Johnny Bower played goal for the Leafs during their last glory years, earning four Stanley Cups in the 1960s. Bower, a Toronto hockey icon for nearly half a century, tells his story in the new book, The China Wall: The Timeless Legend of Johnny Bower. In this excerpt, he looks at the architect of those Cup-winning teams, the colourful and controversial Punch Imlach.

People don't know this, but I almost quit the Leafs before I'd ever won the Stanley Cup.

It was in 1961. We'd lost a game and our coach-GM,  gold to wow Punch Imlach, hated to lose. On top of that, we hadn't played well and we'd lost by a big score on the road. We came back to Toronto, and when Punch said, "Ten o'clock on the ice for practice," you'd better be on the ice for 10 o'clock.

We're all sitting on the bench at about one minute to 10 and we see Punch coming around the corner.

They'd had wrestling at Maple Leaf Gardens the night before and they hadn't finished sweeping up, so there were a lot of cigarette butts on the floor around the bench. Eddie Shack spotted an unused cigarette on the floor by the bench and asked me to slip it into my glove and save it for him for later. maple story mesos Then when Punch comes out, Shack says, "Punch, Bower's smoking a cigarette."

Punch asks, "You smoking, Bower?" and I said, kind of sarcastically, "Yeah, I'm smoking all right," not thinking that Punch probably still wasn't in a good mood from the night before.

So Punch snaps at me, "Get in that room, Bower." We were just joking around, but he was still mad about the game. He looked at me and scowled and demanded, "You want to run the hockey club? I'm the coach and the manager." And I said, "Punch, I didn't want to get Shack in trouble. There's butts from cigarettes all over. I dropped my glove and when I picked it up, I saw a cigarette butt drop out of my glove. That's all there was, there was no lighting up."