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Hockey stick signed by Leafs legend Bill Barilko sells for $70K at auction
An old wooden hockey stick sold for tens of thousands of dollars at an auction in New Hamburg, Ont., over the weekend.
Granted, it was not just any old hockey stick but one which was signed by a number of Toronto Maple Leafs legends, including Bill Barilko in the summer he died.
The winning bid was for $60,000, a number which inflates to over $70,000 once one adds in the buyers' premium as well as GST to the initial figure.
The stick was sold by Miller & Miller Auctions, as part of a sports memorabilia sale which also saw two 1952 Mickey Mantle baseball cards sell for more than $50,000 apiece.
Barilko's story was famously retold by the Tragically Hip in their song '50 Mission Cap,' as he died in a plane crash in northern Ontario the summer of 1951 after scoring the game- and series-winning goal of the Maple Leafs' Stanley Cup win that year. They would not win another hockey crown until 1962, the year the wreckage was recovered.
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Although this stick was not connected to that fishing trip, it was connected to another that the Leafs defenceman took with his teammates that same summer, according to Ben Pernfuss, who serves as the consignment director for sports cards and memorabilia with Miller & Miller.
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'After the Leafs won the Stanley Cup in the 1951 season, Bill Barilko and a number of his teammates went on a fishing trip up north and they stayed at a cottage as a bit of a halfway point before they got on a flight to go farther north,' he said.
'They gifted the cottage owner a couple of sticks autographed by Barilko and the people who joined Barilko on the fishing trip.
'And this was one of those sticks, and it just happened to be a number five-stamped, Bill Barilko stick.'
He said the stick has changed hands a couple of times over the years, but this is the first time it ever went to the open market.
'The one thing to note is that it's signed by Barilko and a number of the other Toronto Maple Leafs players, which is exceedingly rare just because Barilko died so young and didn't have the opportunity to sign much in his time with the Leafs,' Pernfuss said.
It is a Barilko model from Love & Bennett, a sporting goods store, which supplied sticks to many players at the time. It has the appearance of being game-worn but Miller & Miller could not confirm whether that was the case.
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'The stick is taped for game use that matches Barilko's style and puck marks and lower hand grip wear indicates the stick was likely game used but without photo matching, no guarantees can be made, thus, the stick is being represented as game issued,' the listing for the stick says.
It was also signed by a lengthy list of other Leafs legends, including Turk Broda, Ted Kennedy, Joe Klukay, Cal Gardner, Fleming Mackell, Ray Timgren, Howie Meeker, Harry Watson, Bill Juzda, Sid Smith, Max Bentley, Al Rollins and Tod Sloan.
The auction house placed an estimate of between $3,000 and $5,000 on the stick.
'There were bids from all over Canada and even some all over North America, really, and most of the bidding happened at the end,' Pernfuss explained.
The auction house would not say who was adding the special stick to their collection but did confirm it would remain somewhere in southern Ontario.
