Stanley Cup

goldie’s rush

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From The Front: News of Goldie Prodger’s shrapnel wound reached Canada in October of 1918.

The goal came late, with four minutes left in the game.

With the visiting Rosebuds tied 1-1 with the hometown Montreal Canadiens, Portland winger Smokey Harris shot the puck, which Montreal goaltender Georges Vézina saved: that’s where things got started. Vézina cleared it to the corner, where Newsy Lalonde picked it up, the Canadiens centreman. He left it for a defenceman who then, well — Goldie Prodger skated through just about the entire Portland team, is what Goldie Prodger did.

It was a “rough journey,” the Montreal Gazette noted, but Prodger kept going. He beat Harris at centre ice, then barged into defenceman Del Irvine: “his weight toppled the Portland player over.” He evaded the second Portland defender, Moose Johnson, with some ease, and by then he only had the goaltender, Tom Murray, to hoodwink. He paused, to test Murray’s patience. “As the Portland goaltender came out to meet him,” the Gazette narrated, “Prodgers [sic] skated around him and lobbed the puck into the nets.”

And that was it: with Montreal leading 2-1, they fell back into defence to see out the decisive game of the Stanley Cup Finals, which they duly did on the penultimate day of March in 1916, to outlast the PCHL Rosebuds and take the series 3-2 at Montreal’s Westmount Arena.

It was, of course, Canadiens’ very first Stanley Cup championship, and 25-year-old Goldie Prodger, who was born on a Wednesday of today’s date in 1891, was the man who clinched it.

He was from London, Ontario, where he was christened George. Though his surname was often pluralized throughout his career (and continues to be, in many of the standard references, including at NHL.com), his birth registration and other vital documents confirm that it was, properly, Prodger.

Goldie? He owed that sobriquet, a press profile from 1912 helpfully explained, to “his sunny complexion.”

That was the same year Prodger won his first Cup, playing for the NHA Quebec Bulldogs, whose formidable line-up also featured Joe Malone, Joe Hall, and goaltender Paddy Moran.

In May of wartime 1916, Prodger flocked to his country’s colours, enlisting with the Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force. He was soon following Howard McNamara, his captain with the Canadiens, into the highly hockey-focussed 228th Battalion. Just how puck-minded was the 228th? Later that year, having recruited to the unit’s ranks some of hockey’s best talents, the 228th iced a team in the NHA alongside the Canadiens et al. (I’ve written about that whole fantastical finagle before, over here, if you’re interested.)

Prodger’s military career began with trip to the hospital: that August, probably while the battalion was in training at Camp Borden, north of Toronto, he broke an ankle playing baseball. That didn’t end up interfering with his skating: once hockey season got going in late December, he would play in all 12 of the 228th’s NHA games.

Along with many of his teammates, Prodger did eventually make it overseas, in 1917. The battalion was converted from an infantry to a railway construction unit; Prodger, for this part, was soon promoted corporal and then company sergeant-major. He took time to write home to remind friends just how vital hockey was, as the Ottawa Journal reported in a morale-boosting column:

Even if we are at war [Corporal Prodger rationalized] with an enemy that threatens our very existence, it is no reason why the great winter sport should be allowed to die. In fact, just such diversions are required at this time to keep the minds of those at home away from the horrors of war.

In 1918, as noted in the clipping from that October presented above, Prodger was added to the casualty list again, suffering a shrapnel wound in the back in (I think) France while attached to an Australian field artillery battery.

Battle Bulletin: Casualty report from Montreal’s Gazette in October of 1918.

He recovered, again. Following his CEF discharge in 1919, Prodger headed back to the ice, though not before some dramas played out, both medical and contractual. Another baseball injury befell him that fall, and this one got complicated when he came down with blood poisoning and had to have a finger amputated.

Meanwhile, in the fledgling NHL, Prodger’s rights were owned by the Quebec Hockey Club. He wanted to play in Toronto, and for a while it seemed as though he would sit out the season rather than report to Quebec. In December, Quebec traded him to his old team, the Canadiens, in exchange for Eddie Carpenter. But Prodger didn’t want to play there, either, so he waited until mid-January when Montreal’s George Kennedy worked a deal to send him the Toronto St, Patricks for Harry Cameron.

After finishing the season with the St. Pats, a trade took him to Hamilton the following season, and it was there with the Tigers that he played the rest of his NHL career, five seasons, through to 1925.

Goldie Prodger died in October of 1935 at the age of 44.

Habs Have It: Goldie Prodger and the rest of the 1915-16 Stanley Cup champions.

 

april 16, 1949: last call

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Salut: Filling the Stanley Cup at Maple Leaf Gardens in April of 1949, that’s Toronto Maple Leafs PR manager Spiff Evans. Steered by coach Hap Day (right), the Leafs beat the Detroit Red Wings in four games that spring to earn their champagne. (Image: City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1266, item 132800)

strolling lord stanley

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Out And About: Members of the Chicago Black Hawks takes the Stanley Cup for a stroll in October of 1938. From left, they are: Baldy Northcott, Joffre Desilets, Bill Mackenzie, Ab DeMarco, Russ Blinco, Johnny Gottselig (with Cup), Alex Levinsky (with other part of Cup), Carl Voss, and Roger Jenkins.

The clock was showing 9.45 p.m. on this night, 84 years ago, when veteran Chicago centreman Carl Voss took a second-period pass from Johnny Gottselig and batted the puck past Toronto goaltender Turk Broda. Though there remained half a game still to play, Voss’ goal would prove the winner as the Black Hawks went on to a 4-1 win over the Maple Leafs on that April night in 1938 to claim the team’s second Stanley Cup with a 3-1 series win.

The throng at Chicago Stadium was 17,204 strong that night. But for all the happy hullabaloo that enveloped the ice, Chicago didn’t actually take possession of the storied Cup that night: as we’ve told it here before, the silverware was languishing back in Toronto, and only arrived in Illinois two days after Carl Voss sealed the deal for the Black Hawks.

Do It Again: An account of Jenkins’ 1938 jaunt with Mike Karakas.

The Black Hawks did get in a parade, of sorts, midday on the Wednesday, April 13. Back in 1934, Hawks’ defenceman Roger Jenkins had promised goaltender Charlie Gardiner that if Chicago won the Cup that year, he’d trundle Gardiner around the city’s downtown Loop in a wheelbarrow. He was — as seen below — as good as his word.

As he was, again, in 1938, treating goaltender Mike Karakas to a ride, this time. Reports from this follow-up foray vary: did they go for five blocks or just the one? It was one o’clock in the busy afternoon, and the hockey players, it was widely reported, tied up traffic on State Street for several minutes.

The Black Hawks got to visit with the Stanley Cup again in the fall of 1938, October, just before the team departed Chicago for a training camp at the University of Illinois at Champaign. That’s when the photograph that tops this post was taken: after the team lunched, the players went walkabout, trophy and (for some) luggage in hand.

Coach Bill Stewart wasn’t there: he was back home in Dorchester, Massachusetts, recovering from a bout of appendicitis, and would join the team later. The new season brought new faces to Chicago’s line-up, and some of them are seen here on the stroll, too: Baldy Northcott, Joffre Desilets, Ab DeMarco, and Russ Blinco hadn’t been with the Black Hawks when the won the Cup the previous April.

Carl Voss and Roger Jenkins are, notably, on hand. Also of interest is the storefront the players are passing here: McLaughlin’s Manor House Coffee was, of course, the business concern of Black Hawks’ founder Major Frederic McLaughlin.

Barrow Boys: In April of 1934, after Chicago won its first Stanley Cup, Black Hawk defenceman Roger Jenkins fulfilled his promise to take goaltender Charlie Gardiner for a wheelbarrow ride around the city’s downtown Loop. Presiding at left is pipe-smoking teammate Lionel Conacher.

 

 

the dawn-defying whoopee

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A birthday today for Lester Patrick, legendary rushing defenceman (and stopgap goaltender), hockey innovator, and architect of the New York Rangers, born in Drummondville, Quebec, on a Monday of this date in 1883. Here he is, with headgear, at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto in April of 1940, when his Rangers seized the (detachable) Stanley Cup from the Maple Leafs in six games. Patrick was 56 that year, and just GM, having handed over coaching duties that year to Frank Boucher after 13 seasons on the bench. This was the sixth Cup of Patrick’s illustrious career. It was the Rangers’ third championship; they wouldn’t win a fourth (as New York fans might remember) until 1994. Cavorting with Patrick are Rangers (from left) Bryan Hextall and Neil Colville.

“Pandemonium reigned in the Ranger dressing room,” a CP dispatch noted of events at Maple Leaf Gardens before the party moved over to the Royal York, “as [Toronto] manager Conn Smythe and members of the Leaf team congratulated the New York players. In their own quarters, the Leafs proved good losers and many of them later joined the Rangers in the dawn-defying whoopee.”

 

 

sometimes strikes twice

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Tampa Mayor Jane Castor got her wish. On Sunday, with the local NHL juggernaut known as the Lightning poised to sweep past the Montreal Canadiens to win a second consecutive Stanley Cup, the mayor hoped for hiccup. “What we would like,” told a news conference, “is for the Lightning to take it a little bit easy to give the Canadiens just the smallest break, allow them to win one at home, and then bring it back to the Amalie Arena for the final and the winning of the Stanley Cup.”And so it went, of course: after bowing to Montreal in overtime on Monday, the Lightning did bring it all back home, prevailing 1-0, in Game 5 on home ice to join the Pittsburgh Penguins of 2016-17 as just the second team in the last 15 years to repeat as champions. 

Pictured above, that’s Mayor Castor the first time around, nine-and-a-half months ago, after the Lightning did their winning in an Edmonton bubble. She was on hand at Tampa International Airport to greet the team as it arrived home in early October of 2020, and to receive the Cup from captain Steven Stamkos (left) for an obligatory hoist. “People say it’s 35 pounds,” an ebullient Mayor Castor told me in an interview a few days later, “I’d say it’s heavier than that.” 

“Born and raised in Tampa, 60 years old,” she said, by way of presenting her hockey bona fides. “I’ve never been on ice skates in my life, and I’m a rabid Tampa Bay Lightning fan.”

(Image courtesy Mayor Jane Castor)

fête accompli

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Chef de Mission: Jacques Demers was the coach in Montreal the last time the Canadiens made their way to the Stanley Cup finals, which was back in 1993. That year they overcame the Quebec Nordiques, Buffalo Sabres, and New York Islanders in the early rounds of the playoffs before upending the Los Angeles Kings in the finals to win the 24th Cup in team history. For the record — no jinx intended — the Canadiens have found themselves on the losing side in 10 other finals through the years. (Image: Serge Chapleau, 1993, watercolour and graphite on paper, © McCord Museum)

cups might come and cups might go: cyclone taylor and the 1909 stanley cup take a road trip (possibly)

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Out And About: A threadbare Cyclone Taylor shows off his Vancouver Millionaire colours in 1913.

A birthday today for Fred Taylor, who was born (probably; there’s some blurriness to the record) on a Monday of this date in 1884 in Tara, over towards Owen Sound, in southwestern Ontario. Taylor grew up a little to the south, in Listowel, northwest of Kitchener, and that’s where he honed his hockey. Cyclone he came to called, in his heyday, which was back in the first few decades of the 20th century, when Taylor was far and away one of the fastest and most skilled players to don skates and step out on the ice and, thereby, one of the game’s best-paid practitioners. Playing at rover and cover-point (defence), he starred in the IHL for Portage Lakes and for the NHA’s Renfrew Creamery Kings before finding a home, for nine seasons, with the Vancouver Millionaires of the PCHA. Five times he led the league in scoring on the west coast, and in 1915 he helped the Millionaires beat the Ottawa Senators to win the Stanley Cup. It was Taylor’s second championship: he’d been with the Senators in 1909 when they played in the old ECHA and surpassed Art Ross’ Montreal Wanderers to take the Cup.

Taylor hung up his skates in 1922, at the age of 38. He was elected to the Hall of hockey Fame in 1947. Cyclone Taylor was 94 when he died in 1979. 

Did Taylor score a goal for Renfrew in 1910 after having skated backwards through some or possibly all of the Ottawa line-up? Many paragraphs have been written on the subject, including in the Ottawa Citizen at the time … but while some reports (including in the Ottawa Citizen at the time) would seem to confirm the feat, Taylor himself told Stan Fischler that it never happened.

Not so well documented is another bit of lore relating to that 1909 championship. Insofar as I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere else in the 112 years that have intervened since then, it may even qualify as breaking news. Eric Whitehead’s 1977 biography Cyclone Taylor: A Hockey Legend doesn’t mention it, and nor do any of the authoritative histories of hockey’s most vaunted trophy, but Taylor may well have been the first player to take the Stanley Cup home with him to share with and show off to his kith and kin, a whole eight decades before it became standard practice.

The Stanley Cup’s annual summer tour is a rite of hockey’s post-season, and a charming one at that: each year, Cupkeeper Phil Pritchard escorts the venerable trophy to the hometowns of players, coaches, and staff across the globe so that those who’ve won the Cup can spend a day in its company, sharing the glory around with friends and family, eating from its silvery bowl, maybe feeding their horses. 

Pandemics permitting, of course: while in 2019, the Cup travelled to eight Canadian provinces, seven U.S. states, as well as Sweden, Finland, and Russia on visits to happy members of the St. Louis Blues, COVID-19 meant that last year’s champions, the Tampa Bay Lightning, could only celebrate with the Cup in Florida.  

The Hockey Hall of Fame keeps an online catalogue documenting the Cup’s off-season travels that goes back to 2003, when the New Jersey Devils were champions: that’s here. These summer peregrinations were established as a routine in 1995, says the Hall. (The Devils reigned that year, too.) 

The Cup did some house calls before that, too: in 1989, when the Calgary Flames prevailed, Pritchard himself took the Cup to visit Flames forward Colin Patterson at his home in Rexdale, Ontario. That same summer, the Cup was packed up and shipped — unaccompanied — to Saskatoon, where Calgary defenceman Brad McCrimmon’s dad, Byron, collected it at the airport and took it for a sojourn in McCrimmon’s hometown of Plenty, Saskatchewan. 

Turns out Cyclone Taylor had a like-minded plan a full 80 years earlier. 

In 1909, there was no Stanley Cup final, as such. Having finished atop the standing of the four-team Eastern Canada Hockey Association, Taylor’s Ottawa Senators inherited the Cup from the holders, Montreal’s Wanderers. A challenge did come in from the Winnipeg Shamrocks, and was accepted by Cup trustee William Foran, but by then it was mid-March, too late in the season for the series to be arranged. 

The Senators and Wanderers did take a quick trip to New York in March, to play a two-game exhibition series, but that was on artificial ice. Ottawa prevailed, for anyone keeping score, winning the first game 6-4 and settling in for a tie, 8-8, in the second.

Back in Canada’s capital, the Senators were wined and dined at a banquet at the Russell House Hotel. The Cup, which looked like this in those years —

— had been absent from Ottawa since 1906, when the mighty Ottawa Silver Seven were ending a run of four consecutive championships. The line-up of the new champions featured five future Hall-of-Famers, including goaltender Percy LeSueur and forwards Bruce Stuart and Marty Walsh. 

Reports of the 1909 celebration include an account of the Cup being filled (of course) with champagne and shared around the room. When it reached Taylor, he demurred. “I will drink only after the greatest hockey general in the game has done so,” he said, passing the Cup to Stuart, his captain. 

Trustee Foran spoke a piece, too. He was positively giddy in his praise of the teams in the ECHA, declaring that their brand of hockey was the “greatest, fastest, and cleanest” ever seen anywhere. Ottawa’s team, he felt, further, was “the best team Canada or the world had ever produced. 

He was confident, too, that the Stanley Cup, now in the 16th year of its youth, was here to stay: “Cups might come and cups might go,” paraphrased the Ottawa Journal, “but the Stanley Cup would always remain the true emblem of hockey supremacy.” 

News of Cyclone Taylor’s initiative was carried in another dispatch from the banquet room. His request, which was deemed “unusual” by the correspondent writing about it, was this: Taylor asked “that he be allowed to take the Stanley Cup home to Listowell [sic] when he goes on his Easter holidays, guaranteeing to return it in safe order. Taylor remarked that it was his one ambition to be on a Stanley Cup team, and wished to take the famous mug to his native town so that the Listowell people could have a look at it. His wish may be gratified, providing the trustees do not object.”

Did William Foran give Taylor the go-ahead? That I can’t confirm. The Cup may well have been handed over to his care in April of 1909, and made the journey west to Listowel for a spell. If so, none of the major daily newspapers seem to have registered the event. I haven’t yet consulted local papers to see what they might have to report, but I’ll get to them and report back. Did the Stanley Cup parade down Listowel’s Main Street as Cyclone Taylor’s friends, familiars, and neighbours cheered? Possibly. Was it, anticipating the 1991 scene in Mario Lemieux’s Pittsburgh backyard, sunken to the bottom of the Taylors’ swimming pool? Not likely. Did anyone, including local livestock, feed from the Cup? To be determined. 

In the meantime, if anyone has further intelligence on this, let me know. 

Dialled In: Cyclone Taylor at home, listening to the radio, in his elder years. (Image: William Cunningham, Vancouver Public Library)

a cup for the canadiens, 1931: busses from battleship

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Back-To-Back: George Hainsworth pitched the shutout, Johnny Gagnon scored the decisive goal, and just like that, on a Tuesday night of this date in 1931, the Montreal Canadiens claimed their second consecutive Stanley Cup by defeating the Chicago Black Hawks 2-0 at the Forum. “This is a marvellous team,” said coach Cecil Hart in the aftermath. Howie Morenz scored Montreal’s insurance goal on the night, and both he and Gagnon were rewarded for their efforts by teammate Albert (a.k.a. Battleship) Leduc: as the Gazette reported, the bulky defenceman “embarrasses his mates with his spontaneous gestures whenever a goal is scored. Gagnon and Morenz each received hearty kisses from the Battleship after they got their tallies.”

once upon a winged wheel

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Red Winner: Johnny Mowers in his Red Wings rig in the 1940. Note the jerryrigged blocker he’s wearing here.

It was on another Thursday of this date in 1943 that the Detroit Red Wings swept to the third Stanley Cup championship in franchise history. Having surpassed the Toronto Maple Leafs in six games in the first round of those wartime playoffs, Detroit dismissed the Boston Bruins in four straight games in the finals. Goaltender Johnny Mowers, 26, was a big part of the Red Wing story: winner of the Vézina Trophy that year and the netminder voted to the NHL’s First All-Star Team that year, he shut out the Bruins in both of the final two Cup games. In ten playoff games, Mowers made 263 stops and allowed 22 goals that year.

Along with the Stanley Cup, Detroit’s winning line-up collected a pile of championship cash. Thirteen players plus coach Jack Adams and trainer Honey Walker each earned $1586 as their share of playoff revenues, with six other players receiving a lesser amount. From Red Wings owner James Norris, the players received a bonus to split of $5000, with $2500 more added in for having won the Cup in four straight games. A pair of anonymous fans rewarded the players with a further $1000 for their victorious troubles, while Bill Pfau, head of Detroit’s Sportsman’s Show, ponied up $500 for the sweep as well as individual bounties for notable Red Wings performances in the finale: Joe Carveth and Carl Liscombe got $25 each for the goals that sealed the 2-0 win while Mowers scored $30 — a buck for every puck he stopped on the night.

quaffing from the stanley cup: would a lot of shared consumption be a problem?

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Bottoms Up: Readying the Stanley Cup for action in April of 1949 is Toronto Maple Leafs PR manager Spiff Evans. Steered by coach Hap Day (right) and managing director Conn Smythe (middle), the Leafs beat the Detroit Red Wings in four games that year to earn the championship and the right to sip. (Image: City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1257, series 1057, item 3015)

“I’d like to have a dollar for every time the Stanley Cup has been filled with champagne.”

When Frank Calder, the NHL’s first president, said that in 1942, hockey’s most cherished trophy had already been won more than 80 times in its 48 years of history, going back to 1893, when the Montreal Hockey Club laid original claim on the Cup. Calder was in a storytelling frame of mind rather than a profiteering one, regaling reporters with tales of Cup shenanigans, some of them involving Lord Stanley’s chalice being misplaced, or maltreated, some of which may even be true. Calder wasn’t at the time harbouring a reliable quaff-count; his point was presumptive, recognizing that however hallowed a symbol it may be, the Stanley Cup will never escape its original self and purpose as a drinking vessel.

All of which gets us around to the question of the night: can you truly be said to have won the Stanley Cup if you don’t end up merrily slurping sparkling alcohol from its silvery bowl?

Seventy-seven times the Cup, in several incarnations, has been awarded since Calder spoke his piece in 1942. With a lock-out having washed out the 2005 season and Final, the Tampa Bay Lightning made it 78 last when they dispensed with the Dallas Stars in Edmonton to win these perturbed playoffs and receive the Cup from Calder-heir Gary Bettman, putting an end, finally, to the 2019-20 NHL season.

And, yes, champagne (and beer) was decanted into the Cup and duly poured out, into and onto the happy faces of the new champions. Was there ever any doubt that they  would partake, despite what public health officials might advise in, say, a surging  pandemic such as we’re in?

Not really.

No-one needs reminding how unlikely the whole idea of completing the hockey season seemed back in March and April when COVID-19 interrupted everything. Even when the NHL looked north for a bubbled restart at the beginning of August there was no guarantee that the summer’s emergency experiment would work out.

The NHL deserves credit for the fact that it has. Prudent planning, strict procedures, stringent testing, good luck: they’ve all played a part in getting the league to this point. When, back in August, I talked to some NHL high-ups for a New York Times feature I was working on, they were assuming nothing.

“I’m just hopeful we get to that point,” Dr. Winne Meeuwisse, theNHL’s chief medical officer told me when I raised a question about possible protocols involved in the eventual presentation of/sipping from the Cup. “We’re a long way away from that, and we have a lot of work to do to get there.”

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Everybody I spoke with emphasized that health and safety were — and would remain — the top priority.

I asked Dr. Meeuwisse specifically about infectious disease and risk and all the potential for Cup handling, passing around, kissing, and, yes, drinking from.

“Would hoisting the Cup be a problem? No. Would a lot of shared consumption be a problem? It probably would be.”

I asked the NHL’s deputy commissioner, too, Bill Daly.

“That’s a fair question,” he said. Without offering specifics, he suggested that it just might be something that the league would indeed regulate … maybe. The full quote: “For better or for worse, we’re roughly six or seven weeks away from having to deal with that. I think we have some time to figure that out. Quite frankly, I think that’s been a recurring theme in terms of our approach to the pandemic from the start, which is we want to remain nimble. We want to react, or be in a position to proact, where you can, but when as we learn more and new things become evident or apparent to us, we can and have you know proven to this point where we can we can adjust on the fly.”

I talked to Phil Pritchard, too, the Hockey Hall of Fame vice-president and curator who’s better known as the Keeper of Cup. “As we get closer,” he said, “we’ll see what rules and regulations we have to put into effect.”

I get it. Who, exactly, was going to tell Steven Stamkos, or Pat Maroon, that after 65 days sequestered in their Canadian bubbles, far from friends and family and fans, they weren’t allowed to touch their lips to the Cup in all the traditional ways?

Dr. Meeuwisse well understood the challenge. “At that point,” he told me a month ago, “is a player going to care enough about it to alter their behaviour?”

Dr. Andrew Morris was someone else I consulted in August. He wasn’t professionally involved in the NHL’s return to the ice, but he’s a fan and, as an infectious diseases specialist at Toronto’s Sinai Health and University Health Network, an interested observer.

Would the champions bow to best preventive practices and forgo the clutching of the Cup, the kissing, the swigging, maybe just wave to it across the distance in the dressing room?

“I think they’ll say, ‘We’ll live with the risk here,’” Dr. Morris. And that’s true for this disease in general: there are public health issues, and then there are people’s own personal risk assessment issues.”