Turnbull helped drive Sittler, Maple Leafs to new heights

More than 43 years after the fact, Ian Turnbull is best remembered for five goals, a record that stands to this day for goals scored in one game by an NHL defenseman.

But Turnbull should be celebrated for this too:
It was Feb. 7, 1976, Turnbull's turn to car-pool three teammates from their homes in Toronto-suburban Mississauga to Maple Leaf Gardens downtown for a game against the Boston Bruins.
Passenger Darryl Sittler was famous for wanting to be in the locker room hours before pregame warmup. Turnbull didn't much care if he had to lace his skates while heading to the ice.
That day, Turnbull slept through his afternoon-nap alarm and scrambled to begin rounding up his teammates -- forwards Sittler and Lanny McDonald and defenseman Borje Salming. Off they went, headed for the highway into the city when Turnbull realized his car was low on fuel. He peeled off into a gas station, steam by now coming out of Sittler's ears.

Ian Turnbull at home in Torrance, California, with a scrapbook opened to the 1969-70 Memorial Cup-champion Montreal Junior Canadiens.
The young pump-jockey nearly fainted when he saw four Maple Leafs stars pull into the station in a Lincoln Continental.
"The kid tried the full service deal, cleaning the windshield, checking the oil," Turnbull said, laughing. "He ended up putting oil in the radiator, if I recall, so it took him another 20 minutes to drain it and refill it. Darryl was [displeased].
"Half the time, I didn't even take the warmup. I'd skate a couple minutes then go and sit down. We made it to the Gardens more than comfortably in time, but not for Darryl. The whole way to the Gardens, he was cursing me out, muttering, 'I'm never going to ride with you again. Ever.' "
Of course, Sittler went out and piled up an NHL-record 10 points that night, scoring six goals and four assists. In the chaos of the locker room after the game, Turnbull, who had scored once in the 11-4 win, found the man of the hour and told him, "See? I told you that you don't have to be at the rink three hours early."
For Turnbull, 66, those memories are every bit as rich as the ones attached to his own record-setting night of Feb. 2, 1977, when he scored five goals on five shots in a 9-1 Maple Leafs home-ice win against the Detroit Red Wings.

"I was never one for personal stats. I couldn't care less about them, really," he said on Monday from his home in Torrance, California. "That's why I laugh more than 40 years later that people are still talking about my five goals. It happened but I certainly didn't plan it. I didn't wake up that day and say, 'I'm going to score five goals tonight.' It's always meant more to others than it has to me."
Turnbull was a guest Monday on an "Original 6 Alumni Luncheon" function, a popular monthly event that organizers Paul Patskou, a Toronto-based hockey researcher and video historian, and Lora Evans have taken online in a Zoom conference. It was a personal delight to listen in, then catch up with Turnbull by phone, because the two of us have a history, even if only one of us remembers it.
In early May 1978, between Games 1 and 2 of a Stanley Cup semifinal at the Forum against the Montreal Canadiens, Turnbull would be the first of by now hundreds of NHL players I've interviewed, that maiden one-on-one interview something that a hockey journalist never forgets.
I was one of countless reporters to whom Turnbull has spoken, an almost-cub reporter two years into his career lobbing a community newspaper's hometown-boy-makes-good questions at him during the heat of the playoffs, so I don't take my invisibility personally.

Ian Turnbull featured in the May 11, 1978 edition of the Pointe-Claire, Quebec weekly "News & Chronicle."
Our paths had sort of crossed seven years earlier. Turnbull, and his future wife, Inge, graduated from John Rennie High School in Montreal-suburban Pointe-Claire in 1971, the year I began my studies there. He was a year late graduating because he'd had to split academic years, by then on the roster of the Montreal Junior Canadiens.
I'd already seen him on defense for the 1968-69 West Island Flyers of the Metropolitan Junior B Hockey League, their home games played at Pointe-Claire Arena across the street from the school. He was 15 that winter, four years younger than many in the league.
I never saw Turnbull in the hallways of John Rennie, not that he often was at school, anyway. His 1971 JRHS Highlander Yearbook graduation entry is just a photo and his name, without the usual bits and pieces.

Forty-nine years after his 1971 graduation from John Rennie High School, Ian Turnbull this week completed his Highlander Yearbook entry.

"I was travelling, playing hockey, so school was sort of secondary," he said. "The Junior Canadiens were on the road a lot, so getting to class was quite a hassle. I'd get thrown out by most of the teachers until I cut a deal with a guidance counsellor that made it ok that I might be there or might not be. It was challenging, to say the least."
Turnbull blazed a trail for three future John Rennie NHLers: Peter Worrell, Vincent Lecavalier and Mike Matheson.
He remembers Inge playing music at the arena for Toller Cranston, a world-championship and Olympic figure-skating medalist, and her mother teaching swimming at the aquatic center adjacent to the rink.
Graduating from the Flyers, Turnbull would win the 1969-70 Canadian-championship Memorial Cup on the Montreal Junior Canadiens, captained by Gilbert Perreault; the team featured Richard Martin, Jocelyn Guevremont and a handful of other future NHLers.

The 1969-70 Memorial Cup-champion Montreal Junior Canadiens. Bottom row, from left: Michel Dion, Jocelyn Guevremont, GM Phil Wimmer, Gilbert Perreault, Norm Gratton, coach Roger Bedard, Bobby Guindon, Wayne Wood. Middle row, from left: trainer Bobby Stewart, Bobby Lalonde, Richard Lemieux, Scott MacPhail, Serge Lajeunesse, Richard Martin, Claude Moreau, John Garrett, trainer Phil Langlois. Top from left: Pierre Brind'Amour, Ian Turnbull, Allan Globensky, Michel Latreille, Hartland Monahan, J.P. Bordeleau. Trophies, from left: George Richardson Memorial Trophy, Memorial Cup, John Ross Robertson Cup, Hamilton Spectator Trophy.
From the Ontario league's Ottawa 67's, Turnbull would be selected in the first round of the 1973 NHL Draft (No. 15) by the Maple Leafs, embarking on eight seasons with Toronto from 1973-81, playing 42 more games with the Los Angeles Kings and six with the Pittsburgh Penguins before a back injury and surgery ended his career in 1982.
His finest hour was during the Maple Leafs' seven-game elimination of the New York Islanders in the quarterfinals of the 1978 playoffs. With defense superstar Salming sidelined with injury, Turnbull stepped up for Toronto coach Roger Neilson, scoring in Game 7 and setting up McDonald's goal in overtime. That clincher was four days before we met at the Forum following Maple Leafs practice, a reporter on his 21st birthday scribbling the quotes of a 25-year-old he'd first watched a decade earlier.
The Maple Leafs, pounded in a physical series against the Islanders, were easy pickings for the Canadiens, who would sweep Toronto then defeat the Bruins in a six-game Final to win their third of four consecutive championships.
Turnbull would face the Canadiens one last time in the playoffs, another 4-0 Montreal sweep in the 1979 quarterfinal round. Remarkably, it's the last time the Canadiens and Maple Leafs have met in the postseason.

Maple Leafs defensemen Borje Salming (left) and Ian Turnbull haul down Boston Bruins' Terry O'Reilly in front of goalie Wayne Thomas during a 1975 game at Maple Leaf Gardens.
After hockey, having stayed in California since being traded to the Kings in November 1981, Turnbull has worked in real estate and the mortgage business, a quick study on computers who today is the information technology director for a car dealership.
Married 45 years, he and Inge have a son and a daughter and two young grandchildren. Their library includes a half-dozen scrapbooks that his late father kept, a chronicle of Turnbull's hockey career since his days at mosquito level.
Forty-nine years after high-school graduation, the classrooms of John Rennie might not be burned into his memory but his academic craftiness most certainly is.
"Thank heavens for Coles Notes, Cliff Notes in the U.S.," he said, laughing again, of the students guide to literature, a convenient shortcut for those who knew how to use them shrewdly. "I took a North American literature course. I didn't read a book and I got like 90 percent or something. When I wrote my exams, I used everything from Coles Notes almost verbatim.
"Inge was (not happy). She read all the books. I told her, 'You should have bought some Coles Notes. They cut right to the chase.' "
Photos: HHoF Images; courtesy Inge Turnbull; 1971 John Rennie High School Highlander Yearbook