A Great Game

by Stephen J. Harper

  That said, in the amateur era only a small part of the action took place with the puck or on the ice. The terms “visitors” and “home” were not mere labels on a score sheet. The Victorias were expected not only to provide the competition inside the rink, but to host the Wellingtons away from it as well. Mrs. J. C. Armytage, spouse of the club president, offered the Iron Dukes a bouquet of pink and white carnations at the conclusion of game one. The “Bisons” promptly followed up by hosting the Iron Dukes at a local theatre.

  After game two, the victors banqueted their guests at the Queen’s Hotel—the same hotel that had been kind enough to supply the Wellingtons with food and refreshments in their dressing rooms. Senior officials of the two clubs rose in turn to toast the hard but gentlemanly play of their opponents throughout the series. The Wellingtons’ Miln was particularly diplomatic: “The Victorias are all good sports and play good hockey. Our boys are not at all sore over their defeat, but are proud to think that they gave the champions of the world such a hard rustle for their win.”25

  The next morning, the Victorias gave the Wellingtons one final breakfast banquet before passing them over to other city dignitaries. The rival Winnipeg Hockey Club provided a luncheon for the men at the Commercial Club. They were then taken by Mrs. E. L. Drewry, the Victorias’ “Lady Patron,” who hosted a reception for 200 in honour of the Iron Dukes, who received “three hearty cheers”26 upon arrival. Unfortunately, a trip to Silver Heights to view the buffalo had to be cancelled due to the freezing weather. The evening concluded pleasantly, nevertheless, in the officers’ mess of the Canadian Mounted Rifles.

  This is Lord Stanley’s trophy as it looked after 1903. It’s a safe bet the early champs found it a lot easier to hoist over their heads.

  Although there was no third game, hospitality extended into Saturday the 25th. At noon, the Wellingtons were the guests of honour for a luncheon at the Cavalry Barracks put on by Major Gardiner. The final reception was hosted by a Mrs. R. F. Manning, the purpose of which was to have the fellows entertain some local young ladies. In charmingly chivalrous wordage, it was noted that “their success in this particular was even more marked than against the Victorias.”27

  Needless to say, the Wellingtons could expect no less attention from their hometown. A crowd, smaller than expected due to “Arctic weather” and a seven-hour train delay, greeted the Wellingtons at Union Station. With Mayor Oliver Howland in tow, President Robertson, who had transmitted laudatory telegrams to the boys throughout, led the delegation in “three cheers and a tiger for the plucky Wellingtons!”28 He and his executive then promptly took the crew for dinner.

  The Toronto Wellingtons, also known as the Iron Dukes, were the city’s first genuine hockey dynasty. This picture shows the club as it neared the end of its four-year reign. Standing: A. Ardagh, M. Irish, W. Lamont, W. Loudon, W. Smart, C. Pringle. Sitting: J. Worts, I. Ardagh, G. Chadwick, C. Hill, F. McLaren. Reclining: A. Miln.

  A grand public reception awaited the team as the players arrived at Shea’s Theatre later that evening. They were escorted to boxes decorated in the team’s red and white for the purpose of viewing the show. However, time and again cheers broke out for the hometown heroes, all interest in the performance being utterly forgotten. It mattered not in the least that the Wellingtons had lost. The club, as one local paper observed, “by their gallant and sportsmanlike conduct, both on and off the ice, attained to a degree of popularity far greater than was ever before.”29

  The Wellingtons returned the accolades. They prominently published thanks to their supporters along with a detailed list of the patrons who had underwritten the eleven-day trip to Winnipeg. It was noted that the whole affair, after a $1,000 share of the gate, had almost broken even.

  However, none of the generous hospitality or kind words directed towards the Torontonians by the Winnipeggers should suggest that this had been a tame affair. The national championship was on the line in what was regarded as a tough, manly sport. By the end of the two matches the Iron Dukes, to use the phraseology of the day, were “badly used up.”

  The Victorias had sensed the relatively poor conditioning of the Wellingtons early in the Toronto season30 and had taken the body to them with a vengeance. One Toronto player had a dislocated shoulder. Another sported damage around the eye. Yet another hobbled on a crippled leg. One was so sick with injuries he had to leave Shea’s early (and was later diagnosed with a mild case of scarlet fever). The Vics were not pristine either, one member having a badly damaged rib cage.

  It should be noted that the beginnings of a less genteel era were also on display in Winnipeg. At halftime of game two, a large black Newfoundland dog suddenly appeared on the ice surface, pursued by a frantic owner. More serious was the crush when the auditorium gates had opened for the series, a stampede and critical injuries being only narrowly averted. And pure hooliganism occurred when youths who had been shut out climbed high in the building and smashed some upper windows to gain free admission. The times, indeed, were changing, although few then realized how quickly those changes would come.

  Following the Stanley Cup challenge, the Wellingtons went on to win the Ontario senior series again in 1901–02 and an unprecedented fourth consecutive title the following year. They were known to be actively planning another run at the Cup when, at their annual banquet on November 30, 1903, the club abruptly announced it was disbanding. Too many veterans, it seems, would be unavailable—and irreplaceable—for the coming season.

  The Vics were the first non-Montreal team to win the Stanley Cup. They were a formidable opponent for anyone.

  Chummy Hill, with the Wellingtons since their inception, was just one player reported to have broken down upon the news of their demise. In fact, Toronto’s OHA establishment—including team patron John Ross Robertson—was stunned by the unexpected end of the venerable club. The OHA had laboured mightily to create the perfect order in hockey in the province and the Iron Dukes represented the epitome of its ideals.

  In truth, the series between the Toronto Wellingtons and Winnipeg Victorias was the last gasp of the gentleman amateur in Stanley Cup play. Before the end of 1901–02, the Vics would lose the championship to the Montreal AAA. That team would, at the end of the next season, defect en masse to the newly formed Montreal Wanderers—a decidedly entrepreneurial act that certainly hinted at professionalism. The Cup itself would be taken by the Ottawa Silver Seven. They were a gang not merely suspected of accepting pay, but employing dirty play as part of a deliberate strategy of winning at all cost.

  In other words, the demise of the Wellingtons would prove to be a relatively minor blow to hockey’s old order. Much bigger challenges were about to confront the amateur world that John Ross Robertson had sought to entrench.

  • CHAPTER THREE •

  THE ENEMY IN THE OPEN

  The Ascent of the Marlboros

  We have met the enemy and he is us.

  —POGO (COMIC-STRIP CHARACTER CREATED BY WALT KELLY)1

  The great irony of the efforts John Ross Robertson and his cohort undertook to preserve the amateur order is the degree to which those efforts would serve to undermine it. More than once, in their search for an enemy, the Ontario Hockey Association brain trust would create one. Their first such target was Jack Gibson. It all began with that $10 coin Gibson received from the mayor of Berlin (later Kitchener), Ontario, in 1898—a coin he never asked for and in fact had offered to return.

  Gibson was a local boy and an accomplished athlete who excelled in virtually every sport he took up: lacrosse, baseball, rowing, swimming, cycling, soccer, curling, cricket, tennis and skating. He played his first organized hockey when he was sent to Pickering College, a private school in what was then a rural setting just east of Toronto. At fifteen, he was captain of the school team. At seventeen, he was a member of the Berlin intermediate team that was soon to be disgraced by the OHA’s heavy-handed actions. Even though the players’ suspensions were to be lifted at the end of the season, the exp
erience had a profound effect on the handsome young hockey star.2

  Doc Gibson. When the Ontario Hockey Association exiled John Liddell MacDonald Gibson, it turned out to be one in a series of grand miscalculations by John Ross Robertson’s organization. The wandering Gibson would become “the father of professional hockey.”

  Gibson moved from his Ontario hometown to Detroit, where he played some non-OHA hockey and studied dentistry. He then settled in the copper-mining town of Houghton, on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where he set up a dental practice. There, in 1900, “Doc” Gibson would establish the Portage Lake Hockey Club, giving it Berlin’s green and white colours. With the 200-pound Gibson as its star, and bolstered by other Canadians from Gibson’s Detroit college team, Portage Lake soon emerged as a force. At one point, Houghton ran off fourteen straight victories, defeating all comers in the States and some reputable Canadian challengers as well.

  Then, in the fall of 1903, Gibson made a momentous decision. He resolved to make his Houghton Portage Lakers hockey’s first avowedly professional club. Setting out to build the strongest possible team in an area with few homegrown recruits, he determined that he would openly remunerate the players by dividing any gate receipts among them.

  For the OHA zealots, the enemy had finally come into the open. However, this adversary was no longer some callow youngster suspected—rightly or wrongly—of breaking the finer interpretations of ancient dogma. Gibson’s action was to rapidly transform paid hockey from a hidden and isolated exception to a systemic development across clubs and leagues. The kid with the $10 coin who had been driven into OHA exile was about to become the “father of professional hockey.”

  The first effects of Gibson’s move were felt in other parts of Michigan and neighbouring northern Ontario, specifically in Sault Ste. Marie. The birth of a pro team in the Canadian “Soo” was perhaps inevitable. The city had built a large arena, incurring much debt in the process. There being no serious OHA competition in the area, the city’s newly formed Algonquin Hockey Club turned to the only nearby rival: a competitor of Gibson’s in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, that the OHA clearly considered professional. The Canadian-side Algonquins said they would rather remain amateur, but according to the rules of the day, they were branded as professional as soon as they skated out against the team from across the St. Marys River.

  Semi-professionalism had already taken hold in another U.S. state, hundreds of miles south of Gibson’s Michigan realm. In 1896, the Western Pennsylvania Hockey League had been founded in Pittsburgh.3 After a false start (the local arena burned down that December), the WPHL was relaunched in 1899, making its home in an enormous, modern arena called the Duquesne Gardens. In addition to its status as a former streetcar barn, what set the Gardens apart from other rinks was its still-novel artificial-ice plant. The league needed paying fans to cover its costs. However, just as had happened in Michigan, hockey in the Pittsburgh area saw its status as a spectator sport quickly outgrow its local talent pool, creating a market for paid players. As early as 1901–02, the Pittsburgh league had been drawing quality Canadian players with promises of modest dollars and side jobs. And in 1903, the WPHL champion Pittsburgh Bankers met, and were narrowly defeated by, the Portage Lakers for the first-ever “United States Hockey Championship.” John Ross Robertson’s Telegram had run an exposé on the organization’s professionalism, leading—not surprisingly—to an OHA ban against any Ontario boy who might play there.

  These commercial pressures south of the border were already having repercussions in Canada. For example, the new Stanley Cup champions, the Ottawa Hockey Club, had seen their clandestine payroll creep from a nominal $100 to about $250 in the preceding years. Battles over anything with financial implications—league membership, scheduling dates, Cup challenges—were thus growing ever more serious in eastern hockey. The combination of the overt demands of hockey’s popularity with the covert ones of its sham amateurism could not be contained by the sport’s existing structures for much longer.

  On December 1, 1903, came the announcement of a rival to Canada’s elite eastern hockey league. Since its founding in 1886, the Amateur Hockey Association of Canada—which became the Canadian Amateur Hockey League in 1898—had been the country’s leading organization. Yet, during a period of rapidly expanding interest in the sport, it consisted of just five clubs: Montreal’s Wheelers (a.k.a. the AAA), Victorias and Shamrocks, plus the Quebec Bulldogs and Ottawa Silver Seven.4 That exclusivity had been the key to maintaining the calibre of play and the league’s dominance. But it had also engendered increasing controversy and resentment that contributed to the rise of the new Federal Amateur Hockey League.

  The Federal League—loosely, a successor to an Ottawa-based league called the Central Canada Hockey Association—would consist of organizations long shut out of the older circuit: Cornwall, the Capital club of Ottawa and the Francophone Nationals of Montreal.

  However, it was the flagship English Montreal team that really raised eyebrows: the suitably named Wanderers.5 Not backed by any established athletic club, the Wanderers became a contender overnight with the defection of virtually the entire roster of the Montreal Wheelers. The “Little Men of Iron,” who had lost the Stanley Cup the previous spring, claimed to have been badly treated by Wheelers management. They were joined by a couple of disgruntled Victorias. The Montreal amateur authorities were blissfully unconcerned about local star players apparently receiving better offers to leave their clubs and suit up with the Wanderers.

  The establishment CAHL initially scoffed at the upstart circuit, only to have its position gravely weakened when the champion Ottawa Silver Seven abruptly quit the older league during the 1903–04 season. In taking the Stanley Cup with them, as well as toying with membership in the FAHL, they had measurably altered the balance of power in eastern hockey. The Silver Seven were soon to establish an on-ice rivalry and business camaraderie with the Wanderers that would dominate hockey for almost a decade.

  In short, the two best teams in Canadian hockey, the Silver Seven and the Wanderers, were now professional in all but name.

  With embryonic professional hockey taking hold on its eastern and northern fringes, the OHA held its fourteenth annual meeting at Toronto on December 5, 1903. Notwithstanding the changing landscape around it, the organization was strong and united under the ironclad control of John Ross Robertson. Its more open nature (compared to the CAHL) had brought the association wealth and growth, facts for which it never ceased congratulating itself.

  Ottawa Silver Seven (1904–05). The defection of this Stanley Cup champion, a tough and sometimes dirty team, to the new Federal Amateur Hockey League showed that the hockey world’s order was changing rapidly.

  President Robertson did have some concerns. He scolded the growing trend of “offside interference” (essentially, forward blocking). He also bemoaned slackness in the wearing of uniforms, which he declared part of the “harmony, propriety and attractiveness of the game.”6 However, secure in his office, his fire was largely turned outward—and upward.

  Robertson launched into a lengthy denunciation of the nation’s governing sports body, the Canadian Amateur Athletic Union. He decried not only the CAAU’s Montreal-centric nature, but also its lax enforcement of amateur principles. He noted, for example, that amateurism had hit “a low ebb”7 at all levels of baseball. Tired of waiting for the CAAU to deal with the situation, he instead called for the blanket banning of all baseball players from Ontario hockey.

  W. J. Bellingham. Billy “Turkey” Bellingham appears to be the first man to attempt to organize a professional Toronto Hockey Club, in the fall of 1903.

  On one level, Robertson’s suspicion of baseball was understandable. Less than two months earlier, the first modern World Series had been played between the Boston Americans of the American League and the National League’s Pittsburgh Pirates. It had been a sensation. Ropes were required to hold back overflow crowds at Pittsburgh’s Exposition Park and Boston’s Huntington
Avenue Baseball Grounds. Boston won the best-of-nine series in eight games, but not before more than 100,000 fans had paid for tickets and shelled out even more in wagers.8

  Baseball was the first incontrovertibly professional team sport. Robertson no doubt saw this as a U.S. phenomenon, but in fact, professionalism was appearing in all the games that were native to either side of the North American border. And, of course, it did not follow from the rampant commercialism of the World Series that every baseball player at every level in Ontario was being secretly paid.

  Robertson clearly viewed any professionalism, in any sport, anywhere, as a challenge for the OHA. Although this view was clearly extreme, there was evidence that the murky semi-professionalism of the Montreal hockey world could impact affairs in amateur Toronto.

  For the past month, W. J. “Turkey” Bellingham, one of the Wheeler defectors, had been in town. His main purpose seems to have been to put together a team of nonlocal players—to be called, rather oddly, the Toronto Hockey Club.9 The Federal League was reputed to be looking to place such a franchise in its circuit. In any case, the scheme fizzled and Bellingham returned to Montreal.

  The upshot, however, was that Robertson, not content to limit OHA jurisdiction to its own rink, called for consideration of a new national governing body for Canadian sports—one that would be stricter and more representative of the country as a whole. The meeting passed a unanimous motion giving him a mandate to pursue the project. This was a sign not only of his power in the OHA, but also of his growing influence on the Canadian sports scene. To leave no doubt, at the OHA annual banquet there were only two toasts on the menu—one to the King and the other to Robertson.

  President John Ross Robertson would soon be joined by another influential media ally. The late 1903 meeting concluded with the election of W. A. Hewitt as secretary of the OHA. An all-round sportsman as well as sports editor of the Toronto Star, Hewitt would use his newspaper address for association business. President Robertson of the Toronto Telegram and First Vice-President Francis Nelson of the Toronto Globe were again elected by acclamation. There would not be much doubt as to how these papers would come down on future OHA controversies.