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“There are two types of forwards. Scorers and bangers. Scorers score and bangers bang.”
—Ken Dryden
MINER LEAGUE HOCKEY?
The first full-fledged professional hockey league was created to give Michigan copper miners some recreational activity.
DOC HOCKEY
J.L. “Doc” Gibson was a dentist in Houghton, Michigan, who knew pro hockey well. He had played in his Ontario hometown of Berlin (now Kitchener), where his team was banned from the Ontario Hockey Association after players were given $10 gold coins after an important win, a violation of amateur rules. Gibson graduated from college in Detroit and established a dental practice in Houghton, a town of 5,000 on the Michigan peninsula close to a productive copper mine. Gibson founded the Portage Lake hockey club in Houghton. To stock his team, he recruited amateur players, turned them into professionals by paying salaries, and dominated hockey in the area.
Other teams, some backed by those with financial interests in the mines, formed to compete with Portage Lake. The result was the International Professional Hockey League in 1904–05, comprising Houghton; Calumet-Larium Miners; the Indians of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario; and two teams in Pittsburgh, which had one of two artificial ice surfaces in existence at the time.
CYCLONE SIGHTING
Fred “Cyclone” Taylor, a brilliant 19 year old from Ontario, was playing senior hockey in Portage La Prairie, Manitoba for the Rat Portage (now Kenora) Thistles. He received room, board, and $25 a month in spending money. Taylor said: “The Portage Lake team in Houghton made me an offer of $400 plus expenses for the rest of the season. I took their offer and helped them win the championship that season.”
STACKED LINEUP
When Taylor joined the Houghton team, he found himself in select company. The Portage Lake club had Riley Hern in goal, Barney Holden and Fred Lake at point and cover point (defence), and forwards Bruce Stuart, Joe Hall, Harry Bright and Grindy Forrester. Taylor, Hern, Stuart, and Hall continued to put up big seasons even after the International League folded and were all inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.
The Houghton team played in the Amphidrome, located in the center of the town. It had 3,000 seats, all of them filled for the club’s games. The fans were eager to see the team’s new player and in his first game, Cyclone Taylor scored twice in an 8–2 win over Calumet.
NEWSY, THE CYCLONE & BAD JOE
Taylor faced another young player destined to be a big star, Newsy Lalonde – a tough player with great skill. Lalonde and “Bad” Joe Hall had a longtime feud that featured fist and stick fights over the years. Lalonde had the assignment of checking Taylor. “Newsy played a tough game and handling that caliber of checking prepared me for what I would encounter through my career,” Taylor said.
Taylor returned for a second season in Houghton, 1906–07, won the scoring title and was named the league’s outstanding player. A sweep of three late-season games in Pittsburgh clinched a second championship and the team returned to Houghton by train to be greeted by a band, a parade and a banquet in honor of their achievement.
RUBBED OUT BY RECESSION
But the future of the International League was in doubt. The U.S. economy was chopped down by a recession and the northern Michigan mining areas were the hardest hit. The next autumn, they announced that teams would not be able to afford players’ salaries—the Houghton team’s total payroll for the season was approximately $5,000—and the league dissolved. “The International League was a great experience for many young players,” Taylor said years later. “The hockey was good, very competive, and physically tough, which prepared us well for anything we encountered later in our careers.”
HOCKEY’S FIRST OLYMPIC MVP
And much more about the high-scoring—and violin-playing—Icelandic-Winnipeggian, Frank Fredickson.
ICELAND JONES
The exploits of Frank Fredrickson read like the script for an Indiana Jones movie: The charismatic, flamboyant, and handsome Icelander seemed to excel at any endeavor he tried, from hockey to flying airplanes to coaching to music. He was a star in amateur hockey, a star again as a professional in the Pacific Coast Hockey Association (PCHA) and the NHL, an accomplished violinist, a World War I pilot, and a survivor of a torpedoed ship in the Mediterranean Sea. On top of that, he won an Olympic gold medal.
BORN TO GLIDE
Fredrickson’s family had moved from Iceland to Winnipeg, Manitoba, in the late 1800s, joining a community of their countrymen in the Canadian city. Born in 1895, Sigurdur Franklin Frederickson spoke no English until he started elementary school at six years of age, and was often teased and bullied by the other “real Canadian” kids. “Luckily for me, I loved sports and played every game as hard as I could to gain acceptance,” he said years later. “Because Winnipeg had cold winters, ice surfaces for skating and hockey were plentiful. I was on them every chance I had.”
Fredrickson played junior and senior hockey as a teenager in Winnipeg, then was captain of the University of Manitoba team while continuing amateur league play. But his hockey career was put on hold in 1916 when World War I broke out. Frederickson enlisted and shipped off to England with the Canadian Army’s 196th Battalion, then to Egypt with the Royal Flying Corps, where he earned his pilot’s wings. On a 1918 trip to an active-duty assignment in France, his ship, the Leasowe Castle, was torpedoed by a German submarine in the Mediterranean Sea. Ninety-two men were lost; Frederickson and 2,800 other men made it to the lifeboats. They were rescued a half day later by a Japanese ship.
THE GOLDEN FALCONS
In 1919 Fredrickson returned to Canada, where he helped organize a hockey team called the Winnipeg Falcons. All but one of the team’s players were of Icelandic descent. Refused entry by the Manitoba senior amateur league—big mistake—Fredrickson and his friends formed their own three-team league in 1920. After scoring 22 goals in nine league games, and another 22 in six playoff games, Fredrickson challenged the Manitoba league champions to an official “challenge” game. The Falcons won. That got them to the Canadian amateur championship, the still-famous Allen Cup, against the University of Toronto Blues. They won that, too. From there the Falcons went to Antwerp, Belgium, to represent Canada at the 1920 Winter Olympics. Fredrickson lead the team to wins over Czechoslovakia, Sweden, and the United States, and the Falcons—er, the Canadians—won the very first Olympic hockey gold medal. Frederickson—who scored 12 goals in just three games—became the first Olympic hockey MVP.
BORN TO FLY?
Because the newly formed NHL and the PCHA were eagerly seeking players, Fredrickson was a prized commodity. Lester Patrick, one of the PCHA’s founders, saw him as a star on the ice—and off, because of his war exploits—and made him a generous offer. Frederickson declined. Instead, he signed a five-year deal to conduct an aerial study of Iceland and make a report on the feasibility of air transport in that country. But the program was canceled after six months, and Frederickson was back in Winnipeg—where he decided to join the Canadian Air Force instead of playing hockey. And in his spare time he played the violin in a hotel orchestra and gave concerts with his pianist wife Bea, a graduate of the Toronto Conservatory of Music. Was hockey ever going to get him back?
The answer came in 1921, when Frederickson signed with the Victoria Cougars for the then-astronomical sum of $2,700 per season. Lester Patrick pumped up the publicity for the first meeting of their new 26-year-old star and the league’s 37-year-old superstar, Cyclone Taylor of the Vancouver Millionaires. Fredrickson scored two goals in a win over Vancouver, and even Cyclone had words of praise, calling Fredrickson “as fine a player as I’ve ever seen, with a wonderful quick shot.”
Fredrickson spent six years with the Cougars, winning the scoring title in 1922–23 with 39 goals and 55 points in 30 games, a new record. In the 1924–25 season, Fredrickson led the Cougars to the PCHA title. Then they became the last team outside the NHL to make it to the Stanley Cup f
inals, where they defeated the Montreal Canadiens and their great young star Howie Morenz. (The next year they made it back, but were defeated by the Montreal Maroons.)
When the PCHA was disbanded in 1926, most members of the Victoria team joined the Detroit Cougars of the NHL. Fredrickson became a Cougar along with them, but he’d made his own deal with the new club for $6,500 per season…more than double what the other players were paid. When they discovered his salary, his teammates refused to pass the puck to him, forcing the Cougars to eventually trade him to the Boston Bruins.
MUSIC ON ICE
With the Bruins, Fredrickson’s violin was joined by the saxophone of great young defenceman Eddie Shore. But their music sessions on the team’s train trips weren’t popular with everyone; Bruins boss Art Ross soon banned all musical instruments. Fredrickson later played with the Pittsburgh Pirates (where he was the NHL’s first player/coach) and the Detroit Falcons, where a knee injury ended his career in 1931. He stayed in hockey by coaching in the Manitoba Junior Leagues, and for the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II—where he led the team to another Allen Cup title. In 1958 he was named to the Hockey Hall of Fame.
Extra: One more note about Sigurdur Franklin Frederickson, one of hockey’s historic geniuses: while coaching at Princeton University, according to legendary sportswriter Eric Zweig, he walked to work every day with his neighbor—and fellow violinist—Albert Einstein.
HOCKEY’S COLOR CHANGE
The NHL should have given black players a chance much earlier than they did but color barriers had to fall.
When Anson Carter of the New York Rangers scored the overtime goal for Team Canada that won the 2003 World Championship in Finland, he claimed he was happiest about one factor. “There was a big media conference after the game with press from all over the world,” Carter said. “The great thing about those interviews was that nothing, no reference or question, was made about me being a black hockey player. I was just a hockey player who scored a big goal.”
SMYTHE MAKES US WRITHE
Carter is one of the growing number of black players who are making their mark in the NHL. Jarome Iginla of the Calgary Flames has proven himself to be an elite NHL player: a scoring champ, twice winner of the Maurice Richard Trophy as leading goal-scorer, twice an all-star and winner of the King Clancy Memorial Trophy for community and charity service. Add the induction of former Edmonton Oilers goalie Grant Fuhr as the first black player in the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2003 and it’s clear that black players are an integral part of the game.
But it wasn’t always that way. Herb Carnegie, now in his 80s, must often think of what might have been in a later time. He and his brother Ossie were the sons of Jamaican immigrants to Toronto and played pond and corner-rink hockey, becoming good players at the high school level. When Herb earned a spot with a Junior A team, the Toronto Young Rangers, in 1938, he was certain he was bound for the NHL. But the call never came and while debate exists as to why the Carnegie boys didn’t make it, color definitely entered the picture.
Conn Smythe, the owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs, reportedly said while watching Carnegie practise with the Young Rangers, “I will give $10,000 to anyone who can turn Herb Carnegie white.” There’s no definitive proof that Smythe made such a statement but some reliable hockey people insist the Leaf owner said it.
BÉLIVEAU & THE BLACK ACES
Even the player shortage during the years of World War II did not open the doors for the Carnegie brothers. They played in the Quebec League, a strong amateur circuit with Sherbrooke, where Herb was most valuable player for three consecutive seasons. The Carnegie brothers and Manny McIntyre played on a high-scoring all-black line called the Black Aces. Herb Carnegie joined the Quebec Aces as a teammate of the great Jean Béliveau, who had turned down the Montreal Canadiens to stay in Quebec for a big salary. Béliveau always said he learned a great deal from Carnegie whom he called “a beautiful skater and playmaker, a super hockey player.”
CARNEGIE SPURNED
When he was 29, the New York Rangers wanted to sign Carnegie but told him that he would open the season on the American League farm team. He refused, figuring he would be buried in the minors for what remained of his career. An “ace” in financial businesses and founder of the Future Aces hockey school, Carnegie was a success in life but the bitterness still lingers on about the NHL door not opening for him.
O’REE AT LAST
The doors did open for Willie O’Ree, the first black man to play in the NHL when he joined the Boston Bruins for two games in the 1957–58 season and 43 in 1960–61. He was a fast skater who had a lengthy minor league career, spending the most time with Los Angeles Blades and San Diego Gulls of the old Western League where he was a high scorer. But not even the NHL expansion of the late 1960s gave O’Ree another shot at making it back to the bigs. He has worked for the NHL during the past few years as director, youth development, NHL diversity. O’Ree plays down the “pioneer” aspect of his brief NHL career: “There were a few racial slurs but I faced nothing even remotely close to what Jackie Robinson endured when he broke into big-league baseball.”
UNDERGROUND HOCKEY
The post-Civil War “Underground Railroad” brought many black people to Canada to escape persecution in the U.S., where the freedom they had been granted didn’t really mean that. Hockey was a growing game in Canada and the black community joined in. But as many former slaves drifted back south, the black population dwindled. Two black senior amateur players who made names in Ontario hockey in earlier times were Hippo Galloway of Dunnville and Charlie Lightfoot of Stratford. Bud Kelly was a star on an army team based in London, Ontario, during World War II and George Barnes stood out in intermediate hockey, a level for teams in smaller centers. In 1920, St. Catharines, Ontario, had an all-black team, the Orioles, playing against an all-white club.
RAMPANT RACISM
Arthur Dorrington, from Truro, Nova Scotia, the first black man in U.S. minor-pro hockey in 1950, faced heavy discrimination in both racial slurs from opponents and fans and barriers to accompanying his white teammates to hotels and restaurants. Mike Marson was a good junior, drafted by the expansion Washington Capitals in 1974, a talented and tough kid in an interracial marriage. He played 196 NHL games over six seasons but complained of racial slurs—even from his teammates—death threats by both phone and letter and having the tires of his car slashed.
TOUGH TONY MAKES WAY
Tony McKegney discovered early in his career in the late 1970s the sting of racism. He had been adopted by a white family in Sarnia, Ontario, and became a star junior with the Kingston Canadiens. Drafted by the NHL Buffalo Sabres in 1978, McKegney instead accepted an offer from the Birmingham Bulls of the World Hockey Association, which was in its final season. When Alabama fans threatened a boycott because of McKegney’s color, the Bulls released him from his contract and he signed with the Sabres. McKegney played 912 NHL games with seven teams, scoring 320 goals. Several top stars—who just happened to be black—followed the McKegney lead and slowly the racism, both from rivals and fans, disappeared. Fuhr and Iginla are just two top-drawer black players who have contributed immensely to the modern game.
THE HOUSE THAT SMYTHE BUILT
In the midst of the Great Depression, Conn Smythe used his ingenuity to find financing and build Maple Leaf Gardens.
In 1931, the Great Depression had established its downward lock on North American financial markets, unemployment had reached record percentages and few trains in Canada ran without transients in the baggage car. To consider construction of a large arena to house a professional hockey team required a man with big vision, nerves of steel and the ability to get blood, in the form of money, from a stone (Canada’s financial institutions and investors). Conn Smythe was precisely that man, and when Maple Leaf Gardens—for decades probably the best-known building in Canada—opened in November 1931, Smythe said, “I’m either a great visionary or the dumbest guy who ever lived.”
A GU
Y WITH “GUILE”
But in a feat of incredible daring, guile and salesmanship, Smythe, aided abundantly by his assistant Frank Selke, raised the money in a dead market to build the living stage for his Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team. Smythe had scuffled hard to find the $160,000 to purchase the Toronto St. Patricks in the fledgling National Hockey League in 1927, a team that was a steady money loser in the elderly Mutual Street Arena.
HOW TO MOTIVATE A VENGEFUL HOCKEY MIND
Smythe was a college hockey player, served in the Canadian army in World War I, built a sand-and-gravel company and started his thoroughbred racing stable in the post-war years. He coached the U of T hockey team and was an investor in the Toronto Marlboros operated by Selke. The New York Rangers hired him to build their team when the NHL first expanded into the U.S. in the mid-1920s, and after he had assembled a strong team of mostly unknown amateur players—many who later went into the Hockey Hall of Fame—the Rangers fired him. He returned to Toronto with $10,000 in severance pay, vowing to own a team there that would be better than his Rangers.
THAT’S RIGHT, KIDS, GAMBLING PAYS
Smythe increased his bankroll through winning bets on sports events, found backers through his persistence, then bought the St. Patricks. He quickly changed the team name to the Maple Leafs and the colors from green to blue and white and built a strong lineup around players from Selke’s Marlboro junior team—augmenting it through trades and purchases until, by 1930, the Leafs had high potential. Turning a profit in the old Mutual Street building proved impossible, stoking Smythe’s dreams for a big arena. But the stock market had crashed: The few investors who had money were clinging to it and construction of an expensive building did not appear to be in the cards.
LEAFS PROGRAMS GOOD BATHROOM READS
“It looked as if we would have to postpone the building,” Smythe said. “Then early in the ’30–31 season, Selke produced a special program to be sold at the games that boosted the need for a new arena. [Leafs radio broadcaster] Foster Hewitt mentioned on the air that the program was available for ten cents and we got 91,000 requests for it. Those 91,000 dimes convinced a few money guys and bankers that there was big interest in hockey and a new building.” Folklore, much of it originated by Smythe over the years, includes the story of how in the spring of 1931 backers of the MLG project opened the bids from construction companies and found they were several hundred thousand dollars short of launching the building. Smythe claimed it was the bleakest moment of his life; he was certain the project was dead.
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