This is another one of those incredible stories lost to history. But it's true and there's a reason the most famous hockey broadcaster in history misled listeners - he was trying to trap a rival. 

It happened in 1953, when Hewitt was broadcasting the Leaf games on the station he'd founded just two years earlier, CKFH (the "FH" stood for Foster Hewitt.) 1400 (it became 1430 in 1960) was THE hockey station in Toronto and held the exclusive rights, but for some reason, rival-up-the-dial CKEY was also "broadcasting" the same games at the same time. 

'EY was relying on an old method that started almost with the beginning of radio, when stations - sometimes hundreds of miles away - would "recreate" a baseball game using wire services and sound effects. They even sold special records designed to help in the production.



Apparently, 580 (it would move down the dial to 590 in 1964) decided to get in on the action, 'calling' a contest with an almost unbelievably convoluted system - a guy would literally telegraph descriptions of what was going on in Morse Code from each arena, someone at the station would translate it to readable copy and then those "calls" would be given to a sportscaster, who - along with those sound effects - would explain the action, as if he was actually there. 

It's hard to know now how good this sounded or why you would listen to CKEY when CKFH had the real thing. But you can imagine how angry rights-holder Hewitt became when he found out. Eventually those Morse Code guys were banned from all the stadia, but somehow 'EY still continued to present the games.

But how?

Hewitt suspected they were actually listening to his broadcasts and repeating what he said on a slightly delayed basis. So he decided to start adding in fake penalties repeatedly in his calls, just to see if they turned up on his rival. When they did, he taped them and took his complaints about piracy straight to the BBG, the precursor to the CRTC. 

Jack Kent Cooke, the eccentric owner of CKEY, emphatically denied that they were stealing anything from their competitors, but never did explain how they included the fake penalties. 

The problem with this story is that I don't know the final score. The article below ends before there's any resolution. But I have to assume Hewitt won his battle, because the proof was, frankly, undeniable. Even if he had to mislead his own listeners to do it. 

But what an amazing tale of Toronto radio involving a legendary broadcaster you've probably never heard before.