Category Archives: Hockey History

Canucks Go For Pucks at Gonzaga

During the late 1980s, when I was at my most interested in NCAA basketball, I had a fondness for Gonzaga University. Partly that was because Gonzaga grad John Stockton was starring alongside Karl Malone with the NBA’s Utah Jazz, whom I also liked at the time. Admittedly, though, a big part of it was that I just liked to say, “Gonzaga!”

A couple of years ago, Canadian star Kelly Olynyk (now with the Boston Celtics) led Gonzaga to the top seed in the West Region at the NCAA tournament. Sadly, after a 31-2 regular season, the Zags (their actual nickname is the Bulldogs) went out in the second round. This year, with Canadians Kevin Pangos and Kyle Wiltjer, Gonzaga was 32-2 and were seeded second in the South. The Zags reached the “Elite Eight” for just the second time in school history, but were eliminated this past weekend by top-ranked Duke in the South Region Final and so failed to reach this weekend’s Final Four.

More than 75 years ago, Gonzaga used a Canadian connection to briefly become a West Coast hockey power. Coach and promoter Denny Edge ran Gonzaga’s hockey team. He was born in England, but raised in Regina, where he played junior hockey from 1918 to 1922, helping the Regina Pats reach the finals of the 1922 Memorial Cup. Edge played pro hockey in Los Angeles in 1926-27 and then managed the rink in Portland, Oregon until 1936 before moving to Spokane, Washington, to coach at Gonzaga.

Gonzaga
Denny Edge wears the suit, Frank McCool wears the pads,
and Jerry Pettigrew stands on the right.

Edge tapped his home province of Saskatchewan for hockey players to take to Gonzaga – particularly the town of North Battleford. Future NHL goalie and executive Emile Francis was a young boy in North Battleford at the time and remembers the exodus of local talent. Jerry Pettigrew had led the North Battleford Beavers to the Allan Cup (Canadian amateur championship) Finals against Sudbury in the spring of 1937 before being recruited to Gonzaga that fall. Several other local boys made the trip with him and Gonzaga won the West Coast Amateur Hockey title in 1937–38. In their final game of the season they defeated the Big Ten champion University of Minnesota 5-1.

Edge added goalie Frank McCool of Calgary to the Gonzaga roster in 1938-39. McCool, later known as “Ulcers,” would famously win the Calder Trophy and the Stanley Cup with the Toronto Maple Leafs as an NHL rookie in 1944–45 while guzzling milk between periods to calm his roiling stomach. In his first of two seasons at Gonzaga, McCool led the team to the Pacific Northwest Amateur championship, a second straight West Coast Amateur title, and the Pacific Coast Collegiate championship.

James “Stocky” Edwards of Battleford, Saskatchewan isn’t a name most hockey fans will know. He was one of Canada’s leading air aces of World War II, but before that, Edwards played hockey at St. Thomas College, a Catholic high school in Battleford. He was small, but determined and very competitive. Barbara and I have visited with Stocky and his wife Toni several times before and after she wrote The Desert Hawk. He and I have talked hockey a bit, and I also had the chance to speak with Emile Francis about him.

Stocky
Jim Edwards is on the right with brothers Paul (center) and Edd Ballandine.

It had been decades since Francis faced Stocky (or had even seen him) when Stocky was finishing up at St. Thomas and Francis was a freshman at North Battleford Collegiate. Still, he remembered him as an excellent shooter who would cut hard for the net from the right wing. “He didn’t take the ‘overland route,’” said Francis, who added that the first time he played against Howie Meeker of the Toronto Maple Leafs he thought, “This guy reminds me of Jimmy Edwards.”

Edwards was good enough that Johnny Gottselig of the Chicago Blackhawks arranged for him to have a tryout with the team. He also attracted the interest of Denny Edge, who recruited him for Gonzaga. Excited as he was by the NHL attention, Edwards planned to further his education at the Spokane University … but decided to join the RCAF instead. Edwards went on to a career in the Air Force, while Denny Edge’s powerhouse hockey program at Gonzaga University became a forgotten casualty of the Second World War.

Net Results…

Are bigger nets the answer to more scoring in the NHL?

The debate has come up from time to time since the end of the lockout that wiped out the entire 2004-05 season. Goalies these days are bigger than ever, and the NHL has made an effort to reduce the size of the equipment they use. Still, there seems to be little appetite for increasing the size of the nets from the 6-feet-by-4-feet they’ve always been since netting was first draped over metal posts in 1899. Tradition is often given as a reason in the arguments against enlarging the nets, but surprisingly, such talk dates back a lot further than people probably think.

Early Net

With scoring in the NHL down considerably in 1926-27, sports editor Frederick Wilson of The Globe in Toronto noted in his column on February 21, 1927, a suggestion made in New York to widen the nets to seven feet. Nothing come of it, and scoring continued to drop, reaching an all-time low in 1928-29. Only 2.8 goals per game were scored on average that season by both teams combined, meaning the typical score was 2-1 in overtime. This is the year that George Hainsworth set records with 22 shutouts during the 44-game schedule and an average of 0.92. Every one of the NHL’s 10 starting goaltender had an average of 1.85 or better, and eight of them had at least 10 shutouts. More modern passing and offside rules were introduced in 1929-30, and offense jumped to over six goals per game. However, scoring dropped dramatically again in 1930-31, although it wasn’t nearly as low as it had been at its worst.

Even so, the Mercantile League in Toronto (which played out of the Ravina Rink, near Keele and Annette) was given permission by the Ontario Hockey Association and the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association to experiment with nets that measured 7½ feet wide from January 28, 1931, until the end of its regular-season schedule in March. The new nets resulted in a few games with scores as wild as 10-5, but most were still 3-1 and 2-0.

Smythe Nets

Maple Leafs boss Conn Smythe loved the wide nets. He wrote letters to NHL president Frank Calder and his fellow governors inviting them to Toronto to see for themselves. Smythe, Calder and Leo Dandurand attended a Mercantile league doubleheader on February 18, but Mike Rodden, writing in The Globe the next day, noted that the teams “proceeded to give their worst displays of the season.” (The games were 3-3 and 3-1, Rodden worked both as referee, and elsewhere in The Globe it was noted that they were marked by “exceptional goalkeeping.”) Calder and Dandurand were unimpressed, though the NHL president noted that the nets didn’t strike him as alarmingly wide.

Given the animosity between them, it’s entirely possible that Conn Smythe supported the wider nets simply because Art Ross had designed the ones the NHL had been using since 1927-28. (The Art Ross net would be used without change through the 1983–84 season, and all the new nets used since then are still just a variation of his original design.) The 6-by-4 size had been well established long before then, but Ross still became the go-to guy whenever talk of the nets came up. It’s unlikely he saw any of the wide-net games in Toronto in 1931, but he did give his thoughts on the experiment to Boston Traveler hockey editor Ralph Clifford. “Adhere to the rules,” Ross said. “Have them strictly enforced … and you will have a game that is wide open enough to satisfy the most exacting fan.”

AHR Net
Art Ross with sons Arthur (the goalie) and John. Courtesy of Art Ross III.

People don’t think of the heyday of Gordie Howe and Maurice Richard as a low-scoring era, but the 1952-53 season saw only 4.8 goals scored per game. Once again, people wondered about widening the nets. “Somebody brings that up every time the defense gets ahead of the offense for a while as it is right now,” Tom Fitzgerald quoted Ross as saying in the Boston Globe on November 28, 1953. “We’ve gone through a lot of different phases like this, and certainly the hockey has been interesting this season, even if fewer goals are being scored… Increasing the width of the nets a little wouldn’t boost scoring to any great extent.”

Speaking about scoring again a few days later, Ross said: “It’s pretty simple. The more you keep shooting at the net, the more chances you have to score. There are a lot of factors that are going to help if you pour enough shots at a goalie – deflections, funny bounces and the like. If you just keep shooting away the percentages will work out for you.”

But chances are, Art Ross never envisioned a game where players blocked shots like they do today, or one where goalies were so large, agile and well padded. He’d been involved with the game at its highest levels since 1905 as a star player and then an executive, but Ross never seemed to be bound by tradition. It would be interesting to see where he’d stand on enlarging the nets if he were alive today.

Would 4-on-4 Mean More Goals Get Scored?

With a little more than three weeks to go in the NHL season, the race for the Art Ross Trophy is incredibly tight. And yet there doesn’t seem to be much buzz about it. Perhaps that’s because whether the winner is John Tavares, Alex Ovechkin, Sidney Crosby, or one of the others in the bunch, he’s likely to end up with no more than 86 points. If so, that’ll be the lowest total in a non-strike season since Gordie Howe led the league with 86 points in 1962-63. But, of course, the NHL season was just 70 games long then.

Tavares

Howe’s points-per-game average of 1.2285 in 1962-63 works out to about 101 points in an 82 game season, whereas 86 points in 82 games translates to only 73 points in a 70-game schedule. Nobody has led the NHL with fewer than 73 points since Max Bentley led the way with 72 in 1946-47. But the season was just 60 games long at that time, so even Bentley’s total would work out 84 points in a 70-game season, or 98 points in 82 games.

Given that no one has led the NHL with less than a-point-per game total since Toe Blake topped the league with 47 points in a 48-game season back in 1938-39, (comparable to 80 points in an 82-game schedule), we’re looking at a fairly historic lack of scoring in the NHL this season.

David Feschuk, writing in the Toronto Star on March 13, noted that the decline in scoring can be traced directly to power-play offense, with man-advantage chances at the lowest level in 50 years. Feschuk quotes St. Louis Blues coach Ken Hitchcock and Nashville Predators’ GM David Poile as saying that everyone seems to be on board these days with what is and what isn’t a penalty and that coaches are happy with the way games are being called.

Hockey Cards 1

Yet Feschuk also quotes former referee Kerry Fraser as saying that the current, younger, referees have been insufficiently trained, and that they’re calling minors instead of majors, or sometimes nothing at all, because they’d rather let plays go knowing that anything they missed will be flagged for additional suspensions, if warranted, by the NHL’s video review. Fewer power-plays means fewer power-play goals, and, even worse, calling fewer penalties makes it that much easier to clog things up for the skilled players. The game may be faster than ever before, but that doesn’t mean much if there’s no room to move and no time to think.

Of course, there’s also the argument that scoring – briefly on the rise after the “Dead Puck Era” by the tweaks to the rules introduced in 2005–06 after the season-long lockout ended – is once again on the decline because goalies today are better than they’ve ever been. They may well be. They’re certainly better-trained than they’ve ever been and physically larger too (even if their oversized equipment has been reined in somewhat).

Hockey Cards

So, if scoring chances have more-or-less remained the same, but goalies (based on their save percentages) are stopping more shots, then what’s the answer? People aren’t saying it as much as they were a few years ago, but is it larger nets? (We’ll look at that next week.) But if there really isn’t enough time and space on the ice, then maybe the answer is fewer players.

Talks are moving forward on some form of 3-on-3 overtime to break more ties before going to a shootout, but there’s little if any talk these days of going to 4-on-4 in regulation time. I’m not saying that 4-on-4 is the answer (and you’ve got to wonder how much the NHL Players Association would support it), but there did used to be a rover in the early days of hockey and the decision to eliminate that extra position (which was first made in 1911-12) worked out pretty well! Not everybody was on board with that in the beginning either. I think it was future Hall of Famer Marty Walsh of the old Ottawa Senators who said that playing hockey without a rover was like playing baseball without a shortstop.

Newsy clip

Yet as early as 1946, another early era Hall of Famer, Newsy Lalonde (who survived and thrived after the change from 6-on-6 skaters to 5-on-5) already believed that the best way to allow speed and skill to flourish in the coming years would be to eventually reduce the game to just four skaters and a goalie per side. Future Hall of Famers Ebbie Goodfellow, Joe Primeau and Charlie Conacher shared Newsy’s view, as did Hooly Smith. “There’s no more stickhandling,” Smith complained, “and 90 percent of the goals are scored by passouts from behind the net or from scrambles in front of the goal.”

That’s a complaint that’s pretty familiar!

About Face

A month ago, I entitled my story about early hockey radio broadcasts, Hockey Nerd – Part II. This could easily be Part III, but I’ve decided I’m going to try not to refer to myself that way any longer. It was my friend and colleague Roger Godin who set me straight. In my recent story reviewing the film Red Army and discussing the Winnipeg Falcons heritage moment, I referred to my criticism of the Falcons jersey color as being “pretty nerdy.” Roger left a comment, saying: “Let’s rid ourselves of that description ‘nerd.’ Those of us in this business just want to get things right and frequently find ourselves up against a wall of indifference…”

Often times, the problem isn’t the indifference of others but the mountains of misinformation already out there. For example, if you ask people, “who was the first goalie to wear a mask?” most of those who’ll offer an answer will say, “Jacques Plante.” Plante was my first favorite hockey player when I was a boy and he was starring with the Maple Leafs. He had certainly popularized the use of goalie masks, but he wasn’t the first to wear one … even in an NHL game.

Before he wore one in game action for the first time on November 1, 1959, Plante had been one of many goalies (most of the others at the amateur level) experimenting with masks in the late 1950s. In September of 1957, Delbert Louch of St. Mary’s, Ontario, unveiled a “head-protector and face-shield” that caught on with many NHL goalies for practice, but proved impractical for games.

Louch mask

Long before then, a handful of goalies wore wire masks (like baseball catcher’s masks) in international competition in the 1930s, and many people know that Clint Benedict wore a mask with the Montreal Maroons in February and March of 1930 during his final season in the NHL. Benedict’s was a leather face shield he wore after being sidelined for several weeks following a couple of shots to the face that January.

The NHL had modernized its forward passing rules for the 1929–30 season, and just as the schedule was getting under way, Conn Smythe of the Toronto Maple Leafs stated that he planned to introduce a proposal at the next league meeting making it mandatory for all NHL goalies to wear masks. Smythe stated that there were several NHL managers in favor of the move, but no goalie wanted to be the first, so a rule should be adopted to compel them all to do so.

Smythe Masks

Apparently, the Ontario Hockey Association had passed such a rule for the 1921-22 season saying that goalies may wear a mask for protection though nobody appears to have done so. Despite what Smythe said in 1929, it would be many years before the NHL adopted similar legislation. Amazingly, even as late as 2009–10, the NHL rule book only said that: Protective masks of a design approved by the League may be worn by goalkeepers. The wording was not changed to say must be worn until 2010-11!

These days, the trendy answer to the question who wore the first goalie mask is Elizabeth Graham, who donned a fencing mask while playing net for the Queen’s University women’s team in 1927 … reportedly under pressure from her father who had recently paid for some expensive dental work. However, others had already worn masks before Ms. Graham. The earliest story I’ve come across about a goalie wearing a mask in a hockey game is from the New York Times on February 24, 1916. The Union Club defeated the Knickerbocker Club 14-0 the night before as part of a Charity Ice Carnival for the Belgian Relief Fund during World War I. Knickerbockers goalie J.G. Milburn Jr. was replaced after the first period by J.J. Higginson, who, the Times noted, “wore a baseball mask.”

Interestingly, in a story reported in the Regina Leader on February 8, 1912, the National Hockey Association (forerunner to the NHL) was said to be considering the use of face protection for goalkeepers “in the shape of a baseball mask,” which some clubs in the United States were already said to be using in practice. A story about roller polo – essentially hockey played on roller skates – in Pittsburgh in 1906 describes the goalie as looking much like a modern-day lacrosse goalie, and wearing a catcher’s mask. (Perhaps the fact that hockey was not nearly as widely popular in the United States as it was in Canada, and was played mainly at elite schools and swank athletic clubs, meant Americans were less hung up on the “manly” aspects of the game?)

Early Masks

Still, the earliest example I’ve come across of a goalie using a catcher’s mask and/or a leather face shield is from Canada in 1903. Eddie Giroux (often misspelled as Geroux in newspapers) was hurt in preseason practice with the Toronto Marlboros on a shot by teammate Tommy Phillips on December 9, 1903. When Giroux returned to the ice a few days later he was wearing some sort of facial protection. Here’s a quick summary of the newspaper accounts:

• sustained “a nasty cut” in practice – Toronto Globe: Dec. 10, 1903
• skips practice, will return with baseball mask – Toronto Globe: Dec. 12, 1903
• practiced wearing a “padded hood” – Ottawa Citizen: Dec. 16, 1903
• discarded his baseball mask – Toronto Globe: Dec. 17, 1903
• experimented with baseball mask; discarded it – Montreal Gazette: Dec. 18, 1903
• discarded baseball mask, using leather headgear – Winnipeg Telegram reporting from Toronto News: Dec. 21, 1903

Whatever it was Giroux was wearing, he does not appear to have used it when the Marlboros played their first exhibition game in Barrie on December 18, nor in any games that followed during the 1903-04 season. He was said to be having trouble locating shots from the side while wearing it. Baseball catcher’s masks date back to the 1880s, and hockey goalies were quick to adopt cricket pads for added protection during the 1890s, but for now, Giroux’s brief experiment is the oldest usage of a mask by a goalie that I’m aware of.

Marlboros
Giroux wears the pads (but no mask) while seated second from the left with the Marlboros in 1904. Tommy Phillips is seated second from the right. Giroux followed Phillips to the Kenora Thistles in 1905. They won the Stanley Cup in 1907.

Glowing Pucks From Hockey’s Past

The NHL recently added many “enhanced” analytic stats to its web site NHL.com. More are likely to come. This year, at the recent NHL All-Star Game, the league introduced sensors in the pucks and uniforms that allow for the tracking of speed, positioning, ice time, and other data that – it’s said – will revolutionize the way we watch and understand hockey. The general buzz around all this has all been positive. VERY different from the much-maligned innovation introduced at the All-Star Game back in 1996 … the Fox Trax glow puck!

It’s not quite the same concept, but take a look at this story I recently came across from the Montreal Gazette back in 1941:

Glowing Puck

Rebuilding in Toronto

Monday, March 2nd at 3 pm Eastern marks the NHL trade deadline. Everyone seems to be in agreement that the Toronto Maple Leafs are now fully committed to rebuilding around youth, although the general consensus is that they’ll be better off waiting until this summer if they plan to trade players such as Phil Kessel or Dion Phaneuf. We shall see…

Everyone also seems to be in agreement that this is the first time the Maple Leafs have fully committed to a youth movement. That’s not entirely accurate. Though this does appear to be the beginning of the first true rebuild since the introduction of the NHL Entry Draft (originally the Amateur Draft) in 1963, it’s certainly not the first one in team history.

After giving up day-to-day control of the Maple Leafs while serving in the Canadian army during World War II, Conn Smythe resumed full charge of the team for the 1946–47 season. Toronto had won the Stanley Cup in 1945 only to fall out of the playoffs the following season, so Smythe and coach Hap Day decided a complete overhaul was necessary. Seven of 21 Leafs players from 1945-46 were traded, released or encouraged to retire. Another four were sent to the minors. The team would go with youth, and though Smythe couldn’t guarantee success, he promised that no team in the NHL would work harder than the new crew he assembled.

Smythe

Unlike today, how to find and properly develop this new young talent wasn’t much of a concern for Conn Smythe. With no draft and only six NHL teams, it was easy enough for him to rebuild around youth because of the sponsorship of junior and minor league teams that allowed NHL clubs – particularly the wealthier ones; Toronto, Montreal and Detroit – to stockpile young players. (Boston tried the same thing after World War II, but Art Ross didn’t have the financial resources that Smythe did.)

Conn Smythe admitted that he was critical of the 1945–46 version of the Maple Leafs not because they’d missed the playoffs a year after winning the Stanley Cup, but because they had the fewest penalty minutes in the NHL. He vowed that would never happen again under his watch. In his 1980 autobiography, Smythe wrote that he couldn’t remember when he first uttered his famous motto, “If you can’t beat ’em in the alley, you can’t beat ’em on the ice.” He also wrote that his motto was often misunderstood, stating that he didn’t want his players to be bullies, he simply wanted them to refuse to be bullied. Still, while no newspapers appear to quote him using the “alley” expression during the rebuild in 1946, it became pretty obvious that Smythe wanted tough guys in his youth movement.

Smythe “told his players he wanted a fighting team filled with the desire to mix it with anyone,” wrote Jim Vipond in the Globe and Mail on September 27, 1946 as training camp got under way. “He further stressed the importance of team spirit and co-operation.” Gordon Walker of the Toronto Star wrote that same day of Smythe’s “brief, forceful address on club policy,” quoting Smythe directly: “If they start shoving you around, I expect you to shove them right back, harder. If one of our players should get injured by illegal tactics of the enemy, I expect the players on our team to see that the man responsible doesn’t get away with it.”

To reshape his team in the image he wanted, Smythe turned to the young players he already had in his farm system, which had been built by Frank Selke, who was now in Montreal after falling out with his longtime boss. Smythe reasoned that if the Leafs had to lose he’d rather lose with youngsters than with veterans and so on September 20, 1946, a week before training camp opened in St. Catharines, Ontario, the Leafs held what would now be called a “prospects camp.” The best from that group were invited to the main camp and were there when Smythe delivered his forceful address.

Young

From that prospects camp emerged Bill Barilko (though he would begin the season in the minors), Gus Mortson and Howie Meeker, who would all be a part of four Stanley Cup–winning teams in Toronto over the next five years. Jimmy Thomson’s brief appearance with the Maple Leafs in 1945–46 had already earned him a spot at the main camp, where he too made the team and won four titles in the next five years. Three-time Cup-winners Garth Boesch and Vic Lynn also came out of the prospects camp, as did Tod Sloan although he needed a few more years to develop into the star he would become in 1950–51. Sid Smith hadn’t been there, but did make a brief debut in the NHL in 1946–47 before breaking out as a star a few years later. (There was, in fact, so much young talent in Toronto that Smythe would deal five players to Chicago the following season to land veteran Max Bentley.)

Barilko

Smythe was confident entering the 1946-47 season that he’d put together a team he might win with a year or two down the road. Having Syl Apps and Turk Broda back in pre-War form, and with twenty-one year old Teeder Kennedy already entering his fourth season, certainly helped, but with six rookies among 12 new faces on the 18-man roster, Smythe down-played his expectations. “The Maple Leafs will suffer plenty of defeats this season,” he admitted. But he couldn’t completely hide his optimism: “We’ll win plenty, too!”

Broda

With a team that refused to back down from anyone, the Maple Leafs finished a surprising second behind the Canadiens in the regular-season standings. Frank Selke was critical of Toronto’s style all season, and early in the year he accused Maple Leafs defensemen of using “wrestling tactics.” There was plenty of rough stuff when the two teams met in the Stanley Cup Finals … which Toronto won to launch the club’s first dynasty.

It’s unlikely the rebuild will go quite as quickly this time!

Hockey Nerd – Part II: Radio Active

Back in December, I titled a story Hockey Nerd in Canada – Part I. One of my nerdiest hockey nerd interests is the early history of hockey broadcasts on the radio – which I pursue as if someone’s going to give me a prize if I finally push it right back to the beginning!

For me, this pursuit began several years ago with confusion over the date of Foster Hewitt’s first game. Hewitt himself had long claimed that his first broadcast was a senior OHA semifinal playoff at Toronto’s Mutual Street Arena. He said the game was between Kitchener and the Parkdale Canoe Club to determine who would face the Toronto Granites for the Eastern championship. He said the date was March 22, 1923 … but on March 22, 1923, the Toronto Granites defeated the University of Saskatchewan in Winnipeg to claim the Allan Cup as the senior amateur champions of all of Canada. So, how could Hewitt have called the game he said he did on that day?

Obviously, Hewitt was wrong. Turns out, his first broadcast was actually made on February 16, 1923, on Toronto radio station CFCA (which was owned by the Toronto Star, where Hewitt was employed). It was a game between the Kitchener Greenshirts and the Toronto Argonauts. Hewitt never flat out claimed (at least I don’t think he did) that his broadcast had been the very first, but he certainly didn’t discourage people from thinking that either! In truth, CFCA had actually been on the air eight nights earlier, on February 8, 1923, with Norman Albert of the Toronto Star handling the play-by-play. (For more on all this, see the story I did for the Star on the 90th anniversary of that game.)

Star Broadcast

Given that several other radio stations in several different Canadian cities (Winnipeg, Regina, and Edmonton for certain) were on the air with their own broadcasts within a very short time of the ones in Toronto, I’ve often wondered if anyone, anywhere else, had actually broadcast a game before Norman Albert. The earliest stories I’ve found saying anything about hockey on the radio are from December of 1921 and January of 1922, but they only claim that Westinghouse radio stations (KDKA in Pittsburgh, WJZ in Newark, WBZ in Springfield, Mass. and KYW in Chicago) would transmit the scores of games played in those cities.

I’ve yet to find any earlier live hockey broadcasts then the ones in Toronto, but in March of 1922, the radio station owned by the Vancouver Sun was reading on the air the telegraphed reports they were receiving of the Stanley Cup games in progress between the NHL’s Toronto St. Patricks and the Vancouver Millionaires of the Pacific Coast Hockey Association at the Mutual Street Arena. The station operated by the Vancouver World was broadcasting score updates as they were received. Neither was actually providing live play-by-play, but people certainly seemed pleased … particularly with the Sun‘s coverage.

Van Sun 1922

Eight months later, on November 28, 1922, the Stanley Cup champion St. Pats were in Winnipeg to kick off a preseason western exhibition trip with a game against the Edmonton Eskimos of the Western Canada Hockey League. As had been done in Vancouver, the Winnipeg Tribune promised that its station, CJNC, would broadcast the results from the game “as fast as reports are received.” Again, not live play-by-play, but certainly comprehensive hockey coverage for the time.

Just recently, I came across another interesting hockey broadcasting story from Winnipeg two months prior to this game, from September 23, 1922, about Lester Patrick appearing on CJNC the day before.

LP 1922

The story states:

A pleasing surprise was given to hockey enthusiasts by the appearance before The Tribune’s radiophone of Lester Patrick, manager of the Victoria Pacific Coast hockey team, and part owner of the Pacific Coast hockey league, who was passing through the city on his way west, and who delivered a short address on hockey prospects for the coming season. Sporting fans expressed their appreciation of this addition to the program.

Though I’ve yet to check every other city with radio stations at this time, Patrick’s broadcast in Winnipeg may just be the first example of sports talk radio in Canada!

Connecting all this directly to modern times … In March of 1923 the radio stations owned by the Winnipeg Tribune and the Winnipeg Free Press both agreed to go out of business (they were likely losing money!) to clear the way for a new station in Winnipeg operated by the Manitoba Telephone System, which would later become Manitoba Telecom Services. Known both then and now as MTS, this is the same company that currently holds the naming rights on the MTS Centre in Winnipeg where the Jets play.

Upon Further Review…

Last week, on the night before it opened in Toronto, I attended a screening of Red Army – a documentary about the Soviet national hockey team. It was followed by a question-and-answer session with the director, Gabe Polsky, and Roy MacGregor of the Globe and Mail. I’m not sure how widely available this film is yet, but I known that it’s already playing in New York and Los Angeles and now Vancouver too. If it’s playing anywhere near you, go and see it!

Red Army

I won’t be the first one to say it’s not really a film about hockey. The director (who is an American) willingly admits it’s a movie that was made to show Americans about life in the Soviet Union by using hockey – and the story of Viacheslav Fetisov’s desire to escape the oppressive regime of coach Viktor Tikhonov.

I think most Canadian hockey fans of a certain age always knew that the Soviets trained 10 or 11 months of the year, and believed that they could be sent to Siberia if they failed – which seems to be true! – but I don’t think very many of us ever thought about how tough that actually was on the players and their families. Fetisov clearly loved his country, and loved being part of a spectacular hockey dynasty, but the story of how he eventually came to fight the Soviet system is fascinating … as is all of the vintage footage of life and hockey in Russia from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.

As a Canadian, my biggest complaint would be that if you watch this movie, you’d never know that we ever beat them! But that’s not really the point. As a writer, I hate when critics complain about what’s NOT in a book, so I hate to do the same about a film. Still, it could have included something about the 1987 Canada Cup – not because we beat the Soviets in probably the greatest set of hockey games ever played, but because that tournament is said to have been a real eye-opening experience for some of the key Soviet players who wanted the chance to leave their homeland to play in the NHL – which is what a great deal of Fetisov’s story is about. Perhaps this is something that could have been addressed by Igor Larionov, but Polsky told the audience in our Q&A that Larionov (and Sergei Makarov) would not speak with him.

Falcons 2

Also last week, I saw on TV the new Canadian heritage minute featuring the Winnipeg Falcons. Apparently, it’s been out since Remembrance Day (which makes sense!) but this was the first I knew about it. I’m a big fan of the Falcons’ story … which is, in a nutshell, about how the players overcame the prejudice against them in Winnipeg as immigrants from Icelandic families to become Canada’s first gold medalists in Olympic hockey. (My book Long Shot tells their story for young readers.) The heritage minute tells the story in 60 seconds. It plays with some facts and compresses others, but it does a great job of covering a lot of information so quickly. My one beef with it is pretty nerdy, but what can you do?

The Falcons are depicted in their dressing room prior to a game at the Olympics and are shown wearing pretty good replicas of the mustard yellow jerseys they wore for the tournament in Antwerp, Belgium. (These were not the team’s regular uniforms, but were specially designed for whichever team represented Canada at the Olympics.) Two other green-and-blue Falcons sweaters are shown on the wall in the dressing room, representing a couple of former players who died while serving their country in World War I. (All of the Falcons who were of age signed up.) The sweaters are a nice, artistic touch, and my complaint is not that these dead players probably never wore them (as I believe they were new for the 1919-20 season), but that it’s highly unlikely they were green and blue!

Falcons 1

The fault (though that’s probably too strong a word) most certainly lies with the display honoring the Falcons that’s been at the MTS Center (and is shown above) in Winnipeg for several years. I’m not sure how they came up with those green and blue colors. All my research indicates that the Falcons pre-Olympic sweaters were actually orange with black stripes and collars … which I also happen to think is a much better match if you try to imagine the colors from the black-and-white team photograph.

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Like I said, a pretty nerdy complaint – but given all the research I’ve done on this team over the years, it would be nice if my reputation ever got to the point where more people think to call on me for things like this…

Hockey Stars Join Baseball’s Maple Leafs

Well, the big blizzard sort of skipped New York, though it hit pretty hard elsewhere. And it’s supposed to warm up – albeit briefly! – around here today. It is only the 28th of January, but pitchers and catchers begin to report for spring training in three weeks, so summer can’t be too far away! Hockey may be where my head is much of the year, but baseball is where my heart is … and, sometimes, you get to tell one story that combines both sports!

In late January of 1926, the Toronto Maple Leafs baseball club was already hard at work preparing for the International League season. This would be a big year for Toronto baseball. The team was leaving its old park on Hanlan’s Point and moving into the brand new Maple Leaf Stadium at the foot of Bathurst, near Fleet Street. (Behind what is now the Tip Top Tailor lofts near the Canadian National Exhibition grounds.) With a seating capacity of 20,000 the new stadium was considered the most modern facility in the minor leagues. Baltimore had won the International League pennant every year from 1919 to 1925, but in 1926, Toronto had a record of 109-57 to take the league title. They then swept five straight games from Louisville of the American Association to win the best-of-nine Junior World Series.

But all of this was still nine months into the future on January 29, 1926, when Maple Leafs manager Dan Howley signed a couple of locals boys for his team. Both also happened to be NHL stars: Cecil “Babe” Dye and Lionel Conacher.

Conny Dye

Babe Dye was one of the top scorers in the NHL during the 1920s and a future Hall of Famer, but he was also a minor league baseball star with a couple of offers from Major League teams over the years. He had his best baseball seasons with the Buffalo Bisons from 1922 to 1925, but injuries suffered in the NHL seemed to take their toll and he had a poor season with the baseball Maple Leafs in 1926. Released halfway through the schedule, he finished the year with Baltimore and never played baseball again.

Lionel Conacher was a great all-around athlete who was best known as a lacrosse and football player when he was younger, but willed himself to become a Hall of Fame hockey player because that’s where the money was in Canadian sports. Conacher also boxed and wrestled, but baseball was only a sport he’d dabbled in around the Toronto sandlots.

Still, according to the Toronto Star, Conacher’s contract with the Maple Leafs stipulated that he had to be carried for the entire season and could not be traded or sold. Having him on the roster meant added publicity, but Manager Howley was said to be sure that Conacher would make good. Given that Toronto had a working relationship with the Detroit Tigers and shared a spring training facility with them in Augusta, Georgia, it was hoped that Ty Cobb would help to make a star ballplayer out of Canada’s future Athlete of the Half-Century. Conacher saw action in the Maple Leafs outfield with Dye during spring training, but was pretty much glued to the bench once the season got under way. What statistics there are show him batting only three times all year. (In a quick search, I could only find him batting once, grounding out as a pinch hitter for future Hall of Fame pitcher Carl Hubbell in the eighth inning of a game on June 27.)

Conny

It seems unlikely that Conacher actually spent the entire season with the Maple Leafs, as a Toronto Star story on August 14 discusses him being on a trip to Sudbury with his wife and a brother and fishing with future Hockey Hall of Famer Shorty Green. Later, Conacher was playing lacrosse in St. Catharines on September 19 during the final weekend of the International League season.

Both Conacher and Dye made their biggest splash of the baseball season on June 19, 1926, when the Maple Leafs were on the road but they were allowed to return to Toronto for an exhibition game at Maple Leaf Stadium between the Toronto Semi Pros and Buffalo’s Pullman Colored Giants. The Semi Pros featured a third future Hockey Hall of Famer in Conacher’s buddy and longtime teammate Roy Worters. The baseball team also had two other Conacher-Worters hockey teammates in Duke McCurry and Jess Spring and another hockey player in Chris Speyer. Conacher had a single and a triple in this game, and made two sensational catches in the outfield, but the Colored Giants rallied for an 11-10 victory.

Toronto’s First Stanley Cup Challenge

I hadn’t planned to write on this subject, but last week I came across the two old photographs shown below. (I already had the cartoons from years ago.) I found the pictures online in the March 1902 edition of The Canadian Magazine. I LOVE pictures like these, and the timing was perfect, so here we go…

On this very day, way back in 1902, the first team from Toronto to play for the Stanley Cup opened a best-of-three series in Winnipeg. The Wellington Hockey Club of Toronto (known as the Wellingtons, and often called the Iron Dukes after the first Duke of Wellington for whom they were named) had been formed around 1895 as a juvenile team for youngsters in the Jarvis Street area of downtown Toronto. Soon, they entered the Junior division Ontario Hockey Association and in 1896-97 the Wellingtons won the provincial championship. Moving up to Intermediate, and then to Senior, the Wellingtons won the OHA Senior title in 1900 and 1901. (They would also win it in 1902 and 1903 before withdrawing from hockey suddenly and surprisingly just prior to the 1903-04 season.) As champions of 1900-01, they sent word to the Stanley Cup trustees in Ottawa saying they wished to challenge the Winnipeg Victorias for the prized trophy at the start of the 1901-02 season.

Welly 1

In this era, the Stanley Cup was a challenge trophy. Because of the need for natural ice, the hockey season only stretched from late December to mid March. Train travel meant leagues had to be fairly local, so in order to make the Stanley Cup available to teams all across Canada, the senior champions of any recognized provincial association were able to challenge the current Cup champion. Games could take place before the season, after the season, and even right in the middle of a season.

Welly 3b

Hockey in Canada was considered strictly amateur at this time. The Ontario Hockey Association was the largest hockey league in the country and rigidly enforced the amateur code. The Wellingtons were fairly typical of Ontario hockey teams in that their players generally came from well-off families. Most of them worked in banks or for insurance companies. In fact, when the Winnipeg Victorias requested that the Stanley Cup series be played later in January, the Wellingtons objected because most of their players had to get back to Toronto in time to balance their books for the first of February!

The Wellingtons were considered huge underdogs in their series with the Victorias. Outside of Ottawa (whose top team played in the Canadian Amateur Hockey League, which was considered a Quebec circuit), hockey in Ontario was not believed to be on a par with the game as it was played in Quebec and Manitoba. Many senior hockey players across the country were from the same types of background as the Wellingtons, but the OHA seemed much more determined than other leagues to maintain a gentlemanly style of play, which, sadly, didn’t help from a competitive standpoint. Compounding the problem in Toronto, the city had no first-class arena, with even the main rink on Mutual Street having an undersized ice surface and small seating capacity. Nor did Toronto have the same cold weather as Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City or Winnipeg. In fact, during January of 1902, the weather in Toronto was unusually warm which hurt the Wellingtons’ ability to practice and hampered the quality of the few games they got in before leaving for Winnipeg on January 18.

Welly 2

Even so, the Wellingtons surprised most critics by keeping the games close and playing pretty good hockey against the Victorias. Still, they lost the January 21 game 5-3 and dropped the second game by the same score two nights later, giving the Winnipeg team a sweep of the series. “We played as hard as we ever played in our lives,” said Wellingtons captain George McKay, “but the checking … was much harder than we were accustomed to. It was fierce.” The Victorias were also said to be faster skaters.

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Despite the loss, Toronto hockey fans were proud of the team’s showing in Winnipeg. The Wellingtons arrived back in the city at 9 pm on January 28. Even though their train was seven hours behind schedule, there was still a big crowd to greet them at Union Station. “Captain McKay has his left arm in a sling,” according to the Toronto Star report. “Chummy Hill’s bad eye is cut again, Frank McLaren walks with difficulty, and George Chadwick is completely done up. Irvine Ardagh, Dutchy Morrison, Worts Smart and Jimmy Worts, are all in good shape.” The Wellingtons were taken from the train station to Shea’s Theater and were given a great reception.

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