The Defense Never Rests
Once they were heroes with the Leafs... today they battle the NHL and Alan Eagleson

Gordie Howe, Carl Brewer, Bobby Baun, Frank Mahovlich, Bobby Hull, Tim Horton, Allan Stanley- these names are engraved forever in the minds of hockey fans. In the days of the “Original Six” NHL teams, young players like these thrilled thousands with their no-holds-barred style on and off the ice. They made millions of dollars for the league, often receiving inadequate compensation for the tough game they played and the physical punishment they endured. Little did they know that when the cheering died their biggest fight would be with the NHL itself and Alan Eagleson.

The Defence Never Rests is the riveting story of young men who dreamed only of playing hockey and winning the Stanley Cup. Nowhere was this dream more attainable than at Maple Leaf Gardens in the ‘60s, when the Leafs swept to victory four times. Bruce Dowbiggin captures the heady days of Conn Smythe and Punch Imlach who ruled the club with an iron fist and he vividly recreates the excitement of “Hockey Night in Canada” when the voice of Foster Hewitt reached across the country. But his story continues to the time when, after hanging up their skates in middle age, hockey greats found themselves without adequate pensions, sometimes virtually penniless.

Ignored and cheated by an indifferent NHL management whose coffers they had filled, and abandoned by Alan Eagleson whose Players’ Association had become a one-man show, the players overcame age-old team rivalries and banded together for one last fight. A bitter lawsuit over mishandling of pension funds pitted the likes of Brewer and Howe against the might of the NHL. A prolonged and eventually successful struggle to unseat Eagleson to divide old and new players and rocked the very foundations of the league.

Moving from nostalgia to news, from dressing rooms to courtrooms, The Defence Never Rests is an entertaining and revealing expose of the pride and shame of our national sport from the journalist whose award-winning television coverage of the Eagleson story has sports fans throughout North America talking.