‘The Donut King’: How Tim Horton’s NHL career funded … Tim Hortons (2024)

Red Kelly slid a contract offer across the table in his office and waited for a reply. It was the first week of September in 1971, and Kelly, the Pittsburgh Penguins head coach and general manager, was trying to talk an old friend out of retiring. This friend’s name, in the formal language of an NHL contract, was Miles Gilbert Horton, but he had always gone by Tim — Tim Horton.

Across the table, Horton picked up the sheet of paper and started to read.

Horton was 41 and a surefire Hall of Fame defenseman even if he never played another game. He had won four Stanley Cups with the Toronto Maple Leafs, all of them with Kelly skating beside him. Their friendship was the only reason Horton had driven to Pittsburgh to talk about playing one more season.

“I’m a tired old man,” Horton had said. “I’ve had enough hockey.”

Horton seemed sincere saying that. But then the contract offer looked too good to refuse. It was for one year and $100,000, the largest salary given by the Penguins at the time, and more money than Horton — nicknamed “Thrifty” by his Toronto teammates — had ever made in a season. And Horton could end his career where it began. He had broken into pro hockey in the 1940s with the Pittsburgh Hornets, the Maple Leafs’ minor league affiliate. He’d met his wife, Lori, at their home arena, Duquesne Gardens, a trolley barn turned ice rink.

So, Horton was inclined to sign the contract. He had one condition, however, and he didn’t want his wife hearing about it. Horton was looking to lock down a loan with a bank back home in Ontario, and he wanted his Penguins salary sent straight to the bank as backing. You see, Tim Horton was trying to finance a fleet of delivery trucks for his fledgling coffee-and-doughnut enterprise.

Tim Horton Donuts, now named Tim Hortons, was born of necessity.

This was back in the 1960s, an era of pro hockey — just before the NHL players union was founded and the World Hockey Association pressured NHL owners to raise salaries and permit free agency — when players had summer jobs and second careers. They pumped gas and tended bar and ran businesses.

“That was the way the game was,” says Craig Ramsay, who later played with Horton in Buffalo. “You didn’t make all that much money. Timmy certainly didn’t at first.”

Horton had taken on a handful of odd jobs early in his NHL career. He delivered beer, picked weeds on a tobacco farm, worked in a gravel pit and sold ads for a Toronto newspaper. Horton knew his hockey career wouldn’t last forever. Teammates used to say Horton was “as strong as a buffalo and as blind as a bat.” He had 40/400 vision in his left eye, forcing him to wear hard contacts on the ice and thick, black-rimmed glasses everywhere else. He passed eye exams in training camp by memorizing the eye chart beforehand.

After Horton broke his leg in an on-ice collision in 1956, he so feared for his hockey future that he got a real estate license and sold homes for a year.

Later, Horton endured a series of failed business ventures. After running a Studebaker car dealership and gas station in Toronto, Horton adopted a mantra: “It’s always wise to be in a business where you can eat.” Horton and his brother, Gerry, opened a burger joint in North Bay, Ontario. It was called The Big Seven and had an image of Horton (who wore No. 7) on the front façade. Horton opened four more drive-in burger restaurants in Toronto in 1962, and they were bankrupt within a year. When local kids set off some sort of homemade explosive in the washroom of one of the restaurants, Horton figured it was time to focus on a different food group. The burger business folded.

Even after his eventual success, Horton disliked discussing those early failures.

“Let’s just leave it at that,” he once told a reporter. “They flopped.”

Turns out, Horton should have paid more attention to his sweet tooth. He had been enamored with a doughnut shop in Pittsburgh since his minor league days, visiting every time he and Lori drove to Pittsburgh to see her family.

“There was this big, beautiful doughnut shop on the outskirts of town,” Horton told The Canadian Magazine in 1973. “I had never really thought of being anything else but a hockey player before, but the first day I walked into that shop, I thought that I would really like to own my own doughnut shop some day.”

The first Tim Horton Donuts went up in a converted gas station at the corner of Ottawa Street North and Dunsmure Road in Hamilton, Ontario — where the flagship Tim Hortons still stands, now complete with a second-floor museum. The doors opened May 17, 1964, two weeks after Horton won his third Stanley Cup in Toronto. A cup of coffee was 25 cents, and a dozen doughnuts sold for 69 cents. The clientele on Day 1 was a mix of Maple Leafs players, starting with Dave Keon and Frank Mahovlich, and workers stopping by as they headed down to the steels mills on the shore of Lake Ontario.

“Nobody knew what Tim Horton Donuts was,” says Miles Mattatall, whose father bought that store four years later. “But they knew who Tim Horton was.”

The shop’s logo was Horton’s signature. (It still is a close approximation.) Below was a stack of four doughnuts, one for each of Horton’s daughters.

When Lawrence Martin was a student at McMaster University in the late 1960s, a Tim Horton Donuts shop opened in the west end of Hamilton.

“We used to go to one of the bars near McMaster at night and get hammered, then we’d go over to Tim’s to get sobered up,” Martin remembers. “His place stayed open all nights. You got coffee and doughnutsand felt a little better.”

Martin worked at McMaster’s student newspaper and would go on to have a long career covering hockey and politics. Today he writes for The Globe and Mail. But back then Martin was just a college kid looking for a late-night bite. And he saw that Horton’s doughnut franchises seemed to be picking up steam.

“Of course,” Martin says now, “nobody thought it would become so big that it became a cultural institution in Canada, for crying out loud.”

At the time, however, the first few shops were hemorrhaging money. Horton’s first business partners backed out, selling their shares to Horton. That’s when Horton connected with Ron Joyce. A former police officer who had struggled to keep a Dairy Queen afloat, Joyce took over two Tim Horton Donuts franchises in Hamilton, then bought Lori’s 50 percent of shares in 1967.

Together, Horton and Joyce began expanding the company. While Horton played hockey, Joyce was aggressive on the business front. Mattatall, whose family wound up owning nearly 20 Tim Horton Donuts stores, recalls a frazzled Joyce confiding that he was $13 million in debt. “Today, that’s nothing,” Mattatall adds. “The man (Joyce) died a billionaire, two times over.”

Horton’s full NHL salary went to Tim Horton Donuts, then he and Joyce were paid equal salaries from the company. (This wasn’t just the case for Horton’s year with the Penguins, but throughout the back half of his career.) The details of this arrangement were not disclosed to Horton’s wife until much later.

“When I did find out,” Lori wrote in a book years later, “I was furious.”

As his NHL career surpassed 20 seasons, Horton continually planned to retire, then returned for a raise. The story goes that after the 1969-70 season, Horton sent a box of moldy doughnuts to the Maple Leafs front office as a sarcastic message: “Do you think a man who can make a superior product like this needs to play hockey for a living?” Horton got a raise to $80,000, double his previous salary.

So, Horton stuck around for friends and for the love of the game, sure, but also for the paychecks that were keeping his upstart business alive. Tim Griggs, Horton’s godson, says hockey “certainly paid the way” in the early days. The two careers were intertwined. That’s why it all worked. While the Tim Horton Donuts product evolved, the name alone offered runway.

“Probably the most important thing we had all the way along was Tim’s name,” Joyce told The Canadian Magazine. “You can’t really estimate the impact of his name in terms of numbers, but all I know is that it helped a hell of a lot.”

When Horton was traded to the New York Rangers in 1970, he arrived at the team’s practice rink for the first day of work and was surprised to discover a Dunkin’ Donuts across the street. He went in after practice to scout the shop.

“They aren’t bad,” he said after sampling, “but my doughnuts are better.”

A few years ago, Wayne Gretzky told the story of how he got his first autograph. He was 4 or 5, living in Brantford, Ontario, a half hour from Hamilton, and he heard that Horton would be signing at the grand opening of a Tim Horton Donuts. Gretzky begged his mother to drive him there. “I told my mom, ‘You’ve got to take me. I’ve got to meet Tim Horton,’” he recalled.

At the doughnutshop, Horton signed a scrap of paper: Wayne—Best Wishes, Tim Horton. The boy’s father stowed it in a scrapbook that Gretzky still has.

Hearing Gretzky’s memory of meeting Horton brought tears to the eyes of Griggs, Horton’s godson. He quibbled, however, with one detail in the story.

“There’s no way Wayne got dropped off and got to walk right in and see Tim,” Griggs says, with a laugh. “There would’ve been a line of kids in front of him.”

One time, when the Hortons came for lunch, the three Griggs boys were instructed not to tell any of their friends about it. Then Horton decided to go to the corner store for a bag of ice, and the boys piled into his sports car with him. “Quickest drive up the street that I’ve ever had,” Griggs says. Their cover was blown. By the time lunch ended, there was a line of children down the block. Horton hoisted his godson onto his shoulders and started to sign.

“I swear, you couldn’t see the end of the line,” Griggs says. “We didn’t think of him as a hockey legend. For us, he was just Uncle Tim.”

Off the ice, Horton was a gentle giant. He wasn’t tall, at 5-feet-10, but he was built like a stone house. Teammates called him Clark Kent because of his strength, his black-rimmed glasses and his habit of wearing trench coats.

He and Lori had four daughters — Jeri-Lyn, Kim, Kelly and Tracy — and a collie named Punchy. The oldest, Jeri-Lyn, experienced separation anxiety and ran a fever each time Horton left the house to go to a game. So, Horton looked for little ways to say hi. Before games, he would slap his stick on the ice, loudly, and his girls listening at home would know their father was thinking of them.

On the ice, Horton was considerably less gentle.

“He was the strongest player that I’ve ever seen in the game — when I played, or now as a general manager,” says current Penguins GM Jim Rutherford, who was their starting goaltender during Horton’s season in Pittsburgh.

“He was just like a bull.”

But it was Horton’s smarts, more than his strength, that explains his longevity. As he aged, Horton took fewer risks and settled deeper into the defensive zone. “If I slow down any more,” he once joked, “I’ll be going backwards.” He helped his team to the playoffs in 14 of his final 15 seasons in the NHL, and so teams didn’t mind his focus on doughnuts. Horton could unplug. He used to say that he played games for free; the salary was for practices.

After Pittsburgh, Horton retired again. But Buffalo Sabres GM Punch Imlach, the former Maple Leafs GM, selected Horton in an intra-league draft and persuaded him to play in 1972-73. And that’s how Larry Carrière, a 21-year-old Sabres rookie at the time, found himself paired on defense with a man more than twice his age.

“Tim was 43,” Carrière says. “And my dad was 43.”

In one of his NHL first games, Carrière fought a Philadelphia Flyers player and lost badly. Horton skated up and yanked the Flyer off of Carrière.

“Am I going to have to do this all year?” Horton snapped.

“No, Tim,” Carrière replied. “You watch. You won’t have to help.”

The next shift, Carrière fought the same Flyer again and won.

Ask Horton’s former teammates about his off-ice demeanor, and they say he was all business. He was quiet, for the most part, but he commanded attention when he spoke. He carried business cards in his pocket: Tim Horton, President. Tim Donut Ltd. During trips to Toronto, Horton would take teammates on tours of his shops. When players went out to dinner after games, Rutherford recalls, Horton loved to talk about different industries, investments and business opportunities. “It was fun to listen to him,” Rutherford says.

But not everyone believed Horton’s business would stand the test of time. Once, Carrière remembers, a teammate piped up after practice, asking Horton, “Do you really think you’re going to sell a lot of doughnuts and coffee?”

“What do you mean?” Horton replied. “I’ve already got a bunch of stores.”

“Just seems like a tough business,” the teammate said. “Lot of competition.”

Horton didn’t say another word.

One day, during the 1972-73 season, Horton sipped rum and sat in a black leather chair at Tim Horton Ltd. headquarters in Oakville, Ontario, a stone’s throw from Queen Elizabeth Way, halfway between Hamilton and Toronto. Martin, the former McMaster student who had sobered up on doughnuts, was there, too. The Canadian Magazine had asked Martin to write a feature on Horton’s coffee-and-doughnut shops. Outside Horton’s office, 15-tontrucks — the ones financed with Horton’s Penguins salary — rumbled past.

Martin, who was 25 at the time, had grown up in Hamilton, knowing Horton as a popular Maple Leaf with a crew cut and a body chiseled from granite.

Now Martin was seeing Horton’s corporate side up close. Horton said he spent more time on doughnuts than hockey. He much preferred talking doughnuts. The company had 33 stores in Ontario, with another 15 under construction. The shops baked 57 kinds of doughnuts. The most popular was the honey dip, though Horton’s favorites were the orange twist and the apple fritter. His offseason training consisted of eating doughnuts and running between stores.

Horton also had negotiated with the Sabres to have Mondays off during the season. He spent those off days in Oakville. Though newspapers referred to Horton as “The Donut King,” he focused on financing and left baking to others.

“Ron took me aside for a week and tried to teach me, but I got burned all to hell,” Horton told Martin. “Baking doughnuts is worse than fighting in a war.”

Horton expected he’d retire from hockey at the end of that year, but he admitted, “I’ve done that the last three years and it hasn’t happened yet, so nobody will believe me if I do it again.” (Spoiler: He played another season.)

Rereading his Horton feature in The Canadian Magazine now, more than 47 years after it was published, one line in particular sticks with Martin. It’s this quote from Horton: “I want to do more skiing and take up drinking a little more seriously.” Martin had included it at the time as a throwaway remark, a parenthetical in a paragraph about Horton hemming and hawing about retirement. But now it reads differently. It’s the clearest line in the story.

“It was ominous, right?” Martin says.

Drinking already had been a problem for Horton. In the book “In Loving Memory: A Tribute to Tim Horton,” which Horton’s wife co-wrote with their godson, Griggs, Lori claimed Horton drank a bottle of scotch per day while recovering from a separated shoulder during his season with the Penguins. Lori struggled with substance abuse, too, and those issues strained their marriage.

Eventually, teammates told Lori stories about Horton’s legendary drunken antics throughout his career. They called him a “door crasher.” He would bust down hotel doors during the night if his buddies didn’t open them. Longtime Maple Leafs executive King Clancy once told Lori, “We can afford his salary, Lori. We just couldn’t afford any more hotel doors.” Lori wrote that Horton had cut down on drinking in Buffalo, but he was never able to stay sober.

Prior to the 1973-74 season, Horton announced (again) that he was retiring. But he came back. Imlach coaxed Horton with a $150,000 salary, and Horton got Imlach to toss in a De Tomaso Pantera, Ford’s $17,000 sports car.

“Maybe it’s just a bad habit I’ve acquired. I like to play hockey,” Horton told the Buffalo Evening News. “I have a long time ahead of me to sit behind a desk.”

But he did not.

On Feb. 20, 1974, the Sabres lost in Toronto. Horton played but was hurting. He had cracked his jaw in the previous game. While the team bused back to Buffalo, Horton drove separately. He stopped at the Oakville office, where he and Joyce talked and drank into the early hours. Joyce offered him a place to sleep, but Horton slid back behind the wheel of the Pantera. Around 4 a.m., a woman phoned the police to report a car speeding along Queen Elizabeth Way.

A police officer clocked Horton at well over 100 mph, then lost sight of the Pantera. In St. Catharines, Ontario, Horton’s car left the roadway and flipped multiple times in the median. Horton was ejected from the vehicle and, a short time later, pronounced dead at a local hospital. He was 44. An autopsy confirmed his blood-alcohol level was twice the legal limit.

At 5:30 a.m., Sabres head coach Joe Crozier got a phone call from the police. His number was in Horton’s wallet. The hospital needed Crozier to identify the body. Crozier, his wife, Bonnie, and Sabres team doctor John Butch drove the 40 minutes to St. Catharines. They prayed it was a mistake, hoping Horton had loaned his car to someone else. But when they were led into the hospital, the first thing they noticed was a pair of black-rimmed glasses sitting on a desk.

“It was a sad night,” Carrière says. “I always remember the date: Feb. 21, 1974. We were devastated. He was our mentor. He was our father. He was our man.”

Lori wrote, “I don’t remember too much from that day, beyond laying the flowers on the casket and the girls saying goodbye.” At the family’s home in Toronto, Lori packed Horton’s things in boxes. She didn’t open the boxes until Griggs offered in the 1990s to make scrapbooks for Horton’s grandchildren. (It turned into a book.) “I just couldn’t stand to look at them,” she wrote.

In the year after Horton died, Lori sold Horton’s share in the company to Joyce for $1 million. She would regret it. Today, Tim Hortons, with almost 5,000 stores worldwide, is a multi-national corporation. It was sold to Burger King in 2014 for $11.5 billion, using $3 billion in funding from Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., and is now a subsidiary of a restaurant conglomerate whose majority owner is the Brazilian investment firm 3G Capital.

With success came growing pains and controversy. Lori unsuccessfully sued Joyce, claiming he had cheated her out of Horton’s half of the company. (Lori died in 2000.) In his 2006 memoir, “Always Fresh,” Joyce painted unflattering portraits of both Horton and his wife. (Joyce died in 2019.) Their families, however, are inextricably linked. Horton’s daughter Jeri-Lyn married Joyce’s son, Ron Joyce Jr. They own multiple Tim Hortons franchises.

Horton has been gone longer than he lived, yet more people know his name now than ever. Tim Hortons is no longer a hockey player’s second career nor a family-owned company. It has expanded and evolved, achieving heights Horton never could have imagined and headlines he never would have believed.

But something else has happened that Horton never could have expected when he opened the first store on Ottawa Street. His coffee-and-doughnuts shop, and with it the Horton name, has become a hallmark of Canadian life. Tim Hortons is the largest fast-food chain in Canada, so ubiquitous that a franchise was opened at Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan to serve Canadian troops.

“When politicians talk about wanting to communicate with the Average Joe, they talk in terms of, ‘What are people at Tim Hortons thinking?'” Martin says. “That’s the general attitude of Canadians. Because regular Canadians go there all the time.”

So, a slice of Horton’s legacy was creating a space for the average Canadian, people like the steelworkers who supported Horton’s donut shop from the start.

But he has also impacted the hockey world. Penguins captain Sidney Crosby is among the many thousands of Canadian kids to come through “Timbits,” a learn-to-play program since the 1980s that has provided children with hockey instruction and equipment. Crosby helped bring a similar program to Pittsburgh in 2008, and it has since spread across the NHL.

“You think of youth hockey in Canada,” Crosby told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “you automatically think of Tim Hortons.”

In the 46 years since Horton’s death, there’s no question that his success selling doughnuts has overshadowed his hockey career. While many older hockey fans may remember Horton as a Maple Leaf and a Hall of Famer, a younger generation of fans knows his name primarily because it’s on their coffee cup.

“There isn’t a corner anymore where we don’t have a store,” Mattatall says. “But after a certain period of time, I think, people forgot who Tim Horton was.”

Ramsay, Horton’s former teammate in Buffalo, grew up in Toronto watching Horton win Stanley Cups with the Maple Leafs. In fact, Horton was playing in the NHL before Ramsay was born. Over the years, Ramsay has seen Tim Hortons pop up all over the map. He recalls stopping by a Tim Hortons in the middle of West Virginia and another as far south as Pompano Beach, Fla.

“I’ve explained that many times. I know kids wouldn’t know. I’ll just say, ‘That picture on the wall, he was a real player. They didn’t make that up,'” Ramsay says. “I tell them I played with him back in Buffalo. He was a great person and a great player. And he’d be so proud. We often talk about that as players. Timmy would be so amazed by the growth of his shop.”

One day, a couple of years ago, Carrière was ordering a coffee at a Tim Hortons in Manhattan. There was a friendly young man behind the counter and no one else in line. So, Carrière got to chatting with the employee.

“Did you know Tim Horton was a hockey player?” Carrière asked.

The young man shook his head.

“I played hockey with him,” Carrière said.

The young man thought that was pretty cool.

“Your coffee and doughnuts are great,” Carrière said, with a smile, “but Tim was the guy who started it all.”

(Top photo of Ron Joyce and Tim Horton: Courtesy of Tim Hortons)