Bobby Baun jokes that even he wonders sometimes if his hockey career lasted only one game.

There is, after all, a tendency to remember, and even define, our nation’s hockey heroes through one radiant, crystallized moment: Bobby Orr soaring in midair; Paul Henderson, arms skyward in celebration; Doug Gilmour twisting and turning for an overtime wraparound.

For Baun, it is an improbable shot after an implausible return that, 50 years later, still holds a revered place in Maple Leafs lore.

An overtime goal in a Stanley Cup final is itself deserving of historic permanence. Add that it was scored on a broken leg and the storyline shifts into myth-making. Such was the magnitude of that dramatic night in an arena that no longer stands, for a team that no longer wins, that it dwarfs the other 1,059 times Baun pulled on an NHL sweater, and remains seared in the memory of Torontonians of a certain age.

Visit Baun now at the modest south Ajax home he shares with his wife Sallie and he’ll willingly recreate that night in Detroit, April 23, 1964, supplying colour to the grainy black-and-white video that will undoubtedly be replayed frequently this anniversary month.

Bobby Baun reflects on his fascinating life and the goal, scored 50 years ago, that became part of Maple Leafs lore. Full story in Saturday's Star.

Bobby Baun talks about his famous injury and what he thinks happened leading up to it.

That the once hard-hitting defenceman has retold the tale thousands of times — the cracking fibula that “sounded like a cannon” firing, the freezing and doctor’s reassurances that he couldn’t inflict further damage, the “triple-flutter blast with a follow-up blooper” shot that somehow found mesh — doesn’t diminish the telling. A bemused grin and a twinkle in his eyes gives the impression that the 77-year-old enjoys the yarn as much as the listener.

But he also makes it clear that in the same way that one game doesn’t encapsulate a career, being a hockey player doesn’t summarize a life. There is more to being Baun than being an autograph-signing link to a city’s last Stanley Cup, trotted out for ceremonies and anniversaries but not allowed to grow old in our mind’s eye; forever Bobby, never Bob.

“How can you say what one’s life is?” he says wistfully, letting the question hang in the air, so a guest at his kitchen table can ponder the impossibility of the task. You can’t is the unspoken answer. But Baun clearly enjoys sharing snippets of his.

Hearing his stories is akin to following the puck at a poorly played game. They suddenly change direction and its never certain where they are headed next. Baun was a farmer, a Tim Hortons franchisee times three, a car salesman (while he was a Leaf; it really was a different era), an executive with the fledgling players union, a hockey coach and a politically connected fundraiser. That’s without mention of the $400 bottles of wine, the hot tub for eight in his bedroom, the two times he was named the best dressed man in Canada by a clothing retailer or when he learned to fly his own planes.

Toronto-raised Baun, already driving a Cadillac when he dropped out of school in Grade 10, careened through life enjoying a series of adventures. He met two presidents, lunching with Dwight Eisenhower at Augusta National Gold Club and, with his teammates, encountering future president Richard Nixon during a weather delay at New York’s LaGuardia Airport.

Nixon, Baun recalls, knew the Leafs and didn’t have to be told they had won the 1963 Stanley Cup but that recognition wasn’t completely mutual. As teammate Eddie Shack shook Nixon’s hand, he turned back to his teammates and loudly asked: “Who the f--- did you say this guy was again?”

What makes great athletes and what drives them, in Baun's view.

Baun’s material is polished from giving over 6,000 speeches in his post-hockey career and through co-writing his autobiography, Lowering the Boom.

His is a life in which he values character but also doesn’t mind playing the character. His free-wheeling book is replete with colourful episodes. Such as the time he went into a Toronto hospital for surgery and secretly set up a fully stocked bar, complete with appropriate cocktail glasses, in his room and dined on lobster bisque he had brought to him from La Scala restaurant.Or during the times when George’s Spaghetti House downtown became like a second home and he’d help the owner, a friend of his, run the 26-room hotel above the restaurant. One night they had to change the sheets 159 times.

“I’m a good storyteller but, to me, it’s not a story. It’s telling a bit of my life and how it twists and turns,” he says. “And I’d say everybody’s life does the same thing within reason. We all have our stories.”

But Baun’s stories come with a moral, an underlying philosophy.

Essentially it is this: “The more positive thoughts we can put in our heads, the better we’re going to be off. That’s exactly what I’m like in everything. You can’t go through life with a negative attitude.”

It might sound trite in a wired-for-cynicism world but Baun figures it helped him score that goal 50 years ago, helped guide him out of bankruptcy when his farming career went bust, helped keep him hopeful through treatments for colon cancer, and is useful now, helping him raise funds for a scholarship that carries his name at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) in Oshawa.

It helped him see the upside when good friend and fellow Toronto blueliner Tim Horton hatched a plan to open a chain of doughnut shops. He even loaned Horton $10,000 to get it off the ground. And Baun says he was the one that argued for the drive-through concept despite skepticism from the restaurant’s founders.

Bobby Baun on why he got into the donut business.

Baun was born with an innate ability to deliver what the customers want, on and off the ice. He remembers when he was a cub scout, he could barely contain his excitement about Apple Day.

“I used to polish my apples for three days. I had to be the No. 1 seller.”

Baun’s attitude was further shaped by the teachings of Norman Vincent Peale, the power-of-positive thinking guru. It was honed by observing a lifelong friend who spent his days in a wheelchair without ever losing his ambition or humour after a childhood diving accident. It was given more direction by a book on psycho-cybernetics, a self-help guide to setting proper goals and visualizing positive outcomes, that was his nightstand Bible for years in the early ’60s.

Baun says Horton would drag him to see Peale on Sunday mornings when the team was in New York, and the preacher took a liking to the players. It must have been a striking image: Horton, Baun and teammate Billy Harris on the steps of Manhattan’s Marble Collegiate Church, getting extra words of encouragement from the grandfatherly Peale after his sermon.

The former hockey player cites a couple of examples of when his positive approach rescued him.

First there was the farm, a 250-acre operation near Claremont, Ont., that in the early ’70s grew to 2,000 acres with leased land and was the home for 600 head of cattle.

“Don’t call me a gentleman farmer,” he says. “I had manure on my boots.”

But when plans for the Pickering airport devalued his land and an early frost devastated his corn crop in 1975, the financial pressures became too great and Baun lost over $1 million and tumbled into bankruptcy. He next coached the Toronto Toros of the World Hockey Association but, with five children, things got a little desperate after he was fired.

In an effort to help, a developer friend paid Baun $500 to sign autographs at the sales pavilion of a new housing project near Oshawa. Baun signed the autographs but he also watched potential buyers come and go. He did that for three straight weekends and concluded the sales staff was doing a poor job relating to people.

Baun asked if he could try it and over a period of eight months, his personable, upbeat pitches earned him $120,000 in commissions, he says.

Bobby Baun talks about how he made more money off his season tickets than he did while playing as a Leaf.

On another occasion, Baun was seeking a job to head up the new sales force for an insurance company that was branching into Canada. The former Leaf flew to Columbus, Ga., to be interviewed and as he sat in the reception area waiting to meet the company owners, he struck up a conversation with an older gentleman. It ended up that unfamiliar face was the company’s chairman of the board and unbeknownst to Baun, he had been interviewed there in the waiting room. Baun’s easy way and the enthusiasm he displayed towards a stranger got him the job.

“Never prejudge,” he says. “My (12) grandchildren think I’m a broken record sometimes. I don’t care. I want it ingrained in their heads that they have to be positive about everything they do.”

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Never was that more in evidence than during that high drama at the Olympia 50 years ago, an unfolding of events for which Baun credits a high pain threshold and his positive approach to life.

Freezing out thepain

It was late in Game 6 of the Stanley Cup final against the Red Wings and Detroit was leading the series three games to two when Baun crumpled to the ice. This game was tied 3-3 but the sight of one of their best defenders leaving on a stretcher, left arm dangling at his side, was decidedly inauspicious for the visitors.

Baun had taken a Gordie Howe shot off the outside of his right leg earlier in the period.

“Those old shin pads weren’t worth a s---,” he says.

He kept playing but on a faceoff in the Toronto end – it was common for defenders to take defensive zone face offs in those days – Baun lined up against Howe and winked at him a couple of times before the puck dropped, hoping to agitate the Red Wing into taking a penalty.

Baun won the draw, spun on his right leg and collapsed mysteriously to the ice. After a few minutes, he was carted away to the Toronto dressing room.

“I asked, ‘Can I hurt myself even more?’” Baun recalls of his subsequent conversation with doctors. “And they said, ‘No.’ That was the answer. I’d been around a long time. I was fine with what they told me. They froze it and taped it.”

Baun played a couple of late shifts in the third before receiving more pain-deadening needles in the trainer’s room. Early in overtime, the 27-year-old returned to the bench. Carl Brewer, Baun’s usual partner, was about to go on for a shift with Larry Hillman. Baun told Hillman to stay back and he jumped on the ice.

Bobby Baun talks about hockey expanding into a worldwide game and why Putin might be a problem.

It took just a few seconds for the puck to come to Baun, who wasn’t known for a big shot; surgery on both elbows during his career made sure of that. From the blueline, he launched something akin to a knuckleball at the Detroit net. The puck deflected off the stick of Wings defender Bill Gadsby and eluded star goaltender Terry Sawchuk at 1:43 to force a deciding Game 7.

Baun spent the next two days lying low at a friend’s farm, icing his leg. The Leafs didn’t let it be known he was going to play until moments before the game when he skated out, creating a roar at Maple Leaf Gardens that gave more energy to the home side.

For that Game 7, team doctors again taped up Baun’s leg tightly, leaving a space so that he could be, Baun says, “shot up with Novocaine” every 10 minutes. Baun was a huge contributor to Toronto’s 4-0 victory — named one of the three stars that night — and the win clinched the team’s third consecutive Stanley Cup.

It is only after sipping from the Cup that Baun consented to an X-ray. It revealed he had a hairline fracture of his right fibula; his championship-saving goal was scored on a broken leg.

“Pain didn’t bother me much,” he says. “Still doesn’t.”

That goal wouldn’t have happened, Baun believes, if not for his ability to put mind over matter, what Peale called the power of positive thinking.

Missed opportunities

Baun says the only disappointment from that era is that, he believes, the Leafs had the talent to win several more Stanley Cups, but didn’t receive the proper coaching from Punch Imlach or the support from egotistical owners motivated by self-interest.The aging core of that ’64 team, with some good young additions, would win one more championship in 1967. It was Toronto’s last.

Baun says it was the players that almost squandered a chance at the 1964 championship when a group of veterans, including himself, became distracted by playing the stock market. The including, Brewer, Bob Pulford, Billy Harris and Allan Stanley called themselves the Blue and White investment club and were making more money on Bay Street than Carlton St.

At a time when his hockey salary was $12,500, Baun said he was up as much as $40,000 in the markets.

“But it was too much of a distraction,” he says. “We just about blew it.”

Beyond the players each ultimately getting about $10,000 from the venture, those meetings were also a chance to share grievances about how they were paid and treated. That helped form the roots for what would become an NHL players association.

Bobby Baun talks about screening young players before they slip on the Leafs jersey.

How to live life

It seems the more distant they are, the more people want to revel in stories about the Leafs glory days, especially the one about a goal scored on a broken leg. Baun willing obliges. But when he received an honorary degree from the UOIT, Baun channelled Norman Vincent Peale during his convocation address to thousands of graduates.

“I was talking about life,” he says. “I ended my speech by saying, ‘There’s only one way I can really explain this as you go out into the big world to make your way. It’s like when you’re leaving home or leaving to go to work and your wife wants to make love.’ I said, ‘You make love like it’s the last time you’ll ever make love.’

“That was the end of my speech. Well, my wife, I thought she was going to crawl under the chair. But the whole crowd just got up. I got a standing ovation on that. It was incredible how it rung into everyone.”

Fifty years after one of the greatest goals in Maple Leafs history, Baun can still bring a crowd to its feet.

WATCH: Bobby Baun on:

The goal, 50 years on

On donuts

On what makes a great athlete

On draft picks

On season tickets

On expansion

On the injured leg