With the Leafs back in the playoffs tonight, let’s dream big! Would a Stanley Cup parade in Toronto rival the scenes from the World Series parade for the Cubs in Chicago last fall? Quite likely. But whatever happens (and whenever it happens), it’s certainly bound to outdo the show the city put on at its first Stanley Cup civic reception 95 years ago.

It appears that there was no public display in the city when Toronto won the Stanley Cup as a member of the National Hockey Association in 1914, nor at the end of the inaugural National Hockey League season back in 1917–18. Things were different when the Toronto St. Pats won the Cup in 1922 by defeating the Vancouver Millionaires in the final game of their best-of-five series.

Headlines from Toronto’s Globe and Daily Star sports pages on March 30, 1922.

“Mayor Alf Maguire was as tickled as a schoolboy when the St. Pats won the Stanley Cup last night,” reported the Toronto Daily Star on March 29. “Right away he arranged a banquet for the boys which will take place at the Carls-Rite tonight at 6:30.”

Given that footage exists of a Stanley Cup parade in Ottawa when the Senators returned triumphant from Vancouver in 1921 (unless that’s actually 1923), it seems unlikely that this event in Toronto was the first of its kind for a professional sports team in Eastern Canada as the Star reported … although it was likely a first for pro sports in the city. The evening seems to have been a fairly tame one. None of the accounts I’ve seen mention how many people were there, nor what kind of food or drink was served. For sure there were a lot of politicians and team executives present, and a lot of speeches were made.

The site of the Hotel Carls-Rite is currently a parking lot not too far
from the Maple Leafs’ current home at the Air Canada Centre.

Mayor Maguire led the festivities, making a speech in which he lauded the St. Pats for the attention they had brought to the city through their fair play and skill. He asked that the players “continue through the summer the clean living which has characterized their winter’s work.”

Coach George O’Donoghue and manager Charlie Querrie replied on behalf of the players, who received their winner’s checks from the Stanley Cup series prior to the dinner (no mention of the amount, but likely a few hundred dollars each) and were presented with silver-mounted rabbits’ feet by a fan known as  Oh Boy Saunders, the Human Fly, (more on that if I ever find it!) afterwards.

The highlight of the evening came when Mayor Maguire presented the Stanley Cup to team president Fred Hambly after NHL President Frank Calder had presented the O’Brien Cup – aka the O’Brien Trophy, symbolic of the NHL championship at the time – to St. Pats captain Reg Noble.

This dining room was likely the site for Toronto’s 1922 Stanley Cup banquet.

“This cup was lost for some time,” said Calder, “and when I dug it up it was being used as a watering trough for a bulldog. May you and your team show the proverbial tenacity of the bulldog who drank out of it, in defending it.”

“We will do our best to keep it here,” replied the captain.

But it would be 10 years before the next NHL championship came to Toronto.

I don’t suppose anyone needs reminding that this year marks 50 since the last one!

Since at least  1896, when the Winnipeg Victorias traveled east to face and defeat the Montreal Victorias in a one-game challenge for the Stanley Cup, hockey fans have been coming up with ways to follow the game when they couldn’t be there in person. Telegraph lines first made this possible. Special wires were often set up in hotels, where people could gather in comfort to hear scores and details, or outside of train stations and newspaper offices, where people had to stand in the cold.

The Manitoba Free Press, February 15, 1896.

“Hundreds would gather to get the latest bulletins,” superstar Cyclone Taylor would recall from his childhood for biographer Eric Whitehead. “The mobs would hang around at night in sub-zero temperatures just waiting for the operator to leave his key and come dashing out with an announcement…. He’d chalk the score up on a blackboard and then go back to his office, and we’d just stand there and talk hockey and wait for the next bulletin.”

Of course, you didn’t have to wait in the cold if you didn’t want to … as long as you had a telephone. Newspaper offices often put extra operators on duty to give out score updates to those who called in. But beginning in 1922, newspapers had a more efficient way of getting scores out to anyone living within a thousand miles of their office. They could do it with the magic of radio.

The Vancouver World, March 21, 1922.

I’ve written before about my interest in early hockey broadcasts. (See … Radio Active and …Listening In.) The technology was virtually brand new in Canada in 1922. The earliest radio stations had been set up in Montreal in 1920, but it took another two years before the concept took off. According to the timeline of The History of Canadian Broadcasting on the Canadian Communications Foundation web site, no other stations came on board in 1921, but by 1922 there were 23 new stations in six more provinces across the country. Many of these new radio stations were owned by newspapers, including CFCA in Toronto, which was owned by the Toronto Star and would feature the first live play-by-play hockey broadcasts by Norman Albert, and then Foster Hewitt, in February of 1923.

The Vancouver Sun reporting  on its radio coverage of Game 1 in the 1922 Stanley Cup Final.

Eleven months before those hockey broadcasts in Toronto, in March of 1922, three Vancouver newspapers — the Province, the Sun, and World — were all racing to get their own radio stations on the air. The Province was first, on March 13, followed by the Sun two days later, and then the World on March 23. Unfortunately, the archives of the Province can’t be searched on line, but the others can, so we know for certain that in addition to news reports, stock prices, and musical programs, the Sun and the World (likely the Province too), were providing almost up-to-the minute reports on the Stanley Cup Final between the Vancouver Millionaires and the Toronto St. Pats which took place in Toronto between March 17 and March 28.

The Vancouver Sun, Game 2. Toronto won 2-1 in overtime.

From the newspaper accounts, it’s unclear exactly how much information the Sun was providing for its listeners during Vancouver’s 4-3 win in Game 1. Just the scores? Or was some effort being made to recreate (or at least read) the play-by-play accounts that telegraphed reports had long been able to relay? And were they providing more by Game 2?

The Vancouver Sun, Game 3. The Millionaires won 3-0.

It’s hard to imagine anyone reporting “that it was as good as being at the game” if all they were getting was score updates. But Sun readers were reporting that again after Game 3.

The Vancouver World, March 24, 1922.

When the World reported on its triumphant first broadcast, which had been made the day of Game 3 on March 23, it bragged of “Hockey Results Told as Fast As Plays Were Made” but provided no further details of what that actually meant.

The Vancouver Sun, March 27, 1922 and Vancouver World on March 28.

After a 6-0 win for Toronto in the fourth game of the series on March 25, the St. Pats and Millionaires were even at 2-2 in the best-of-five series. Interestingly, the Sun noted on March 27 that it would be “giving a complete and comprehensive story of the final world series hockey game” … but the game wasn’t actually played until March 28! By then it appeared that the Sun station had already given up on daily broadcasts, and all the World was promising was the final result, which would be a 5-1 Stanley Cup-winning victory for Toronto.

So, whatever it was that fans in Vancouver were tuning into 95 years ago, it was far from the multi-platform experience we’ve become used to today. But everything has to start somewhere!

This Saturday, the Maple Leafs will be wearing Toronto St. Pats uniforms for their home game against Chicago. It’s a nod to the team’s heritage during its 100th season and, of course, to the fact that Friday will be St. Patrick’s Day.

Way back on March 17, 1934, the Maple Leafs celebrated St. Patrick’s Day by declaring it “Clancy Night” in honour of King Clancy, their own Irish leprechaun whom Conn Smythe had acquired as the key piece he felt he needed to build the team into the powerhouse he envisioned. (Clancy did exactly what Smythe hoped he would and, basically – except for few years – remained with the Maple Leafs for the rest of his life.)

King Clancy wore this green shirt – sold a few years ago by Classic Auctions –
on Clancy Night in 1934 … until Lester Patrick of the New York Rangers
demanded he put on his regular Leafs uniform.

Over the past few years, a man I have never met named Daniel Doyon has been emailing me notes about the books I write and corrections to errors he’s come across in the NHL Official Guide & Record Book. (And, honestly, he’s never sent me anything where it hasn’t turned out that he was right!) A few weeks ago, on February 25, he sent me a note saying that it was King Clancy’s birthday and did our records show he was turning 114 or 115, because although hockey sources have long listed 1903 as Clancy’s birth year, he’d come across a document indicating it really should be 1902.

Even with web sites such as Ancestry.com and others like it, this type of research is far from perfect. Despite the fact that King Clancy himself signed this document stating that “I certify the foregoing to be true and correct to the best of my knowledge and belief,” it was still 70 years after the fact. He could have been wrong.

Even with Daniel’s track record, I needed more than this to go on. So, I checked the Census of Canada records. In 1911, Francis Clancy (he inherited his famous nickname from his father, Thomas, who was a rugby star known as “The King of the Heelers,” but he wasn’t born King Clancy!) appears to have had 1902 written overtop of 1901 (yes, it looks a lot like 1907!) and had his age of 10 crossed out and changed to a 9. In 1921, where no birth years are recorded, he’s listed as being 19 years old.

These were two more bits of evidence for a birth year of 1902 … but I know from past experience that Census information from these days can’t always be trusted. What is much more reliable, however is the statement of baptism. Clancy’s is hard to read, but it says: “On this the first day of March one thousand nine hundred and two we the undersigned parish priests of St. Joseph’s Church have baptized Michael Francis, born on the 25th inst. of the legal marriage of Thomas F. Clancy and Catherine J. O’Leary…”

Bingo!

But maybe not. Clancy’s name is supposed to be Francis Michael, not Michael Francis. Still, with everything else a perfect match, it must be him, right? Fortunately, as it turns out, Clancy’s wedding record from 1933 also lists his name as Michael Francis (and shows his age as 31, which would again indicate a birth year of 1902).

And to erase any lingering doubt about that record possibly being the wrong Clancy, newspaper coverage in both Toronto and Ottawa shortly after the wedding match the names and dates too perfectly for this to be anyone else.

Ottawa Journal, October 14, 1933.

Yet the hockey records showing his birth year as 1903 are so prevalent that you will find plenty of stories today claiming that Clancy was 18 years old in 1921 when he broke into the NHL (reputedly as the first teenager in league history – I haven’t looked into that!). But in his hometown of Ottawa at the time, people knew better. The Ottawa Journal in reporting on his signing on December 15, 1921, noted that Clancy was 19:

And two years later, on February 24, 1923, there was this story in the Journal noting his 21st birthday:

As well as this one that same day in the Ottawa Citizen:

All this evidence has pretty much convinced me that Clancy really was born in 1902, but then, clearly, some time after he got to Toronto, Clancy lost a year, as this short item in The Globe notes on February 25, 1936:

So, I began to wonder two things. First, when did the NHL start to “officially” record birth dates? I sent an email to Benny Ercolani, who’s been with the NHL since 1976 and its head statistician since the 1980s. He didn’t know the answer. Neither has anyone else I’ve spoken to.

It seems reasonable to me that recording birth dates may have begun in 1932 when Jim Hendy published his first NHL Guide, which was the forerunner of the publication I’ve been working on with Dan Diamond and Associates since 1996. Hendy was publishing newspaper stories that included player birth dates at least as early as 1931 … but I’ve never seen a copy of his 1932-33 Guide. The earliest edition in the archives at the Hockey Hall of Fame is from 1936-37 … and Phil Pritchard informs me that Clancy is listed in that one as being born in 1903. (No surprise there!)

Did Hendy solicit birth dates from players? And if he did, did Clancy decide around 1932 that he’d be better off as an aging NHLer who was 29-years-old rather than 30? Maybe. But that’s nothing more than a guess.

To see if the Clancy family could shed any light on this, I contacted his son, Terry Clancy. When I asked Terry what he knew about his father’s age, he told me: “I know that he was 83 when he died (in 1986).” I told him that he may actually have been a year older than that, and then I asked him the second thing I’d been wondering about. Did he have any idea why his father filled out that form in 1972?

I wondered if Clancy had needed a passport to go to Russia for the 1972 Series in September … but Terry said his father hadn’t gone. I also wondered, with Harold Ballard soon to serve a jail sentence for fraud, if maybe Clancy was suddenly worried about his job with the Maple Leafs and decided it might be a good idea to apply for his pension.

Terry had his doubts about that … although it’s hardly the kind of thing a father would have discussed with his children. Still, he got in touch with his older sister to ask her if she’d ever heard anything. “She told me she knew something about the two [birth dates],” he wrote, “but she always went on the assumption that he was born in 1903.”

Toronto Star, February 22, 1983.

Despite having filled out that form in 1972, King Clancy certainly appears to have carried on as if he’d been born in 1903. He happily took part in 80th birthday festivities in 1983 – when he was probably turning 81.

“My father never really cared about his age,” Terry Clancy told me.

I wonder what he’d make of all this effort today!

For the second time in just over two years, an outbreak of mumps has hit the NHL. This one, which began in late February, doesn’t seem to be as widespread as the outbreak in November and December of 2014, which hit five teams. So far, only a few players in Vancouver and Minnesota have been infected, and with no new reports so far this month, perhaps it’s been contained.

I had the mumps as a child. This would have been around 1971, although I have read that the mumps declined by 99 percent after a vaccine was introduced in the 1960s. (Was I just unlucky?) Booster shots since then are apparently effective only 88 percent of the time.

Sidney Crosby with the mumps in 2014.

The NHL outbreaks might make a good story for anti-vax conspiracy theorists, but the truth is that the mumps remains most prevalent where people congregate in close settings and it spreads through mucus and saliva. Sounds an awful lot like every hockey dressing room I’ve ever been in!

The truth is, flu bugs and other germs hit teams in every sport often enough. It’s usually nothing serious – but it can be.

The most famous incident of hockey and disease involves one of the most deadly pandemics in world history. The so-called Spanish Influenza of 1918 to 1920 infected as many as 500 million people around the world and killed as many as 50 to 100 million. The Spanish Flu resulted in the final game of the Stanley Cup series of 1919 being cancelled after several members of both the Montreal Canadiens and the Seattle Metropolitans came down with the disease.

Many people who read this will know that Joe Hall of the Montreal Canadiens died of the Spanish Flu. (Technically, he died of pneumonia, as did most of the flu’s victims, when he passed away in Seattle’s Columbus Sanatorium on April 5, 1919.) Some will know that Canadiens owner George Kennedy never truly recovered from his bout before passing away on October 19, 1921.

Report of Joe Hall’s death in the Seattle Times Sunday edition on April 6, 1919.
Photo courtesy of the Society for International Hockey Research.

Hall and Kennedy are the most famous members of the professional hockey fraternity to die of the Spanish Flu, but they aren’t the only ones.

Hamby Shore isn’t a name many people know anymore, but 100 seasons ago when the NHL was just starting out, he was an important member of the Ottawa Senators. Shore had first played with his home town team back in 1905, and although injuries slowed him down during the NHL’s first season of 1917-18, he was still a fan favourite and was expected to be an important veteran presence on Ottawa’s 1918-19 team.

Ottawa Journal, October 15, 1918. Photo courtesy
of the Society for International Hockey Research.

But around the beginning of October in 1918, Shore’s wife took ill with the Spanish Flu. He contracted the disease while nursing her at home. Ruby Shore recovered, but Hamby would spend a week at Ottawa’s Walter Street hospital before succumbing to pneumonia on October 13, 1918.

On the day of Shore’s funeral in Ottawa, October 16, 1918, the hockey world suffered another tragedy when the son of future Hall of Famer Jack Marshall died of pneumonia brought on by the Spanish Flu. Bobby Marshall was just 12 years old.

The Montreal Gazette on October 16, 1918 reports on the
death of Bobby Marshall and the funeral of Hamby Shore.

By the time the NHL opened its second season in December of 1918, the Spanish Flu had seemed to vanish from the eastern part of North America, but it was still raging in the west. Captain Eddie Oatman of the Victoria Aristocrats was too sick to play when the rival Pacific Coast Hockey Association began its season. Oatman was better within a few weeks, but other Victoria players got sick too.

Lester Patrick caught the flu right after Oatman. Patrick wasn’t just a player in Victoria. He was also the team’s owner, coach and general manager. Having been sick himself, Patrick took no chances when other players showed symptoms. According to a February 21, 1919 story in the Victoria Times, if anyone had even a hint of a fever, he was sent home to bed, and the team doctor made a visit. Despite the precautions, seven Victoria players in all caught the flu during the 1918-19 season, but with prompt care, and some very good luck, not a single one of them died.

Various stories from the Victoria Colonist from January and February of 1919.

It’s long been said that Joe Hall, George Kennedy and the other members of the Montreal Canadiens caught the Spanish Flu in Victoria while awaiting the winner of the PCHA playoffs prior to the Stanley Cup Finals. This was even reported in newspapers at the time, but Seattle defeated Vancouver for the PCHA title while the Canadiens were still on the train heading to the West Coast from Montreal. They arrived in Vancouver on March 16, 1919 and played an exhibition game there on March 17 before immediately catching an overnight ferry directly to Seattle. They arrived there on the morning of March 18.

There was no opportunity for anyone with the Canadiens to be biding their time in Victoria, and even if there had been, virtually everything ever written about the Spanish Flu mentions how remarkably short its incubation period was. There’s no way someone could have been exposed to the flu even if the ferry stopped briefly in Victoria on March 17-18 and then not show any signs of illness for two weeks until March 31.

Ferry schedule from 1919 sent to me by Canadian Pacific archivist
Jo-Anne Colby during research for my Y/A novel Fever Season.

Given that there were two days off between some of the games in Seattle during the series, it’s not impossible (though highly unlikely!) that a player or two may have gone to Victoria for a visit during their time off. But no newspaper I’ve come across reports on that happening during a hard-fought series where rest would have been the top priority between games.

I think the simple fact that so many players in Victoria had been sick during the 1918-19 season meant that it was easy (and lazy) speculation on the part of reporters at the time to say that the Montreal players got sick in Victoria. Unfortunately, nearly 100 years later, the story still persists.

It was big news last week when Sidney Crosby collected his 1,000th career point. He reached the milestone on February 16 with an assist on a Chris Kunitz goal early in the first period, and then picked up another assist on the tying goal in the third period before scoring himself in overtime to give his Pittsburgh Penguins a 4-3 win over the Winnipeg Jets. It was truly a feel-good moment for a player who has clearly re-established himself as the best in the game after the concussions of a few years back that threatened to cut short his career.

Crosby is the 86th player in NHL history to record 1,000 points. (Henrik Sedin and Alex Ovechkin hit the mark earlier this year, and Daniel Sedin and Shane Doan are closing in too.) The first was Gordie Howe, who reached the milestone more than 56 years ago on November 27, 1960. Coverage of that moment was widespread too – although the focus of those stories may surprise you.

Howe reached the milestone with the first of two assists that night in Detroit’s 2-0 home victory over Toronto. It was a Sunday, and Howe had also picked up an assist in the Red Wings’ 3-3 tie at Maple Leaf Gardens on Saturday night. With so few Sunday newspapers in this era, Monday papers had to cover the full weekend’s worth of games, and in Canada, most of the sports pages were filled with Ottawa’s 16-6 Grey Cup victory over Edmonton in Vancouver that Saturday. (The Grey Cup didn’t move to Sunday until 1969.)

The Montreal Gazette devoted the first four pages of its sports section to Grey Cup coverage on November 28, 1960:

And when it finally got around to Sunday’s hockey games outside of Montreal, it made no mention at all of Howe’s 1,000th point. Instead, it focused on his tying for the all-time scoring lead with Maurice Richard, who’d recently retired with 965 regular-season points and 126 more in the playoffs for a total of 1,091.

A Montreal bias, perhaps? After all, fans of the Canadiens and Red Wings had been arguing the merits of Howe versus Richard for years. But the coverage in Toronto wasn’t much different. The Star and the Globe at least mentioned that Howe now had 1,001 points in regular season play – although neither said anything about him being the first to reach 1,000 and both mentioned his tie with Richard.

Even in Detroit, the headline in the Free Press said “Howe Ties Record” as did the story picked up from the Canadian Press in the Star-Phoenix in Gordie’s home town of Saskatoon.

Only the United Press International, it seems, played up the fact that Howe’s first assist in the 2-0 win over Toronto made him the first player to reach the 1,000-point plateau. But even they gave pretty much equal billing to his tying Richard at 1,091.

Howe, himself, seemed to play down the milestone. As noted in the UPI story, what he really wanted was to be able to play another five seasons to reach 20 for his career. Numerous stories pointed out that he didn’t even take the puck from his 1,000th point as a souvenir, although someone must have because the colourized photo above is all over the Internet, and Detroit GM Jack Adams stated that the Red Wings planned to put the puck on display.

Meantime, Howe quickly moved himself into the undisputed spot as hockey’s all-time scoring leader. Despite a 3-2 loss to Boston at home in Detroit’s next game on December 1, he picked up assists on both Red Wings goals to move two points clear of Maurice Richard with 1,093.

Howe, by the way had reached 1,000 points in 938 games over 15 seasons and had needed 1,033 in all to achieve 1,091. Richard hit that total in 1,111 games over 18 years – 978 in the regular season and 133 in the playoffs.

But Maurice Richard continued to loom large in NHL milestones. Even after Gordie Howe became the second player to score 500 goals in 1962 and went on to surpass Richard with 545, sportswriters well into the 1970s would note not just when players reached 500  but when they reached 544 as well. And, of course, 50 goals in 50 games in a single season (which Richard accomplished in 1944-45) would remain a magic mark until Mike Bossy matched it in 1980-81 and Gretzky obliterated it with 50 in 39 the following year.

Today is Valentine’s Day, but it also marks two important Toronto hockey anniversaries. Ninety years ago, on February 14, 1927, the group assembled by Conn Smythe made its first $75,000 payment (they’d already put down a $10,000 deposit and would pay the final $75,000 over the next 30 days) to purchase the Toronto St. Pats. The deal was ratified that day at a meeting of NHL officials at Toronto’s King Edward Hotel. The team played its final game under its old name at Detroit the following evening before making its debut as the Maple Leafs at home against the New York Americans on February 17, 1927.

Today also marks the anniversary of the Ace Bailey benefit game; the first All-Star Game in NHL history, played at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto 83 years ago on February 14, 1934. Recently, I wrote about some of the back story behind the Howie Morenz Memorial in 1937. Today, here are some of the behind-the-scenes discussions that led to the Ace Bailey Game.

I’m sure that many of you reading this will be familiar with the basic story of the Ace Bailey Incident. If not, my friend and colleague Kevin Shea wrote about it recently in the Toronto Star. There’s also an entire chapter devoted to it in my book Art Ross: The Hockey Legend Who Built the Bruins.

Briefly, Bailey was a star for the Toronto Maple Leafs who had his career (and almost his life) ended in a dirty hit from behind by Bruins legend Eddie Shore at the Boston Garden on December 12, 1933. Bailey fell and his head struck the ice. His skull was fractured, and over the next few days there was a blood clot discovered on the left side, and extensive hemorrhaging on the right side, of his brain. His chances of survival were poor, but a series of operations performed by a Boston specialist saved his life.

The scene on the ice at the Boston Garden, with Ace Bailey down on the left and Eddie Shore, after being punched by Red Horner, at the right. Photo courtesy of Art Ross III.

For his hit on Bailey, Eddie Shore was suspended for 16 games, which was one-third of the NHL’s 48-game season. Toronto’s Red Horner was suspended for six games for attacking Shore. Today, Shore is considered one of the dirtiest players in hockey history. His reputation as a dictatorial minor league owner – which I touched on in my recent story about Chick Webster – certainly hasn’t helped! But Shore was no goon. In his day, he was considered rough and tough but not violent. As such, Art Ross of the Bruins felt his suspension was too severe. (Boston fell apart without Shore, and Ross claimed his loss cost the team $50,000 in gate receipts, which was a steep price during The Great Depression.)

Conn Smythe – who had stayed at Bailey’s bedside in Boston for several days –  was incensed at losing Horner for any time at all, given that they had already lost the services of Bailey. He also didn’t feel that his Maple Leafs – who’d paid out about $2,500 by early January – should be on the hook for all of Bailey’s medical expenses. The Bruins had already donated the gate receipts from their next home game on December 19 (reported first as $6,642.22 and later as $6741.21) directly to Mrs. Bailey, but the Toronto owner wanted more.

As early as January 4, 1934, Smythe announced that he would ask for a special meeting of the NHL board of governors to discuss the financial angle. “The Toronto Maple Leafs have been penalized enough already,” he declared, “without incurring a further loss of what I figure will amount to $8,000. Who is going to pay the hospital bill, physicians’ fees and all the expenses resulting from Bailey’s injury. We will have to pay the salary of a hockey player who won’t be on the ice for a single minute during the rest of the season. Boston will have Shore back January 28 and besides that we lost Horner for six games. Is there any justice in that?”

Photos from the pages of Life Magazine in a story about Conn Smythe from 1955.

On January 9, 1934, Smythe, backed by the Ottawa Senators and Montreal Maroons, requested that NHL President Frank Calder call the meeting. It took place at the Lincoln Hotel in New York on January 24. Despite reports that there would be some discussion of extending Shore’s suspension, compensation for Bailey was the only issue. The Boston Globe reported that the meeting lasted three hours. The Toronto Star said five hours. The governors clearly believed Bailey was entitled to something, but seemed worried about setting a precedent that would make teams financially liable for injuries to an opponent.

“The league,” wrote Toronto Star Sports Editor Lou Marsh, “certainly took no chances on establishing a dangerous precedent by making any allowance of league funds to Bailey or accepting any responsibility for injuries to individual players, no matter how they were incurred.”

In the end, it was James Strachan of the Maroons who suggested a benefit All-Star Game, although Ottawa Journal sports editor Walter Gilhooly had already written a similar proposal. The NHL’s announcement was made when the governors broke for lunch at 2 pm. Smythe declared himself satisfied with the action.

Click the photo above to read Walter Gilhooly’s open letter to the NHL
Governors as it appeared in the Ottawa Journal on January 8, 1934.

“My only idea was to get something for Bailey,” the Leafs boss said. “Yes, he’s all through playing hockey. I decided he ought to get $15,000 and I don’t care much how he gets it…. If we don’t draw enough to make up that amount with the exhibition game the Toronto club will put up the rest. If we have something over we may apply the surplus on his hospital and doctors bills.”

In the end, a capacity crowd of 14,074 saw the Maple Leafs beat the All-Stars 7-3. They paid a total of $20,909.40 for their tickets, all of which was turned over to Bailey and his family.

As I said in these “pages” two weeks ago, selecting an all-time list of greats is a bit of a mug’s game. You can’t ever win. While there are certainly a few guys on the NHL’s recent 100 Greatest Players list that I wouldn’t have selected – and not nearly enough names from the game’s early days for my liking! – most people want to see names they remember.

People have been debating the game’s all-time greats pretty much from the time organized hockey began. Newspapers were selected all-star teams as long ago as the 1890s, and there was no more censuses then than there is today. Then as now, it seems, a big part of the debate was shaped by where you came from and who you grew up watching.

On January 20, 1912, the Vancouver World ran a story debating “Who Was The Best of Big Hockey Players?” Though I think it’s meant as a straight account, it reads almost like a parody. None of the people proposing possible players (all of those I list below are future Hall of Famers) is identified by name and yet they seem to come from all across the country.

No sooner is someone naming Russell Bowie as the greatest player they’ve ever seen, then “a former backer of the Ottawa club” is saying that Frank McGee was better. Then a former Winnipeg resident currently living in Calgary is making the case for Kenora’s Tommy Phillips, where upon a Montreal man states his claim to Hod Stuart. There are also voices speaking in favour of Cyclone Taylor, Alf Smith, Rat Westwick, Lester Patrick, Percy Lesueur and Harvey Pulford. (Alas, no one speaks up for Art Ross!)

Except for Lester Patrick, none of these old-time greats ever played in the NHL and wouldn’t have been considered for the Centennial list. But this was not the case 30 years later, when Cooper Smeaton listed the greatest players he’d ever seen. Smeaton was a fine hockey player in his youth, but made his mark in the game as a referee, first in the National Hockey Association and then the National Hockey League, earning his own spot in the Hockey Hall of Fame.

In the Ottawa Journal on November 14, 1942, Smeaton made two lists of all-time greats from the earlier and later stages of his career. Of the 12 players he named, 11 would make it to the Hall of Fame, but only Georges Vezina made it to the NHL’s current list of 100 Greatest Players. Interestingly, Smeaton snubs Eddie Shore (who did – very deservedly! – make it) in favour of his Boston teammate Lionel Hitchman, who has never made it to the Hall of Fame, having been overlooked pretty much forever as have so many other defensive defensemen throughout the years. Give the image below a click to see Smeaton’s list and read his reasons.