The $5,300 Toilet

In what almost certainly provided a pleasing "hey, it's not just us" moment for the United States military, in November 2012, Ontario lawyer Jim Vigmond paid more than five thousand dollars for a toilet. Yes, really. It wasn’t just any toilet, though—it was a dressing-room toilet from Toronto’s historic Maple Leaf Gardens.

In other words, it’s very much like any other toilet. While it’s well established that people are willing to spend a tremendous amount of money on things that do little little more than create poop, it’s a bit more unusual to spend anything more than hardware-store-standard prices to collect an object that does nothing but collect poop. While one can, in fact, easily spend a couple grand on amazing space-age shitters, five thousand dollars seems like an especially outrageous price for a normal one, even if it has, in its heyday, been on the receiving end of some of the most distinguished shit in the annals of Canadian hockey.

Some fun historical facts about Jim Vigmond’s costly crapper:

• On February 6, 1976, Darryl Sittler took an astounding ten dumps into this toilet in one sixty-minute span, setting an NHL record that may well never be broken. If someone does come along and break it—we’re still talking about the record here, but the same goes for the toilet—we don’t want to know about it.
• Hall-of-Fame center Mats Sundin used this toilet exclusively for the bulk of his Maple Leafs career. Unfortunately, during that span, the shitters to his left and right were rarely any good.
• Dion Phaneuf never got to use this toilet, as the Leafs stopped playing at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1999 and he first joined the team in 2009. Had he ever used it, though, Sean Avery probably would have claimed to have gotten there first.
• We would like to add a fourth bullet point right about here, but are forced to admit that we don’t know all that much about the Toronto Maple Leafs. We should have done more research, by which we mean stealing jokes from Down Goes Brown.

Our biggest disappointment here is that, had we posted on this topic back in November when it was relevant, and when the National Hockey League was in the throes of yet another stupid and contentious lockout, we could have wrapped this all up with a joke about how Jim Vigmond could look into his $5,300 toilet and see the remains of the 2012-2013 NHL season.


But then we remembered that Vigmond is a Maple Leafs fan, and when he takes a look into the shitter, he can see every season since 1967.