A Great Game

by Stephen J. Harper

  Back in Toronto in the late spring, J. J. Palmer had sold most of his share in the Caledonian properties to a larger consortium. This land, which was substantially larger than the area occupied by the Mutual Street Rink, had been intended for the famous “new rink.” His manager, Alexander Miln, had long promised such. In fact, in the fall of 1910, Miln had returned from New York with plans for precisely such a modern, steel structure. Building materials had even appeared at the site.

  Maybe Robertson thought the whole thing of no consequence. After all, Miln’s opposition to any professional tenant in a Mutual Street building was well known. However, Miln was away in England at the time of the sale. The new principals—who hailed from both Toronto and Montreal—promptly removed him and put a new man in his place.

  The new manager also had connections to both Toronto and Montreal. He was a Toronto businessman and a former star player in Montreal hockey. He was W. J. Bellingham, the first man to have attempted to form a Toronto professional hockey club back in the fall of 1903.

  And this time, the powerful interests behind Bellingham were determined that pro hockey would come to Toronto to stay.

  • CHAPTER TWELVE •

  THE REVENGE OF HISTORY

  A New and Stronger Toronto Hockey Club Emerges

  Toronto could do with pro hockey of the best brand, though it rather turns up its nose at the kind that loses championships to Galt, Berlin and other rural constituencies.1

  —Toronto Telegram

  In his occupational heart, John Ross Robertson always remained a journalist. As such, he sometimes mixed the two motives that animate his vocation. Believing events to be important, he wanted to shape them as much as report them. And, regardless of his own worldview, he wished to demonstrate objectivity and insight into what was transpiring. The quote above, from the Telegram, may be both. No doubt it was motivated by the ongoing desire of Robertson and his amateur colleagues to denigrate the Ontario Professional Hockey League. In the process, however, it betrayed an understanding that Torontonians’ hockey aspirations were not exactly in line with the ideals of Robertson’s Ontario Hockey Association.

  The amateur zealots of the OHA and its Toronto papers had also fundamentally misjudged the recent developments in professional hockey. As commercial clubs and leagues came and vanished with increasing and shocking rapidity, they saw what, in an amateur environment, would be only disorder and disunity. Yet, in the world of enterprise, what was occurring was the conquest of weaker participants and networks by competitors that were growing ever stronger. A solid group of essentially volunteer organizations surrounded the Allan Cup. However, out of the apparent chaos of Stanley Cup competition, far more powerful structures were emerging. As amateur leaders celebrated their segregated existence, pro hockey was quietly laying the groundwork for its longer-term supremacy in the sport.

  The purchase of the old Caledonian properties by the 1911 consortium was one step in this progression. The group, headed by Toronto’s Sir Henry Pellatt—the man who brought hydroelectricity to the city and was using his enormous wealth to build Casa Loma—also included Montreal interests. These Quebec owners were closely connected to the National Hockey Association.

  The NHA intended to rip the old Mutual Street building down, construct a big new rink and place a franchise in Toronto. A modern artificial-ice arena would ensure a viable commercial season for the full length of Toronto’s unreliable winters. The new rink would also serve a range of other public functions, including selling ice to the populace in the summer.

  Important as it was, the planned arrival of big-time eastern pro hockey in Toronto in 1911–12 was just one in a series of historic developments in the sport that season. The fall of 1911 is the moment when, in retrospect, the era of the professional domination of hockey began to first take shape. And its most significant events that year took place on the West Coast.

  That’s where the Patricks—later to be christened “Hockey’s Royal Family”—had just relocated.

  Joe Patrick had been in the lumber business in Quebec and Ontario before moving his family to Nelson, British Columbia, in 1907. Joe’s eldest son, Lester, had been born in Drummondville, Quebec, in 1883; younger brother Frank came along two years later in Ottawa. They would learn the game in the East, but they would own the game in the West, both figuratively and literally. The Patricks’ effect on the sport would be nothing short of profound.

  The Patrick boys were already well known as superb hockey players. A third brother, Ted, was expected to do just as well, but had any such dreams cut short when he lost his right leg in a sledding accident.2 Ted played anyway, anchoring his peg—at the age of nineteen, he switched to an artificial wooden leg—to the ice while pivoting. He was said by family members to have been good enough to play professional hockey but for his handicap.3

  Lester and Frank, who both played at McGill University, went on to become professionals. Lester famously performed for the Montreal Wanderers in their Stanley Cup days, including the March 1907 exhibition encounter at Mutual against Alex Miln’s Professionals. More recently, both had suited up with Renfrew’s Millionaires in 1909–10. Convinced that pro hockey had a bright future, they persuaded their father to invest the proceeds from the sale of the lucrative family enterprise in their idea for a new league.

  The Patrick family’s Pacific Coast Hockey Association would be a league unlike any other. What made the PCHA unique was that the professional sport had, to date, evolved largely through the conversion of the amateur game’s top level. Conversely, the Pacific Coast league was a completely novel and wholly commercial organization. Its rise was an unmistakable sign that the pro game was creating its own structures and, in the process, fundamentally altering the nature of the sport.

  The first big difference was the character of the PCHA entries. The association’s Vancouver, Victoria and New Westminster squads would not be built around any pre-existing entities and would all be owned by the Patricks. In fact, Frank would play for, coach and manage the team in Vancouver, while Lester would do the same for the one in Victoria. The purists thus derided the PCHA as mere “syndicate hockey,” by which they meant that its component organizations had no membership, no history, no tradition, no real existence in the conventional sense. They were teams, not clubs—mere franchises of the syndicate that ran the league.

  While the critics were entirely correct about hockey’s heritage, it was the Patricks who had grasped its future. Unlike its amateur forerunner, pro hockey was a commercial business, not a network of gentlemen’s clubs. As a business, the profitability of the venture would ultimately depend upon the soundness of the enterprise as a whole. The league, not the club, had to be the ultimate focus if the undertaking were to succeed.

  The National Hockey Association had stumbled upon the “syndicate hockey” concept when it established the Montreal Canadiens in 1909. The Canadiens were, in effect, the first purely “manufactured” big-league franchise in hockey history. They had been similarly denounced, only to quickly earn the highest loyalty of the French Canadian hockey fan. The PCHA’s uniqueness, however, went beyond its complete syndicate nature.

  The PCHA franchises would be located in what was a spectator, rather than a player, environment. B.C.’s Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island were the only parts of Canada where hockey had been essentially a foreign sport. It could be sustained in the West Coast climate only through artificial ice. The Patricks were therefore building the country’s first such rinks: the 10,500-seat Denman Street Arena in Vancouver, then the largest in the country, and the 3,500-seat Willow Arena in Victoria. Pro hockey, it was being discovered, did not depend on player pools or indigenous institutions, but on modern facilities and the urban markets that could sustain them.

  The new league was distinct in yet another way: the Patrick brothers’ view that they could rewrite the rules of the sport to sell it as a commercial product. For years, they had brainstormed on how to open up the game and make it more exciting.
Their proprietary league would be employed to test-market these theories.

  The NHL official rule book contains some twenty-two entries that can be linked to Frank’s innovations—the creation of the blue line, which divided the rink into three zones, being the most notable. The Patricks are credited with inventing the forward pass, the penalty shot, delayed calls, line changes, a playoff format and, finally, a rule allowing goaltenders to leave their feet to make a save.4

  Such innovations are as legendary as the Patrick name itself.

  While most of the Patrick rule changes were still some years off, it was the NHA that introduced the seminal changes of 1911–12. Foremost was the announcement that the league was shifting to six-man hockey. The rover would be eliminated from the game.

  The reason for the disappearance of the rover—until then the key man in the lineup—is still somewhat of a mystery. No explanation was ever made public, although it was alleged the NHA needed to cut rosters to deal with ongoing salary pressures. However, once the position was eliminated, the game flowed more quickly and the innovation gradually became more popular. Along with the rover, the positions of point and cover point withered away, with defencemen tending increasingly to “left” and “right” positions. The “T” formation inexorably gave way to the more familiar triangle configuration.

  The NHA also introduced on-ice substitutions and, consequently, player numbers. Combined with the switch from two halves to three periods and two intermissions—unveiled the previous season—the pace of the action was stepped up, as performers rested in the dressing room or on the bench instead of on the ice. All this also had the effect of prolonging the careers of star veterans entering their thirties. They could now conceivably go the distance against twenty-somethings at the peak of their physical prowess.

  All these changes were interrelated. No rover meant more room on the ice and a faster game. A faster game led to a need for rest and substitution, which produced bigger lineups and therefore numbers to identify the players. Of course, all this would seem to disprove the allegation that the rover was eliminated to reduce payroll.

  Yet the NHA’s most anticipated change for the fall of 1911 was its expected expansion to Toronto. Almost immediately after its consortium got control of the Mutual Street properties, the association sold a franchise to interests connected with the Toronto Lacrosse Club, including Percy Quinn and Frank Robinson. Percy, the brother of league president Emmett Quinn, was most noted in hockey circles as a referee. He had initially been named ref of the Wanderers–Torontos Stanley Cup match of 1908, although he was ultimately unavailable. He had also emerged as an executive member of the Interprovincial Amateur Hockey Union through his connection to the Toronto Athletics.

  It is interesting to note that the franchise sold to Quinn and company—for the modest sum of $2,000—was the O’Briens’ original les Canadiens. This meant, in effect, that two NHA teams now traced their roots to that franchise. One was the new Toronto club, its legal heir, while the other was evidently the team using the name Montreal Canadiens.

  Percy Quinn had been an executive with the Toronto Lacrosse Club, the Toronto Amateur Athletic Club and the Interprovincial Amateur Hockey Union. However, it was his connection to his brother Emmett, president of the NHA, that secured the new Toronto Hockey Club franchise for Percy.

  The Toronto Lacrosse Club’s crosstown rival, the Tecumseh Lacrosse Club, was rather unhappy about the NHA’s favouritism towards Quinn and his organization. It demanded a team of its own. The league hummed and hawed for a while, but ultimately had no choice in the matter. Lol Solman, the managing director of the new arena company, was also the proprietor of the Tecumsehs. He reminded the association he had been granted a franchise back in 1909. With Solman to be in control of Toronto’s new arena, the NHA was obliged to live up to that promise.

  The Tecumsehs were then managed by Charlie Querrie. Querrie had long been the lacrosse club’s boss and star performer. Once a decent hockey player, he had desired to play professionally. He was, however, past his prime when the original Torontos came to town in late 1906.

  What finally allowed the Tecumsehs to enter the NHA was the preseason decision by the O’Briens to sell their hometown Renfrew club, the last of their hockey holdings. They got $2,500 the second time round. Still, it was not enough to compensate for the Millionaires’ two seasons of red ink with no Stanley Cup to show for them.

  The death of Renfrew’s Cup pursuit was yet another example of the failure to build a championship team out of exclusively star performers. It was also the historic end of small-town competition for the national professional championship. As the amateur advocates of the OHA had long claimed, small-market clubs were gradually being squeezed out by the economics of the pro game. Those few, smaller pro leagues that continued to exist increasingly had the feel of a “farm system” to them.

  Yet the amateur ideologues had again missed the big picture. If it was true that Ontario’s smaller centres could not support major-league hockey, then it was just as likely that Toronto could. In a matter of a few months, the Queen City’s hockey order had undergone a remarkable transformation. After a seemingly total victory for the amateurs, the pros were back with a vengeance. The city had gone from being a professional wasteland to having not one, but two franchises in the sport’s biggest commercial association.

  This link of the new Toronto franchises to lacrosse clubs was not coincidental. The leaders of professional lacrosse and professional hockey were increasingly found in the same circles, pursuing the same business models. In fact, the National Lacrosse Union would also soon drop its smaller-market clubs, morphing into the new Dominion Lacrosse Association. The DLA, like the NHA, would find itself mired deep in a recruiting war with a league on the Pacific coast. It was the creation of one Conrad “Con” Jones, a western sports tycoon—the lacrosse parallel of the hockey Patricks and their PCHA.

  Unlike the PCHA clubs, however, Toronto’s new NHA teams were firmly anchored in the city’s sports culture. The lacrosse-sponsored Toronto Hockey Club even had some echoes of its professional predecessor. Jimmy Murphy, now president of the NLU, had been an advisor and sometime coach of Miln’s outfit while he was manager of the Toronto Lacrosse Club. The perennial hockey spare man of 1906–09, Hugh Lambe, had long been a star defenceman on the same lacrosse team.

  The most visible resemblance between the two clubs was, of course, in their jerseys. The new Torontos quickly became known by the moniker of their lacrosse parent, the “Blue Shirts” (sometimes in hyphenated form).5 However, they too would be at times referred to as the Professionals.6

  The strongest connection to the past was yet to come: in October, Bruce Ridpath, founder of the original Torontos, was named playing manager of the NHA team.

  In leading Ottawa to the Stanley Cup the previous season, Ridpath had emerged as one of the league’s premier forwards. Incidentally, his change of residence was not entirely amicable. Despite having granted Riddy permission to go back to his hometown, the Senators would periodically demand compensation from his new bosses.

  Ridpath was certainly worth it. Quite simply, he was the best hockey player Toronto had ever produced. Almost three years since his departure, he was still the hero of the city’s hockey fans.

  Riddy was also quite literally a hero, having saved a life the previous summer. It happened while he was competing in the Canadian Canoeing Association championships on Ottawa’s Rideau River in early August. The junior-four crew capsized near the press stand. “The boat overturned as the Valois paddlers acknowledged greetings from their friends,” reported the Citizen, “and for three minutes Hamilton, who cannot swim, was in grave danger of going under … Ridpath seized a row boat and pulled Hamilton into it, just as he was on the verge of collapse.”7

  Ridpath’s homecoming—a huge coup for the new club—was eagerly anticipated. However, it would soon be eclipsed by a terrible tragedy. On November 2, 1911, Ridpath was the victim of a near-fatal accident. Gettin
g off a streetcar on Yonge Street near Alexander Street, Bruce walked behind the trolley and began to cross the road to meet a younger brother. Startled by the dimly lit headlights of an oncoming motor vehicle, he was hit and thrown back. The hockey star ended up under the car with severe head injuries, just barely alive.

  The Montreal Gazette reported that an “automobile containing a party of men and women came down Yonge Street and Ridpath was struck down [and was] thrown to the side of the street with great force, as the automobile was travelling fairly fast.” The driver, Colin A. Campbell, stopped and carried Ridpath to a nearby drugstore before running for medical help. “Two doctors worked over Ridpath, but could not restore consciousness, and he was taken to the hospital in the ambulance.”8 Campbell followed the ambulance to the hospital and then went and found Ridpath’s brother, informing him of the accident. Shortly after midnight, he was arrested, “charged with causing grievous bodily injury, and lodged in cells.”9

  The Ridpath story was huge news in the hockey world throughout Canada. Though initially given almost no chance of surviving, daily news briefings from St. Michael’s Hospital began to note some improvement in his condition. After a few days, Bruce began to sporadically regain consciousness. A month after that, he left the hospital. Nevertheless, Bruce suffered from severe head pain and memory loss, and there was no possibility that he would play in 1911–12.

  Bruce Ridpath had been the most important on-ice figure during the life of the original Torontos. Had this tragedy not ensued, he would have undoubtedly played the same role with their successor.

  The accident was more than just a personal tragedy. In Toronto, it heightened a growing backlash against the automobile. Though still relatively rare on city streets, cars were becoming common enough to provoke a growing number of pedestrian injuries. Incidents of drinking and driving caused particular anger. Action was demanded by the citizenry. Mayor Geary proclaimed it outrageous that cars “should travel around at twenty miles an hour and keep citizen [sic] dodging them all the time to escape being killed or maimed.”10