Maple Leafs History: ChatGPT vs Fact - EP1 - The Rabbit Feet

In this podcast episode, the host discusses his idea of using Chat GPT to explore the history of the Toronto Maple Leafs. He introduces the concept of lost treasures in the team's history and focuses on the silver-mounted Lucky Rabbit's Feet given to the Toronto St. Pats when they won the Stanley Cup in 1922. He explains that the whereabouts of these rabbit's feet are unknown and shares Chat GPT's answer, which states that their location remains unclear and there are various theories and rumors surrounding their fate. The host also mentions other physical artifacts from the Maple Leafs' history that are known to exist and talks about collectors who possess Leafs memorabilia. He concludes by saying that the mystery surrounding the rabbit's feet adds to their allure and that he will continue exploring the team's history in future episodes. All right, here we go, one take. First episode, Chat GPT vs. Fact, specifically Leafs Fact and Maple Leafs History. It's an idea that came across my mind. I'm Nick Konorowski, by the way, broadcasting in what is live at the moment, but obviously you're listening to it recorded from NBN, which is Nick's Basement Network. And this is kind of an idea I came up with after tinkering with Chat GPT. Kind of a useful tool if you're doing things like writing cover letters. Be pretty helpful with that, saves a lot of time. You kind of have to adjust some stuff here and there. But I got to thinking, well, what else can it do? Because I guess I was kind of new to it in not too long ago, actually, I guess. And I started asking it to write me like Seinfeld scripts with specific things, or give me a perfect end to how The Simpsons should end, which wasn't very good. But then I started to think, well, how accurate is it when it comes to history? Because I am a pretty big history buff, especially when it comes to Maple Leaf's history. And I had this book idea for Maple Leaf's urban legends and myths and some of the stories in the team's history that kind of get wish-washy when it comes to the actual truth. And I wanted to dive in to a bunch of them. So I thought, well, let's see what Chat GPT has to say on some of these topics. So the first couple of episodes are all going to be about the lost treasures in Toronto Maple Leaf's history, because there are some really interesting physical pieces that are basically treasure, because if you find one, you're potentially sitting on a gold mine, because they are, well, there's really no price on them. I don't really know, because they're one-of-a-kind, some of these things that we're going to be talking about. And in this first episode here, we're gonna be talking about the Lucky Rabbit's Feet. What are they? Well, they were the token of gratitude given from the city to the Toronto St. Pats when they won the Stanley Cup in 1922, the silver-mounted Lucky Rabbit's Feet. But nobody really seems to know what happened to these rabbit's feet, to the best of my research. So let's see what Chat GPT has to say about it. So the whole point of this series is I'm going to tell you what Chat GPT says about the subject, and I'm gonna tell you my own research and see how Chat GPT holds up to what I believe is the best history available. So here's the Chat GPT answer when I ask, what happened to this little memento that was given to the Toronto St. Pats when they won the Stanley Cup in 1922? So here's the Chat GPT answer. It says, the silver-mounted rabbit's feet gifted to Toronto St. Patrick's, later renamed the Maple Leafs, for winning the Stanley Cup in 1922, but an interesting and somewhat mysterious history. After the team's victory, it's believed the rabbit's feet were displayed in a prominent location, possibly within the team's offices or at Maple Leaf Gardens, the team's home arena at the time. However, over the years, the whereabouts of the silver-mounted rabbit feet have become somewhat unclear. There are various theories and rumors surrounding their fate. Some believe they may have been lost or misplaced during a transition between ownership or arena renovations. Others speculate they may have been stolen or sold. Despite efforts to locate the rabbit feet, including inquiries from historians and collectors, the current location remains unknown. The mystery surrounding the fate of the rabbit feet has only added to their mystique and intrigue, making them a fascinating piece of hockey memorabilia history. So that's the Chat GPT answer. Is it true? Well, let's find out. Well, when it comes to the Maple Leafs, like I said off the top, well, geez, when your team's around for more than a century as the Leafs have been, there's just bound to be like a treasure trove of goodies and interesting objects kind of attached to their history. And some of them we know do exist physically. We do know at least a few of them. Some of them are in Scotiabank Arena or the offices attached to Scotiabank Arena. I know for a fact there are a few season ticket holder ledgers from various seasons throughout the 1930s with every season seat holder handwritten name by name where their seat was back at the gardens, the cost of the tickets. It's kind of a cool sight to see. It's looking, they kind of look sort of like a first edition Charles Dickens novel, something like that. Dickens had written about the who's who of Toronto and where they'd like to sit to take in a hockey game at the time. I know a more modern piece of history can be seen in the display case on the 200 suite level of the Scotiabank Arena. That's the number one draft card that NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daley revealed back on April 30th, 2016. That date might ring a bell. That was the date where it was confirmed the Leafs would pick first in the entry draft. Of course, they used that pick to select Austin Matthews. The Hockey Hall of Fame Resource Center and Archive, they have a bunch of really cool, incredible pieces from not only Leafs history, but hockey history. I went on a research trip once, actually, in the fall of 2022 with former Leafs captain Rick Vive. And he and I were shown around a massive facility. It's a huge facility within the same rink where the Leafs practice. And the manager of the area, Craig Campbell, took us around, showed us around. He actually reunited Rick with the stick that Vive used to score his 50th goal with during the 82-83 season. Rick hadn't seen the stick since scoring that very goal on March 30th, 1983 in Detroit. So it was pretty cool to see him reunited with that. They've got all sorts of stuff. Like they even have this letter, the letter, I should say, that confirmed the acquisition of King Clancy from the Ottawa Senators back in 1930, one of the first major stars that the Leafs ever had. And they even have a program from the very first game in club history. That's right, December 19th, 1917, when the Torontos hosted the Montreal Wanderers. I sadly didn't get to see it at the time. I think it was on display on a traveling display they had at the New York offices, the NHL New York offices. But if you're a hockey nerd like myself, you could spend days or weeks at a time pouring through the archives in just complete awe of some of the valuables that they have. I remember being almost in like a state of kind of shock, totally mesmerized. I was holding one of Con Smythe's team jackets from the 1930s in my hands. It was pretty cool. It was for a research project, though. Sadly, though, they don't allow tours to the general public of this place. We know artifacts do scatter over the course of time, find their way into the hands of some private collectors. Two of the major Leafs collectors in the Toronto area anyways are Mike Wilson. You might know him better as the ultimate Leafs fan, and another guy named Mark Farah. Wilson actually wrote a book about his experiences. He went to every single Leafs game, home and away, during the 1819 season. He had a huge collection of Leafs goodies that at one point was believed to be around 1,700 pieces of memorabilia. He sold much of it off, he did so in 2017, to the Canadian Museum of History, but he still owns some of the most unique Leafs collectibles by anyone, anyone in the world. These include playing contracts from legends like Tim Horton, George Armstrong. He even has the front door of the team's old dressing room at Maple Leaf Gardens that has been signed by many former Leafs who've come to visit, well, when he had his shrine anyways. Topping Wilson, though, for collection bragging rights in terms of sheer volume anyway, is that guy Mark Farah. He's a Branson resident who is believed to have around 3,000 pieces of Leafs memorabilia. That's an absurd number, but 3,000. His basement's decorated with all sorts of game-worn jerseys. This is a funny, actually, I don't know if funny's the right word for it. Maybe it's an odd story, but Farah actually has a piece of the plane that Bill Barocco perished in while on his ill-fated fishing trip to Northern Ontario in the summer of 1951. He actually has it. One time, this is before I was working at MLSC, he had a wagon and was walking down Bay Street with the wagon with the piece of the plane that Bill Barocco had perished in, and he came into the office there and asked to speak with somebody to see if the team was interested in taking it off his hands or buying it or something, and somebody went down there and said, you know, what do you want to do with this? He's like, well, you should make a shrine out of it, and the team, rightly so, didn't feel comfortable. You know, somebody died in part of this plane, so they passed on it. So we know that the archives, the Hockey Al-Haym archives, they have a bunch of stuff. Collectors have a bunch of stuff, but when it comes to these little rabbit feet, they might be one of the, I can't say the only Holy Grail, because we're going to get to a couple other, quote, holy grails when it comes to collectors, but their status is unknown, and this goes back to the Toronto St. Pat's era, as I talked off at the beginning. So let's go back to that era, and let's give you a taste of what was going on with the St. Pat's 1921-22 season. It seems a lot of people gloss over the history of the St. Pat's. They were only known as the St. Pat's for about eight years fully. They didn't have a ton of success. That 21-22 season was their best season by far. So if you go back to the fall of 1921, NHL was in its fifth season. It was a simpler era. People passed the time by watching Al Capone dance to Charleston on top of a flagpole, and I hope you get that reference. That's a reference for all my fellow Simpsons fans. Camel, I hope you're a Simpsons fan. In reality, though, fall of 1921, Toronto Pro Hockey fans really didn't have much hope for the upcoming season. Since winning the Stanley Cup in their inaugural campaign, the Torontos, or Arenas, or St. Pat's, they had gone a combined 32 and 33 in the regular season. They'd only made the playoffs once since then, and they were absolutely blown out by the Ottawa Senators in a two-game total goal series in March of 21. But luckily for the St. Pat's, they were about to get, well, a little luck of the Irish, you could say. Everything just seemed to click for them in the 1921-22 season. Cecil Dye, better known as Babe Dye, recorded his second straight 30-plus goal season. He had 31. Four other skaters scored double digits in goals, and they had a 22-year-old goalie named John Ross Roach. He was their first truly reliable goaltender in club history. Looking for revenge against the Senators after being humiliated the previous spring, the St. Pat's beat them in a rematch in March of 1922. They took game one of the total goal series, 5-4. I don't like that. I've never been a big fan of the aggregate series. That's the way it used to be throughout the 20s. But yeah, they won game one, 5-4. And then John Ross Roach went save for save with Ottawa's goalie, Clint Benedict. Game 200 in the scoreless tie, so the St. Pat's went to the Stanley Cup Final on aggregate. And this is one of the time when, if you won the NHL championship, you still had to play for the Stanley Cup. The Stanley Cup wasn't exclusive to the NHL at this time. You still had to play the champions from out west. This time it ended up being the PCHA, Vancouver Millionaires, and it won a five-game series where the St. Pat's came back from a 2-1 series deficit, won it in five games. Hurrah, they're the Stanley Cup champions. So a couple of days after the triumph, the team gathered on March 30th, 1922 at the Carl's Wright Hotel in Toronto. Don't go looking for it. That place doesn't exist anymore. So they went to have a celebratory dinner. It was here they were awarded the Stanley Cup as well as that O'Brien Trophy, which was given to the NHL champions at the time when the NHL, like I said, had to compete with other pro leagues for the Cup. And as a special gift to the team, Toronto Mayor Charles Alf McGuire gave him the silver-mounted Lucky Rabbit's feet. Well, you know, the Lucky Rabbit's foot in general is a centuries-old superstition. It's not clear why Mayor McGuire picked this gift to give to the St. Pats, though one can imagine it likely has something to do with like a lucky foot, luck of the Irish sort of connection thing. And as far as I can tell from all my research, the thing is nobody knows what happened to these rabbit's feet. No pictures are known to exist, and not one person seems to know of their physical presence. The Hockey Hall of Fame resources manager, Craig Campbell, who I talked about, he'd never even heard of it when I brought it up to him to ask if, you know, by chance they had it in a, you know, in a little cupboard somewhere or something like that. I even asked Shane Randall, who is a relative of original Toronto's captain, Ken Randall, the very first captain in team history. He was a member of that 22 Cup squad. I asked him about it in a chat over Facebook, and he said he had no idea. He had also never even heard of it. So who knows? Maybe somebody has the rabbit feet sitting on their mantle right now in their peripheral as they listen to this, sort of like when Homer is watching TV and doesn't even realize that his daughter Maggie is playing with Mr. Burns' long lost teddy bear Bobo, and I promise that's the last Simpsons reference. Actually, no, I don't promise that because this is my series, and I'm gonna put as many Simpsons references in as I like. What happened to the St. Pats, though? Unfortunately for the St. Pats, the championship gift didn't bring really any luck with it. Over the next five seasons, they missed the playoffs four times. The lone time they made it back to the postseason in 1925, they lost in the opening round to the Montreal Canadiens. So there's a little bit of the backstory around the rabbit's feet, and going back to the chat GPT answer, it's pretty accurate. It's actually pretty bang on. The year's some mystique, some intrigue for those who know about its actual existence or past existence, if it's gone or sunk at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, might be, but it does make for a fascinating piece of hockey memorabilia history. The only thing that I can find fault in here with the chat GPT answer is that it says it may have been located within the team's offices at Maple Leaf Gardens. Well, that just doesn't make any sense because when the St. Pats were playing in 1922, from the time that they were still the St. Pats up until the name change in 1927, well, they didn't play at Maple Leaf Gardens. They played at Mutual Street Arena or the Arena Gardens, and Maple Leaf Gardens wouldn't exist till 1931. Maybe it was lost in the move over. Maybe it was just thrown out because the new ownership group that led the Leafs from 1927 onward, they didn't really care about the St. Pats lineage. It's something we'll get into in a later episode. But in this, I would have to give the chat GPT score a bit of an A minus. It's pretty bang on. It's pretty accurate from my own historical research. And I'm gonna give you a, you know what? We're gonna do something fun at the end of each episode here. We're gonna give a little did you know, just a little bit of additional tidbit of history and trivia. So like I said, the St. Pats, not much is really known about the St. Pats. The banner hangs in Scotiabank Arena that yeah, they won the Stanley Cup in 1922, and that's about it. Maybe you've heard of Babe Dyer or Roach. Those were kind of the big players of the time. But do you know who the last player was to ever score a goal for Toronto while they were the St. Pats? It was a guy named Bill Bridge on February 10th, 1927 in a 3-2 loss to the expansion, New York Rangers. It wasn't even the last game though that they would play as the St. Pats. The last game that they would play as the St. Pats came on February 12th, but they were shut out by the Ottawa Senators, meaning they didn't even score a goal in their last game as the Toronto St. Pats. Well, I hope you've enjoyed this. I always have fun doing this. It's kind of a neat little thing to see what the AI, what Chats GPT can come up with when it comes to history, specifically history of the Toronto Maple Leafs, which I consider myself a bit of an expert in. And in the next episode, we're going to be looking at something that is also thought to be lost to time, and that is the long lost original first jerseys of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Take care.