I like the chances of Team Canada wrapping up the World Cup of Hockey tonight in game two of the best-of-three final against Team Europe. I don’t mean to get ahead of things, but with gold medal wins at three of the last four Winter Olympics, and even at the last two World Championships (where we don’t get to play our best on best), Canadian men, as Wayne Gretzky said the other day, “seem to be getting better and strong.”

“Canada’s been Canada,” Gretzky said of the team’s performance at the World Cup. “We’ve been as good as we’ve ever been. We sell our sport worldwide, the game is getting bigger all the time, each and every year, but we seem to be getting better and better in our own country.”

“Everybody gets nervous and scared, are we losing our game? We’re never going to lose our game. It’s Canada’s game. I am just so impressed by how much depth and how many good players we have in this country.”

One big advantage we still have over all the other hockey countries – even those with much bigger populations than ours – is that (with the possible exception of Latvia) we’re the only country in the world where the majority of the top athletes want to play hockey. Perhaps the biggest threat to that going forward will be the crazy-high costs of the game forcing more and more of those top athletes to choose less expensive games like basketball and soccer. Global warming probably isn’t going to help either.

In the meantime, while it’s nice to be the best in the world at the sport we care about the most, winning global titles isn’t the only thing that make Canada’s game Canadian. It won’t stop people from worrying about the Americans taking over the NHL. Not when so many decisions coming out on the NHL head office in New York can appear to Canadians to be based solely (soullessly!) on business rather than a love of the game … like when the NHL chooses to place its next expansion team in Las Vegas instead of Quebec City, or when it never seems to consider Hamilton – although that probably has as much to do with the influence of the Toronto Maple Leafs as it does with an unpopular American NHL Commissioner.

One of the earliest warnings of a U.S. takeover of the NHL came in a Hamilton Spectator
story picked up by Toronto’s Globe newspaper on December 12, 1924.

When Las Vegas comes on board in 2017-18, that’ll make 24 U.S.-based teams to only seven in Canada. And before that, when the spring of 2017 comes around, we’re likely to hear plenty once again about how no Canadian team has won the Stanley Cup since 1993. And remember, not a single one of those seven Canadian teams even reached the playoffs last year! Of course the NHL is big business, but things like this hardly make hockey feel like Canada’s game.

But fear not! With the NHL gearing up to celebrate the 100th anniversary of its 1917 founding, it turns out that worrying about Americans taking over our game dates back almost as long as that. With Boston having just become the first U.S. entry in the NHL, one of the first voices of concern was sounded by the Hamilton Spectator in December of 1924. The newspaper warned that, with more American teams to come, “[t]he arenas across the border will be bigger than those in Canada, and the admission charges will be higher, which means that the United States magnates will be in a position to get the pick of the players.”

The Globe expressed Canadian fears with stories such as this one on September 26, 1925, although the story notes that it may be a while before the U.S. could produce enough good players. It also warns that a salary cap may be necessary to save Canadian teams.

New York would get its NHL franchise with the admission of the Americans – at the expense of Hamilton losing its Tigers! – in 1925-26, and the NHL would add a team in Pittsburgh that year too. Canadians were definitely starting to worry about a U.S. takeover, and The Globe in Toronto became the lead voice of that fear. On January 22, 1926, Sports Editor Frederick Wilson warned that Canadian cities could become nothing more than an afterthought as the NHL expanded into more and more populous U.S. cities with “their fat bank-rolls.” Canadian teams would be forced to sell out to American owners, leading to predictions of All-American leagues with cities like Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and others banding together to become little more than all-Canadian minor leagues.

Conn Smythe used stories like this one on November 20, 1926, to convince the owners of the Toronto St. Pats to sell the team to his group. He would rename the team the Maple Leafs.

Fears became even worse when the New York Rangers, Detroit Cougars (later the Red Wings) and Chicago Blackhawks entered the NHL in 1926-27. The NHL was now a 10-team circuit with six of those clubs in the United States. Canada would never again have the majority of NHL teams, yet all these years later, it’s still our game … although it would be nice to see the Stanley Cup paraded through the streets of a Canadian city some time soon!

One hundred years ago tomorrow, on September 23, 1916, word reached his family in Ottawa that the greatest hockey player of his day had been Killed in Action in World War I. Frank McGee had died in fighting at Courcelette in France, one week earlier, on September 16, 1916.

The newspaper story is from The Ottawa Journal on
September 23, 1916,  confirming the death of Frank McGee.

McGee had left instructions that in case of casualty, his brother D’Arcy should be notified rather than his father, whom he’d listed as his next of kin. Rumours had begun to circulate on Friday, September 22, that McGee had died and D’Arcy McGee received confirmation that it was true while in his home at 12 Marlborough Avenue in Ottawa’s Sandy Hill District on Saturday. Another brother, Charles, had been been killed in the spring of 1915. A younger brother, Walter, would be shot through the shoulder in November, but he would survive the war.

From the war records of Frank McGee available on the Library and Archives Canada web site.

Frank McGee was one of thousands of Canadian casualties during the Battle of the Somme. His death hit his hometown, where he’d starred for the legendary “Silver Seven,” particularly hard.

“[O]nce again there has been brought home with gripping grief and pain the grim reality of the present conflict of nations,” reads a story in the Ottawa Citizen. “It is doubtful if the loss of any one of the splendid young Ottawans who have fallen at the front since the outbreak of war has occasioned such keen regret as that of the late Lt. Frank McGee … Frank McGee dead? Thousands of Ottawans knew him. Few seemed able to believe that he too had given up his life in the struggle for freedom.”

Frank McGee had a brief career at hockey’s highest level, playing only a handful of games over four short seasons from 1902-03 to 1905-06. But his Ottawa team won the Stanley Cup in each of those years (although lost it before the 1905-06 season ended) and he averaged nearly three goals per game during that time. He is best remembered today for scoring 14 goals in Ottawa’s 23-2 win over Dawson City in a Stanley Cup game on January 16, 1905.

An ad in The Ottawa Journal showing dates and ticket
prices for the 1905 Stanley Cup series with Dawson City.

McGee accomplished all that he did despite having been blinded in one eye when he was struck by a stick (or maybe a puck) in 1900. According to a story in The Ottawa Journal on the twentieth anniversary of his death, the injury had not caused the removal of his eye, but McGee’s vision was impaired to the extent that he could only distinguish between light and darkness with it. It didn’t seem to slow him down on the ice, but it should have been enough to keep him out of the army. So how did he get in?

The most common story that’s told today is that when he was taking his medical exam and was asked to read the chart on the wall, McGee covered his left eye with his left hand and then, when asked to read with his left eye, raised his right hand, crossed his face, and covered the same left eye again.

However McGee got himself into the army, this medical officer who examined
him later appears to have left the description of the vision in his left eye blank.

But the story being told up until 1936 was quite a bit different then the modern one. Back then, it was generally accepted as authentic that McGee had a friend who looked quite a bit like him take the eye exam for him. But D’Arcy McGee told a very different story to The Ottawa Journal for its anniversary story. D’Arcy admitted that because of his eye, Frank was nervous about his physical … but then the medical officer asked him his name.

“Frank McGee.”

“Not Frank McGee of the Silver Seven?”

“Yes, sir.”

“There can’t be anything wrong with you!”

The doctor laughed, giving McGee an admiring pat on the chest and passing him for the army.

The story of Frank McGee is one of the first tales of early hockey I can remember learning. I’m pretty sure I heard it for the first time on an episode of Peter Puck. This past year, I had the opportunity to tell parts of McGee’s story myself by contributing segments to two new books that are out this fall.

Though he was actually quite small, Frank McGee was depicted as a hulking giant
with an eye patch in the Peter Puck episode. And if you care to, you can check out
the books I contributed to for Firefly and The Hockey News.