Borje Salming’s death from ALS a tragedy for hockey

By Lethbridge Herald on December 3, 2022.

LEAVE IT TO BEEBER
Al Beeber
Lethbridge Herald

The death of Toronto Maple Leaf great Borje Salming from ALS recently hit a nerve with me and after two weeks, it’s still hard to believe he’s gone.

The Leafs were the favourite NHL team in my family and I remember watching them win their final Stanley Cup on black-and-white television while living in Cardston along Lee Creek.

Playing hockey that creek our hockey heroes were the likes of George Armstrong, Ron Ellis,  Dave Keon and Johnny Bower.

In the ‘70s after briefly switching allegiance to the Montreal Canadiens, I turned my loyalty back to the Leafs when Red Kelly was hired as coach for the 1973-74.

A huge fan of hockey magazines, I thought the Leafs were going to be something special that year with a roster that still had Keon and Ellis along with NHL vet Norm Ullman. But they also had exciting young players such as Lanny McDonald, Darryl Sittler, Ian Turnbull along with the trailblazing Swedish defenceman Salming.

While they lost their quarterfinal series in four straight to arch-rival Boston Bruins – a team I still loathe – the Leafs were exciting to watch. How could you not love a team that had Eddie Shack and Summit Series hero Paul Henderson on the roster? 

Salming and hard-hitting defenceman Mike Pelyk were my favourites on the team, especially Salming who could score, defend and hit with the best of them.

He was a unique talent and opened the door for hockey players from Sweden to make an impact in the NHL.

When he was diagnosed with ALS in August, I was saddened because this is a disease with no cure. His final appearance in Toronto a few weeks ago was shocking. Sittler had to lift  Salming’s right arm to wave at the crowd and the tears in his former teammates’ eyes told the story – he didn’t have much time left.

Nobody deserves to die from ALS and for Salming to go that way is a tragedy. His skills and playing style were an inspiration, even to a former beer league hack like me and to lose a legend with so much life to live is heartbreaking.

We here at The Herald lost one of our own several years ago to ALS, Harman Vanderlee. I’d heard about his diagnosis and when I ran into one day at the southside Safeway after not seeing him for years, Harman hugged me and told me he didn’t have much time left – that he had ALS but he was trusting God to take care of him. His courage and calmness in the face of death struck me hard and I shed a few tears when I got back to the car. While resigned to his fate, Harman was determined to live life on his own terms until the end.

When I lived in Ontario, I played hockey with a former Detroit Red Wing, Vancouver Canuck and Winnipeg Jet (from the WHA era) named Danny Johnson. He and his wife owned a jewelry store in town where Danny played a season with the old Fort Frances Royals junior team before his career took him to Tulsa and eventually the Leafs for whom he played one game in the 1969-70 season before being claimed by the Canucks in the 1970 expansion draft. Danny was part of our morning coffee group and quite frankly one of the nicest, soft-spoken human beings on earth.

A forward in his pro career, Danny played defence in what we called the “liniment league,” his skill set in a town loaded with former junior and semi-pro players still at the elite level even in his 40s.

Danny, too, died of ALS, at the young age of 44. I’ll never forget the call from my old pal Gus Lindberg, whose son Chris played for several years with Canada’s national team before having brief stints with the Quebec Nordiques and Calgary Flames. Gus kept me in touch with everything Fort Frances and visited here in Lethbridge a couple of times enroute to Calgary where he owned and raced a harness horse.

Another Ontario friend Jon Fryer, I saw recently in the obituary notices, died of ALS in Chicago where he was a renowned surgeon at Northwestern University before being stricken with that insidious disease. While in Fort Frances I got to know Jon, his brother Ron and their dad Bob, a junior high school principal  who ran an informal Wednesday night basketball league where 10 to 12 of us never-weres and has-beens hit the court every week in winter for some camaraderie.

Jon was my age and his departure really  hit close to home. But nothing like that of the loss of Salming, who was a true hockey legend. Like the day the music died with the crash of Buddy Holly’s rented plane, the day Salming died in a way is the day the puck didn’t drop. There were too many tears flowing from fans around the world. 

RIP.

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