In March 2025, Ron Hurst rode a blue carpet onto the ice at a Toronto Maple Leafs home game, honored by the team's Alumni Association as its oldest living former player. He died on September 17, 2026, at 95, Hockey Patrol reported. Hurst had played right wing for Toronto in 64 NHL games across the 1955-56 and 1956-57 seasons, part of a professional career that ran from 1951 to 1960 across five different leagues.

Born May 18, 1931, in Toronto, Hurst played junior hockey with the Toronto Marlboros before turning professional in 1951-52 with the Saint John Beavers of the Maritime Major Hockey League. The following seasons took him through the Ottawa Senators of the Quebec Senior Hockey League, the Charlottetown Islanders and the Soo Greyhounds before the Maple Leafs organization signed him.

Hurst's NHL debut came in 1955-56: 50 games for Toronto, 7 goals and 5 assists, plus three playoff games. He reportedly earned about 10 dollars a game as a rookie, roughly 117 dollars in 2026 terms, Hockey Patrol reported. Of that first NHL game, played in New York, Hurst recalled: "But my first game, I got hit in the eyebrow by a puck, just sitting on the bench in New York. George Armstrong saw it coming and ducked." New York Rangers coach Phil Watson, on the other side of Hurst's physical play that season, said he had "kicked the devil out of three of my left wingers."

Hurst played 14 more games for Toronto in 1956-57 before returning to the minors for good. He closed out his career with the Rochester Americans and the Hershey Bears of the American Hockey League, retiring in 1960 with NHL totals of 9 goals and 7 assists in 64 games.

In March 2025, the Maple Leafs Alumni Association gave Hurst a Blue Carpet Welcome at Scotiabank Arena, the Toronto Maple Leafs Alumni Association said, recognizing him as the oldest living man to have played for the team in the NHL, according to Hockey Patrol.

Hurst's NHL career was brief, 64 games across two seasons, set against nearly a decade in the minors that surrounded it: Saint John, Ottawa, Charlottetown, the Soo, Pittsburgh, Rochester and Hershey. What the Maple Leafs organization chose to mark in his final years was not a statistic but his standing as the team's oldest living NHL alumnus, honored with a Blue Carpet Welcome in March 2025. His older brother, Art Hurst, won an Olympic bronze medal in hockey for Canada at the 1956 Winter Olympics in Cortina d'Ampezzo; in the same mid-1950s stretch, one brother played NHL games at Maple Leaf Gardens and Madison Square Garden while the other competed for Canada on Olympic ice.