St. Patrick’s Day at Maple Leaf Gardens was a big do in 1934: Conn Smythe spared no extravagance in celebrating the day in raucous style, and Leafs’ star defenceman, King Clancy, along with it. There was a hockey game, too, as Toronto beat the visiting New York Rangers, but it was what took place before any pucks were played that makes an impression almost 90 years later, even if the Leafs and the NHL would rather not recall the circumstances in too much detail. First published at TVO Today earlier this year, my report on the Irish-infused revelry that night — and how Clancy ended up playing the game in blackface, and why Toronto barely batted an eye — went like this:

The hockey? No, the actual game wasn’t anything special, even if the evening’s proceedings offered up plenty of what one newspaper classed as “thrills.” Of course, the quality of the hockey might not have mattered as much to the 11,000 Saturday-night fans on hand at Maple Leaf Gardens 89 years ago as the outcome, which was the right one: Toronto’s beloved Maple Leafs beat the visiting New York Rangers by a score of 3-2.

The sportswriters found plenty to fill their columns. Some decried the refereeing. Others worried that Toronto’s players had forgotten how to stickhandle: with the Stanley Cup playoffs about to start, how would the Leafs cope? It was, in the words of one rinkside dispatch, both a “slam-bang” and “turbulent” affair, filled with swinging sticks and major penalties, and a penalty-box fight that policemen had to break up.

There was plenty in the way of extra-curricular spectacle that night, too: it was St. Patrick’s Day, and Leafs owner Conn Smythe decided to celebrate in style. The pre-game ceremonies were extravagant and seemingly, for the hockey players involved, all in such good fun that things veered off-script. Off or on, it led to this: that night in 1934, one of the NHL’s biggest stars ended up playing a game in blackface.

It’s not something that the Leafs or the NHL have to tended to talk about in the years since it happened, despite the former’s ongoing propensity for celebrating its Irish past.

Then again, nobody seems to have batted an eye at the time: Toronto the Good hardly seemed to notice. And that, maybe, tells a tale in itself. This wasn’t anything outrageous  then — it wasn’t even out-of-the-ordinary. For all the fans in the Gardens knew that night, it was all part of the scheduled show.

King Clancy was  the superstar at the centre of all this. He was a defenceman, actually, and his first name was Frank, though no-one through his decades-long association with the Leafs called him that: on the ice and later, as coach, general manager, and an ongoing ubiquitous friendly presence at Maple Leaf Garden, he was, always, forever, King.

He was 32 that winter. Popular? Think Mitch Marner-level, plus a half. Clancy had been the mainstay of the (original) Ottawa Senators through the 1920s, abetting his hometown team in winning two Stanley Cup championships. He was Ottawa’s captain by 1930 when the Leafs’ ambitious Conn Smythe parlayed money won at a horse race into a deal to pry the star defenceman from the financially struggling Senators.

He was smallish, 5’7”, carrying just 150 pounds — “the lightest of all NHL defence players,” a weight-watching correspondent called him in 1933. “No hockey player gives more of his talent than King Clancy when on the ice,” an admiring Ottawa newspaper declared. The rest of his press had a gleam to it, too: he was Toronto’s “sparkplug,” an “ice general without superior,” not to mention “clean-living” and an all-around “ornament to the game.”

NHL scoring exploded in 1929-30, thanks to a new forward-passing rule, and when that happened, Clancy found his touch at the net, piling up goals and assists in an abundance that no other defenceman could match. He became the first blueliner in league history to tally 40 points in a season. His feisty play had helped the Leafs secure a Cup of their own in 1932. In ’34, he’d be named to the NHL’s First All-Star Team. His coach during these Leaf years was Dick Irvin: in 1942, he would praise Clancy’s “boundless courage” and commitment, calling him “the greatest all-time hockey player” he ever handled.

All in all, the ebullient Clancy was a hit in Toronto, on and off the ice. He was, the Ottawa Citizen reported in 1931, maybe just a little wistfully, “the idol of the kids.” His grinning face featured in newspaper ads for razor blades in March of ’34 and  at Simpson’s Department Store at Queen and Yonge, $4 would buy you a fine-fur felt “King Clancy” snap-brim hat. It came in four styles: pearl, steel, fawn, and brown.

The Leafs were a powerhouse in 1934, just two years removed from their championship season, and sitting atop the NHL standings. They had the veteran George Hainsworth manning their goal, with Clancy and the stalwart Hap Day on defence, and the illustrious Kid Line — centre Joe Primeau between Charlie Conacher and Busher Jackson — leading the way up front.

But they were a diminished team, too. The players must have been quaking still, emotionally, have gone through the trauma not quite three months earlier of seeing Ace Bailey, their friend and Leaf teammate, nearly lose his life in a game in Boston.

A blindside hit by Bruins’ defenceman Eddie Shore knocked Bailey to the ice that night, resulting in a grievous head injury. The 29-year-old underwent two surgeries to relieve pressure on his brain, and while he survived and was recovering in March of ’34, he would never play another game in the NHL.

St. Patrick’s Day must have seemed to Smythe and his Leafs like an easy opportunity to lift some spirits. Toronto was a city, after all, that was all too pleased to wallow in its Irishness. The hockey team, too: after all, before Smythe came along in 1927 and changed the name to Maple Leafs, the city’s entry in the NHL was the green-sweatered St. Patricks. In 1922, they even won a Stanley Cup in that Hibernian incarnation.

Clancy’s father, Tom,  was the original King, an Irish-born legend in his own right (his mother was an O’Leary) who’d starred in Ottawa for the football Roughriders. The Leafs duly dubbed the March 17 game against the Rangers “Clancy Night” and got busy hatching an elaborate plan to fête their famous defenceman.

On the night, the celebrations were, indeed, something.

Before any pucks were played, a strange cavalcade sledded out onto the ice at Maple Leaf Gardens. There was float in the shape of an oversized boot that opened up, Trojan-style, to divulge goaltender George Hainsworth. There was a big pipe and a massive shoe; Leaf players Ken Doraty, Baldy Cotton, and climbed out those. Leaf trainer Tim Daly emerged from a gigantic bottle of ginger beer (sponsored by O’Keefe’s Beverages). Joe Primeau rode in a monstrous Irish harp, while a shamrock (courtesy of Eaton’s) divulged Bun Cook of the Rangers. A giant potato (from Loblaw Groceterias) divulged a collection of junior players from the OHA’s Toronto’s Marlboros.

Finally, a final float appeared, bearing a throne. On it was a figure arrayed in crown, robe, and beard — King Clancy himself, dressed (as the Toronto Telegram described it) as “Old King Cole.”

He then was deluged with gifts. There was a chest filled with silver from the directors of the Maple Leafs and a grandfather clock from his teammates. General Motors chipped in with a radio for his automobile; from the Knights of Columbus came more silver, a tea service.

When Clancy was invited to say a few words at centre-ice, he took the microphone in hand and said, “We are lost, the captain cried,” before skating away.

The Globe ran a photograph the next morning on the first of its sports pages showing Clancy posing with his wife, Rae, and his father. The latter look happy; Clancy seems a little bewildered. “The black smudge on his face,” a caption explains, “was shoe polish some of his playful teammates applied when they were taking off his disguise.”

It was spontaneous, apparently, a burst of boys-will-be-boys shenanigans: as Clancy was descending from his throne, some other Leafs surprised him by smearing his “regal face” black. That was how the Globe described it; donning a green sweater that featured a shamrock on the back, he then joined in the game that started once the ice was cleared.

Clancy gives his own view of the night in Anne Logan’s 1986 biography Rare Jewel for a King. It was Hap Day and Charlie Conacher who ambushed him, he recalled. “Some claim [it] was soot, some say shoe polish, but Clancy claims it was lamp black.”

“Anyway,” he told Logan, “it got into my eyes, ears, and throat. And I scrubbed and scrubbed, but it took days to get it off.”

With Brian McFarlane lending a narrative hand, the defenceman published his own memoir in 1997, Clancy: The King’s Story. He wrote there of his amazement at the honour that “Clancy Night” as a whole represented, “the greatest tribute an individual could hope to get.”

“I always look back upon it as one of the greatest things that ever happened to me in sport.”

Here’s his rendering of what happened:

When my turn finally came the lights were all turned out and, dressed in in royal robes and wearing a crown, I was ushered in on a big throne pulled by Hap Day. As the float reached the middle of the rink I got hit in the face with a handful of soot from Day and Conacher, and when the lights came on I looked like Santa Claus but my face was pitch black! It took me two or three days to get that stuff off.

“Good-natured hoaxing” Toronto’s Daily Star called it, in sum, “pantomime horseplay” and “giddy clowning.” There was grumbling from some hockey writers that “too much Irish celebration” had tired Clancy and affected his performance in the game that followed. Also, that his green sweater was confusing to his teammates. He changed back into his regular Leaf blue-and-whites after the first period.

And that was just about it. If anyone was offended by Clancy’s blackface, thought it inappropriate, insensitive, imagined that an apology might be in order, none of that was registered at the time. In Toronto in 1934, it was nothing more than hijinks. At Maple Leaf Gardens, in front of a hockey crowd that would almost certainly have been exclusively white, this was just a bit of foolery that everybody could share in or let pass, as they pleased.

Two decades later, in the 1950s, Toronto newspapers were still recalling the episode and calling it what it was. “The King was the first Leaf ever honored with a special night.” The Globe and Mail remembered in 1954,  “— and a couple of spalpeens tricked him into a black-face act.” In 1956, it was the Toronto Daily Star that evoked past glories, reviving the memory of “Clancy all dressed in green and wearing blackface and looking for all the world like Al Jolson about to sing ‘Mammy.’”

Today, as the Leafs don green again to honour St. Patrick, the episode is all but forgotten. King Clancy doesn’t feature in the Legends Row line-up of Leaf statues that guards the Scotiabank Centre, but he remains a revered personality in Toronto by those who remember him, and his number 7 hangs in honour in the rafters inside the arena.

It’s not to censure Clancy that it’s worth recalling that night in 1934.  Even if the Leafs don’t choose to remember it this way (or at all), the episode does crack open a perspective on hockey and its history. It’s a reminder, if nothing else, that while the NHL has in recent years taken up the mantra Hockey Is For Everybody, for much of the league’s 106-year history, that very much wasn’t the case.

It was in 1928 that NHL president Frank Calder blithely declared that hockey had “no colour line.” Nothing on paper, anyway, no bylaw, or guideline. But for so many BIPOC players in those early decades, there may as well have been an ice ceiling above them, limiting opportunity (if not always notice) and all but excluding any chance of making to hockey’s top tier.

There’s a whole history to fill the years between Calder’s statement and 1958, when Willie O’Ree became the first Black player to skate on NHL ice. It wasn’t until 1986, when winger Val James appeared in four games, that a Black player suited up for the Leafs.

What happened at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1934 reflected the Toronto of the time. As far back as 1840, Toronto’s Black community had petitioned the city protesting American blackface performers in the city. Almost a century later, American broadcasts of “blackface comedians” like Amos ’n’ Andy were still popular on Toronto radios. Minstrel  bands were still performing in blackface in the city in the late 1920s.

A reminder of the casual racism that was entrenched in Toronto traditions and institutions was, in fact, front and centre on Clancy Night: while there’s no indication that the musicians performed in blackface at that hockey game, it was the Knights of Columbus Minstrel Band that was on hand to serenade the crowd with Irish airs.

Harry Gairey was a Jamaican-born railway porter and anti-discrimination leader who today has a Toronto hockey rink named after him. He recalled in later a memoir just how small and unseen the Black community was in Toronto in the 1920s and ’30s. “At that period,” he wrote, “we, the Blacks, were nothing you know, and you just almost gave up and said, ‘What’s the use?’”

It’s not that there were no Black hockey players in the city at the time, either. The talented Carnegie brothers, Herb and Ossie, were making an impression in the ‘’30s in high-school and then junior hockey. Many thought that Herb Carnegie, who went on to star in senior hockey in the 1940s, was talented enough to play in the NHL.

It never happened. He remembered in an autobiography just where that started to die: Maple Leaf Gardens, in 1938, when he was still a teenager. He was practicing there one day with his team, the Young Rangers, when his coach called him over. Pointing up to the high seats, Carnegie remembered Ed Wildey telling him that Leafs owner Conn Smythe was up there watching. Carnegie, who died in 2012, never forgot Smythe’s message, as his coach relayed it: “He said he’d take you tomorrow if he could turn Carnegie white.”