Category Archives: Sports History

Olympic Thoughts on Jews in Sports

Sports History

I’ve never really been one of those Jewish sports fans who cares a whole lot if a player is Jewish. But I do love trying hunt down the facts. So, when my brother texted “Way to go Jewish (I suppose) hammer thrower!” and I texted back, “Hadn’t thought of that” I quickly got on the case.

Ethan Katzberg certainly sounds like a Jewish name – and Katzberg himself looks like he could be Jewish – but it was hard to find anything to prove if he was. His father, who had first taught Ethan’s sister, and then Ethan, to throw the hammer at the Nanaimo Track and Field Club, is named Bernie. That sounds pretty Jewish too! His mother – Coralee – not so much.

Evan Katzberg and Summer McIntosh were
Canada’s flag bearers at the Closing Ceremonies.

I soon came across a Nanaimo News Bulletin story from 2013 about Mike Gogo’s Christmas Tree farm, which had been in his family for 84 years. Included is a picture of the Katzberg family, who had just picked out their tree! It was, apparently, their first time tree hunting … in Nanaimo, at least.

“A light came down from the sky and illuminated it from above,” joked Bernie. “And the kids helped pick it out too,” Coralee added, also stating that the family loves authentic trees. “The real ones are better,” Coralee said. “They smell good.”

Plenty of mixed marriage Jewish families out there who celebrate Christmas and Hanukkah. Was this a case of that? “My guess,” I texted my brothers and nephew “is his Dad is Jewish and his Mom is not.”

The Katzberg family picks out their Christmas tree in 2013. (Nanaimo News Bulletin.)

Clearly, we weren’t the only people wondering, as other queries started showing up online. There was a particularly long thread on Reddit … which would seem to show that Katzberg is NOT Jewish. As one comment noted:

Ethan and I went to the same high school (years apart). I was so proud of him today! The Jewish community is pretty small in Nanaimo and I haven’t seen his name mentioned anywhere, so I don’t think he’s Jewish.

Still, maybe a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother? Plenty of other commenters thought that was possibile … but it doesn’t appear so according to these two comments from somebody else:

No he is not Jewish. I went to school with his father at a German Baptist college in Alberta.

Bernie’s family (of origin) attended Baptist church, so not Jewish. His ethnicity is German and he speaks (some) German. I went to school with him during our late teens.

But fear not, Jewish sports fans, there’s plenty more Jewish sports content in the rest of what I’m going to write. Admittedly (though I’m not much of a basketball fan) I was intending to write this in celebration of Canada’s first basketball medal since 1936. That drought continues, but still…

From the pages of The Jewish Standard in 1931. (Courtesy Michael Hayman.)

The common Jewish stereotype is that Jews are sports fans, but more likely to be team owners than athletes. But back in a time when Jews mostly lived in the inner city, sports were seen as a way to assimilate. Even a way to a better life. Back in the day, there were Jewish track stars, Jewish boxers, and Jewish basketball players too.

The 1936 Olympics had been awarded to Berlin in 1931, a few years before Adolph Hitler came to power. As the time drew closer, there were those who were pushing for the International Olympic Committee to move the Games somewhere else. Apparently, the most the IOC was willing to do was to push the Germans to include one token Jewish athlete on their Olympic team. Many Jewish athletes from around the world refused to go to Berlin and planned to attend The People’s Olympiad in Barcelona instead, but this leftist-inspired competition was called off shortly before it was to start due to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

Note the thoughts on Jews and basketball! From the pages of
The Jewish Standard in 1931. (Courtesy Michael Hayman.)

Still, a handful of Jewish athletes did attend the Berlin Olympics … including two members of Canada’s basketball team which won a silver medal at the first Games where basketball was a full medal sport.

It’s often said that Canada was represented in basketball at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by the Windsor Ford V8 team. That’s only mostly true. The Ford V8s were the 1935-36 Canadian Senior Basketball Champions, but for the Olympics they picked up four members of the runner-up Victoria Blue Ribbons. (Windsor, Ontario – said to be because of its proximity to the United States – and Victoria, British Columbia, were the hotbeds of Canadian basketball at this time.) The Windsor team included two Jewish players: Irving “Toots” Meretsky and Julius “Goldie” Goldman.

The 1936 Canadian Olympic basketball team.

Though he had moved to Canada when he was two years old, Goldman had been born in Mayesville, South Carolina, to Lithuanian immigrant parents. Being American-born, he wasn’t allowed to play for Canada, so instead served as an assistant coach and the team’s representative on the 1936 Olympic Basketball Rules Committee. It was in that capacity that Goldman would modernize the game by suggesting the jump ball to restart play after every basket be eliminated … although this rule change would not be implemented until after the Berlin Olympics.

Irving Meretsky was born in Windsor in 1912 and lived his whole life there. When he died in 2006 at the age of 94, he was the last surviving member of the 1936 Olympic basketball team. A 2015 story by Tony Atherton of Postmedia News on the web site of Canada Basketball tells an anecdote Meretsky must have told many times in his life about seeing Adolph Hitler at the Opening Ceremonies:

Close up on Irving “Toots” Meretsky.

Down on the field, among the ranks of athletes from 52 nations, a skinny 24-year-old in a red blazer and white ducks, a Maple Leaf upon his breast, couldn’t keep an impish smile from spreading across his face. “He looks like Charlie Chaplin!” Toots Meretsky told himself. And no doubt felt better for it.

Toots was a Jewish kid from Windsor, Ont., standing in the heart of Nazi Germany, staring up at Hitler – on Shabbat, no less. He had passed ranks of crimson, swastika-emblazoned banners on his way into the arena. Now, he was hemmed in by an honour battalion of the German army. Everywhere he looked there were brownshirts, blackshirts, and blond, ecstatic Hitler Youth. He knew of the systematic oppression of German Jews since the Nazis had come to power three years before. He knew about the boycotting of Jewish businesses, the revocation of citizenship, the edicts against intermarriage, not to mention the random vandalism, beatings, and intimidation.

But Adolf Hitler looked like Charlie Chaplin. So Toots had to smile.

Hitler and Charlie Chaplin. (Courtesy of Michael Hayman.)

Basketball was almost an afterthought at the Berlin Olympics. The Germans didn’t think fans would care to watch, so the games were played on a modified outdoor clay tennis court. Mainly because of the jump ball rule, the lack of a 24-second clock (which wouldn’t come to be until the 1950s) and the fact that goaltending wasn’t against the rules, basketball was much more lowing scoring in this era. En route to the gold medal game against the United States, Canada posted the following victories:

24–17 over Brazil

34–23 over Latvia

27–9 over Switzerland

41–21 over Uruguay

42–15 over Poland

James Naismith, the inventor of basketball, was a guest of the Americans in Berlin
in 1936, but was happy to pose with the team from his home and native land.

The U.S. got a bye in the first round when Spain withdrew, and then won:

52–28 over Estonia

(Bye through the third round)

56–23 over Philippines

25–10 over Mexico



Rain would mar the championship game on August 14, 1936.

Years later, [Canadian] team member Gord Aitchison would describe the scene to the Windsor Star. “On the opening play, an American player raced down the court, caught a pass as his feet went from under him and completed the last 15 or 20 feet to the basket sliding on the seat of his shorts, water spraying out from both sides.” The rest of the game followed suit.

Sam Balter, a U.S. point guard (and the only Jewish-American medal winner in 1936) regretted the circumstances of that game for the rest of his life, he told Sports Illustrated. “A comedy of errors and unfortunate circumstances had combined to make a sandlot affair of what should have been the greatest basketball tournament ever,” he said.

Game action from the 1936 Final.

The jump ball rule meant the height advantage of the American team would have been big at any rate, but on a soggy court where dribbling was impossible and even passing the ball was difficult, it proved a huge advantage. The U.S. led 15–4 at halftime, and while the Canadians played them even in the second half the final score was 19–8.


Unfortunately, the Olympic Committee had only minted seven medals of each color for the basketball competition. The Canadians drew lots to determine which of their players would receive a silver medal. Toots Meretsky didn’t win … however, after a media stir about the oversight, the IOC minted a new silver medal for Toots in 1999 from the original mold.

“Our group of guys were the greatest in the world,” Toots told a sports website sometime before his death in 2006 broke the last direct link with Canada’s only Olympic medal winning basketball team. “We all helped one another, we worked together, we played together.”

An Olympic Century

Sports History

I’m sure it won’t surprise anyone to learn I’m watching plenty of Olympics. Not a ton, but still plenty. Watching sports I don’t usually watch, like fencing, where Eleanor Harvey won a bronze medal for Canada in Women’s Individual Foil…

And Women’s Rugby Sevens, where Canadian women earned a silver. Canada had a chance, but I think the better team – New Zealand – won. The game was exciting, but it’s always a bit strange to “lose” the silver medal…

Part of the enjoyment of these Olympics for me is that Lynn and I were in Paris in May (my first time), and it’s been fun to see some of the sites we just recently saw.

But, so far, Olympic-wise, I think I’ve had even more fun watching the film of the 1924 Paris Summer Games, which was reconstructed from French and British archives. (It was one of several official Olympic films that aired on Turner Classic Movies the night the 2024 Paris Olympics opened.) The film is, of course, black and white. It’s silent too, with title cards. Running time is nearly 3 hours, and while I admit I watched plenty of it on fast-forward, it’s pretty fascinating stuff! So, I hope you’ll enjoy the little still-image synposis that follows.

The opening shots set the scene with footage from the Opening Ceremony on July 5, 1924:

We then move inside for the parade of athletes. The first title card you’ll see mentions 45 nations, though most web sites seem to say there were only 44. Wikipedia lists 3,089 athletes, of which 2,954 were men and 135 were women. Female athletes competed only in swimming, diving, fencing, and tennis. They were not permitted to compete in track and field events until the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam.

France, as the host nation, had the biggest team in 1924 with 401 athletes. The Americans were next with 299.

I combined two images into one here to give a sort of panoramic look at the Olympic Stadium, which, by the way, is still in use in Paris and will host the field hockey tournament this year.

The tradition of the Olympic oath began at the Antwerp Games in 1920 and continued in Paris in 1924. The text, originally written by Pierre de Coubertin, has evolved. Since the 2000 Games in Sydney, it has included a sentence committing to sport without doping. These days, as well as on behalf of the athletes, the Olympic oath is taken on behalf of the officials and coaches. (Way to go, Canadian soccer officials!)

There were 126 events in 23 disciplines, comprising 17 sports, on the Olympic program in 1924. The full film shows most (but not all) of them. This little “slide” display will concentrate mostly on the famous athletes who took part, and mostly just in track and field, AKA Athletics:

Paavo Nurmi of Finland was the biggest star of 1924 Games. I probably first heard of him in the lead up to the Montreal Olympics in 1976, as I know our family bought a couple of books about those Games and the history of the Olympics that year. “The Flying Finn,” as he was known, ran with a stopwatch to help him control his pace. (You can see him checking his stopwatch in the third image.) A middle and long distance runner, Nurmi had already won three golds and a silver medal at the 1920 Olymics, and would add another gold and three more silvers in 1928. In Paris in 1924, he won gold in five different events: the 1,500 meters; 5,000 meters; Individual Cross Country, Team Cross Country, and Team 3,000 meters. That’s Nurmi approaching the finish line in the last image.

Track and field at the 1924 Olympics featured two British runners made famous (again) in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire. One of them was Harold Abrahams, who won the 100 meters in an upset of 1920 Olympic champion Charley Paddock of the United States. Abrahams was an amateur athlete who controversially employed a professional coach. His father was a Jewish immigrant to England from Polish Lithuania, which was then part of the Russian Empire. Abrahams also won a silver medal in the 4 x 100 relay in 1924.

Eric Lidell was a devout Christian, born in China to Scottish missionary parents. He refused to compete in the 100 meters at the 1924 Olympics because the preliminary heats were held on a Sunday, and he did not run on the Sabbath. Lidell later won the 400 meters and earned a silver medal in the 200 (in which Abrahams finished sixth).

Perhaps the most famous athlete to compete at the 1924 Paris Olympics was American swimmer Johnny Weissmuller. Weissmuller won gold in the 100, 200 and 4×200 meter freestyle events, and earned a bronze medal with the U.S. water polo team. He’d win gold in the 100 meters and the 4 x 200 in Amsterdam in 1928, but is probably best known for playing Tarzan in 12 movies between 1932 and 1948 after his retirement from competitive swimming. There are no individual shots of Weissmuller in the 1924 Olympic film, but that’s him out in front in lane four in the third picture, and you can see his “wake” at the finish well in front of the swimmers in lanes one, two, and three in the fourth shot.

There’s tons more great footage in the film from most of the other sports. Notably for me was the high jump and pole vaulting, whose competitors look even more ancient in comparison to today’s athletes that do the sprinters. Diving too. Barely a twist or a tumble. It looks like a well-executed cannonball from the high tower could have won! There’s also soccer, rugby, fencing, yachting, rowing, canoeing and tennis. Perhaps I’ll add some of that later during the Olympics, but perhaps not. (Putting this together was way more labour-intensive than I’d imagined!) But, I’ll conclude today with this:

There were hardly any Black athletes to be seen in the 1924 Olympic footage. Hardly any athletes of any colour but white. William DeBart Hubbard is not someone I’d heard of previoulsy, but he became the first African-American to win a gold medal with his victory in the long jump in 1924.

Wikipedia reports that DeBart Hubbard qualified for the Olympics in the broad jump and the triple jump. It also references an NBC News story from earlier this month in which Hubbard’s nephew says he qualified for the 100 metres and the high hurdles too, but was not allowed to compete in those events because they were for whites only. Camille Paddeu, a curator at the Musee municipal d’Art et d’Histoire in Colombes, the Paris suburb where the main stadium was located, confirmed Hubbard was not permitted to compete in some events. You can read more about that here if you’d like.

Childhood Sports Heroes…

Hockey History, Personal, Sports History

Joe Theismann hobbled towards me on crutches, his right ankle encased in a cast to protect a broken bone. I, too, was in a cast. Mine went from the tips of the fingers on my right hand all the way up to my shoulder. I’d broken both bones in my wrist around the same time Theismann had broken his ankle. My dad and I had made our way down to the sidelines as the players came onto the field. I was too shy, but my dad called out, “Joe, would you sign my son’s cast?”

As he made his way over to me, Theismann said, “Signing casts isn’t exactly my bag.” But he was smiling when he said it. And he signed it for me. He didn’t ask me to sign his.

I know what some of you are thinking. Who in their right mind would ask Joe Theismann to sign his cast so soon after that injury?

But this wasn’t the gruesome, career-ending broken ankle of Monday Night Football fame from November 18, 1985. What Theismann said to me is a pretty good clue that we were in an earlier era. This all happened shortly after Joe’s Toronto Argonauts season-altering broken ankle of August 3, 1972.

He signed my cast before the next Argos home game on August 16 — 50 years ago tonight.

Before the Blue Jays, the Zweigs were a football family. David and I were really into it. Jonathan, not so much. (He was the all-time hupper!) The picture on the right is the three of us at Centennial Park in Barrie. Later that night, I fell out of the top bunk in our bedroom at the cottage and broke my wrist. Not sure of the exact date.

I kept that cast for the better part of 20 years, until it all but crumbled to dust.

I always say baseball is my favourite sport. And hockey is the sport that has been the main part of my professional life for almost 30 years. But football was my first sports love, and Joe Theismann was my first sports hero. He led Toronto to a 10-4 record and the East Division championship as a rookie in 1971 — before a crushing defeat by the Calgary Stampeders in the Grey Cup. I’d seen my first Argos game in person earlier that season, and was hooked on football!

Not the best picture of me, but there I am wearing my Joe Theismann Argos jersey with David and Jonathan and our cousin Bob (Bobby back then).

It’s just a coincidence about the 50 years, but I’ve been thinking about that night a lot lately. Last month, on the same night we had the local launch party for my new hockey book, Engraved in History: The Story of the Stanley Cup Champion Kenora Thistles, I spent almost the entire day prior to that (7:35 am to 4:55 pm) doing 17 different phone and zoom interviews for my other current book, It’s a Numbers Game! Football, published by National Geographic Kids. (I did an 18th interview the following week.)

There are some football books in my “canon.”

I’ve never done that much promotion for anything before. It was fun … but it was exhausting. I’d written about me and Joe Theismann in a brief biography the NGK publicity people put together for the day … and practically everyone I spoke to asked me about it! If you care to watch, you can see me telling the story in the first few minutes of my interview on The Douglas Coleman Show, a syndicated talk and music show/podcast.

These two books, by my first sports heroes, were like my bible!

Theismann spent just three years in Toronto through 1973 before signing with Washington and jumping to the NFL. Interestingly, 1973 was the same year that Borje Salming signed with the Maple Leafs and entered the NHL from Sweden. I suppose it’s because Theismann spent only those three seasons with the Argos (when I was seven-to-10-years-old) that I associate his time in Toronto with my childhood. Salming was with the Leafs for 16 seasons until 1989 (when I was 25) and has, really, been associated with the city ever since.

You may have heard the announcement last week that Salming has been diagnosed with ALS — Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Though there are better treatments now, there is still no cure for ALS. It’s a horrible disease … and it’s horrible news.

Sports cards from the early 1970s.

I have no personal connection to Salming, other than having watched and admired him for years. Before he came to Toronto, goalie Jacques Plante was my first favourite Leaf. (He was with the team from 1970 to 1973.) After that, I could never settle on just one. I was a big fan of Darryl Sittler, Mike Palmateer, and many of those mid-to-late ’70s Leafs. Still, Salming — with his unique brand of toughness in an era of goons — was always something special.

I recently asked my brother David what his first memory of Salming was.

It was exactly the same as mine.

My brother David, and his friend Melina, with Borje Salming back in 2016.

We were at our family cottage late in the summer of 1973. (It was just a year after my broken arm. We were seven and nine years old.) David was looking at a newspaper story with the Maple Leafs roster, probably for training camp. There were names he recognized from the past season, and new players he hadn’t heard of yet. Two of the new names were strange, and he read them out loud to me: Borje Salming and Inge Hammarstrom.

Our family was a Toronto Star family, and I figured it would be easy to track down the article in an online search. It must have been August, or the Labour Day weekend at the very latest.

But I couldn’t find it.

Strange.

Good luck to Borje and his family. It’ll be a tough battle. But few people are tougher than he is.

Hockey and Olympic History

Hockey History, Sports History

Last week, the NHL and the NHL Players’ Association announced that they had reached an agreement with the International Olympic Committee to confirm the participation of NHL players at the Beijing Winter Olympics this coming February. COVID may have the final word on that, and you can certainly argue whether or not Canadians — or anyone — should be participating at all, given the continued incarceration of the two Michaels. (But is it right to use athletes for diplomatic purposes? Would China even listen?)

Hockey, as you may know, has been a part of the Olympics since before there were the Winter Games. The Winter Olympics began in Chamonix, France, in 1924, but hockey (and figure skating) had been part of the competition four years earlier when a spring sports festival was held in April of 1920 as part of the Olympic Games held later that summer in Antwerp, Belgium.

I’ve written about the 1920 Olympics, and Canada’s first Olympic hockey team — the Winnipeg Falcons — on my web site before (on February 21, 2018 and on February 3, 2015). Still, I thought I’d use the NHL’s announcement as a chance to determine exactly when the decision was made to include hockey at Antwerp in 1920.

Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics logo and a 1924 Winter Olympics poster.

As I discovered in 2018, Antwerp had bid to host the 1920 Olympics back in 1912, but no decision was reached before the outbreak of World War I. Shortly after the Armistice on November 11, 1918, the IOC offered Antwerp the first choice to hold the Games in 1920 if the Belgians still wanted to do so. The move was seen as a way to honour the suffering of the Belgian people during the War.

Apparently, the Belgian Athletic Federation met on March 15, 1919, to discuss hosting the Olympics. It was decided to go ahead … provided the Games could be postponed until 1921. Stockholm (which had hosted in 1912) and Havana were said to be interested in hosting in 1920, and a few days later, reports would indicate that Rome, and perhaps Geneva, were also in contention. (Online sources say Amsterdam, Lyon, Atlanta, Budapest, Cleveland, and Philadelphia were in the running too.) But by April 3, 1919, it appears that Antwerp was good to go for 1920 and the city was confirmed as the Olympic host (as reported in newspapers the following day).

I also knew from previous research that the official program and schedule for the Antwerp Olympics was announced on December 16, 1919. Hockey was included for April, 1920. (Figure skating would be added later.) Still, I reasoned that couldn’t actually be the first time that anyone knew there was going to be a hockey tournament at the Olympics. But I never found an earlier date because … well … I got distracted!

I got distracted because I discovered that on Friday, December 26, 1919, the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, entered a bid to host the 1924 Summer Olympics. This would appear to make Halifax the first Canadian city to go after the Olympics, well before Montreal landed the Summer Games of 1976 and even before that city had bid back in 1929 to host the Winter Games of 1932.

New York Tribune, December 28, 1919, and the Calgary Herald, January 15, 1920.

Unfortunately, I don’t know of any Halifax newspapers with archives that are searchable online, but various other newspapers across Canada and the United States confirm the “Blue Nose” bid in the following days. The New York Tribune on Sunday, December 28, 1919, and The Globe in Toronto on December 29 note that the Halifax Olympic bid “follows the decision reached at a provincial convention in this city early in the month.” And, apparently, Halifax also wanted to host an International Exposition (World’s Fair) in 1924 — long before Montreal hosted Expo in 1967.

Both the Olympic and World’s Fair bids would be confirmed on January 14, 1920. “That all facilities required for the Olympic games, to be held at Halifax in 1924, will be provided, is the guarantee which the executive board of the International Exposition for Nova Scotia has cabled to the authorities in Europe…” reported the Calgary Herald the next day.

Yet by March of 1920, it was apparent that not all was well:

Halifax, Nova Scotia, March 11. – Halifax business men who are interested in the proposal to try to obtain the 1924 Olympic games for this city, are conducting a preliminary canvass to determine the best means of meeting the housing problem. Unless conditions are greatly improved, it is hardly possible that Halifax will be selected, newspapers have pointed out. It is claimed that the present facilities would hardly provide quarters for 8,000 visitors, whereas it is estimated that 100,000 would have to be accommodated if the Olympiad were awarded to the Maritime city. One plan under discussion is to provide great temporary dormitories around the city to supplement the buildings and hotels which are being planned for construction before 1924.

That story appeared in The Bismarck Tribune (Bismarck, North Dakota) on March 11, 1920.

It’s the last story I’ve found about Halifax and the 1924 Olympics.

Obviously, Halifax didn’t win the bid. In the end, the city wasn’t even in the running when Paris was chosen.

It was stated for a while that the host for the 1924 Summer Olympics would be selected at the 1920 Antwerp Games. Instead, the decision was put off until a meeting of the IOC in Lausanne, Switzerland, on June 3, 1921. By then, Paris had emerged as the favourite in a competition that also included Amsterdam (who would instead be awarded the 1928 Games), Barcelona, Los Angeles (1932), Prague, and Rome.

Paris, which had first hosted the Olympics in 1904, will host for the third time in 2024, with Los Angeles getting its third in 2028 (L.A. also hosted in 1984) followed by Brisbane, Australia, in 2032. After the Winter Games in Beijing in 2022, next up will be the Italian cities of Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo in 2026. The host city for the 2030 Winter Olympics is expected to be announced in 2023. Vancouver and Quebec City are said to be among the cities considering bids.

Mercurys Rising…

Hockey History, Sports History

On February 24, 1952, the Edmonton Mercurys completed an undefeated run through the Winter Olympics in Oslo, Norway, to win the gold medal in hockey. Canada had previously won Olympic hockey gold in 1920, 1924, 1928, and 1932, and after settling for a surprising silver behind a Great Britain team loaded with Canadian-born players in 1936, won gold again in 1948 when the Olympics resumed after World War II. With the Soviet Union entering the Olympic scene in 1956, Canadian men wouldn’t win Olympic hockey gold again after 1952 for another 50 years until the star-studded NHL team at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

Though Canada no doubt deserved its gold medal in 1952, the win wasn’t without controversy. After scoring victories of 15-1 over Germany, 13-3 over Finland, 11-0 over Poland, 4-1 over Czechoslovakia, 11-2 over Switzerland, 3-2 over Sweden, and 11-2 over Norway in its first seven games, Canada managed only a 3-3 tie with the Americans in the finale for both clubs. Had Canada won the game, the United States would have finished fourth. With the tie, the U.S. claimed silver and a newspaper in Moscow accused the two North American countries of colluding to deny the Czechs (who would finish fourth) a medal.

Canadian fans, of course, have long accused Soviet and Russian teams, and European authorities, of similar shenanigans in international competition. But while there likely hadn’t been a fix in Oslo, European teams — as they often would — sharply criticized the Canadian and American hockey teams for their rough tactics. This would have a surprising result on Olympic and sports history.

At the Summer Games in London in 1948, Czechoslovakian long distance runner Emil Zatopek won a silver medal in the 5,000 meters and gold in the 10,000. He improved on that performance in Helsinki in 1952 and shortly after those Summer Olympics concluded, Zatopek claimed that the rough play in hockey (and perhaps the way his countrymen had been denied their medal) earlier that year was indirectly responsible for his record-breaking feats in Finland.

“It was the brutal and harsh play of the United States ice hockey team which drove me to my most recent performances,” said Zatopek in a story widely reported in North American newspapers on August 16, 1952. “I made a pledge to win at least two gold medals for my country.”

Not only did Zatopek win gold in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters in Helsinki, he made a last-minute decision to enter the marathon for the first time in his life … and won the gold medal in that race too! He is the only man ever to win all three races in the same Olympic Games.

Zatopek fell out of favour with the Communist party in Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring of 1968, but was finally “rehabilitated” in 1990. He died in Prague on November 22, 2000 at the age of 78 and became one of the first twelve athletes named to the IAAF Hall of Fame in 2012. Zatopek was selected as the Greatest Runner of All Time by Runners World Magazine in 2013.

But if it hadn’t been for some chippy hockey back in February of 1952, who knows what might have happened…

Working Hard or…

Personal, Sports History

My web site recently turned five years old. I posted my first story on October 10, 2014. Seems hard to believe. The intention at the time was to promote my writing and to try and drum up more appearances for me at schools to talk about my kids books. It was NOT to help me work through my problems.

That said, a lot of you have only been reading my site since I started posting stories about Barbara and me. Even for those who’ve followed me since the beginning, I’ve certainly gotten more reaction from these personal stories than anything else … and it helped me. A lot. So, thank you. Still, I’m not one who really likes to talk about his feelings! When I had something to say (or something to work through) I wrote about it. But I haven’t felt the need for a while. I guess that’s good.

When my web site was first set up, I told people that I would use the News and Views section to “share some of the quirky sports history stories I come across during my research.” It was fun for me, so I pretty much shared something every week. But I haven’t had much cause to be poking through old hockey stories lately. Nor much inclination, either. The truth is, the only real lingering side effect that I can detect in myself after 14 months is that I don’t have much enthusiasm for work. That might be a function of aging as much as anything. I don’t know. But even when I’ve had work, and I’ve gotten into it – and expected that would make doing more work easier – I still wake up the next day thinking, “I have to do it again?!?”

Well, I may not like working, but I do like to eat … so early this past summer, I agreed to do a book about football for National Geographic Kids. (Mainly American football, but I slide in the occasional Canadian reference when I can.) The book will be very similar to many of the hockey books I’ve done in the past, but I have to admit it’s been kind of fun to be researching something different. (As it was several years ago when I did a soccer book for NGK.) This one’s going a little slower than I’d like, but I’ll still have it ready for them on deadline at the end of this month. And, recently, while working on it, I came across the kind of story that I love to dig into. So, I thought I’d share it.

J.T. Haxall as a young Princeton football player and elderly Baltimore banker.

The football book is part of a series of Sports by Numbers, so it needs to include as many numbers as it can. Math when possible, but statistical lists are more than acceptable. So, plenty of those. And when delving into the longest field goals in football history (NFL, CFL, NCAA, anything!), I stumbled across the fact that a man named John Triplett “Jerry” Haxall had kicked a 65-yard field goal for Princeton versus Yale … in 1882!

Given how large and heavy a football of that era would have been, this struck me as pretty much impossible! I had to know more.

Fortunately, Wikipedia has a short entry on Haxall. He was from a wealthy Virginia family and later went on to a long and successful career in banking in Baltimore. Not that Wikipedia tells you much about that. But it did have a reference to a story by legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice on November 30, 1915 that proved a fine starting point.

As it turned out, on October 16, 1915, a player named Mark Payne at Dakota Wesleyan University had drop kicked a field goal from 63 yards out, breaking the 1898 drop-kick record of 62 yards by P.J. O’Dea of Wisconsin (both of which also strike me as impossible!) This put Haxall’s 65-yard place kick — which had been noted year in and year out in the Spalding Football Guide – back in the news. And (like me, now) there were people who doubted it.

Old-time kickers must have been pretty good!

Apparently, Grantland Rice asked to hear from anyone who’d been at the game and could testify to Haxall’s record. He got a response from James O. Lincoln, Yale class of 1884. “Dear Sir,” wrote Lincoln. “Luther Price, a newspaper man whom I know well, is correct. Haxall kicked that goal against Yale in 1882. I saw him perform the feat. Although, of course, the spectators did not measure the distance, it was beyond the midfield, and was announced at the time as being sixty-five yards.”

This satisfied Grantland Rice … but I was still skeptical. So, I began looking for contemporary accounts of the game played at New York City’s old Polo Grounds. In reporting on it, the Boston Globe on December 1, 1882, said only that, “This was the greatest kick ever seen.” The New York Sun said, “It was a long distance, and nobody believed that he could make it.” However, the Sun also said the ball “was 115 feet from the goal.” That’s only 38 yards or so, and, apparently, it was this account that led people in 1915 to wonder. But the New York Times (who wrote Haxall’s name as Hoxall) had said in its game report, “He was over 65 yards from Yale’s goal,” and the Hartford Courant (which spelled his name as Hachall) said he “sent the ball 66 yards across the field to the goal.”

But I was still curious, so I kept digging…

This illustration appeared in various newspapers in November of 1915.

Next, I found a story from December 12, 1915, which quotes Parke H. Davis writing a few days before in the New York Herald. “Since I am the compiler of this record,” wrote Davis of his work for the Spalding Guide, “I beg the privilege of defending its accuracy… My authorities for fixing the distance of this field goal at sixty-five yards are the accounts in the Yale News, the periodicals at Princeton, and the testimony of several eyewitnesses of the kick.”

The Yale News of December 5, 1882, quoted by Davis, says that the Yale team knew to look out for Haxall, and that he was 65 yards from the Yale goal, “when he made a kick that would have disturbed the transit of Venus. Slowly, steadily the ball was blown onward by the wind over the heads of the breathless players to drop at last on the wrong side of the goal for Yale. And now pandemonium reigned among the yellow and black. It is said that this is the finest kick ever made. You should erect a bronze statue of Haxall, Princeton.”

As to the players Davis interviewed, many had gone on to be prominent business men. “The members of these football pioneers are strikingly clear as to the events of the game, he says. “While no one of them says positively that the goal was kicked down sixty-five yards, in the absence of any mark except the midfield mark, which was fifty-five yards distant from the goal [NOTE: American fields were not reduced to the 100-yard standard of today until 1912, while Canadian football fields have remained 110-yards long], all of these players, nevertheless, assert that the kick was ‘about sixty-five yards.’”

It’s interesting to note that the Princeton narration of the game says only that “Haxall kicked (a) magnificent goal from midfield among Princeton cheers.” Yet Davis then quotes a player from that game who’d become a well-known clergyman in New York … though he chooses not to mention him by name: “Haxall put the ball down for a place kick fully 65 yards from the goal line,” states the clergyman at the end of a lengthy recollection of the game, “and what is more he stood at least 15 yards towards the one side line from the center of the field, thereby not only making the kick more difficult but in reality making the kick longer than 65 yards. The ball sailed in the wind squarely between the posts.”

Not surprisingly, all the talk of his 33-year-old field goal record came to the attention of J. Triplett Haxall himself. He was then asked by a fellow Prinecton alum to give his account of the kick, which he did for the Princeton Alumni Weekly in mid December of 1915.

Haxall writes that he and Tommy Baker (apparently an uncle of U.S. hockey legend Hobey Baker) had practiced their kicking “for some time preceding the Yale game of 1882.” They discovered that having the holder place the ball practically perpendicular to the ground and then kicking it on the bottom end, “started it accurately revolving on its long axis and resulted in long distance being realized before it began to drop.” Haxall added, “why the tendency nowadays seems to be to kick the ball in its middle and not on its ends I have never been able to understand.” (I guess kickers eventually rediscovered Haxall’s technique.)

As for the big kick in the Yale game – which Princeton lost, by the way: “I have always understood the distance was as recorded by the officials who had such matters in hand. The claim lately advanced that, due to a typographical error, the distance should have been 35 yards and not 65 yards, I think all the writings of the time sufficiently refute.”

Haxall recalls, “the wind was blowing sufficiently to require testing its direction by tossing up a bunch of grass or something of the kind,” but states that his record kick, “was the result of quite long practice by Tommy Baker and myself.”

Following his death on June 5, 1939, an obituary in the Princeton Alumi Weekly from July 7, 1939 (which is quoted on Wikipedia), notes that Haxall had once remarked, “My epitaph will probably be:

J.T. Haxall
Kicked a football.
That’s all.

Well, he did get a larger writeup in the Baltimore Sun, but he wasn’t far off.

It still may not be 100 percent official, but if it wasn’t for that lengthy kick, who’d still be writing about John Triplett Haxall today?

We The North

Personal, Sports History

You’d never call me a Raptors fan, but I’m glad they won … and I’m particularly happy for their fans. It’s a lot of fun when your team wins. As Nuke Laloosh says in Bull Durham (a movie Barbara loved, and a line we quoted often) “It’s, like, better than losing!” So, good for the Raptors, and good for basketball fans all across Canada.

I admit, I was a doubter pretty much right up until they won it in Game 6 last Thursday. (I’m not so disinterested that I don’t know their past history of playoff defeats!) I’d been watching a little since the Philadelphia series, but not very closely. In fact, the championship game is now the only Raptors game I’ve ever watched from start to finish … including the one I attended many years ago.

The crowd at Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square is reflected in the
Larry O’Brien Trophy and Kawhi Leonard’s NBA Finals MVP Trophy.

I think the Raptors just came along too late for me. I used to really love basketball. Though I never actually saw them live, I remember the Buffalo Braves and their games in Toronto when I was a kid. I knew who Bob McAdoo was when he was winning scoring titles. I really started paying attention as a teenager, with Magic Johnson and Larry Bird in the NCAA championship in 1979 and was hooked when their Lakers and Celtics teams were battling for titles throughout the ’80s. But by the time the Raptors entered the NBA in 1995, it was too late for me. I was with Barbara and helping to raise Amanda. It was nothing they did. I still watched a ton of baseball, and hockey was becoming my regular “day job.” I was happy — and I didn’t have any interest in more sports or another team.

Amanda and Barbara were happy to be Blue Jays fans, though they didn’t care much about the Leafs. I did take Amanda to the Raptors Fanfest in January of 1999 after the NBA lockout … but that was pretty much it for basketball.

Although I’m not really a Raptors fan, I’m not truly a basketball band-wagon jumper either. So, I think that I’m allowed to say that it annoys me that so many American commentators seem to think that basketball in Canada didn’t exist before the Raptors! That used to bug me about the Blue Jays too. We had the Maple Leafs baseball team in Toronto from 1896 to 1967. My parents – especially my mother – grew up as huge baseball fans! As for basketball, we had a hoop in our driveway 40 years ago, and I played on a team in Grade Six. (I was terrible, and never played for our school teams in Junior High or High School, but we had them!) I know my Uncle Gerry, who recently turned 90, played basketball when he was in high school. (When Jews were inner city kids, basketball was a Jewish game!)

The Bond Purple Raiders from Owen Sound were Provincial basketball champions.

Everyone seems to know that James Naismith, who invented basketball in 1891, was a Canadian. And many know that the first NBA game in 1946 (when the league was actually called the Basketball Association of America) was played at Maple Leaf Gardens, where the Toronto Huskies hosted the New York Knicks. That’s really it for pro basketball in Canada before the Raptors, but it’s not like the sport was unknown here! It was played by boys and girls, men and women, in clubs and in schools, since the very beginning. Google the Edmonton Grads, if you’ve never heard of them.

One of my favorite images in the Ross family collection is this picture of
Art Ross with the Crescent basketball team, senior champions of the
Westmount Amateur Athletic Association in Montreal during the winter of 1902–03.

With that in mind, I was agreeable when a producer from CTV News Channel asked me to talk about the historic significance of the Raptors’ victory. Perhaps you saw it? (But probably not!) Anyway, three or four minutes on TV go by so quickly, I barely had any time to discuss anything beyond the comparisons with the Blue Jays winning the World Series. So, if you’re interested, you can read this (slightly bulked up) exchange below between me and the producer to get a sense of what I really hoped to talk about…

(Oh, and by the way, I was disappointed that I didn’t mention the Women’s World Cup and Canada’s team when Marcia MacMillan asked me what was worth watching now. Barbara never followed anything in sports the way she was briefly hooked on Christine Sinclair and the Canadian women’s team after watching that epic semifinal game with the U.S. at the 2012 London Olympics.)

Hi Eric,
 
Here are some talking points ahead of tomorrow’s interview at 10:45 AM EST
  
1.  How monumental is this victory?

It’s huge. As the only Canadian team in an American sport, it feeds into the love-hate relationship with our neighbours. When they validate our victory, it’s even bigger. Though the Leafs have a following all across the country, there is also that national hatred of Toronto. The Raptors and the Blue Jays seem to overcome that. The big thing is, how much does this do for basketball in Canada going forward… (See more in the “Where does it rank…” question.)

 
2.  How does it compare to other Toronto titles of the past?  The Leafs in 67 and the Blue Jays in 1992 and 1993?

The Leafs in 67 has become much bigger in retrospect than it was at the time, although upsetting Montreal in the Centennial year was noteworthy. Very similar to the Blue Jays (see below). But the next Leafs victory — if it ever comes — will be the big one! Though, of course, while the Leafs have a following all across the country, there is also that national hatred of Toronto. The Raptors and the Blue Jays seem to overcome that, as I said.

 
3.  Where does it rank amongst Canada’s greatest wins?  (please provide specific examples)

The most obvious comparison is the Blue Jays. I think this is at least as big as that. Possibly bigger. As I already said, as the only Canadian team in an American sport, it feeds into the love-hate relationship with our neighbours. When they validate our victory, it’s even bigger. And basketball is such a global game. No Grey Cup team has a shot at that, and, really no NHL team either.

The birth of the Blue Jays, and then the World Series win, increased interest in baseball all across Canada, and we’ve seen record numbers of Canadians in the Majors in recent years. The birth of the Raptors, and the success of Steve Nash, has already led to more and more Canadians making it to the NBA. This should only increase that in the years to come…

Other examples are the Canadian Olympic hockey wins for the men’s team both in 2002 and, especially in Vancouver in 2010. And, of course, Paul Henderson’s goal in 1972. But those only confirmed that we’re a hockey-crazy country. Just having a women’s national team that competes for World and Olympic titles (and often wins them) has been a huge boost for women’s hockey. More and more girls are playing … but it hasn’t done much to help the women’s professional game. 

Donovan Bailey, and the 4 x 100 relay team at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. Perhaps there’s no Andre de Grasse without that. (Ben Johnson would have been HUGE). Another historic comparison would be Mike Weir winning The Masters … though I think the Raptors and Blue Jays are bigger. Still, is there a Brooke Henderson without that?

The only other examples are really extremely old. There’s the Paris Crew, four rowers from New Brunswick who won Canada’s first World Championship in any sport when they won in Paris, France in 1867. (There was a Heritage Minute about that) Rowing was a huge sport internationally then, and during the 1880s, Toronto’s Ned Hanlon became a world champion and was probably the most famous athlete in the world.

 
4.  What do you think James Naismith would think about the Raptors success?

I’m sure he’d be pleased. But he’d probably wonder what took so long! Naismith (1861-1939) lived long enough to see how popular his sport became all around the world. In fact, basketball became hugely popular very quickly, even in Canada. Canada won silver in the first official Olympic basketball tournament in 1936, and the sport was very popular in pockets of the country (particularly Windsor, ON and Victoria BC) much as hockey has always been popular in parts of the United States.

Hockey Helmet History

Baseball History, Hockey History, Sports History

I guess I’m lucky that my working life has mostly been an interesting one. I’ve always been a person who didn’t like to do anything he didn’t like to do — and I’ve mostly been able to get away with that! Barbara and I always used to say that we may not make a lot of money doing what we do, but we get to meet some very interesting people and have some pretty neat experiences.

As I’ve said a lot lately, I’m kind of burnt out on hockey. But it does still help me pay my bills, so I continue to pay at least some attention. I may not watch very much these days — it’s not my job to do that anymore — but it turns out that I still enjoy poking around in hockey history.

Next weekend, I’ll be attending the Annual General Meeting of the Society for International Hockey Research (SIHR) being held in Windsor, Ontario. (That’s the Victoria Day weekend for those you in Canada, or the “they have a holiday before Memorial Day?!?” weekend for you in the United States.)

In the most recent edition of the SIHR Bulletin, Bill Sproule of Houghton, Michigan, posted the following picture he’d recently come across of the 1914-15 Portland Rosebuds of the Pacific Coast Hockey Association…

picture

In this photo, Ernie “Moose” Johnson (third from the left) can clearly be seen wearing a leather football helmet. Bill’s accompanying story dealt with the well-told early history of helmets in hockey, which is always said to have begun with George Owen — a former Harvard football star — of the Boston Bruins in 1928-29. (It appears that football players began wearing helmets as early as 1893!) Bill rightfully wonders if Moose Johnson should be credited as the first pro hockey player to wear a helmet.

Now — surprise, surprise! — I have some doubts about the George Owen story. If he did wear a helmet during his rookie season in 1928-29 (and he may have), it certainly wasn’t widely publicized. Coincidently, when Owen played his first NHL game in Canada against the Canadiens on January 10, 1929, the Montreal Gazette had a story about a player named Nick Carter (aka Fred Carter) wearing a leather rugby football helmet to protect a cut on his head when his Canadian National Railway team faced the Bell Telephone team in a Railway-Telephone Hockey League game (I’m not kidding!) at the Forum the night before. In a story about hockey helmets following the death of Bill Masterton that appeared in The Boston Globe on January 18, 1968, veteran sportswriter Harold Kaese noted that Jack Culhane of Boston College wore a helmet playing hockey during the 1920s. So guys were definitely wearing them that far back, and it was making news when they did.

Whether or not George Owen wore a helmet as a pro hockey player during his rookie season in 1928-29, he definitely wore one during the 1930 NHL playoffs — but so did his Boston defensemates Lionel Hitchman and Eddie Shore. Hitchman, in fact, had already worn a helmet in the regular-season finale to protect a broken jaw, and the article below from the Montreal Gazette on March 20, 1930, mentions that Shore “has worn a headgear in the past.”

Bruins

During the Bruins’ rough opening-round series against the Montreal Maroons, John Hallahan of The Boston Globe noted that “Owen had a brand new one on that made him look something like a halfback.” If it was brand new, perhaps he’d been wearing an older helmet previously? If so, I’ve yet to see that story. And, if Moose Johnson was wearing a helmet during the 1914-15 season, he may well have been the first pro hockey player ever to wear one. But how come?

A brief search through old newspapers turned up the fact that Johnson (like Lionel Hitchman) had suffered a fractured jaw. He was injured either in a practice leading up to, or the pre-game warmup right before, Portland’s first road game of the 1914-15 PCHA season in Victoria, British Columbia, on December 15, 1914. Game stories make it clear that Johnson played for a while with his head bandaged and The Oregon Daily Journal of January 10, 1915, confirms that Johnson had been wearing a helmet in games. Another story from the same paper on January 24 notes that his jaw had finally healed to the point where Johnson might be ready to discard his headgear.

There’s nothing in the papers that claims Moose Johnson was the first pro hockey player to wear a helmet, but he was certainly wearing one long before George Owen. Admittedly, I’m not sure how a helmet that sits on top of your head protects the jaw on the bottom of your head — although I suppose the ear flaps on a football-style helmet help. But what I found most interesting of all was that sportswriters were already taking shots at the relative toughness (or lack-there-of) of baseball players versus hockey players as long ago as 1915, as this Oregon Daily Journal clipping from the January 10, 1915 edition confirms…

story

Season’s Greetings

Personal, Sports History

From the Vancouver Daily World, on Tuesday, December 24, 1912…

Xmas 2017

Who knows how “Extra” becomes “Wuxtry”? And, personally – not to be sexist or racist in this day and age! – I wish All Good Sportsmen AND Sportswomen a Merry Christmas, a belated Happy Hanukkah, or best wishes for any holiday you celebrate at this time of year.

Thank you to everyone who takes a few minutes once a week or so to read these stories, and especially to those who offer comments; either by email or Facebook, or directly on the site.

All the best to everyone in 2018.

Toronto as Title Town

Sports History

Not that long ago, Toronto was being mocked as the worst sports city in North America. Well, in recent years we’ve had two exciting Blue Jays playoff appearances (though I fear we won’t see that again for a while), a resurgence of the Raptors and a rebirth of the Maple Leafs. And now, within a two-week span from November 26 to December 9, a Grey Cup championship by the Toronto Argos and an MLS Cup win by Toronto FC.

TFC

Once upon a time, titles in Toronto weren’t so rare. In fact, there was a time when it seemed like the Argos and Maple Leafs would never lose. In an eight-year span from 1945 to 1952, the Argos won the Grey Cup five times and the Leafs won the Stanley Cup five times. That’s got to have been a pretty wonderful time to have been a Toronto sports fan! During those eight years, there was never more than 18 months between championships, and often as few as six months:

  • April 22, 1945: Toronto wins Stanley Cup
  • December 1, 1945: Toronto wins Grey Cup
  • November 3, 1946: Toronto wins Grey Cup
  • April 19, 1947: Toronto wins Stanley Cup
  • November 29, 1947: Toronto wins Grey Cup
  • April 14, 1948: Toronto wins Stanley Cup
  • April 16, 1949: Toronto wins Stanley Cup
  • November 25, 1950: Toronto wins Grey Cup
  • April 21, 1951: Toronto wins Stanley Cup
  • November 29, 1952: Toronto wins Grey Cup

This was when my parents grew up. I know it made a big impact on my father, and I’m sure it’s a big reason why sports still runs so deep in my immediate family. I mean, there’s never really been another run like it in all of Canadian sports. Even when the Edmonton Eskimos and Edmonton Oilers were winning all those championships between 1978 and 1990 (and there were 11 in total – although it took them 13 years to do it) the only time they both won in the same calender year was 1987. Toronto did it in 1945 and 1947.

Argos

Montreal comes out on top in terms of twin NHL and CFL titles, although even with their 24 hockey championships dating back to 1916, the only years in which the Montreal Canadiens won the Stanley Cup and a Montreal football won the Grey Cup in the same season are 1931, 1944 and 1977. Ottawa almost joins the list of twin wins with Grey Cup victories in 1925 and 1926 and the Stanley Cup in 1927.

American cities have had their multiple champions too, but not very often. In 1927, the New York Yankees and the New York Giants football team were both champions, although the NFL did not have a championship game yet. In 1928, the New York Rangers and Yankees were both champs and in 1969 the New York Jets and New York Mets both won titles too. (The New York Knicks added an NBA title in 1970.) In Pittsburgh, Super Bowl championships by the Steelers in January of 1979 and 1980 bookended a World Series win by the Pirates in October of 1979. And way back in 1935, the Detroit Tigers and Detroit Lions won the World Series and the NFL championship within two months of each other. (Detroit’s Joe Louis was boxing’s Heavyweight Champion of the World at the time, and the Red Wings would add Stanley Cup titles in 1936 and 1937.)

In terms of timing, the ultimate back-to-back championships would be to win the Stanley Cup and the NBA Finals in the same season, given that they have often wrapped up within a week or two of each other. No one city has ever accomplished that double feat. But in past years Toronto has crowned multiple hockey champions in a timeline often tighter than the 13 days between this year’s Argos and TFC titles. Have a look…

  • March 22, 1922: Toronto Granites win Allan Cup
    March 28, 1922: Toronto St. Pats win Stanley Cup
  • April 6, 1932: Toronto Nationals win Allan Cup
    April 9, 1932: Toronto Maple Leafs win Stanley Cup
  • April 22, 1945: Leafs win Stanley Cup
    April 23, 1945: St. Mikes wins Memorial Cup
  • April 19, 1947: Leafs win Stanley Cup
    April 22, 1947: St. Mikes wins Memorial Cup
  • April 15, 1964: Leafs win Stanley Cup
    May 9, 1964: Marlies win Memorial Cup
  • May 2, 1967: Leafs win Stanley Cup
    May 14, 1967: Marlies win Memorial Cup

Toronto doesn’t have a monopoly on this. Montreal has done it too, but not nearly as often.

  • March 30, 1930: Montreal AAA wins Allan Cup
    April 3, 1930: Montreal Canadiens win Stanley Cup
  • May 4, 1969: Montreal Canadiens win Stanley Cup
    May 5, 1969: Montreal Junior Canadians win Memorial Cup

Once again Ottawa comes pretty close, with the Senators clinching the Stanley Cup as champions of the Eastern Canada Hockey Association on March 3, 1909 and the Cliffsides being awarded the inaugural Allan Cup on March 6, 1909 only to lose it to Queen’s University in the first challenge match nine days later.

If anyone’s aware of any twin wins I’ve missed, please let me know!