Last month, I received an email from Don Weekes. (For those of you who don’t know, Don is a fellow hockey historian/author who has written several books of hockey trivia and hockey firsts, as well as Picturing the Game: An Illustrated Story of Hockey, which was — for my money — the best hockey book of 2023.)

In his email, Don asked: Have you done or seen any (solid) research on Fred Waghorne and the face-off? Is he really the guy who started the puck drop? I guess it would be nice if it’s mentioned somehow in an old game report from 1900. Have you ever run across anything to prove what has appeared any number of times in books?

In my own work, I often ask questions of my fellow writers/researchers, or experts in the field, or to the editors I’m working with. Whenever I do, I want an answer NOW! So, when people ask me, I try to respond as quickly as possible As soon as I received Don’s email, I gave him a call. We mostly talked about other writing-related things, so that after he received another call he had to take, I ended up texting him my answer:

Regarding Fred Waghorne, no, I’ve never seen any direct proof about the puck drop.

A longtime referee in both hockey and lacrosse, if you Google the name Fred Waghorne, you’ll come across lots of stories about him being the first referee to drop the puck for a face-off. (Also about whether he pioneered the use of whistles among hockey referees, or the old-time practice of using a cowbell instead.) Many of the face-off stories are very similar, though all are pretty vague. Even when they give places and teams, there’s never been any specific date attached. Not even a reliable year. Still, later that afternoon, I went searching for more. Having done this before, I didn’t really expect to find anything … but there are so many old newspapers available online that there didn’t used to bet so it seemed worth a try.

At first, I didn’t find anything. Then I found a story in the Windsor Star from December 19, 1953. It was actually about The Hockey Book, by Bill Roche, which had come out that year. “It is a collection of hockey stories and anecdotes,” the article explains, “by the game’s great personalities — Cyclone Taylor, Art Ross, Newsy Lalonde, and many more who are legendary already… One of the first referees is here, too — Fred C. Waghorne, who changed face-off and other rules.”

Nothing new there … but I have a copy of The Hockey Book. (Art Ross’s copy, in fact, given to him by Bruins chief scout Harold “Baldy” Cotton, and given to me by Ross’s grandson, Art Ross III.) I suppose I must have read Waghorne’s stories before, but now I had reason to read them again. Though he was 88-years-old by then, and it was some 50 years after the fact, here’s what Waghorne had to say about face-offs:

When young fans see hockey played these days, the face-off that starts play must seem to be a simple, obvious thing. The referee just tosses the puck between a pair of sticks and the game is on. But it wasn’t always done that way. There were years of exasperating and often painful experiences for referees before the present style of face-off was instituted. I know, because I’m the referee who brought it about.

First, I should point out that it was not “invented” by any great wave of mental brilliance on my part. I was really just acting in self-defence and trying something that would speed up the game.

Face-offs in the early days of hockey were similar to what they still are in lacrosse. The referee would place the puck on the ice between the blades of the centers’ sticks, lean over the puck to line up the sticks fairly, step back, and shout, “Play!” But, as Waghorne explains, things seldom worked out that way.

Just after the referee had placed puck and sticks, and before he had time to move out of range, one centreman would feel the other fellow’s stick wiggling a bit, and he’d try to beat the other boy to the draw. Both would start to slash and swipe at the puck. And before the referee could move away, he’d often get banged by a stick on a shin or toe. Also, every time the centremen started chopping away before the official had a chance to give the signal, the puck had to be faced-off again. This held up play so often that it got to be monotonous.

Waghorne explains that around the year 1900, he refereed a game in Southwestern Ontario. He could no longer remember the place, “but it was in the Brantford-Paris-Woodstock area.” The rival centers were definitely cheating on the draw that night, and Waghorne was tired of it.

I said to myself, “To heck with the rules in this case!” Then I told the centremen what I was going to do. They were to place their blades on the ice about a foot and a half apart and I’d stand back and toss the puck between their sticks. After the rubber hit the ice, they could do as they darned well pleased.

Waghorne says his face-off experiment worked out well, and that he kept thinking about it.

The following winter, having journeyed to Ottawa to referee a National Hockey Association game between the Ottawa Silver Seven and Renfrew, I was ready with a suggestion when asked to handle an amateur playoff at Almonte between teams from Arnprior and Renfrew… I told the clubs’ officers of my face-off innovation and proposed that it be tried in the game coming up at Almonte. They agreed.

Waghorne explains that after that game, “the new face-off spread rapidly across Eastern Canada, and eventually all leagues, both amateur and pro, made it official.”

So, there it was from the man himself.

But there were still plenty of problems.

Leaving out the question of where the game around 1900 had been played, there was the fact that the National Hockey Association wasn’t formed until the winter of 1909–10. So, if the Renfrew-Arnprior game at Almonte had been “the following winter” as Waghorne remembered it, he had either tried out his new face-off as late as the 1908–09 season … or “the following winter” actually had to be closer to 1901 and therefore several years before the start of the NHA. Also, Ottawa’s early hockey dynasty didn’t become known as the Silver Seven until winning the Stanley Cup for the first time in the spring of 1903. (And only until about 1906.) So it seemed likely to me this had all happened between 1900 and 1906.

I knew (and confirmed with some quick online research) that hockey playoffs between the Upper Ottawa Valley Hockey League and the Lower Ottawa Valley Hockey League for the Citizen Shield (donated by the Ottawa Citizen) had begun around that time. In the winter of 1902–03, it turned out. So searching for a playoff game between Arnprior and Renfrew played in Almonte in 1903 or 1904 seemed like a good place to start.

It proved easy enough to find!

As it turns out, Waghorne journeyed to Ottawa late in February of 1904 — 120 years ago this week — when the Toronto Marlboros (for whom he was a club executive) faced the Silver Seven for the Stanley Cup on the 23rd and the 25th of that month. As it happens, on Friday night, February 26, 1904, Arnprior beat Renfrew 6–2 in a game played on neutral ice in Almonte to win the championship the Upper Ottawa Valley Hockey League and the right to meet the champions of the Lower Ottawa Valley Hockey League for the Citizen Shield.

The referee that night?

Fred Waghorne.

The game report in the Ottawa Citizen from Saturday, February 27, notes how “well pleased” everyone was with the job Waghorne had done. There’s also coverage in the Ottawa Journal that Saturday saying Waghorne “gave perfect satisfaction.”  No mention in those game stories about face-offs, but in a further story about the game in the Ottawa Citizen on Tuesday, March 1, 1904, the unnamed writer goes to great lengths in explaining the fine job Waghorne did in keeping the two teams under control in a contest where “The crowd was prepared to be treated to a slugging match.” The writer later noted:

Another little incident that impressed the spectators as being an improvement over the eastern style of play was that, in facing the puck … instead of letting the two men bang it around, each trying to have the advantage over the other … the referee simply dropped the rubber between their sticks and the game was on the moment it touched the ice…”

So, it would seem that February 26, 1904, is the true start date for the modern face-off.

As to the earlier game where Waghorne first tried it, that’s proven harder to pin down.

Newspaper stories from his hometown in Toronto in the 1920s make it fairly clear that Waghorne didn’t begin to referee games in the Ontario Hockey Association until the winter of 1902–03. Maybe not until 1903–04. Prior that that, he only seems to be involved in hockey through local Toronto leagues.

Searching the Toronto Star, the earliest reference I found to Waghorne in the OHA comes on December 29, 1902, when it was reported he was a referee in the OHA’s Intermediate division. Group 12 in the OHA intermediate series had teams in Brantford and Paris. Group 13 had teams in Simcoe, Stratford, Ingersoll, and Woodstock. So, it it all fits pretty nicely. Then again, going through the Globe as well circa 1902 to 1904, it doesn’t look like Waghorne actually called OHA games on a regular basis until the 1903–04 season … which matches a Star Weekly story from March 24, 1928, saying he didn’t begin in the OHA until his friend William Hewitt (Foster’s father) became the league secretary in December of 1903. So, maybe all the face-off stuff actually happened during the 1903–04 season?

Of course, there’s always the chance that Fred Waghorne merely popularized something he’d seen from someone else and then outlasted them so that he became the “inventor.” That same Star Weekly story about his 25-year-career as a referee says only that Waghorne “was one of the first to introduce the dropping of the puck,” not THE first. Then again, no one else ever came forward to claim the distinction. So, if Waghorne was remembering correctly that the Arnprior–Renfrew game in Almonte had come “the following season” after his first face-off experience in Brantford, Paris, or Woodstock, there’s a decent chance that happened during the 1902–03 season. But maybe it really was earlier in 1903–04. (For what it’s worth, I’m beginning to like the chances that’s actually the case.)

No luck yet in tracking down a face-off story from any of those cities in those years.

Good luck to anyone who wants to take on that challenge … and I want to hear about it if you find it!

Oh, and about the bells and whistles, here’s what Fred Waghorne had to say about that in The Hockey Book:

One hundred years ago today, on January 25, 1924, the first Winter Olympics opened in Chamonix, France. Although the International Olympic Committee had decided to hold a winter sports week when Paris was awarded the Summer Games at its meetings in Lausanne, Switzerland, in June of 1921, and the French Olympic Committee confirmed the events in June of 1922, the competition was originally known as the “International Winter Sports Week” — even though it actually stretched for 12 days until February 5, 1924. It was retroactively confirmed as the first Olympic Winter Games at the IOC congress in Prague in May of 1925.

I’ve written several stories over the years about hockey at the Olympics, including the 1924 gold medal victory of the Toronto Granites, the 1920 victory by the Winnipeg Falcons, and the 1928 win by the Toronto Varsity Grads. But this is a story about the 1924 U.S. Olympic hockey team — the silver medalists behind Canada — and one member of the team in particular: Clarence John “Taffy” Abel. The nickname, apparently, comes from his childhood love of the sticky candy.

Some of you reading this will recognize Abel’s name.

Some will even know the story.

But many won’t.

So, here we go.

I believe the first time I ever heard the name Taffy Abel was from Alex Levinsky. Levinsky was one of the first Jewish players in the NHL during the 1930s and a relative by marriage of the former wife of a cousin of mine. I met him at a handful of large family gatherings in the late 1980s. Back then, I didn’t know nearly as much about hockey history as I do now (and I’d never heard of Levinsky) but it was always fascinating to talk with him. He was a defenseman — as was Abel — and I remember him telling me once how difficult it was for any NHL forwards to get past Abel and his New York Rangers defense partner Ching Johnson … particularly in the days before forward passing was allowed in the offensive zone. Howie Morenz, the top NHL forward of this era, stood only 5’9″ and weighed just 165 pounds, and even other forwards who were as tall as 5’11” rarely weighed more than 180. Ching Johnson was 5’11” and 210 pounds, while Taffy Abel stood 6’1″ and weighed 225 pounds. Together, they formed a formidable barrier!

Levinsky faced his share of prejudice as a Jewish player in the NHL in the 1930s. Much of what’s reported is just the sort of casual racism that was typical of the time. I’m sure he encountered plenty of worse things that didn’t make the newspapers given that his Jewish background was well known. But nobody knew Taffy Abel’s true story. Born on May 28, 1900, in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, Abel was actually Native American — a Chippewa — who spent most of his life passing for white, which he began to do as a young boy in order to avoid being sent to an Indian boarding school.

Taffy Abel died in 1964, but in recent years, George Jones, a nephew, has been trying to get the NHL to officially recognize Abel’s role in breaking the NHL colour barrier when he first joined the Rangers in 1926. It has proven to be an uphill battle. Other, later, players of colour — Larry Kwong, who was Chinese, Fred Sasakamoose, who was Indigenous, and Willie O’Ree, who was Black — had no way to hide their racial features. But Abel — though apparently listed as Chippewa, along with his mother and sister, in the 1908 “Durant Roll” (a basic census count of Native Americans named for an agent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs) — was able to pass for white. So, nobody knew the truth at the time.

According to Jones, Abel didn’t announce his Native heritage until the death of his mother in 1939, which was five years after his NHL career ended. With support from the Sault Ste. Marie Band of Chippewa Indians, Abel was inducted posthumously into the American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame in 1989. He was later among those the National Museum of the American Indian honoured in a roster featured in its 2012 “Native Olympians” exhibition. Several Native Americans — including Jim Thorpe — had competed at the Stockholm Olympics in the summer of 1912, and Taffy Abel is now considered the first Native American Winter Olympic athlete … although — as with his NHL career — nobody knew that in 1924, when he was a late addition to the U.S. team.

A charter member of the United States Hockey Hall of Fame in 1973, Abel’s biography on their website says he began to play hockey in 1918. He likely started earlier than that. The website of the Society for International Hockey Research begins tracking him with a Michigan Soo team during the winter of 1917–18. After four more seasons in his hometown, Abel moved on to the powerhouse St. Paul Saints of the United States Amateur Hockey Association in 1922–23. He was with that team again to start the 1923–24 season before being added to the U.S. Olympic team.

The American team departed for Europe from New York on January 9, 1924, and Abel wrote about the voyage in a letter to Charles Bye of Sault Ste. Marie. The letter was dated January 19, after arrival in Cherbourg, France, and appeared in the local Evening News on February 2. Abel writes of a rough passage after hitting a storm four days out from New York. “[W]e managed to come out of it all right except for missing a few meals,” he said. “It was five days before we finally came out of the gale. I was sure glad when we landed.”

By the time the story was printed, the U.S. hockey team had already scored a 19–0 win over Belgium, a 22–0 win over France, an 11–0 win over Great Britain, and then defeated Sweden 20–0 on February 1 to advance to the gold medal game on February 3. Abel had written before the competition started that it looked like a certainty that the United States would meet Canada in the final (Canada put up even more lopsided wins en route to the big game), but that the Americans would need to improve their teamwork from the few games they had played together in Boston before leaving for France. “If we play that way against Canada,” Abel worried, “they will need an adding machine to keep track of their scores.”

Still, Abel promised better things. “If the forward line will give [goalie Al “Frenchy”] LaCroix, [defense partner Irv] Small and myself just one goal to work on, we swear we will eat the puck before we let them score.”

The Americans did get one goal … but Canada scored six to win the gold medal. According to a story in the Pittsburgh Gazette Times on February 22, 1924, Abel believe the best team won that day, although he was convinced the Americans could have been better. “The Granites beat us on the merits of the teams as they lined up,” said Abel, “but I’ll never be satisfied that they could not be beaten if America had sent over its best available hockey team. They were too strong for us as things were in France, but if the best possible team had been picked and the best possible men had gone over, after having had plenty of practice, America would have won.”

Taffy Abel would never have another chance to win Olympic gold. He later won the Stanley Cup with the New York Rangers in 1928 and again with the Chicago Blackhawks in 1934. Metis players Tony Gingras and brothers Magnus and Rod Flett won the Stanley Cup with the Winnipeg Victorias in 1901 and 1902. Abel is the first Native American to have won the Cup, and the first to do so with an NHL team … but the complicated legacy of early Indigenous players has made such feats difficult to track.

As George Jones told Stephen Whyno of the Associate Press for a story about Abel in December of 2022: “The reason he had to pass was not one of choice — it was one of survival. I’m proud of him, what he did — very proud. I know what he had to go through and the internal torment that he had to go through as part of this ‘passing’ thing. He had depression, he had drinking problems, but he survived.”

This is, I guess, a sequel of sorts to my recent story about Walter Smaill. When finishing up my research for that one, I came across a cartoon and a brief story in the Calgary Herald from February 27, 1932. It reported on Helge Bostrom of the Chicago Black Hawks (two words in those days; not Blackhawks) who had recently been cut for 140 stitches. Having previously suffered some 100 stitches from various minor injuries, Bostrom was now considered hockey’s Most-Stitched Player. “The former title holder,” the story reported, “… was Walter Smaill, of the old Montreal Wanderers, who suffered 168 in his career.”

The 1931–32 season marked Helge Bostrom’s third year in the NHL. He’d just turned 36 years old when he joined the Black Hawks in January of 1930, and had played plenty of hockey before that. His earliest records place him in military and patriotic hockey leagues in his home town of Winnipeg (some sources say he was born in Gimli, Manitoba), playing for the Ypres team against Walter Smaill’s Somme in 1917–18. After a year of military service in England and France, Bostrom played two seasons of amateur hockey with the Moose Jaw Maple Leafs in Saskatchewan before turning pro with the Edmonton Eskimos of the Western Canada Hockey League during the 1921–22 season.

Mostly a hard-hitting defensemen, but also something of a penalty shot specialist (in those days, penalty shots were taken from a fixed point, so a powerful blast was key), Bostrom helped Edmonton to a WCHL title in 1922–23, before a Stanley Cup loss to the Ottawa Senators. He spent the next four seasons with the Vancouver Maroons before top-level pro hockey collapsed in the west after the 1925–26 season. He then played three-plus seasons with the Minneapolis Millers of the American Hockey Association before finally entering the NHL.

As to the injury in question, Bostrom was hurt during the second period of a 1–1 tie with the New York Rangers at Madison Square Garden on November 24, 1931. There’s not a lot of details about the injury in most game stories. The New York Times says nothing at all, noting only that Bostrom (they spell it Bostrum — as many papers did) was in the penalty box when the Rangers scored their only goal late in the first period. (Chicago tied the game late in the third period.) The New York Daily News reports, “The second session was marked only by an injury to Helge Bostrum … who cut a tendon in his leg in a mixup with [Earl] Seibert.”

Of the newspapers I’ve been able to check, the Montreal Gazette and the Brooklyn Times-Union had the most to say about Bostrom’s injury in their game reports the next day. “Early in the second period,” says the Gazette, “Bostrum was assisted off the ice after colliding heavily with Seibert and it was afterwards announced that the burly defence man had cut a tendon in his left leg.” The account in the Brooklyn paper says, “Bostrum was injured by a skate when he checked Seibert in the second period.”

The Times-Union story says it was Bostrom’s instep that was cut — though most stories later would say his ankle — “and the discovery of a severed tendon means that he will be lost to the team for several weeks.” The Brooklyn paper further notes that “Bostrum’s foot was to be operated on today.” A later story in the Chicago Tribune on December 6, 1931, reports that Bostrom was still in New York’s Polyclinic hospital when his Black Hawks teammates visited him there on a return trip to New York prior to a game that night against the Americans. The operation was likely performed there, as Madison Square Garden and New York Rangers team doctor Henry O. Clauss Jr. was a member of the surgical staff at the Polyclinic.

In recalling the injury in the New York Times on January 4, 1932, John Kieran writes: “Remember the night Helge Bostrum of the Hawks was hurt at the Garden? Ankle cut by Earl Seibert’s skate. Didn’t seem so bad as he hobbled off the ice, but when Dr. Clauss checked up, three of the four tendons were cut and before they got through patching him up, they took exactly 142 stitches to pull him together.” (Stories in other newspapers put the number of stitches at 140 or 145, but the Minneapolis Star-Tribune asked “What’s [a] Mere 400 Stitches” in a headline above a story about Bostrom on February 12, 1932.)

Despite the early report that he would be sidelined for several weeks, word soon was Bostrom might never play hockey again. That was certainly a fear Black Hawks coach Emil Iverson expressed in a story reported in The Minneapolis Star on December 11, 1931. A story in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle a month later, on January 10, 1932, explained more:

It was cruel the way the accident happened…Earl Seibert just stumbled over the half-prone Helge in a harmless-looking mixup around center ice. But the tip of Seibert’s skate bit like a rapier down to the bone, slashing tendon after tendon. The cut wasn’t more than an inch and a half long and the surgeons had to lengthen it, reach up and pull down the muscles, and fasten them. When they knit together Bostrom will be able to walk without even the semblance of a limp, but the repairs may not be able to hold under the strain of those sudden stops in hockey.

Apparently — according to a story in The Minneapolis Journal six years later (February 17, 1938) — things were so dire that Bostrom was receiving ads from casket owners (casket makers?) while he was in the Polyclinic hospital. But Helge was having none of it!

By early February of 1932, Bostrom was in the Twin Cities and skating again. “Out of hockey, nothing,” he roared for an Associated Press story out of St. Paul that appeared in papers on February 12. “I’ll be playing again before the season’s over.” The day before, The Minneapolis Star quoted him saying, “Whoever said I wouldn’t be able to play hockey again is crazier than the hombre who insists that the Hawks won’t be in the Stanley Cup playoffs. Why, I expect to be in those same playoffs myself.”

And he was.

Maybe.

Bostrom was back in action on February 17, 1932, when the Black Hawks hosted the Canadiens in Chicago. According to the NHL game logs, he played in seven more games after that, but then missed the next five, before returning for two playoff games against the Toronto Maple Leafs. The strange thing is, the newspaper accounts of games late that season don’t always match up with the NHL records. And for sure, those records must have it wrong when they show Bostrom playing in Boston on November 26, 1931 — two days after the injury. It seems highly unlike that he was hurt that badly on November 24, had surgery on November 25, played in Boston on November 26, and then returned to New York to spend another week or more in hospital there.

Regardless of how many games Bostrom actually played in 1931–32, he was not only back with the Black Hawks for the 1932–33 season, he was named the team’s new captain. But that December, he was traded to the St. Paul Greyhounds of the American Hockey Association, where he would be their player-coach. Bostrom continued to play in minor league cities through the 1935–36 season, finishing up with the Kansas City Greyhounds, whom he would later coach for two years from 1937 through 1939.

And tough as he must have been, it seems Helge Bostrom may have done more for the sport of figure skating than hockey. According to Roy Shipstead, one of the founders of the Ice Follies, Bostrom gave the struggling Roy, his older brother Eddie, and their partner Oscar Johnson, a significant boost. Shipstead told the story to Vern De Geer of the Gazette for his column on February 1, 1961 while in Montreal for the Canadian Figure Skating Championship.

It wasn’t easy. We were fancy skating bugs in St. Paul when most of our neighborhood pals were busy on the hockey rink. Most of the hockey players were coming in from Western Canada. They were making good money and it looked like a good career for Minnesota boys. But it was one of those imports who persuaded me to follow Eddie and Oscar in the ice skating entertainment business.

Helge Bostrom, a fun-loving Norwegian friend of ours from Winnipeg, recommended us to an entertainment booker at the Chicago Sherman Hotel’s famous College Inn. That was in 1935. We were given four weeks trial and stayed for 16 months. It was the success of this run that started us in the travelling carnival routine the next year. And we’ve been at it ever since. We’ll be forever grateful to Helge for this.

Walter Smaill is not a name likely to be recognized by many hockey fans today. (Even my spell-checker keeps trying to change his name to Walter Small.) But that’s never stopped me before! Smaill is yet another OLD old-time hockey player I have great affection for.

Walter Sydney Smaill was born in Montreal on December 18, 1884. He grew up in Westmount, playing local sports with other future hockey stars such as Art Ross, Frank and Lester Patrick, and Sprague and Odie Cleghorn. (He would play most of his his pro hockey career alongside Ross or Lester Patrick.) As Frank Patrick would write of those neighbourhood kids in the Boston Sunday Globe on January 27, 1935, in one of an eight-part series on his life when he was the coach of the Bruins, “Almost every young boy competed in football, baseball, basketball and [track] as well as hockey.” Walter Smaill was no exception. He grew up to play hockey, football, and lacrosse at the highest levels. He was also an excellent paddler, sailor, and swimmer.

When Smaill died at the age of 86 on May 2, 1971, he’d outlived almost all his contemporaries, save for Cyclone Taylor. Smaill lived most of his life in Montreal, but spent time in Victoria, Winnipeg, and a few smaller cities across the country too. In his younger days, he worked as an athletic instructor, often running sports clubs for youths, and even after going to work as a car salesman around 1925 he stayed involved in sports for many years, serving as a coach, referee, or league executive in hockey, lacrosse, football, canoeing, and other sports. He even served as an NHL referee during the 1924–25 season, and was suggested as a potential president of a professional hockey players union before the 1925–26 season. “Smaill denied all connection with the movement,” reported the Montreal Gazette on September 2, 1925. “He stated that ten years ago there had been such a move in which he had been interested, but that the present plans … did not concern him directly.”

Smaill seems to have been a guy that people liked, and likely because of his “good guy” status — and also because he lived so long — many sportswriters (particularly in Montreal) who’d been on the job since his playing days would occasionally mention his name in columns during the 1960s as someone who should be in the Hockey Hall of Fame. He was definitely a good player.

Smaill’s career at the highest levels of hockey lasted from the winter of 1904–05 through 1915–16. He played mainly with the Montreal Wanderers, Ottawa Senators, and Cobalt Silver Kings of the National Hockey Association (forerunner to the NHL), and with the Victoria Aristocrats of the Pacific Coast Hockey Association. He played both forward and defense and had a couple of decently high-scoring seasons in his early days. He helped the Wanderers win the Stanley Cup in 1908, and Victoria to victory over the Stanley Cup champion Quebec Bulldogs in a “world championship” exhibition series in 1913. Still, he was probably more of a support player than a true Hall of Fame star — although he seems no less worthy of selection than some of the other inductees from his playing days.

One thing, it seems, most other players of his era agreed on was that Smaill was “the worst battered man playing hockey.” In a story that made the rounds in at least a few Canadian newspapers in January and February of 1918, Smaill’s numerous cuts and scars over the course of his career — “he has over one hundred stitches sewn into him by surgeons in all parts of the Dominion” — were detailed. One of the more than 50 times his nose had been cut occurred in the first game ever played in the history of the PCHA, on January 2, 1912, when he collided with future Hall of Famer Harry Hyland of the New Westminster Royals. Smaill was married six days later, and as several of the papers in Victoria, Vancouver, and Montreal that reported on the wedding noted: “[he] looked anything but the happy bridegroom with his nose all swathed up in bandages.”

The 1918 stories mention nothing of one of Smaill’s more unusual injuries/afflictions, which was detailed in the New York Telegraph on March 18, 1908, the morning after the Montreal Wanderers played the Montreal Shamrocks in New York:

Walter Smaill, who played with the Wanderers, has the distinction of being the only man in this or any other country who has a silver-plated shin bone. Vicious blows from hockey sticks in the hands of his opponents in games he has played have from time to time so battered Smaill’s right leg below the knee that he was for a time retired from the game. He sought medical aid for months, but was compelled to continue the use of crutches until he visited a prominent surgeon in Quebec. The physician told him that the hurt could be remedied if he was willing to undergo a very tedious and painful operation. He consented at once.

Suffering the most excruciating pain, he permitted the surgeon to lay bare the bones of his leg an inch at a time and bind it with thin plates of silver. The operation required more than three months to complete, but was very successful.

Back in Montreal, the Gazette repeated the story the next day, under the headline HIS SILVER SHIN, but explained the original injury had actually occurred while playing a different sport. “The foundation for the story,” said the Gazette, “is that Smaill was laid up three years ago from a kick on the leg received in a [Quebec Rugby Football Union] game against Ottawa on Atwater Park.”

The whole truth of the story is difficult to confirm, but you can see below in this article from the Montreal Star on October 23, 1906, that Smaill did hurt his shin playing football for Westmount and would likely require surgery:

While he did miss the end of the 1906 football season, which wrapped up early in November, he was out for practice with the Montreal AAA hockey team by mid December.

Ironically , Smaill suffered the worst injury of his hockey career shortly after the appearance of the newspaper articles outlining his battered career. It occurred on February 21, 1918. Technically, Smaill had retired from hockey by then.

Having spent four seasons from 1911 to 1915 playing and living in Victoria, work took Smaill to Winnipeg in the summer of 1915. Having been granted free agency by the PCHA, he returned to Montreal for the winter of 1915–16 and played for the Wanderers in the NHA. Hockey at this time was suffering during the years of World War I. Many amateur leagues shut down for the duration, and several pro teams went out of business. Not surprisingly, salaries were slashed. A Toronto Star story from December 14, 1916, notes that Smaill had once earned as much as $200 per week to play hockey (probably a $2,000 contract for 10 weeks with Cobalt during the first NHA season of 1909–10), but was being offered only $40 per week to return to the Wanderers for the 1916–17 season. He quit hockey instead, and took a full-time job working for the YMCA in Winnipeg. In the fall of 1917, Smaill was appointed secretary of the YMCA for military athletics in the Winnipeg area. “Smaill has had a vast amount of experience in sport,” reported the Winnipeg Tribune on November 20, 1917, “and should be able to provide many attractive events for the khaki boys.”

Among the sports Smaill organized was a military hockey league, with three Winnipeg teams dubbed Vimy, Ypres, and Somme. (Future Hall of Famer Dick Irvin starred for Ypres, and led the league with 29 goals in just nine games played.) Smaill returned to the the ice with the Somme, and was injured in the final game of the season. A report in the Tribune on February 22, 1918, notes only that, “in clearing an attack Walter Smaill was badly hurt in the head and was obliged to retire.” The next day’s Manitoba Free Press tells more:

The greatest anxiety prevails among Walter Smaill’s friends on account of the serious reports received from the General hospital last night of his condition. On examination his skull was found to be fractured, and he had suffered a series of convulsions during the day and was unconscious the greater part of the time; it was found that the only relief can be found in an operation of a highly dangerous character. The physicians in charge of the patient believe there is either a blood clot on the brain or a piece of the broken bone pressing upon it.

When the accident happened at the Amphitheatre rink Thursday night in the Somme-Vimy game, the final of the schedule, Smaill and [Harry] Wilson were making an attempt to stop [Cecil] Browne who was going down at a rapid gait. The two Somme players bumped into each other and Smaill was a little overbalanced when he met Browne, and he fell heavily, his head striking the ice with terrific force. Though he was able to walk from the dressing room to the ambulance he was in a much more serious condition than at first believed.

There were concerns that Smaill’s injuries might prove fatal. As it was, he would spend five weeks in hospital before (as the Winnipeg Tribune would report on March 25, 1918), “his grand physique pulled him through in good style.” Even then, it was thought he would require another two or three weeks of recovery at home. He never played hockey again.

Smaill had suffered a dangerous head injury once before, in a manner similar to the way in which hockey star Hod Stuart had been killed in the summer of 1907. On July 1, 1909, Smaill and some friends were standing on a dock in Cartierville in the North End of Montreal. A woman dropped her glasses into the river, and she asked Smaill — an expert swimmer — if he would dive in and recover them. “He was told,” reported the Montreal Gazette on July 3, 1909, “the water at this point was sixteen feet deep, and so he dived almost straight down.” But the water was only three feet deep with a rocky bottom. “The result was that Smaill hit bottom with sufficient force to stun him, and he remained for a few moments head down in the river.” His friends thought he was just fooling around, and were laughing until “he suddenly came up with his face a mass of blood and bruises…. He was badly dazed, and was helped to the shore, where he soon recovered.”

Still, with all of his sporting mishaps, perhaps the closest Smaill ever came to death was while he was helping in the construction of the Victoria Arena he would play in for four seasons. Smaill told the story to Lloyd McGown of the Montreal Daily Star for a column on February 22, 1941:

I went to the Coast to play hockey for Lester [Patrick] in 1911. I went with Skinner Poulin, Dubby Kerr and Bobby Rowe… We went out to play for $1,500, which was more than we were making here in the East…. We went out in August of 1911. The Patricks were building the rinks at Victoria and Vancouver. Both rinks went up at the same time, so we went to the contractor for jobs—Poulin, Kerr and Rowe and I. We bought canvas aprons with pockets, T-squares, chisels and hammers. We helped build the rink to play in at 50 cents and hour.

I almost fell from the roof, about a sixty-foot drop to the ground. I happened to catch a scantling [a small cross-section of lumber] and there I hung with my feet dangling over the edge. Finally they lassoed my legs and hauled me up to safety. I was sick for three days. It was that close…. [T]he sports writer of The [Victoria] Times was there. ‘Walter, I thought you were done for,’ he told me.

After that, Smaill helped install the ice-making system in the Victoria rink. (The Patrick arenas in Vancouver and Victoria were the first in Canada to feature artificial ice.) “We helped lay 15 miles of pipes,” said Smaill. “When we got them down they had a test and found about 150 leaks. We had threaded the pipe-ends the wrong way, though a plumbing inspector was supposed to be overseeing the job. We weren’t very good plumbers.”

It’s stories like these that are the reason I find hockey of this era so fascinating!

It’s been almost four months since I last posted a story on my website. I don’t usually go this long, but I’ve been pretty busy since June, working on three manuscripts due to publishers between the start of September and the end of October. Two done, one still to go for anyone who’s interested…

There’s a lot I could be writing about now. The Blue Jays are — probably — headed for the postseason. But they’ve been so frustrating this year. Yes, I do believe (as I heard on the radio recently) that any team that actually makes the playoffs deserves to make the playoffs, but baseball used to be about excellence over a long season. I really don’t like the fact that, after treading water for most of the schedule, they could get hot at the right time and possibly win the American League pennant.

That’s so hockey!

And, of course, the hockey preseason is under way. I could write about the Maple Leafs. But they’ll probably have another excellent season that will be undermined by an early playoff flameout. (That’s so baseball!) Or, I could chime in on the Boston Bruins’ selection of their 100 “Historic Players” to kick off the team’s centennial celebrations. But, despite literally writing the book on Art Ross (and contributing stories about him, and his era, to the Bruins’ centennial book and upcoming documentary), I’m not really a Bruins guy. My thoughts — as with the NHL and the Leafs in recent years — is that these lists “are what they are” and that too many old-timers get overlooked.

So, what am I writing about today?

Well, admittedly, this one’s a bit quirky even by my quirky standards!

Recently, while looking for something else (the best stories get found that way!), I came across some interesting things about a long-ago goalie named Clarence Gorrie.

Now, aside from the three people I’ve asked for a bit of help from for this story, I figure there are probably only about three or four other people out there who will recognize that name. Unless you were a pretty rabid fan of Toronto hockey about 120 years ago, you’d have no reason to know of Gorrie. But still…

Clarence Gorrie started playing goal for the Toronto Marlboros at least as early as the winter of 1900–01 when the team played in the Toronto Lacrosse-Hockey League. When the Marlboros entered the Ontario Hockey Association for the 1902–03 season, Gorrie played for their intermediate team. However, after the junior team won the OHA championship that season, he was replaced by the junior team goalie in the intermediate finals. (That goalie was Eddie Giroux, later of the Kenora Thistles, and I’m pretty sure that Gorrie’s name stuck in my mind after researching Giroux for my 2022 book about the Thistles.)

Anyway, a story I stumbled across about Gorrie recently in the Montreal Gazette on October 27, 1903, mentioned him signing to play in Pittsburgh that winter, where Canadian players had been lured for a few years with the promise of being paid. Most of the Canadians were hired for cushy off-ice jobs, but everyone knew they were really being paid to play hockey, which often got them banned from playing back home in Canada, especially in Ontario, where the OHA championed amateur hockey over professionalism.

I checked for Gorrie on the web site of the Society for International Hockey Research. There were no stats for him playing with the Pittsburgh Bankers in 1903–04. It turns out the Toronto Star had the same story back on August 7. Still, I couldn’t find any stories about him actually playing in Pittsburgh. But since there were a lot of gaps in his SIHR stats record, I did a little poking around. Turns out, Gorrie actually played — with the OHA’s permission — for the Markham intermediate team in the winter of 1903–04 instead of in Toronto with any of the Marlboros teams. (Eddie Giroux and Tommy Phillips of the Thistles led the Marlboros senior team to an OHA championship that season, and on an unsuccessful Stanley Cup challenge of the Ottawa Silver Seven.) Gorrie also played at least one game with a Toronto team known as “the Fearnaughts” at a tournament in Markham in February of 1904.

No reason as to why Gorrie left the Marlboros intermediates — though maybe there was a bit of bad blood over his being replaced. Yet, it seems he was at least at the preseason workouts with the Marlboros seniors in 1904–05 when they were looking for a new goalie after Tommy Phillips convinced Giroux to head north to Kenora — still known as Rat Portage at the time.

I won’t go into all the whys and wherefores of where Gorrie played over the next few seasons — except to note that he served as the secretary of the Toronto Aquatic Hockey League in 1906–07 instead of playing with the new Toronto professional team that season that was a feature of Prime Minster Stephen Harper’s hockey book. (Gorrie — and the Aquatic league — are mentioned briefly in Harper’s book.) The league involved the Parkdale Canoe Club, Toronto Canoe Club, Toronto Rowing Club, the Argonauts Rowing Club, and the Balmy Beach Canoe Club. Gorrie was a member of the Toronto Canoe Club, though the only record I’ve seen that indicates he may have played for the team was a listing for one game showing a player named Gorrie at center. He did serve as a referee in some league games.

When he wasn’t playing hockey, Clarence Gorrie worked for the post office in Toronto. In the hockey news in The Globe on November 14, 1907, under the headline A HOCKEY ROMANCE, the following story appeared:

The staff of the general post office yesterday presented Clarence M. Gorrie, the well-known hockey player, with a silver tea service as a mark of esteem on the eve of his marriage.
The bride-to-be is Miss Rundle, a member of the Wellington ladies hockey team which aggregation was under the management of the groom…. Mr. Gorrie is a versatile athlete and widely popular.

So, Gorrie the goalie married a goalie!

Miss Vera Rundle played goal for the Wellington ladies team from the winter of 1904–05 though 1906–07. (It was probably not considered proper for her to continue playing after she was married.) Her sister Amy was a center. Toronto papers covered the team — and other women’s teams of this era — in pretty decent detail.

In reporting on one of the team’s early games, The Globe of January 18, 1905, said this:

The ladies’ hockey match, played last night on the Broadview Rink, was won by the Wellingtons, who defeated the Broadviews by a score of 4–0. The ladies did not play in crepe de chene, as some of the spectators imagined, but buckled down to hard work, donning white and red sweaters and short bicycling skirts.

The Toronto Daily Star on February 15, 1907, which reported on the Wellingtons’ second consecutive Ontario ladies hockey championship, said, “the game was by no means a burlesque. The girls were very much in earnest all the way, and considering the handicap afforded by three-quarter skirts, put up a very good exhibition of Canada’s national winter pastime.”

The Wellingtons defeated Waterloo by a score of 6–0. “The [team] is a well-balanced aggregation,” said the Star. “Miss Rundle in goal made many good stops.” As for her sister, “Miss Rundle, at center, a decidedly pretty girl, was very tired at the finish but she showed much ability while she was fresh. A jolt in the face from the butt end of a stick made her dizzy for a while, but she was plucky and continued.”

Though both families appear to be working class, The Globe gave a decent amount of space to the Gorrie-Rundle wedding in the paper on November 16, 1907. “The bride wore a pretty dress of pale grey. Her sister, Miss Amy Rundle, was bridesmaid, in a mauve colienne.”

The last records of Gorrie playing goal are from the 1908–09 season, but he stayed in the game as a refereee, and was still prominent enough that the Toronto Star considered this story newsworthy on December 10, 1921:

Clarence Gorrie the well-known OHA referee and ex-goal keeper of the famous Marlboros senior team [that would appear to be an error], has been promoted by the Post Office authorities to Woodstock. Clarence, who has spent ten of his fifteen years’ service at Postal Station E., Markham street, was yesterday presented with a handsome club bag by his fellow employees prior to his departure for Woodstock tonight.

The Gorries would live the rest of their lives in Woodstock, with Clarence coaching the local OHA junior team during the 1921–22 season. He passed away on March 22, 1952. Vera survived him for another 30 years. They are buried together in Woodstock at the Hillview Cemetery.

On May 2, 1967, the Toronto Maple Leafs won the Stanley Cup. It was the fourth time they’d won it in six seasons. Overall, in what was then the 50-year history of the NHL, the franchise had won the Stanley Cup 13 times; 11 since the team name had become Maple Leafs 40 years earlier. And how many times have they won it in the 56 years since then? Well, we all know the answer to that! It’s the longest Stanley Cup drought in NHL history.

When the city’s newspapers came out on May 2, 1967, they didn’t know yet that the Maple Leafs would win that night. Interestingly, they didn’t even consider the opportunity to win it to be front-page news. I don’t have access to the Toronto Telegram, but you can see the front page from the Toronto Daily Star and The Globe and Mail here:

Sports sections were a lot smaller back in 1967, but you can see that — even in the sports pages — the Stanley Cup news was limited to one page in each paper … and not even the full page:

Tonight, May 2, 2023, the Maple Leafs will face the Florida Panthers in the first game of their second-round playoff series. (Note that in 1967, the last year of the six-team NHL, it only took two playoff rounds to win the Stanley Cup.) I still get home delivery of the Toronto Star, and in my paper this morning you can see that Leafs news is featured on the front page (it may well have been even more prominent if not for the death of Gordon Lightfoot yesterday) and it fills the entire front page of the sports section:

Leafs news also dominates the next two pages inside the sports section (which is only six pages long these days):

And the Leafs also get space on two more pages in the front section:

What does all this mean?

Nothing, really.

I just thought it was kind of interesting.

Hope you do too.

Go Leafs Go!