🏒 Framed Autographed/Signed Johnny Bower 35x39 Toronto Maple Leafs Blue Hockey Jersey JSA COA — The Framed and Authenticated Hand-Signed Toronto Maple Leafs Blue Hockey Jersey, Signed During His Lifetime by the Late John William Bower, "The China Wall," Who Was Born in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan on November 8, 1924, Spent a Decade as the Most Dependable Goaltender in the NHL as a Toronto Maple Leaf, Won Four Stanley Cup Championships — Including the Last Championship the Maple Leafs Franchise Has Won to This Day — and Passed Away on December 26, 2017, Leaving Behind a Legacy That Cannot Be Fully Separated From the History of Toronto Hockey or the History of Goaltending as a Position in Professional Hockey

✨ The framed autographed 35x39 Toronto Maple Leafs blue hockey jersey, authenticated by James Spence Authentication with COA, carries the signature of Johnny Bower — a goaltender whose story is one of the most unusual in NHL history, not because of what he achieved, which was considerable, but because of when he achieved it. Bower did not establish himself as an NHL starter until he was in his mid-thirties, an age when most professional athletes are contemplating retirement. The years before his Maple Leafs breakthrough were spent in the minor leagues, in the wartime military service that took him away from hockey during what should have been his developmental years, and in the minor-league exile of a goaltender whose talent the NHL had not yet given a permanent home. What the Maple Leafs received when they finally did give him that home was something extraordinary: four Stanley Cup championships and one of the most celebrated decades of goaltending in the franchise's history.

🏒 John William Bower was born November 8, 1924, in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan — a city in central Saskatchewan whose hockey traditions run deep and whose history includes a long list of players who traveled through its rinks and training environments toward professional careers. Bower grew up in the Depression era, in circumstances that were shaped by poverty and scarcity, and his early hockey development occurred in the improvised, outdoor-rink environments of a Prairie winter where the love of the game was sufficient motivation to skate regardless of the conditions. His path to professional hockey was interrupted by his service in the Canadian Army during World War II, an interruption that cost him years of his athletic prime and delayed by a decade the NHL career that his talent deserved.

🏒 The Toronto Maple Leafs acquired Bower from the Cleveland Barons of the AHL in 1958, a transaction that gave the franchise the goaltender it would build its late-dynasty championships around. The Maple Leafs under head coach Punch Imlach were assembling a team that would become one of the most successful of the early 1960s, and Bower — who was by now 34 years old, an age at which most goaltenders are in their final seasons — proved to be exactly the element the team needed. His poke-check technique, refined through years of minor-league competition into one of the most reliable and distinctive defensive tools in the league, combined with his athleticism and his competitive focus to make him a goaltender who opposing forwards learned to respect even as they found his age difficult to reconcile with his performance level.

🏒 Four Stanley Cup championships: 1962, 1963, 1964, and 1967. The 1967 championship — the Toronto Maple Leafs' most recent, a title the franchise has not reclaimed in the decades since — was won by a Maple Leafs team of veteran players who exceeded every expectation and defeated the Montreal Canadiens in a six-game series that has been described, in the years since, as one of the most improbable championship runs in NHL history. Bower was forty-two years old when the 1967 Cup was raised. The jersey he wore through those championships — Toronto Maple Leafs blue, the specific uniform of a franchise whose hockey identity has been inseparable from the colour for a century — is the artifact that this framed, signed display presents to the collector. Bower won the Vezina Trophy in 1961, sharing it with Terry Sawchuk in 1965, and was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1976. He passed away on December 26, 2017, at the age of 93, in Mississauga, Ontario, having lived a life in and around the game he had loved since a Prince Albert winter gave him his first pair of skates. Condition: NOS.

🏒 Johnny Bower. The China Wall. Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. Born November 8, 1924. Passed December 26, 2017. Toronto Maple Leafs (1958-1970). Four-Time Stanley Cup Champion (1962, 1963, 1964, 1967). Vezina Trophy 1961. Hockey Hall of Fame 1976. Framed 35x39 Toronto Maple Leafs Blue Hockey Jersey. JSA COA. Hall of Fame Sports Memorabilia. Condition: NOS.