A Great Game

by Stephen J. Harper

  —AN NHL FOUNDER

  The year 1914 was one of the true watersheds of history. A mere 131 days after the conclusion of the Toronto Blue Shirts’ Stanley Cup season, the Great War commenced. The changes it would initiate in the power structures of global politics and the social fabrics of participating countries—not to mention the accompanying lives of millions—are simply too numerous and profound to recount here. Let it simply be said that the world of professional hockey was no different.

  The draw of thousands of young contestants to the Western Front profoundly altered the course of their careers and those of the teams and leagues they belonged to. Above all, it created a player shortage that quickly undermined the peace established by the “hockey commission.” In fact, as the war dragged on, the fight for existence among the commercial hockey entities became ever more desperate. The third pro partner, the weaker Maritime Professional Hockey League, was finished off very quickly. However, all were affected, including the Stanley Cup champions.

  The Blue Shirts lost Allan Davidson to the war effort. Scotty was said to have been the first pro hockey player to volunteer for service. The Torontos suffered from both this departure of their leading scorer and the consistent absence of Marshall, their veteran quarterback. They were unable to fully replace either man, and the team slumped back to finish fourth in the National Hockey Association in 1914–15.

  This was the beginning of a rocky road for commercial hockey in Toronto. In spite of the Stanley Cup breakthrough of 1914, it would be almost two decades before the supremacy of the new professional order would be firmly established in Canada’s second city. Yet it was not so much the Blue Shirts as that other NHA Queen City franchise that laid the first big potholes on this long path.

  In the fall of 1914, a new figure entered Toronto’s professional hockey scene: Edward James Livingstone. Livingstone left the OHA champions, the Toronto Rugby & Athletic Association, to buy the troubled Ontario Hockey Club from Tom Wall. He renamed them the Toronto Shamrocks, but that did not much change their luck. The club finished fifth in the six-team association.

  Anyone who had followed Livingstone’s record in amateur hockey and football could have seen what was coming. “Livvy”—also known as E.J. and Eddie—was a combative, sanctimonious and generally difficult personality. He expected others to live rigidly by the rules while he would skirt their spirit. He regularly denounced those with whom he clashed, while demanding apologies for the thinnest of slights.

  While Livingstone’s team was a flop on the ice, its owner was a veritable wrecking ball in the boardroom. His elevation to the governing body, already full of men fractious in their own right, was the last thing the struggling pro game needed. Almost from the day he got hold of the Tecumseh/Ontario/Shamrock outfit, his disputes with the other NHA owners, its partner leagues and his employee-players became legion.

  The Livingstone issue became double trouble when Eddie bought a second hockey team, the former Stanley Cup champion Blue Shirts, before the beginning of the 1915–16 season. Toronto’s marquee team was undergoing devastating raids by the Pacific Coast Hockey Association. Rather than address the issue—and against the wishes of the NHA—Livingstone decided to fold his Shamrocks and use that team’s players to fill the depleted ranks of the Blue Shirts.

  For scheduling reasons, the weakened NHA had not wanted an odd number of clubs. Thus, for 1916–17, it took Livingstone’s second franchise and gave it to an army unit, the 228th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, who would also play out of Toronto’s Mutual Street Arena. When that team, contrary to the promises of the military, got shipped overseas in midseason, the association dropped both Queen City teams. It wanted a balanced schedule and, it can be fairly presumed, to be rid of the cantankerous Livvy.

  With the stroke of a pen, the Blue Shirts vanished from the National Hockey Association.

  E. J. “Livvy” Livingstone was the last owner of the Toronto Blue Shirts. His tenure would transform professional hockey, but not in the way he intended.

  The man who was increasingly leading the other NHA owners in their moves against Livingstone was a former Montreal sports reporter named Frank Calder. Calder had been named the league’s secretary-treasurer in the fall of 1914. It was fitting that Calder and Livingstone joined the board in the same fall that the “war to end all wars” began. Calder became the association’s antidote to the toxic Toronto owner, leading a long business battle that ultimately determined hockey’s structure for the century to come.2

  By the fall of 1917, the NHA was hanging on by a thread because of contract competition from the PCHA and the (literal) wartime bleeding of the players. The quarrelsome and litigious Livingstone was a distraction it could not afford. Calder finally convinced his NHA colleagues they had to get rid of Livvy—at any cost.

  To accomplish this, the other owners left the NHA and, on November 26, 1917, formed a new body, the National Hockey League, with Calder installed as its president. The NHL then created a new Toronto franchise under the management of the Arena Gardens. Effectively expropriated by the new circuit, the Toronto Blue Shirts would thus become the Toronto Arenas, and then evolving into the Toronto St. Patricks a mere two years later.3

  Livvy was left on the outside, desperately trying to figure out how to get back in. He was joined in this NHL exile by the original Blue Shirts’ boss, Percy Quinn, an associate from his Toronto Athletics days. Meanwhile the Arenas/St. Patricks fell under the management of the Tecumsehs’ former kingpin, Charlie Querrie. Ironically, Querrie had been ostracized by the earlier NHA for his argumentative ways.

  Frank Calder created a business empire for the express purpose of keeping Livingstone out of pro hockey. That empire is the National Hockey League.

  Even as an outcast, Livingstone would prove to be a pivotal figure in the evolution of hockey as a business. His manoeuvring to either get into the NHL or create a rival league progressively transformed the reorganized association. Under the iron control of President Calder, the NHL began to replicate the unified “syndicate” culture of its remaining rival, the Patrick family’s West Coast PCHA.

  The final piece fell into place when Livvy started to look at big American facilities as a base for his alternative league. The NHL moved pre-emptively to outflank him. Beginning with the creation of the Boston Bruins in 1924, the NHL finally entered the U.S. market. Such a development had been contemplated by the major eastern Canadian hockey leagues for two decades, but only the western PCHA had theretofore actually done it.

  With its parallel, syndicate-like organization, combined with larger buildings in far larger markets, the superior power of the NHL was ensured. Given the “natural monopoly” features of pro sports,4 this quickly led to its domination of the smaller, western wing of the business. The NHL bought out the PCHA’s remnants (by then part of the Western Hockey League) in 1926. Its control of top-level hockey has been occasionally challenged, but has remained unbroken, ever since.

  By 1927, these developments were belatedly—but unmistakably—reshaping the hockey world in Toronto itself. That was the year Conn Smythe purchased the St. Pats and rebranded them as the Toronto Maple Leafs. With a skilful and strategic approach to management and marketing, the Leafs created a modern, model pro sports franchise. Four years later, Smythe’s Maple Leaf Gardens was built for $1.5 million in a furious six-month span using early-Depression labour.5 Thus, by 1931, the predominance of the paid men in Toronto was ensured.

  This gradual ascent of pro hockey had occurred in complete independence from developments in the amateur hockey world. And this was precisely the way the country’s amateur leaders had wanted it. For many years, and to many people, it had seemed as if that decision to sever any and all connection to professionalism had been correct. Yet the slow and often imperceptible rise of pro hockey in Toronto had been paralleled by a similar decline in the amateur game. This was certainly not what the “winners” of the Athletic War had expected.

  In that great
confrontation, the amateur zealots had fought for the separation principle. By the time the Stanley Cup came to Toronto, they had fully achieved their wish. Commercial shinny was evolving on its own, going through mind-numbing upheavals and restructurings. The stability of the amateur scene appeared a marked contrast. The Interprovincial Amateur Hockey Union may not have lasted for long, but the Allan Cup quickly became a veritable hockey institution.

  Competition for the Allan Cup helped inspire the formation of the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association in that fateful year of 1914. The CAHA completed the system of parallel hockey structures the amateur ideologues had put together to counter the development of the professional sport. It would represent Canadian hockey in other avowedly amateur organizations, such as the International Ice Hockey Federation and the Amateur Athletic Union of Canada.

  To no one’s surprise, the driving force behind both the CAHA and the AAUC had been the Ontario Hockey Association. The OHA remained the great power of Toronto hockey during the First World War. It also continued to be a remarkably progressive body in terms of the evolution of the game on the ice. The OHA’s rule changes were still numerous and significant. At the 1913 annual meeting, its three-foot line for goalie rebounds became a ten-foot line and then, in 1917, a twenty-foot line within which forward passing was allowed. This was also a foreshadowing of the modern blue line. In 1915, the association moved to the modern set of three periods. And, at his final OHA gathering, a declining John Ross Robertson struggled to his feet to successfully urge the adoption of six-man hockey.

  By then, however, it was no longer the OHA that was pioneering these innovations. They were largely originating in the pro ranks. Indeed, if one looks at the various NHA or PCHA rules during the Blue Shirts’ Stanley Cup games of 1914, one can clearly see the outlines of the modern sport (in contrast to the Professionals’ Cup challenge only six years earlier). These modifications had been roundly condemned in the amateur circles as “not real hockey”—at least, that is, until the OHA finally endorsed them, typically at the urging of Robertson himself.

  Needless to say, one set of changes Robertson never advocated would be to the principles of amateurism. On the contrary, it seemed the OHA was going to ever more extreme lengths to enforce its creed. As Torontonians took in the Blue Shirts’ playoff victories against the Canadiens and Victoria in 1914, the OHA debated the idea of making itself the owner of all gate monies throughout the province. How else, Robertson’s Telegram asked, could the temptations of professionalism truly and forever be removed?

  All of this served to underscore the degree to which the former president remained in total control of the OHA. Despite the large membership of the association, its affairs remained dominated by a small clique centred on Robertson and his subcommittee, the Three White Czars. This arrangement allowed Robertson to continue to run the OHA without it absorbing too much of his energies, which were largely devoted to other matters: his newspaper, his hospital and nursing philanthropy, his Masonic duties and his growing collection of historical artefacts.

  Nonetheless, time eventually overtakes even the most vigorous among us. Early in 1918, the seventy-six-year-old Robertson fell ill with a heavy cold when he went to Florida. He returned in mid-April suffering badly from asthma. Refusing to rest, he headed for New York and the annual meeting of the American Publishers’ Association. Back home, still ill, he finished a campaign that cleared the mortgage on the new Masonic Temple and insisted on touring the unfinished building. A friend thought it was this visit, where he breathed cold, damp air amid the wet plaster and green lumber, that took him.6 He was diagnosed with pneumonia, and his condition worsened throughout May.

  The enormity of Robertson’s public stature was reflected even in the obituaries published by his newspaper rivals. His death, however, would not lessen his absolute control over the affairs of the OHA.

  One report said, “During the early part of this week he seemed to be on the mend, but his condition became worse yesterday.”7 He died at home on May 31, surrounded by his family. Flags were lowered throughout the Queen City for his funeral, though he had directed that it should be “strictly private, absolutely plain, simple and inexpensive.”8 The mayor and several aldermen came anyway. Tributes poured in from across the province and beyond.

  Incredibly, Robertson’s iron grip over the Ontario Hockey Association did not loosen with his death. His carefully groomed cadre of activists would provide the OHA with successors for many years to come. Before taking any decision, these men would first carefully reflect upon what John Ross might be thinking in his grave, as if he were still sitting there among them.

  Meanwhile, as the amateur leaders retreated into splendid isolation like the emperors of the Forbidden City, professionalism continued to progress. Pro hockey’s business structures were consolidating, becoming ever more disciplined and marketing themselves ever more effectively. The professional level was becoming the sport’s highest, and was gradually being acknowledged as such. The developmental stages of hockey began to quietly fall under the influence of the commercial side of the game.

  By the time that fortress of professional hockey, Maple Leaf Gardens, opened its doors in 1931, the OHA was in desperate retreat. The Great Depression was putting the final nails in the coffin of the once-omnipotent amateur order. The decade’s economic ravages, along with the popularity of the pros and the exodus of players, were threatening to bankrupt the old association. In a deathbed conversion, its leaders proclaimed Simon-pure amateurism to be a historic anachronism. In fact, in 1936 the OHA led the CAHA into a financial arrangement that effectively made amateur hockey the farm system of the NHL.

  One of the advocates of the OHA’s eventual abandonment of John Ross Robertson’s creed turned out to be none other than Billy Hewitt himself. “The Long Survivor”9 of its various internal battles, Hewitt served as secretary of the Ontario Association until 1961—an incredible fifty-eight years. He was also instrumental in the formation of the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association in 1914, and he served as that organization’s secretary-treasurer and later as registrar and treasurer, also until 1961.

  Hewitt’s involvement in Canadian sports during the first half of the twentieth century was nothing short of astonishing. Beyond his incredible career in hockey management at all levels, he played key executive roles in football and horse racing, not to mention sports journalism. In 1925, he joined his son Foster in the world’s first broadcast of a horse race. Foster Hewitt would soon establish himself as Toronto’s voice of professional hockey. In 1931, Billy himself entered the commercial game when he left the Star sports editor’s job to become manager of attractions at Maple Leaf Gardens.

  W. A. Hewitt lived long enough to help finally overthrow the old amateur order and become a prophet of the professional television age.

  Like so many sports journalists of the era, W. A. Hewitt’s career was racked by what we would now see as real or apparent conflicts of interest. At the same time, the diversity of experience that marked his life in the world of sports helped make him a visionary. “I can foresee an era,” he wrote in his 1958 autobiography, “when promoters can obtain most of their revenue from selling the television rights to corporations who will channel the scenes only to paying viewers … I would predict that during the coming four decades, sports crowds will lessen, but sports viewers will become legion.”10

  In 1947, W. A. Hewitt was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, later to be joined by his favourite broadcasters, son Foster and grandson Bill.11

  Of course, by the time the age of television arrived, the era of the Athletic War had been long forgotten. In truth, beyond the annual and diminishing competition for the Allan Cup, nothing of it remained. The triumph of the amateur ideologues had been an illusion. The “War” had been a battle—and a Pyrrhic one at that. John Ross Robertson’s disciples had followed a path that would prove to be one of history’s great dead ends.

  This was already clear when the CAHA hoisted the f
lag of unconditional surrender to professionalism in 1936. After that, the ironies became even richer as the CAHA withdrew from the AAUC. It then became the leading opponent of hard-line amateurism at the international level.

  Canada was in constant conflict with the IIHF until the latter body began to relax its restrictions against professionals in the 1970s. Gradually, even the Olympic movement—by then an unholy alliance of European elitists and Soviet communists, who were really marketing nationalism more than amateurism—came to terms with the inevitabilities of paid sport. In 1998, the National Hockey League’s top professionals finally played for their countries in the Nagano Winter Games.

  Interestingly, the Athletic War and its aftermath had a parallel in Canadian political life. This was, as noted, the free-trade election of 1911, in which the acolytes of Robertson’s Toryism had decisively defeated free trade with the United States. The next seven decades would similarly feature the steady erosion and final reversal of that watershed moment.12

  In this context, the lasting significance of the Athletic War was something else—the victory of Ontario’s leading city over Quebec’s. It foretold the national shift of power in things generally. After Confederation, Montreal’s English establishment went from being the leaders of Canada’s largest centre to an isolated elite within a largely French-speaking hinterland. By contrast, Toronto became the biggest city of the Dominion’s biggest province.13

  Alas, on the ice, Montreal’s dominance has not been broken. This, more than anything, is the real legacy of this tale. Generations of fans have witnessed more than a century of professional hockey, of which the most legendary and enduring rivalry is between Toronto and Montreal. How incomprehensible, then, it would be to the average fan of the Leafs or the Habs to discover that these seemingly eternal adversaries are descended from a common ancestor.

  Certainly, nobody mentioned this when the Montreal Canadiens proudly celebrated the centennial of their 1909 birth a few years ago. Long glossed over is the fact that the original les Canadiens franchise became dormant in 1910 and was then sold by the O’Briens in 1911. Nevertheless it is, in strict legal terms, a fact.