The Chicago Black Hawks shuffled through coaches after the coffee baron Major Frederic McLaughlin bought them into the NHL for the 1926-27 season. When Tom Shaughnessy’s turn came up in the spring of 1929, he was the fifth man to take the job. He wasn’t like the rest, all of whom were Canadians, all of who had played the game at the highest level (three of them ended up in the Hall of Fame). Shaughnessy was American-born, a Chicago lawyer, and the hockey he’d played was back in college at Notre Dame, though he was active, too, in Chicago’s amateur leagues. He’d played Fighting Irish football, too, as a teammate of the legendary Knute Rockne.

And maybe he was just what the Black Hawks needed. They’d finished each of the last two seasons sunken down at the bottom of the ten-team league. And Shaughnessy did have a plan, which he put into motion in early October of 1929 when he took his team, 15 players strong, for 12 days of pre-season training on the football fields of his alma mater at South Bend, Indiana. For an assistant he had Dick Irvin, just retired as a player, who’d also coached the Hawks from the ice at the end of the 1928-29 campaign. To crack the whip, the new boss looked to trainer Tom Dyer, a former British Army sergeant-major.

American press reports were only too pleased to declare Shaughnessy’s innovations that October, one of which was said to be the notion of putting hockey players under “military discipline” — even though Conn Smythe had his Leafs in Toronto under command of Corporal Joe Coyne a year earlier.

Among the Hawks at Notre Dame were veterans Cy Wentworth, Mush March, Johnny Gottselig, and goaltender Charlie Gardiner. Newcomers included Tom Cook, Taffy Abel, Helge Bostrom. Only captain Duke Dukowski was absent — he’d stayed back home to tend to his wife’s illness.

Harland Rohm was on hand to report on the preparatory proceedings for The Chicago Tribune. The labour was hard, he said, but the hockey players had reported in fair to good condition. “The weight sheet for the first five days shows no man to have lost more than two pounds and several of them have put on a pound or two.”

The camp was ice-free: the daily routine featured a three-hour field workout, with calisthenics, medicine balls, wind sprints. “A few dashes the length of the field and the boys are dropping on the grass, panting for breath — which isn’t unnatural, considering they’re wrapped up in woolen sweaters and trunks of hockey.”

Later, in the afternoon, they took to the softball diamond where two teams — Dick Irvin’s Shadows and Shaughnessy’s Plugs — vied for a $50 prize put up by coach Shaughnessy. (Irvin’s team won the first game 22-21 and the second 5-2, with Lolo Couture and Mush March distinguishing themselves.)

After lunch, those who wanted to golf headed out to the green (Ralph Taylor and Vic Ripley were among the keenest), while the rest of the team went for a walk.

Supper was at 7, followed by “a roundtable conference on hockey plays and rules” and lights out at 11.

Harland Rohm proved to be a serious scout:

Moving over to the shower, a casual server gets a surprise. Frank Ingram, rookie wing from St. Paul, weighs 172 pounds and has a physique a Big Ten coach would like to see among his candidates for back field. Art Somers, another rookie, a center from Vancouver, is like him, only twenty pounds lighter. Big Abel, who always looks fat when dressed, hasn’t a sign of any fat around his waist and appears ready to step on the ice. He weighs 224 now and is usually over 220 in playing condition.

Finishing up in Indiana, the team entrained for Tulsa, Oklahoma, where they started the season’s exhibition schedule against the local Oilers, champions of the American Association. Once the regular season got underway in November, Shaughnessy had his new and improved Black Hawks ascending the NHL standings. By the new year, he had them sitting second in the American Division, just back of the mighty Boston Bruins.

When the two teams met in mid-January, Chicago became the only team to beat the Bruins twice. Dousing the joy of victory somewhat was the news, next day, that Tom Shaughnessy was resigning. The official word was that he needed to devote more time to his law practice, but I’m going to venture here that there more to it than that, and that it just might have been that he and Major McLaughlin didn’t see eye to eye.

What we do know is that for the next several years Shaughnessy laid steady siege to the Major’s hockey dominion in Chicago. In the summer of 1930, he bought the American Hokey Association’s Minneapolis franchise for $60,000 and talked it about moving it west to the Lake Michigan shore. With James Norris’ backing, he also looked into buying the beleaguered Ottawa Senators and shifting them. McLaughlin was able to veto that, though Shaughnessy did eventually fall in with the upstart American Hockey League and get a team, the Shamrocks, into Chicago Stadium. As Bruce Kidd writes in The Struggle For Canadian Sport (1996), the Shamrocks actually outdrew the Black Hawks in 1931.

That was the year the AHL challenged the NHL for the Stanley Cup and the NHL refused, declaring they’d prefer to forfeit than face the “outlaws.” J. Andrew Ross has a full and fascinating account of this in his book Joining The Clubs (2015), which I recommend. The short version: the AHL and Tom Shaughnessy lost, and the league disbanded.