A farewell to Leafs TV: The career-launching, 'ahead of its time' network says goodbye

Earlier this month, a Facebook group named after a squat, forgettable building tucked under a Toronto highway began to crackle. The message board at “307 Alumni” was usually a quiet place, dedicated as a gathering spot for a few dozen employees of a niche cable channel that once threatened to change the face of Canadian sports television.

There was news to share. After two decades and one ownership shuffle, Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment was pulling Leafs TV off the air. It had been housed at 307 Lake Shore Blvd E., a site on the south side of the Gardiner Expressway that is seemingly destined to become the base for another waterfront condominium tower.

Tight budgets forced innovation within those walls and careers were launched, including those of Andi Petrillo and Steve (Dangle) Glynn. As it heads toward oblivion on Sept. 1, the station has already been stripped of most live programming — it is now known as Leafs Nation Network — and left as a vessel for pre-taped content and replays of old games.

“It’s kind of sad to see it go,” said former Leafs TV producer Chris Clarke, who created the Facebook group earlier this year. “I honestly think it died a few years ago, and they’ve been holding by a thread just to have a network on the air.”

“Really, it turned into The History Channel with Toronto Maple Leaf Hockey,” said Paul Hendrick, the channel’s long-time reporter. “And to quote Jim Ralph: ‘I don’t watch The History Channel, because it’s all reruns.’”

It was still a new concept when Richard Peddie stepped in front of the MLSE board of directors during a Saturday meeting at the turn of the century. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission was opening the door to digital cable, and Peddie, then the president and chief executive at MLSE, saw an opportunity.

The company could sell advertising on a channel dedicated to the Leafs for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And more than that, Peddie thought, it would be a way to jolt Bell and Rogers — the two main players for Leafs regional broadcasts — into a more lively discussion about rights fees.

“I’m not going to say they colluded, but they never seemed to want to compete against each other,” said Peddie. “So if they’re not going to compete, we’ll create our own competitor.”

He said Steve Stavro, then the majority owner of MLSE, was initially resistant to the idea. Peddie had a plan to partner with Corus Entertainment Inc., where his brother (Tom Peddie) was in senior leadership and his friend (John Cassaday) was chief executive.

Stavro surprised Peddie. He rejected the partnership but embraced digital cable. The MLSE board gave permission to create not just Leafs TV, but also Raptors NBA TV. After securing the broadcast licenses, both channels would launch on Sept. 7, 2001. (Dozens of new digital channels hit Canadian cable that month, from Animal Planet to SexTV.)

John Shannon was given a production budget of $7 million that year. He was the established television executive hired by MLSE to build the new channels. The NBA channel could be carried nationally, but the Leafs channel was regional, and essentially unavailable to anyone living east of Belleville, Ont.

There was not much room in the budget. Shannon emphasized three key points in his recruiting pitch to prospective employees: Leafs TV would be a teaching hospital, but with microphones and cameras, and the experience earned at 307 Lake Shore would become a springboard to bigger and better job offers.

Also: There was free parking.

“We needed to be inventive, creative and cheap,” said Shannon. “That was the key.”

Some ideas lasted longer than others, and some can still be heard as echoes in sports television. Anyone who subscribed to Leafs TV, for example, could watch the head coach’s press conference live, and in its entirety, long before it became common practice.

If Pat Quinn — who coached the Leafs from 1998 to 2006 — was going to field questions for 40 minutes, Shannon said, the Leafs TV control room was instructed to broadcast every single word. Quinn could be charming or crusty, funny or acerbic, and the combination cemented him as the network’s first main star.

And the star was amenable to granting the channel better access than its outside competitors.

For a while, when the Leafs were preparing to play a game inside Air Canada Centre, subscribers could tune in to watch the morning practice live on Leafs TV. Cameras were allowed inside the player lounge, and they were sometimes in the dressing room when other media personnel were not. (Access began to erode, Clarke said, when John Ferguson Jr. became general manager in 2003 and grumbled that live access to a morning game day skate gave visiting teams a competitive advantage.)

“There are things that we did that have become common and accepted — and almost in demand,” said Shannon. “We did them out of necessity. We needed to create inexpensive content that we thought people would like.”

Jody Vance was an established name in Canadian broadcasting when she joined the company in 2006, having spent several years as an anchor at Sportsnet. As corporate as MLSE headquarters could feel, a few blocks away, she said the doors at 307 Lake Shore felt more open to impulse and creativity.

“It just didn’t have the stoic, $5,000-suit-with-a-pocket-square vibe to it,” she said. “It was more of an every-person’s fan channel.”

One day, armed with a loose concept for a show segment, she approached good-natured Leafs enforcer Wade Belak in the dressing room. Vance thought it might be fun to follow Belak around with a camera, just to get him away from the arena and let him talk about anything that seemed interesting that day.

He liked the idea. More than that, he said they could start filming that day. His one request was that the segment not be called “Wade’s World.”

It was instead called “Wade a Minute,” and it eventually led viewers on a tour of his home. The Leafs TV camera showed the 6-foot-5, 223-pound player at rest with his tiny dogs, and frolicking gently on the floor with one of his young children. In another segment, Belak, who died in 2011, gave a tour of the dressing room (“Here’s my stall, which is usually the green room for Darcy Tucker’s interviews”) and its medical facilities (“I make fake teeth out of leftover wood pieces from our sticks.”)

“It was so fun,” said Vance. “God, I miss that guy.”

The access to players, along with the presumed access to the corridors of power at Air Canada Centre, raised questions about the channel’s editorial independence. In 2002, The Globe and Mail ran a satirical column about Leafs TV under the headline “Presenting your Leafs with a spin,” while the Toronto Star more than once referred to the channel as the “house organ” for MLSE.

“There was never an edict,” said Hendrick.

“If the power-play sucked,” said Shannon, “we have to be able to say the power-play sucked.”

“We were never given real concrete inside information, or too much of a headstart or a heads-up on any of the breaking news,” said former Leafs TV reporter Bob Harwood. “We didn’t have a pipeline from the PR office … they didn’t reach out and call and alert us.”

Harwood, who was on the air when the station launched in 2001, traveled on the team charter with the players. He said he did not go to dinner with them, or lounge with team personnel in the hotel lobby.

“They’re creatures of their own habits,” he said. “Our job was to get enough trust out of them that, if you lined up an interview with a guy on the flight to Detroit, that tomorrow morning, he remembers and the PR staff supports you.”

One interview, though, triggered sparks of controversy. It was March 2002, six months after Leafs TV hit the air, and the NHL trade deadline had passed without the Leafs making a major move. Reporters from all branches of the city’s expansive sports media tree — from newspaper to radio to TV — were waiting to hear an explanation from Quinn.

They waited all day, and then waited even longer: Quinn spoke exclusively to Leafs TV.

Media executives complained (“It’s outrageous,” one radio manager told the Globe). A scathing report in the Star said the decision “was just plain dumb.”

“I remember feeling a bit of a burning bullseye on my back from certain people,” Harwood said with a chuckle. “But I couldn’t name who, and I don’t remember it being that long-lived.”

Shannon, the channel’s lead executive, said it was not his idea to keep Quinn away from the masses that day, but he would gladly accept the credit. He had been lobbying the team for more access, arguing that it was critical the network provide exclusive content in order to justify the investment from subscribers. (A few years later, in September 2005, the Star reported Leafs TV had 120,000 subscribers.)

“We needed to say we owned content,” he said. “Pat Quinn is an employee of the Maple Leafs. We are the Maple Leafs channel. We need to be able to do it. It was just common sense.”

It was also a glimpse into a potential future.

Peddie had grander plans for MLSE’s digital cable experiment. He wanted to expand the footprint into a network that broadcast feature content from all MLSE properties. (Having started with the Leafs and the Raptors, the company now includes Toronto FC, the Marlies, the Argonauts and Raptors 905.)

The new cable channel would be called Real Sports Network, and it would carry games that MLSE previously sold to partners such as TSN and Sportsnet. By removing the outside broadcaster, the idea was that the revenue generated through advertising and corporate partnerships would remain with MLSE.

Peddie and his group had been in contact with outside consultants. There would be a studio inside the eponymous restaurant built next to the arena. It would be a Canadian version of the YES Network in New York, or NESN in Boston.

“Oh, it was going to frigging happen,” said Peddie. “There was no doubt about it.”

He conceded there would have been risks and hurdles, but remained adamant: “I believe to this day that Bell and Rogers bought us because they were worried about the Real Sports Network.”

The sworn corporate enemies became unlikely partners when they each bought a 37.5 per cent stake in MLSE in 2011, paying a total of $1.07 billion to the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan for its controlling interest. Larry Tanenbaum kept his minority stake, and also remained as chair of the MLSE board.

Peddie was already on his way into retirement when the sale was announced. The future of the channels he helped launch came into clearer focus when Tim Leiweke was hired as CEO 16 months later.

Clarke, one of the first employees hired at Leafs TV, remembered when Leiweke paid a visit to staff at 307 Lake Shore: “And basically said, ‘Bell and Rogers want to shut you guys down, but Larry wants to keep you going, so we’re going to keep you going.’”

From there, he said, it felt like only a matter of time until the station was closed. The new owners were not going to surrender valuable inventory — such as regular-season Leafs games — at the expense of their existing networks.

“The lack of programming, in my mind, killed it,” said Clarke. “I think that’s what Bell and Rogers really wanted. TSN and Sportsnet didn’t want the competition.”

There had been signs the company was scaling back on its investment even before the sale. Vance, the host, said she went for what she assumed was a routine meeting in 2009 only to be told that, because of the unfolding global financial meltdown, MLSE could no longer justify the cost of her salary.

She was cut loose. (Her then-husband, Bart Given, was fired as assistant general manager of the Blue Jays the same year, and also for financial reasons.)

“It was a tough time,” said Vance. “I’m not going to lie to you: I was really sad.”

Any remaining viewers tuning into the channel this month would notice a banner heralding its demise at the bottom of the screen. It was concise: “Thank you for your viewership. As of Sept 1st 2022 Leafs Nation Network TV Service will no longer be on air.”

In an email statement, MLSE said coverage of the Leafs would “continue to be shared across the team’s digital platforms” and that it would continue to produce live Marlies coverage for home games. No jobs will be “impacted by this shift in strategy.”

Many of the channel’s alumni still work in media — including Vance, Petrillo and Glynn — while some have moved on. Harwood is living in Raleigh, N.C. Hendrick retired in 2020. Peddie and his wife have opened several small businesses in downtown Amherstburg, Ont.

“We spawned a big group of club TV-themed media services throughout the continent, including every other NHL team in Canada,” said Hendrick. “It’s a legacy I was very proud to be a part of.”

“It’s the end of an era, but I can’t argue with the end of that era,” said Peddie. “It was something done 20 years ago for good, strategic reasons. It was before its time.”

(Photo: Then-Leafs TV reporter Monika Platek speaks with NHL senior VP of hockey operations Kris King before the 2011 Heritage Classic / AJ Messier / NHLI via Getty Images)