Few were prepared for how the returning OHA president would respond. Robertson not only backed the expulsion of both Peel and McMillan, he went further—much further. Shortly before the 1904 annual meeting, he announced the expulsion of all senior lacrosse players from Ontario hockey—on his personal authority. Such a ruling would have a huge impact on the OHA game, as a great many of its top performers were lacrosse stars in summer.
While it was true that the CAAU had already labelled the Canadian Lacrosse Association a professional organization, the president was acting on dubious constitutional authority. It seemed more as if he was railing, Lear-like, at the professional world closing in around him.
There may, however, have been some method in Robertson’s apparent madness. The mass lacrosse expulsion galvanized opposition to his autocratic rule, but it also polarized debate about his control around an issue of principle. Threatening to resign, he quickly brought the executive behind the McMillan suspension, his lacrosse edict and the reversal of the Peel reinstatement.
These decisions also had immediate consequences that strengthened Robertson’s hand. By backing the McMillan expulsion he secured the continued participation of ally Francis Nelson and rid the executive of Gus Porter for good. Likewise, the lacrosse decision purged the body of opposition member Duff Adams, who was associated with Brantford’s lacrosse club. A general message had also been delivered to those thinking of attending the upcoming OHA convention: associate with lacrosse or hockey, but not both.
No doubt this dynamic was undercutting the campaign of Hamilton’s William Wyndham, who had decided to challenge for the presidency. Yet Robertson’s re-election bid did not restrict itself to executive manoeuvres. Prior to the convention, a slander campaign against Wyndham was launched by OHA-friendly papers across Ontario. The essence of the undertaking was, of course, to accuse the opponent of planning to scrap the OHA’s principles in favour of professionalism.
As a matter of fact, William Wyndham was not campaigning for professionalism—or even semi-professionalism—but against Robertson’s increasingly despotic leadership style. The challenger proposed, for example, to end secret proceedings at meetings of the OHA executive. This was a sharp rebuke to a body that included three high-ranking Toronto journalists. Nevertheless, the president had successfully framed the issue: it was about the Peel decision and amateur principles.
After the 1904 annual meeting of the OHA, no view of professionalism other than John Ross Robertson’s would be permitted.
The annual meeting of December 3, 1904, was stormy. Robertson began with a thundering defence of amateurism and the actions of the executive. In an unprecedented move, one executive member then took the floor to deliver a pointed rebuttal. Next, Nelson moved that the meeting back the reversal of the Peel reinstatement and his credentials to do so were challenged.
A heated debate raged for two hours but ended decisively. The removal of Peel was carried by a vote of 43–26. The annual meeting had asserted the principle “once a professional, always a professional” and forbade any future executive from reopening the question. Robertson defeated Wyndham by a wider margin, 49–22.
This meeting marked a turning point in the history of the Ontario Hockey Association. The forces of rigid amateurism, championed by President John Ross Robertson, had carried the day. They would not, however, be content with just their clear victory at the convention. Having gained the upper hand, Robertson and his supporters set out to drive all remaining dissent and debate from the organization.
The agenda of enforced conformity to the president’s views became evident shortly after the annual meeting. The OHA newspapers continued their assault on those who had opposed Robertson. Press allies Nelson and Hewitt had been reelected to the executive by acclamation. This, according to the president, was as it should be. After all, he had concluded, the “growing evil of canvassing for votes”32 was responsible for all the turmoil in the association.
Henceforth, Robertson instructed OHA clubs, delegates should come to the annual meeting unpledged and there should be no campaigning. As he put it: “Office should seek the man and not the man the office.” Likewise, all aspirants must have “the highest interests of amateurism at heart.”33
In other words, even as Doc Gibson’s bold embrace of open professionalism was changing top-level hockey in every other jurisdiction, amateurism had been declared absolute and eternal in Ontario. In its defence, and with the enemy all around him, John Ross Robertson was determined to rule—absolutely and forever.
• CHAPTER FOUR •
THE ROAD TO WAR
The Defection of the Marlboros
You know that Abe Lincoln said that the Union could not exist half slave and half free. I believe that the O.H.A. cannot honorably be half amateur and half professional.1
—JOHN ROSS ROBERTSON
With the Ontario Hockey Association’s amateurism permanently entrenched in its rules, John Ross Robertson’s executive launched the 1904–05 season with a renewed determination to stamp out professionalism. As a first line of defence, virtually no exceptions were permitted to the rule against change of residence after October 1. One so refused was a young Fred Taylor. This would prove to be an epic blunder by Robertson’s organization, creating yet another powerful opponent of the amateur order it sought to uphold.
In his 1977 biography, Frederick Wellington Taylor described the infamous moment that changed his hockey career forever. Preparing to leave the junior ranks in the fall of 1904, Taylor received a call from the OHA’s powerful secretary, W. A. Hewitt.2 Hewitt once again asked Taylor to join the Toronto Marlboros. When he refused, the angry executive “told me straight out, ‘All right, if you won’t play for the Marlboros, you won’t play anywhere!’… I never forgave Billy Hewitt for that.”3
The story has been widely referenced—and widely believed—ever since. It fits to a tee the modern-day image of the arbitrary, controlling nature of the amateur fanatics who ran the OHA of the early 1900s.4 It must be pointed out, however, that prominent hockey author Eric Zweig has recently questioned the veracity of the tale.
According to Zweig, the then ninety-three-year-old Taylor—a two-time winner of the Stanley Cup and early member of the Hockey Hall of Fame—had a notoriously unreliable memory. The last living player of his era, the legend often confused the facts of his career with the myths that had grown up around it. Zweig points to a number of instances where Taylor’s stories cannot be squared with contemporary newspaper reports. Even as a young man, Taylor had given conflicting accounts of his actual date of birth.5
Zweig goes on to raise some specific questions about the story. First, Hewitt had no formal connection to the Marlboro club, so why would he be recruiting for the Dukes? Second, is it not odd that, of some half-dozen clubs reported to be after Taylor in 1904, the Marlboros were not one of them?
These are good questions, but it is far from obvious that they exonerate the OHA secretary. For one thing, Hewitt’s lack of official connection to the Marlies does not mean he had no interest in their welfare. He was one of Toronto’s most important hockey organizers. As a league executive, he was also bitterly disappointed in the OHA’s failure to win the Stanley Cup the previous spring. The more pertinent question is: How emotionally vested was Hewitt in the Marlboros’ goal of becoming the association’s first Cup champion?
As Zweig admits, Hewitt would have known that the defending Ontario champs had some gaps in the lineup that needed addressing if they were to challenge again for the national trophy. True, it would have been highly unethical for the league secretary to do some recruiting on his own, all the while keeping the matter out of the newspapers (including his own Toronto Star). Of course, that doesn’t mean it did not happen. Hewitt was widely rumoured at the time to be willing to bend the rules to help the Marlboros. Furthermore, collusion between the OHA and key Toronto newspapers not only transpired, it was, in fact, notorious.
What is not disputed is that the OHA forbade T
aylor to move from his Listowel juniors to the intermediate squad in Thessalon. It is clear that other clubs were much closer to the boy’s home. It is even clearer that the OHA had an interest in stopping players from shopping themselves around—a habit that smacked of professionalism. Whatever the real reason, the OHA apparently could not accommodate Taylor, and the twenty-year-old star sat out the entire 1904–05 season.
Fred “Cyclone” Taylor. Was his story legend or myth?
Hewitt passed away many years before Taylor and apparently never said anything on the matter. In his biography, published nearly twenty years before Taylor’s, Hewitt glossed over the prodigy’s departure from the OHA. He remembered only that Fred had played in the junior final of 1904 and that “soon after, the young ‘Cyclone’ was pursued by professional clubs.”6 There are, of course, issues around memory and myth in Hewitt’s book as well, his story about Ottawa salting the ice in the Marlboros’ Stanley Cup challenge being the perfect illustration.
Regardless of what might have happened between Hewitt and Taylor, the result was far-reaching. Effectively banned by the OHA, the youthful prospect headed for Portage la Prairie of the quasi-pro Manitoba league the following season. There, he made the contacts that quickly led him down to the burgeoning pro hockey scene in the United States.
South of the border, Taylor would join the world rapidly building up around another OHA exile, Doc Gibson. Indeed, the season that Taylor left the OHA, 1904–1905, would be the one in which Gibson and a growing cast of hockey managers and players brought the International Hockey League into being. It united under one umbrella the clubs in Pittsburgh, Michigan’s “copper country” and Sault Ste. Marie on both sides of the border. It was hockey’s first unabashedly professional intercity league.
The Western Pennsylvania Hockey League had paid salaries before, but usually at a modest, fixed rate of $10 to $20 per week, supplemented by an outside “position.” In contrast, the IHL recruited and negotiated with players individually—that is, with true professional athletes. Some salaries were said to be over four figures for the short season, comparing well to sports like baseball and lacrosse. Beginning with the Portage Lakers, who had beaten the Federal league champion Montreal Wanderers in a “World Series” in March 1904, the IHL was assembling some of the best teams in hockey.
It was here that Taylor and others like him would hone the skills and images that define the career pro athlete. At this, no one was better than young Fred. As adept at promotion off the ice as he was at performance on it, he was rapidly evolving into the man that Governor General Earl Grey would famously dub the “Cyclone,” a name that stuck so firmly that few people remember his Christian one.
And so, an OHA ban gave birth to “Cyclone Taylor,” the professional game’s first colourful superstar, and he would prove to be a key to the building of the widespread fan base the sport required.
Back in the Canadian hockey world—at least outside Ontario—the pace of change was accelerating. The eastern hockey war was getting more intense and more complex. The Federal Amateur Hockey League grew stronger. The champion Wanderers had fought a tough but inconclusive Stanley Cup series against Ottawa in the spring of 1904. Now the Silver Seven were joining the wandering “Redbands” in the new circuit.
The Canadian Amateur Hockey League answered by enticing the Nationals to switch associations and by adding a new club from Westmount. The Federal League retaliated by substituting a rival Francophone club, the Montagnards, and placing a team in Brockville, Ontario. Eastern hockey had gone from five elite teams to eleven in just two years.
Competition to the CAHL was also coming from more distant corners. The Manitoba league was the base of a growing powerhouse, the Rat Portage Thistles, who had startled the hockey establishment in the 1905 playoffs by dispensing entirely with “lifting” in favour of greater “combination.” In effect, instead of clearing the puck from their end by backhanding it high and pursuing it, the Thistles rushed from the defence and transitioned to offence through passing and puck control. They came within a hair of taking the Stanley Cup.
Dawson City Nuggets (1904–05). The Klondike team got slaughtered, but left no doubt that the Stanley Cup was now a truly national championship.
Cup competition was becoming truly national. As early as 1900, for instance, the first Maritime team, the Halifax Crescents, had played for the trophy. However, 1904–05 would feature the most memorable—and most disastrous—attempt ever at Lord Stanley’s mug. Entrepreneur and adventurer Joe Boyle spent $10,000 and took three weeks to move the Dawson City Nuggets 4,000 miles from Yukon, only to lose to Ottawa by scores of 9–2 and 23–2. Frank McGee’s fourteen-goal performance in the second Cup match will never be equalled.
The expanding range of Stanley Cup contenders, the cost of challenges and the increasing movement of players confirmed a growing certainty that financial inducements were involved. This was doubtlessly true in both Quebec and Manitoba. Yet the Montreal-based Canadian Amateur Athletic Union, tightly tied to the eastern leagues and their financial interests, had none of the OHA’s zeal for investigation. Besides, those leagues weren’t just in the midst of their own player war, they were now also fighting the commercial pull of the new International circuit.
Whereas the Toronto-centric hockey realm was ideologically opposed to this professionalism, the Montreal-dominated region was pragmatically adapting. Robertson’s OHA dismissed every departure of a young star to the United States with “good riddance.” Indeed, it had proactively exiled any athlete who also played lacrosse—and in the summer that was a fair number. Conversely, the eastern and other “amateur” leagues wanted those players to come back from the States. They bid accordingly. Thus, there was a growing transit of players between the International and the Canadian senior leagues—except for the hidebound OHA.
The Ontario Hockey Association was becoming increasingly vocal about the CAAU’s growing tendency to “whitewash” such obvious violations of amateur standing. In the case of lacrosse, the national governing body was in essence allowing the sport to professionalize. As Robertson had told the annual meeting:
The Canadian Amateur Athletic Union, whose headquarters are at Montreal … has so far retrograded from its natural and essential position that it has offered to declare as amateurs all the professionals in the country if they will only join some organization that will affiliate with the C.A.A.U.7 (emphasis added)
Nevertheless, the OHA was still prepared to permit games between its clubs and those of the supposedly amateur, but less pristine, Canadian leagues.
The OHA had to, if it wanted to win the Stanley Cup.
And there is no doubt that the Ontario Hockey Association, which rated itself the nation’s best hockey organization, still wanted to win the Cup that had become so emblematic of the championship of the Dominion. As the 1904–05 season got under way, the OHA’s greatest hope again rested with the Toronto Marlboros. As the year progressed, there were more questions about how far the association—Secretary Hewitt, in particular—was prepared to go to help them get it.
The Marlboros began the season with some big holes to fill. Tom Phillips had returned to Rat Portage and taken goaltender Eddie Giroux with him. Stalwart defender Doc Wright had retired. And veteran Frank McLaren was lost in the OHA’s lacrosse decision.
There were, however, some new bright lights in the Dukes’ lineup. Chuck Tyner was an all-round athlete and quality goalkeeper. McMaster University student Rolly Young was known as a talented stickhandler and tough defenceman (or sometimes rover). And at right wing was a new offensive star, Bruce Ridpath.
“Riddy,” as the fans knew him, would quickly become the Queen City’s most popular athlete. He had come up through the Westerns, an OHA junior team associated with Toronto’s Parkdale Canoe Club. Indeed, Ridpath was such an accomplished canoeist that he would give mass exhibitions of canoe and paddling stunts—from headstands using the portaging thwart to “jumping” the canoe fast through the water by ridin
g the gunwales. So in demand was the “aquatic wonder”8 that Bruce would perform throughout North America and Europe in the offseason. Though small, Riddy was exceptionally fit, fast and surprisingly ready to mix it up. The fans loved him.
The Marlboros had another stellar season. They breezed through all the way to a first-game victory in the Ontario final against Smiths Falls at the Mutual Street Rink. They had scored eight goals on a future goaltending legend, Percy LeSueur, while allowing only three.
Then trouble hit.
On the return trip to the eastern Ontario town, the game turned very rough. Due to injuries, the teams were down to five a side at the half, with the champs losing 6–4. The smaller Marlboros, claiming that all but two players were unable to continue, refused to take the ice for the second half.
Standard practice at this point would have been to declare the game a forfeit. Instead, referee Rose called the match off and referred the matter to the OHA executive. Smiths Falls went crazy. A red-faced Hewitt was sent packing by the local club without any gate receipts.
Newspaper accounts of what transpired vary wildly. In Smiths Falls (and a few other places), they brushed it off as a hard-hitting game with some accidental injuries. The Toronto papers (and their network of allies) labelled it a bloodbath.
Toronto Marlboros (1904–05). This OHA senior champion would provide the nucleus of the future Toronto Professionals. Standing: T. Harmon, A. H. Birmingham, R. Burns, J. Earls, F. St. Leger, T. Welch, E. Marriott. Sitting: W. Slean, H. Armstrong, B. Andrews, P. Charlton, E. Winchester, C. Tyner, W. Smith. Reclining: R. Young, H. Birmingham, B. Ridpath.
The game likely was quite dirty, but there was a story behind it. Referee Rose had called twelve penalties against Smiths Falls, versus just two against Toronto. The home team was clearly seeking revenge for rough play by the Marlboros at Mutual. There, a “hard body check”9 by Rolly Young, severe enough to warrant a major penalty, had put one of the Smiths Falls players out of the game.
A Great Game Page 7