Shoulder Season: Art Ross leans into Bruin defenceman Jack Portland at practice in the late 1930s. (Image: Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection)
There’s no need to exaggerate the influence that Art Ross exerted on the game of hockey and the way it’s played — what more could the man have done? He was an outstanding defender in the early years of the 20th century; designed the puck that the NHL adopted when it started up; devised the net that’s still in use today; was the first coach in the league to pull his goalie for an extra attacker. He did that, of course, as coach of the Boston Bruins, the team he was hired to run when they debuted in 1924, and the one he more or less shaped in his own never-back-down image, imprinting the franchise with his penchant for winning and contentious attitude right from the start.
A son of northern Ontario, Art Ross died on a Wednesday of this date in 1964 in the Boston suburb of Medford. He was 79.
His demise was, famously, reported long before that, in error: in the summer of 1918, newspapers across North America announced the sad news that he’d been killed in a motorcycle accident in New Hampshire.
Ross was 33 that year, and had just become a father for the first time. He’d spent part of the previous winter playing the only NHL games he ever got into, three of them. He was captain and playing coach of the ill-starred Montreal Wanderers, scoring his only NHL goal in the team’s very first game, against Toronto. The Wanderers didn’t last, folding after playing four games and defaulting another two. That was all for Ross as a player, though he did get back on the ice as a referee that season, and worked the Stanley Cup final that Toronto won that March.
In the summer, at the time of his purported death, Ross was mourned as one of the “best known hockey players, motor cyclists, footballers, trap shooters, and al-around sportsmen in Canada” — that, from the Vancouver Sun.
As it turned out, Ross had survived an accident that had killed his nephew, Hugh Ross. While some newspapers would still be mourning the elder Ross for weeks to come, he had escaped uninjured.
Ross was back on NHL ice the following winter as a referee. He got his next coaching gig in 1922, when he took the helm of another team that didn’t last, the Hamilton Tigers, before signing on in ’24 with Boston’s expansion team.
Reports of His Death: An ode to Ross from early July of 1918, after he was mistakenly reported killed in a motorcycle accident.
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