"The fans are shouting kill, kill, kill--this is hockey!"
Personally, I liked Foster Hewitt. “He shoots, he scores!”
One story involving Foster concerns his relationship with kindly H Ballard after Ballard assumed majority ownership of the Leafs and Maple Leaf Gardens in late 1971. A few years later in about 1977, Ballard dropped Foster’s broadcasting company that did the Leafs’ radio coverage since the 1920s to go with a FM station in Toronto. At about that time as well, the kindly owner wanted to get rid of Foster’s “gondola” where Foster did the Leaf broadcasts for all of those many years, becoming synonymous with the Leafs in those years of greatness, to make way for corporate boxes. Despite requests from both the NHL and the Hockey Hall of Fame to donate the gondola to the museum, Ballard simply ordered Gardens workers to tear out the gondola and have it incinerated. Many connected with the league and Hall of Fame were naturally upset by Ballard’s move, even though he said it was no good anymore, etc.
However, this did not stop kindly Harold from taking a few old chairs and painting “Foster’s Chair” on them and selling them for one or two dollars a pop, telling unsuspecting people that that was the chair Foster sat in to do his broadcasts of Leaf games. Brian MacFarlane comments that he knew Foster very well and did not recall him using a specific chair.