George Imlach was universally known as Punch, an intense, opinionated, profane man who left absolutely nobody indifferent. Either you loved him or you hated him, and there were a lot of people in each camp. Born in Toronto in 1915, he was a gritty, if under-talented forward, playing his way up his hometown’s amateur hockey ladder. He played for the Toronto Young Rangers as a junior, graduating to the Toronto Goodyears and later to the Senior Marlboros, where he spent the 1940-41 season.

Joining the Canadian Army, Imlach spent his World War II years coaching and playing hockey, enjoying the experience of running his own team. After mustering out, he moved to Quebec City, getting a job in the accounting office with the Anglo-Canadian Paper Company.

It just so happened that his new employer had an entry in the Quebec Senior Hockey League, the Quebec Aces. Imlach suited up for the team, added coaching to his duties and remained behind the bench once he hung up his skates for good. Imlach spent 11 years with the Aces, having more than a few good years and sending numerous players from his squads to the NHL. Among them was the kid Imlach always referred to as the best player he ever coached, Jean Beliveau.

Joining the pros, he accepted Eddie Shore’s job offer and stepped behind the bench of the Springfield Indians of the American Hockey League. Somehow the two men managed to make it through the season although there were several heated conversations along the way since both were convinced there was only one way to do things correctly, theirs.

The Toronto Maple leafs were in complete disarray. Conn Smythe had handed control of the team to a committee known as the Silver Seven. They hired Imlach as an assistant GM to begin the 1957-58 season. In pretty short order, the new guy had managed to wrangle the vacant GM’s job, fire coach Billy Rea and take his place behind the Maple Leafs bench.

Hardnosed and hardheaded, Punch Imlach reigned for more than a decade. The media loved him and he loved publicity so they got along famously. The same couldn’t be said about his relationships with players.

While many of his men adored him and would follow him anywhere, others didn’t respond to Imlach’s leadership style, one that featured a lot of stick and precious little carrot. While the Leafs of the early and mid-1960s were a huge success on the ice, behind the scenes it wasn’t all hearts and flowers.

All he expected from a player was everything he had to give, and a little bit more the next night. Nobody dared to ask to sit out a game for fear of voluntarily ending their career. There were entire teams full of bush leaguers willing to go through a wall to play in the NHL.

Frank Mahovlich was driven to medical care while under Imlach’s orders. Carl Brewer walked away from the game rather than continue to play for him. Many others often wished they’d taken one course of action or the other.

Say what you want about Imlach’s methods, he was effective. With Punch at the helm, the team slowly turned things around, once again earning wins and respect thanks to their grit. Veterans were the cornerstone of Imlach’s teams. He built from the net out, installing the ageless Johnny Bower in net and put together a veteran-heavy lineup studded with other future Hall of Famers to play in front of him.

Toronto took the Stanley Cup in the spring of 1962, again the next year and three-peated in 1963. In 1967, with a lineup venerable even by Imlach’s standards, the Leafs went all the way, defeating the defending champion Montreal Canadiens in the final season of six-team NHL play.

Refusing to change with the times, Imlach was one of the last of the holdouts, espousing the old school way of doing things. He fought tooth and nail against the Players Association and insisted on negotiating contracts with the players themselves rather than sitting down with their agents.

By the end of the 1960s, Imlach’s plusses no longer outweighed his minuses and he was let go. The Toronto Maple Leafs won the Stanley Cup four times under Punch Imlach’s orders. No coach has paraded the silverware through the streets of Toronto in the 40 years since Imlach last did it.

His next stop was the brand new Buffalo Sabres, once again as both coach and GM. His tenure behind the bench was cut short by a heart attack in 1972. Upon returning to work, Imlach concentrated on building a team around his “French Connection” line. The Sabres, who always seemed to have a couple ex-Leaf oldsters in uniform when Punch ran things, made it into the finals in 1975, their fifth year in the NHL. Things went south a few years later and Imlach was cut adrift.

Harold Ballard, a man who loved his circuses and insisted on being the ringmaster, brought Imlach back to Maple Leaf Gardens when Buffalo fired him in 1979. His two-year stint back in Toronto was neither happy nor productive. Imlach, still living in the days when a coach’s word was law, on the ice and off, ran into stiffer and more vocal opposition from the players he lambasted in the press.

The press had changed as well and the new generation of writers were no more taken with Imlach than were the majority of his players. A 1981 heart attack put Imlach into retirement. He was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame as an Honored Builder in 1984 and passed away in December of 1987, an iconic figure in the game that defined his life.