack jumping Gerry Ehman of the Seals when he was with Buffalo and video of him eluding Battleship Bob Kelly and the Plager brothers who wanted to kill him one night at the Gardens in 1974 during his second incarnation as a Leaf.

“I can skate faster backwards than you bastards can forwards,” Shack chirped at the brothers to set them off.

“The fans used to get us going more than today,” he observed. “If I wasn’t playing, my dad would stand up across from the Leafs bench and start yelling ‘We Want Shack!’ Then I’d stand up on the end on the bench on my side and start the cheer, too. But Ballard would yell at me ‘If they want you so bad, go up and sit with them and shut up.’”

His book, with author/sportscaster Ken Reid, is subtitled Hockey’s Most Entertaining Stories and comes with an unusual proviso.

“I haven’t read it,” laughed Shack, still unashamed of his lack of comprehension after giving up on school while a lad in Sudbury. “People who read it like it. I want to hear what Bobby Hull and Wayne Gretzky said about me.”

His dad, a crane operator for Inco, also had a learning disability. Though he eventually learned to write after sometimes giving autographs just marked ‘X’, former teammates still razz him about his reading problem. Bob Baun would taunt him during games after Shack was traded, shouting ‘C-A-T’ at him.

“E-literate … why would they name something like that for someone who can’t read or write?,” Shack roared.

Reid kidded that he lost about 5,000 words from the text once he edited out Shack’s many expletives following their interviews. The book has many intimate family photos from Eddie’s wife Norma and tales of him defying his mother at age 11 to hitchhike 10 miles in morning darkness to Copper Cliff and play for a local team. He lied about his age at 13 to get a driver’s license, which he promptly lost drag racing on Highway 17. Shack also reveals his pride in having a gay son.

The money Shack didn’t earn in hockey — Shack was part of the 1990s group that pursued the league for lost pension money — he regained with a strong business acumen in everything from Christmas trees to shavers to soda pop. He must look at the far greater endorsement income of a Marner or Matthews with envy, but says he still watches the Leafs and the NHL intently.

“What are you going to do at my age but watch hockey,” he laughed. “It’s different than when we played, but it’s still good hockey.

“When I played, it was so easy to recognize people because they didn’t wear helmets. I have to go by the numbers.”

SHACK STILL NOSE PROMOTION

At 82, Eddie Shack hasn’t lost his proboscis for promotion.

The man behind the Pop Shoppe commercials in the 1970s, a staple of Canadian TV with dozens of other money-making ventures, managed to empty giant cartons of his new book on Monday at an event, while raising money for charity by auctioning off his omnipresent cowboy hat. He still gleefully plays off his Leafs fame, large nose and “not being the sharpest knife in the drawer.”

“When you’re this stupid, you can’t lie,” Shack said of just being himself in front of the camera. “I used to do commercials with (late Toronto Sun columnist) Paul Rimstead for Rough and Ready garbage bags. No practice runs with Paul, but he used to put words in the script he knew I couldn’t say.

“The thing I would like to do now, because I have battled prostrate cancer and I’m doing the Movember mustache thing, is a commercial for adult diapers. A lot of guys who wear them are embarrassed. Well I’m not. Then I could say ‘I have a nose for value and these diapers are the best.’ Wouldn’t that be great?”

Eddie did as many commercials as he could, Punch hated this