Dave Feschuk: The life of longtime Maple Leafs owner Harold Ballard and the curse he left behind
Jason Priestley grew up in Vancouver, so he’s a Canucks fan at heart. But in directing the new documentary about Harold Ballard, Priestley said he got an “incredible educational experience” on the life and times of the longtime owner of theran the Leafs like a circus
Much like baseball’s Curse of the Bambino once haunted Boston, embedding in the local sporting culture the notion that the mortal sin of trading away the great Babe Ruth to the rival New York Yankees in 1920 led to most of a century of misery for the Red Sox, so goes a theory espoused in Priestley’s documentary.
“He’d kind of been forgotten. It was time to bring the story, for a whole new generation, right back to the surface,” Geddes said. “It was very simple: I thought there was really nobody like him in this country, let alone Toronto, in the ‘70s and ‘80s. He stood out. He grabbed headlines. I was surprised nobody had done a documentary.
Priestley said Ballard was “using the Donald Trump playbook long before Donald Trump,” particularly in the way he both used and disdained the media. In one hilarious moment of the documentary, when former Star columnist Wayne Parrish recounts a time when Ballard defiantly waved his cane at a group of hockey writers protesting the owner’s refusal to allow women reporters into the Leafs’ dressing room, Priestley cuts to a classic Ballard interview.
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