U.S.A.

olympicsbound, 2022: here’s to muscle cars and america’s industrial past

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Star-Spangled Nine: The U.S. team that lined up on Chamonix ice for the 1924 Olympics included (in back, from left) captain Irving Small, Willard Rice, John Lyons, Alphonse Lacroix, Taffy Abel, Frank Synott, and Justin McCarthy. Sitting, up front, are Art Langley and Herb Drury. (Image: Agence Rol, Bibliothèque nationale de France)

Canada’s botanically flawed 2022 Olympic sweaters weren’t the only ones to debut this week; USA Hockey divulged the wardrobe its players will be wearing in Beijing in February, too:

As in the north, so too in the republic to the south: USA Hockey is insisting on explaining the many meanings of its design. Like Canada’s own exegesis, it’s a brave bit of nonsense. Inspired by “American pride and ingenuity,” the look “pays homage to America’s industrial past, while representing the future of innovation.”

There’s more:

In a nod to America’s symbols, a subtle band of stars is set between red, white, and blue stripes that surround the chest and arms on the home and away [sic] jerseys. Drawing inspiration from American ‘muscle cars’ and traditionally bold hockey designs, Team USA’s alternate jersey bears a deep blue double stripe running around the chest and arms.

And then there’s “the internal back neck message.” No, it’s not XL … or it’s not just XL. “‘Driven by Pride’ serves as a reminder to athletes and fans,” USA Hockey alleges, “that they are, in part, driven by the pride of competing for their country.”

While we’re nodding at American symbols, I’m going to revert to a time before internal back neck messages and conclude here with the 1924 U.S. team. That’s them at the top here, on the ice at Chamonix in France, showing off a truly superlative suite of sweaters that, as far as I’m concerned, require no further explanation.

Pride was, I will add, a souvenir of the American experience in France that year. William Haddock was president of the U.S. Amateur Hockey Association at this time, and he coached the Olympic team in that second tournament. As the U.S. had done in 1920 in Antwerp, Haddock’s charges came home with silvery second.

“While I regret that I will not be able to report a championship victory,” he said in early March of ’24, “I nevertheless can say that I felt very proud of the team, which won all of its matches until it met our neighbors, the Canadians, and they only lost after a magnificent battle which was more closely contested than the score would indicate. I believe that our boys, as individuals, proved themselves every bit the equal of the Canadian players, but the Canadians had the advantage in having played together longer and therefore were superior in team play.”

The score indicated was 6-1 and while I’m not able to adjudicate on the closeness of the contest, I can report that Beattie Ramsay, who played on Canada’s defence in that game, did report at the time that the U.S. didn’t worry the Canadians so much.

Back home in late February, he unpacked an immaculate ingot of Canadian pride to tell a Saskatchewan newspaper that the Americans had tried to impede Canada “by rough work.” There had a row before the final over who should referee: both Haddock and his Canadian counterpart, W.A. Hewitt fretted that a European wouldn’t be up to the task. In the end, they’d settled on Paul Loicq, the Belgian lawyer and Continental hockey pioneer who’d played for his country at the 1920 games and had recently been elected president of the International Hockey Union, forerunner of the IIHF.

Beattie Ramsay, for one, wasn’t impressed by Loicq’s umpiring. “With an efficient referee, he declares, Canada could have won the final game by 20 goals. As it was, it was poor hockey.”

Ramsay did pick out a pair of Americans for praise, defencemen Herb Drury and Taffy Abel. Both went on to play in the NHL, Drury for the Pittsburgh Pirates, Abel as both a Ranger in New York and Black Hawk in Chicago.

In goal for the U.S. in 1924 was Alphonse “Frenchy” Lacroix, who would, a year hence, step into the breach in Montreal when the illustrious Canadiens’ career of goaltender Georges Vézina came to an abrupt end with the onset of his final illness.

 

 

u!s!a! crossing the finnish line, 1980

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Embed from Getty Images

“Tell your whole team I love them,” U.S. President Jimmy Carter commanded Mike Eruzione, captain of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, when he got him on the phone in the moments following the Americans’ 4-2 gold-medal victory over Finland on this date, a Sunday, in 1980. It was the game two days earlier, of course, that everyone remembers, the one where Eruzione, goaltender Jim Craig (above, celebrating gold), and all their star-spangled teammates overthrew the mighty Soviet Union. Mostly they forget that the U.S. team still had plenty of work to do against the Finns. Under the complicated medal-round formula, an American loss combined with a Swedish win over the Soviets could have left the U.S. in fourth place. As it was, goals from Phil Verchota, Steve Christoff, Rob McClanahan, and Mark Johnson sealed the U.S. win, while the Soviets crushed Sweden 9-2. “Outside the arena an exultant throng counted down the final seconds,” Gerald Eskenazi reported for The New York Times, “then started to cheer as a Dixieland band began to play. When the doors of the field house opened, the crowd of 10,000 (including 1,500 standees) streamed into the Olympic Center driveway with chants of ‘U.S.A’ and ‘We’re Number One.’”

Book It: The U.S. victory at Lake Placid got the graphic-novel treatment in this 2008 recounting by Joe Dunn and illustrator Ben Dunn.

whose broad stripes and bright stars

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“One of the most startling and dramatic upsets in Olympic history,” Gerald Eskenazi called it in The New York Times when the U.S. beat the mighty Soviet Union on this day in 1980 in Lake Placid, New York — but you knew that already. The score was 4-3 by the end of that fateful semi-final — see below to relive all the drama of the last few minutes, after Mark Pavelich intercepted a Soviet pass. Beating the Soviets earned the Americans the right to play Finland in the Olympic final two days later, where they prevailed once more, 4-2, and duly collected their golds.

One of the memorable images from the aftermath of the Soviet game was of U.S. goaltender, Jim Craig, touring the ice of the Olympic Field House with a flag caped about his shoulders. That’s it in the thread here above, as it appeared in 2015 when the former Boston University goalkeep decided to sell items from his 1980s treasury via the New Jersey auction house Lelands.

Measuring 5’ by 9.5’, these “forensically photo-matched and authenticated” stars and stripes went on the block attached to an appraised value of between US$1,000,000 and US$1,500,000. With the on-line auction inviting opening bids on the latter … none was forthcoming. At a second auction in 2016, when the bidding started at US$100,000, the flag attracted seven bids without selling — the final offer of US$611,591 failed to meet the reserve on a lot that Lelands called “the sports version of the Declaration of Independence, the “Rosebud” sled, or the suit Neil Armstrong wore to walk on the Moon.” (Take your pick, I guess.)

Craig’s 1980 gold medal also failed to sell, as did the sweater he wore against the Soviets. That 2016 sale did move 13 other lots from the goaltender’s Olympic collection, raising a total of close to US$292,000. Craig’s mask went for US$137,849, and his blocker for US$23,033. You could have had his skates for US$17,569, though you probably didn’t; his goalie pants went for a mere US$1,320.

Last Minutes of Play: Illustrator Ben Dunn’s version of the events of this day in 1980, as seen in his and Joe Dunn’s 2007 graphic history, Miracle On Ice.

 

winterspiele 1936: u + s + a

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The U.S. Olympic hockey team played one last game before they sailed for Europe in January of 1936 to battle in the Garmisch-Partenkirchen Winter Olympics. At Madison Square Garden they played a shortened exhibition (two 15-minute halves) against the EHL New York Rovers, the Rangers’ farm team. The Olympics won, 2-0, on goals from Franks Spain and Stubbs.

Several weeks later, mid-February, as the tournament was about to launch in Germany, a letter from a concerned citizen showed up in the pages of The New York Times. “I am a veteran follower of Canadian and United States hockey,” reader William Gill wrote from Boston, “and here is a prediction Canada will win the Olympic hockey trophy again. The United States is not up to its former teams, lacking experience, as college sixes usually do.”

Arrayed here before the Rovers game are, back row, left to right: Malcolm McAlpin, Fred Kammer, Phil Labatte, John Garrison, Frank Stubbs, and Frank Shaughnessy. Front: Elbridge Ross, Paul Rowe, Thomas Moone, Coach Walter Brown, John Lax, Gordon Smith, and Frank Spain.

 

mclaughlin’s all-americans: making the chicago black hawks great again

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Newlyweds: Irene Castle and Major Frederic McLaughlin, circa 1923, the year of their marriage.

(A version of this post appeared on page D3 of The New York Times on June 12, 2017.)

Long before President Donald J. Trump turned a protectionist eye to the iniquities of Canadians, another opinionated American tycoon decided that he had had enough. Eighty years ago, the cross-border irritant wasn’t Nafta or softwood lumber. As Major Frederic McLaughlin saw it, Canada was flooding American markets with too many hockey players.

In 1937, his short-lived America-first campaign was all about making the Chicago Black Hawks great again.

Canadians have long and fiercely claimed hockey as their own, a proprietary technology that also happens to be a primary natural resource. But the game’s south-of-the-border veins run deep, too. The first organized American game is said to have been played in the 1880s at St. Paul’s, a prep school in Concord, N.H.. The first fully professional league was based in Michigan, in 1904, though most of the players were Canadian.

When the N.H.L. made its debut in 1917 with four Canadian teams, it counted a lonely three Americans among 51 players.

“The climate is not suitable for hockey in the United States,” Lester Patrick (b. Drummondville, Quebec), the longtime Rangers coach and manager, explained in 1928. Unfair as it might be, Canadian boys donned skates at age 3.

“They start skating from the ankles, then with the lower leg up to the knee and at maturity they skate from the hip,” Patrick said. “It is an evolutionary process of time.”

“The Americans,” he held, “start too late to develop a full-leg stride.”

None of that mattered, of course, when it came to the potential profitability of American markets. The N.H.L.’s sometimes rancorous rush south saw Boston’s Bruins as the first United States-based team to join, in 1924. Pittsburgh’s Pirates and New York’s Americans followed in 1925 before the Rangers debuted in 1926, along with teams in Detroit and Chicago.

In Chicago, McLaughlin emerged as the majority shareholder. The McLaughlins had made their fortune on the Lake Michigan shore as coffee importers. In the 1850s, most American coffee drinkers bought raw beans and roasted them at home. W.F. McLaughlin was one of the first to sell pre-roasted coffee. When he died in 1905, his elder son took the helm of McLaughlin’s Manor House Coffee with Frederic, the younger son, aboard as secretary and treasurer.

Harvard-educated, Frederic found fame in those prewar years as one of the country’s best polo players. In 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson sent troops to the restive Mexican frontier, McLaughlin served in the Illinois National Guard.

A year later, the United States went to war with Germany, and McLaughlin joined the Army’s new 86th “Blackhawk” Division, taking command of the 333rd Machine Gun Battalion. Trained in Chicago and England, the division reached France just in time for peace to break out in 1918.

Postwar, McLaughlin returned to Chicago society as a prized catch among bachelor millionaires. But he gained national attention after secretly marrying Irene Castle, a ballroom dancer and movie star revered as America’s best-dressed woman.

As president of Chicago’s N.H.L. team, he reserved naming rights, borrowing from his old Army unit’s tribute to an 18th-century Sauk warrior. From his polo club, the Onwentsia in Lake Forest, Ill., he plucked the distinctive chief’s-head emblem that still adorns Black Hawks sweaters.

“Oh, boy, I am glad I haven’t got a weak heart,” McLaughlin is reported to have said at the first hockey game he ever attended, in November of 1926, just a month before Chicago’s NHL debut. His newly minted Black Hawks were in Minneapolis, playing an exhibition that featured Canadian men named Moose and Rusty and Tiny.

McLaughlin and his fellow investors bought a ready-made roster to get their franchise going: 14 players who had spent the previous winter as the Western Hockey League’s Portland Rosebuds, men named Dick and Duke and Rabbit from Canadian towns called Kenora and Snow Lake and Mattawa.

While owners in New York and Boston hired old Canadian hockey hands to run their teams, McLaughlin decided he would do the job himself. Asked whether his team was ready to compete for a championship, he said, “If it’s not, we’ll keep on buying players until it is.”

The Blackhawks started respectably enough, making the playoffs in their inaugural season. Coaches came and went in those early years, while McLaughlin cultivated a reputation for ire and eccentricity. Still, after only five N.H.L. seasons, Chicago played its way to the finals. Three years later, in 1934, the Black Hawks won the Stanley Cup.

Key to Chicago’s winning formula was McLaughlin’s decision to replace himself with a veteran (Canadian) coach and manager, Tommy Gorman.

“I’m sending myself to the cheering section,” McLaughlin grinned, announcing his midseason surrender in 1933. “I’m convinced that I’m just an amateur in hockey. It’s been a case of the blind leading the blind as far as my influence on the team goes.”

The joy of victory did not linger. Gorman resigned, and Charlie Gardiner, the team’s beloved goaltender, died at 29.

Charged with the reconstruction was a former Black Hawk defenseman, Clem Loughlin, a son of Carroll, Manitoba. Hired in the fall of 1934, he was Chicago’s 11th coach in nine years. The team remained largely Canadian-staffed during his regime, with several talented American exceptions, including Doc Romnes and the goaltender who arrived in 1935, Mike Karakas.

A photograph promoting Loughlin’s 1936-37 squad bore the slogan “Lightning On Skates.” When the season opened, Chicago’s still mostly Canadian roster struck for a pair of listless ties. Then they started losing in earnest. By Christmas, they had won only two of 16 games.

The new year brought no relief. Coach Loughlin threatened a shake-up and then shook, releasing center Tommy Cook, an eight-year veteran accused of “failure to keep in playing condition” and “lax behavior.”

The remaining Hawks won a couple of games before reverting to type. Mulched in Montreal, trimmed in Toronto, they returned to Chicago to lose again and solidify their hold on last place in the league’s American division.

That’s when McLaughlin announced that he had an answer, or at least a vision. Having already lobbied the N.H.L. to replace Canadian referees with Americans, he divulged his plan to shed the yoke of northern tyranny: within two years he would have only American boys skating for the Black Hawks. And he would be changing the team’s nickname to Yankees.

“I think an all-American team would be a tremendous drawing card all over the league,” McLaughlin said.

He was also said to be annoyed that his Canadian veterans rejected the daily calisthenics he insisted they needed.

“We’ve found out you can’t make athletes out of hockey players,” he declared, “so we’ll try to make hockey players out of athletes. Give me a football player who can skate and we can show this league a lot of hockey.”

He already had a so-called “hockey factory” up and running, with five prototype Minnesotans and Michiganders in training on the ice and at Chicago’s Y.M.C.A. These were men in their 20s named Bun and Butch and Ike. Plucked from quiet amateur careers, none of them had yet shown particular signs of stardom. In command was Emil Iverson, a former Danish Army officer who’d coached college hockey in Minnesota and — briefly — the pre-Gorman Hawks.

Meanwhile, the Hawks went to New York, where they hammered the Americans, 9-0. The Americans, as it happened, were almost entirely not — Roger Jenkins of Appleton, Wis., was the only exception. Chicago’s goals were all scored by importees.

Ridicule was brewing in Canada. John Kieran, a columnist for The New York Times, reported that the north-of-the-border consensus was that an all-American team would dominate at “the same time that the Swiss navy equals the combined fleets of the United States, Great Britain and Japan in total tonnage and heavy armament.”

Coach Loughlin stood by his boss. “It isn’t as silly as it sounds by any means,” he said. “I contend that most hockey players are made, not born.”

By March, the future had arrived. With the Hawks out of the playoffs, McLaughlin decreed that his five factory-fresh Americans would debut against Boston.

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It went well — for the Bruins, who prevailed by 6-2. The Rangers and the Detroit Red Wings wired Frank Calder, the president of the league, to protest Chicago’s use of “amateurs” while other teams were still vying for playoff positions.

Boston Coach Art Ross called McLaughlin a “headstrong plutocrat.”

“I have been in hockey 30 years,” he railed, “and never in its entire history has such a farce been perpetrated on a National Hockey League crowd.”

He demanded Chicago refund the price of every ticket —“that’s how rotten the game was.”

“I don’t know whether our constitution will allow the cancellation of an owner’s franchise,” Ross continued, “but if it does, I’ll do everything I can to see that the board of governors do it.”

Unsanctioned by the league, the Hawks went to Toronto, where loudspeakers blared “Yankee Doodle” as “the cash customers prepared for a comedy,” one correspondent reported. Ike Klingbeil of Hancock, Mich., scored a Chicago goal in a losing effort, though a Canadian critic deemed his skating “stiff-legged.”

The new-look Hawks got their first win at home, outlasting the Rangers, 4-3. That night at least, the Times allowed that McLaughlin’s experiment might not have been so far-fetched after all.

The Hawks themselves weren’t entirely contented. A New York reporter listened to a Canadian veteran on the team grumble about the new Americans. “We score the goals and make the plays and they do nothing but a lot of spectacular heavy back-checking,” he said, “but they get all the headlines and all the praise.”

Chicago lost its final two games, finishing a proud point ahead of New York’s even-worse Americans. When the playoffs wrapped up, the Stanley Cup belonged to a Detroit team featuring one American among 21 Canadians with names like Hec and Mud and Bucko.

Come the off-season, the Major gave Clem Loughlin a vote of confidence, right before the coach decided he preferred a return to wheat-farming and hotelkeeping back home in Canada.

Chicago’s five experimental Americans were released. None of them played another N.H.L. game.

The team’s new coach was appropriately unorthodox, for McLaughlin: Bill Stewart, born in Fitchburg, Mass., was best known to that point as a Major League Baseball umpire who carried a wintertime whistle as an N.H.L. referee.

McLaughlin’s wife sued him for divorce that summer, which may have distracted the Major from his all-American plan. In any case, Stewart announced that it was on hold, and the team would continue as the Black Hawks.

When the new hockey season opened, the team started slowly. By March of 1938, they surprised most pundits when they beat the Maple Leafs to win the Stanley Cup.

The trophy itself was absent from the final game, so the champions had to wait to hold it high. Eight of Chicago’s 18 players that season were Americans, men named Doc and Virgil and Cully, who had learned their hockey in Minnesota towns called Aurora, Minneapolis and White Bear Lake.

No N.H.L. champion would count more Americans until last year, when the Pittsburgh Penguins had 10.

(Note: Chicago’s NHL team was Black Hawks for the first 60 years of its history; Blackhawks became one word in 1986.)

 

hockey night in the east room: when prime ministers and presidents dine

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wh cup

Trophy Case: U.S. President Barack Obama welcomes (and gloats over) the Stanley Cup to the White House’s East Room on February 18, 2016. The Chicago Blackhawks were also on hand.

“Canada exports two things to the United States: hockey players and cold fronts. And Canada imports two things from the United States: baseball players and acid rain.”
• Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, speaking at a lunch ahead of Major League’s Baseball’s 1982 All-Star Game, as reported by Michael Farber of the Montreal’s Gazette

Thirty-nine years after Justin Trudeau’s father last dined officially at the White House, Canada’s prime minister will end a busy day of Washington business with a state dinner tonight at President Barack Obama’s place. While we’ve been alerted to what’s on the menu — baked Alaskan halibut casserole; Colorado lamb — what we don’t know at this hour is just how much hockey the two leaders will be talking.

The White House has a long and nuanced hockey history. But ahead of the festivities in the executive mansion’s East Room, a review of earlier White House state dinners for Canadian prime ministers tells us that the game has come up but rarely in the history of official talking — the toasts, the speeches of welcome — that go on when PMs and presidents converge in Washington.

Before tonight, Canadian prime ministers have banqueted seven times at the White House. The first time was in November of 1945 when Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King paid a visit to Harry Truman. Discussing with reporters a telephone call he’d had with the PM a month before the dinner, Truman was asked whether they’d talked atomic bombs at all. “We discussed every subject,” said the President, “in which Canada and the United States are interested, but I am not at liberty to make any statement.”

Which all but confirms that the two leaders were engaged in bilateral talks regarding how well Bill Mosienko was clicking that fall with the brothers Bentley, Doug and Max, for Chicago’s Black Hawks. Come the actual state dinner — well, British PM Clement Attlee was on hand for that, too, so just to be polite at that point in the post-war world they had more pressing matters to talk about

It continued quiet in terms of high-level hockey-talking. John Diefenbaker and Dwight Eisenhower supped together in 1960 without exchanging so much as a token hockey cliché.

Same thing when Diefenbaker met with John F. Kennedy in Washington on February 20, 1961. The Trail Smoke Eaters were over in Czechoslovakia preparing to play for the world championships; in Detroit, Gordie Howe had just scored his 500th NHL goal. The two leaders had no comment, either way.

Lyndon Johnson hosted Lester Pearson on January 22 of 1964. This was a luncheon, mind you, in the White House’s State Dining Room, which means, well, I guess, early in the day and therefore not as momentous a meal as dinner? There were toasts, and President Johnson began his like this:

The Prime Minister asked me if I was going to make a speech and I told him I was going to attempt to, not over three minutes in length, but I would expect loud and vociferous applause.

I choose to feel that this is not just a meeting today between two heads of government, but rather a reunion of neighbors who meet around the dining table in friendship and with affection. Mr. Prime Minister, we in this country are proud of your achievements and we are joined in your purpose. We have applauded your craftsmanship and approved of your leadership from your major role in the creation of the United Nations to your winning of the Nobel Peace Prize and even your performance as defenseman on the Oxford hockey team.

None of the leaders went on the record regarding Bobby Orr, Miracles On Ice, or indeed any hockey matter during Pierre Trudeau’s successive state dinners with Richard Nixon (1969) and Jimmy Carter (1977).

It wasn’t a state occasion in December of 1974 when Trudeau supped at the White House — The Globe and Mail described it as “a stag black-tie dinner” given by President Gerald Ford. They were in the Blue Room, and at 9.15, postprandially, the President toasted his guest. Trudeau responded:

Mr. President, gentlemen, and friends:

When Canadians travel abroad, Mr. President, they spend lots of time explaining to other people how they are different from the Americans. There is a great belief in other lands that Canadians and Americans are exactly the same. I am particularly distressed to find this when I am dealing with the Common Market. We are different, and we have different problems and different economic requirements.

But it does happen that we have to show how similar we are and how close our two peoples are. And the best example I can find, when I have to explain that kind of thing, is to talk about in summer, in the baseball stadium in Montreal where tens of thousands of Canadians get together to cheer for the Canadian team against the visiting American team when every one of the players on both sides is American! [Laughter]

When I have stayed in some of your American cities, it is another story. In winter at your hockey forums, they cheer for the local team, and probably 95 percent of the players on both sides are Canadians — and the best ones.

And this, I think, shows really how close the people are in their goals, in their ways of living, in their love of sports, in their values, even in standards of their own lives.

Brian Mulroney was known to vary a Trudeauvian theme or two: to most Americans, he once said, Canada means snowstorms and Wayne Gretzky.

He followed Trudeau père to the White House, too, when Ronald Reagan had him over, twice, in the 198os.

“Mr. Prime Minister, welcome,” President Reagan said in 1986 when Mulroney stopped in for supper for the first time in 1986. “Allons-y a travail.” Mulroney returned in April of 1988 when, again, nowhere in any of the official wordings did anyone have anything to say about hockey.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, one feels sure, would have had a quip or two to offer, about John Ross Robertson, Toronto’s old Blue Shirts, Bruce Ridpath, but our erstwhile hockey-historian-in-chief never made it to the White House for a state dinner.

And tonight? The chances that there will be mentions of hockey when the leaders rise to speak their pieces are, I’m confident, fair to good, if only to continue the bright banter they began last month.

As presidents like to do, Barack Obama had the Stanley Cup over in February to congratulate the holders from Chicago. “It is always fun to have the Stanley Cup here,” he said in remarks that included thoughtful tributes to Kimmo Timonen and Scott Darling. “It truly is the best trophy in sports.” With the Blackhawks having won three Cups during his presidency, he felt he was owed some thanks. “I think it’s pretty clear the kind of luck I’ve brought to this team.”

He was already thinking of tonight, too. “And,” he said, “by the way, we’ve got a state dinner with Canada coming up, so we may just leave it right in the middle of the room.” [Laughter and applause] “We’ll see. We could gloat a little bit. Just to gloat a little bit.” [Applause]

Prime Minister Trudeau wasn’t long in replying, on Twitter:

trudeau obama

 

 

 

winterspiele 1936: boston strong

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usa afloat

Manhattan Project: The U.S. hockey team aboard the SS Manhattan as hey prepare to sail from New York on January 3, 1936. (Back, left to right) Malcolm McAlpin, Fred Kammer, Phil Labatte, Frank Stubbs, John Lax, Frank Shaughnessy, manager Walter Brown. (Front, left to right) Paul Rowe, Tom Moone, Frank Spain, Elbridge Ross, Gordon Smith. Missing is Johnny Garrison.

The Americans took a more orderly approach to compiling their team for the German Olympics in 1936. That’s how it looked, anyway, compared to what went on in Canada.

Walter Brown was the man in charge, from Boston, where he managed the Boston Garden. He’d led the U.S. to their first hockey world championship in 1933 in Prague; later, he’d also buy the Bruins, help launch the Basketball Association of America, and found the Celtics. In the fall of 1935, his job started with winnowing down the 1,000 hockey players who’d been nominated for Olympic consideration to a more manageable 59.

They came from across the hockey-playing map, Benjamin Langmaid and Audley Tuten, Rauld Morton, Frank Megaffin. In early December Brown brought them to New Haven, Connecticut, for a try-out camp incorporating three exhibition games. Following those tests — against Yale, New York’s St. Nicholas club, and Princeton — Brown and two colleagues would select 13 players for the tournament.

The squad they came up with had a strong Boston flavour, and included three men who’d helped the U.S. win a silver medal at the 1932 games at Lake Placid. Their initial line-up looked like this:

Goal
Gerry Cosby (New York); Tom Moone (Boston Olympics)

Defence
Johnny Garrison (Boston Olympics); Frank Shaughnessy (Montreal Victorias); Phil Labatte (University of Minnesota)

Centre
John Lax, Frank Spain (Boston Olympics); Ding Palmer (St. Nicholas)

Right Wing
Elbridge Ross (Colby College); Gordon Smith, Frank Stubbs (Boston Olympics)

Left Wing
Paul Rowe (Boston Olympics); Mike Baldwin, Ding Palmer (St. Nicholas)

That list shifted a little before the team sailed for Europe in early January: Jerry Cosby had to drop out, leaving Tom Moone as the only goaltender, and Ding Palmer was excused, too, with Malcolm McAlpin from New York brought in for him.

While they were still at home, Walter Brown had his charges on a frenetic schedule. In Boston, two days after Christmas, they played three different area teams in three successive periods. They beat North Cambridge 3-1 in the first, followed by Worcester Club 5-0, before ending the night with a 6-1 dismissal of the University City Club. The combined 14-2 victory was, The Boston Daily Globe reported, quite an evening’s work for the Olympic outfit, even if they were only seen to extend themselves when a goal seemed likely. Frank Spain got three of those, along with five assists on the night.

us aThey went to New York on the last day of the year and word of the game they played there carried up to Canada. Brown’s men, it seemed, had beaten the New York Rovers by a score of 2-0. This was news, and seen as potentially worrying for the Canadians: the Rovers were co-leaders of the Eastern Amateur League, with a line-up handpicked from various Western Canada clubs by Lester Patrick, Ranger manager. True, the game was a truncated one, limited to two 15-minute periods, and the Rovers were in the middle of a schedule that would see them skating four nights out of five, but still, the Rovers couldn’t get going against the Olympic squad owing to the close checking of the Americans and the clever goalkeeping of Tom Moone.

A breathless Canadian Press report from the southern front was also making news in Canada, revealing that the Boston Olympics team for which many of the American Olympians were drawn had long been furtively coached by Frank Patrick and Art Ross from the Bruins with the specific, traitorous aim of overthrowing Canada at the Olympics. To wit:

At the end of last season the team was being whipped into first–class shape when a visiting reporter wandered into the Garden rink there one Sunday afternoon and found the prospective Olympians in the midst of a secret practice. The wandering news hound was heaved out twice before slipping in and remaining unobserved to watch the proceedings. The opposition furnished the Olympic candidates was provided by veteran amateurs and French-Canadians living nearby. The latter were generally led by Joe Patrick, son of Frank.

The brain-trusters apparently realized they had not the natural material with which to develop a team capable of stepping out with Canadian opposition and providing a wide-open free scoring display. Therefore the honorary coaches apparently strove to instill in their proteges’ minds the old Canadian axiom of “cover your man.”

The result was evident in the Olympians’ game with the Rovers, apparently: their puck-carriers seldom got away for a clear shot on goal without some player hanging on his neck. All in all, to a Canadian eye, Walter Brown’s team looked more formidable than the one with which the U.S. had tied Canada in the final game in 1932.

The Olympians played one more game before they sailed, against Princeton, winning 2-1 in a hard-fought battle starring goaltender Tom Moone. The team sailed from New York on January 3 aboard the SS Manhattan. Accompanying the 12 hockey players on the crossing were 15 U.S. skiers, five speed skaters, and 13 bobsledders. The light rain that was falling didn’t disturb the hundreds of well-wishers who’d come to the dock to bid the athletes farewell. It was a jolly, happy crowd. Captain A.B. Randall was in a fine mood, too, quoting with a grin what he maintained was an ancient Chinese proverb: when you start a voyage in the rain, it washes away the devil and brings good luck.

 

miracle on main street

/ puckstruck

miracle-on-ice

Muhammad Ali is here, from 1967, and so too is Billie Jean King, circa 1973, and Nelson Mandela from 1995. The images are of boxers and tennis players, politicians, NBA point guards, NFL stars turned soldiers, drivers of racing Chevys, murdered Olympic athletes. All are depicted in a new series of 20 artworks commissioned by the web sports colossus Bleacher Report and something called the Creative Action Network, a collective of artists and designers from around the world. Those taking part in Transcend: Moments in Sports That Changed The Game were charged with creating “a single work that captures a sports figure, event or evolution that hold power and meaning far beyond any scoreboard.” And so Ali’s refusal to join the U.S. Army is represented alongside King’s victory over Bobby Riggs in the “Battle of the Sexes” and the role Mandela played in turning a Rugby World Cup into a pivotal moment in South African history. Hockey’s here, too, thanks to Michigan artist Mark Forton and his take on America’s now-and-forever myth-making miracle that unfolded on the ice of the Olympic rink at 2634 Main Street, Lake Placid, New York, in February of 1980.

“David versus Goliath,” Forton has written about his work, here, “good versus evil.

One of the greatest hockey games ever to be played is not only a historical snapshot of Olympic competition but also of our world at that time. Nothing defined our culture and who we were as Americans like this hockey game did 35 years ago in the shadow of the Cold War. With this project I wanted to reflect on the historical aspects of the game of hockey represented in the old-style hockey mask and also the divisions that separated the USA and the old Soviet Union at that time. Even though the divisions were great at that time — the red that runs through the Soviet Union flag and the red in our US flag bleeds the same. Like the red blood that runs through our veins. Equal, two equally fantastic teams that defined Olympic competition at its best. It was an honor to work on this project for the Miracle on Ice.

america’s cup

/ puckstruck

The manner of their victory was decisive, and they dazzled the Canadiens under their own rules. I’m quoting here, from The Ottawa Citizen’s report on the Seattle Metropolitans 9-1 “regular rout” of Montreal’s Canadiens, which on this day in 1917 won the former a Stanley Cup, the first ever for an American team. The Montreal Daily Mail said that without Georges Vézina in the Montreal net, the score would have been much more. The Montreal defence put up a creditable performance in the first and second, but in the third they collapsed. “Their forwards also went to pieces, the Seattle team running in goal after goal and making a farcical runaway of it,” said The Citizen. The only thing to save Montreal from “the humiliating coat of a whitewash” was Didier Pitre’s goal.

So: not such a great day in Canadiens history, this one. They had won the opening game of the series, all four of which were played at the Seattle Ice Arena. The games alternated between west-coast and eastern rules, which is to say that in games one and three, seven players skated for each team and forward passing was permitted while in games two and four six players relied on back and lateral passes. This was a Montreal team that counted Pitre, Con Corbeau, Newsy Lalonde, and Jack Laviolette in the line-up, but they faltered after that first 8-4 win, losing 6-1 and 4-1 before the final debacle.

If you’ve read Stephen J. Harper’s A Great Game (2013), you’ll recognize the names on the Seattle scorecard, many of which had featured when the Toronto Blueshirts won the Cup in 1914 before migrating to the Pacific coast. Hap Holmes was the goaltender, with Jack Walker on defence in front of him, Frank Foyston up at the front. I don’t mean to be rude on so auspicious a day for Seattle hockey, but the Metropolitans who (The Citizen) “skated off the ice, surrounded and cheered by the echo, champions of the world,” were sons of Minesing, Ontario, (Foyston) and Aurora (Holmes), Winnipeg (Cully Wilson) and Brandon (Bernie Morris), Bayfield, New Brunswick (Jim Riley), Ottawa (Roy Rickey) and Port Arthur (Walker).

Eddie Carpenter, at cover, was from Hartford, Michigan, though. That’s true.