Aislin

the rendez-vous of good sports! (some conditions apply)

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Toe Blake’s playing days in the NHL came to an end in 1948 after the Montreal Canadiens’ captain collided with Bill Juzda of the New York Rangers in a game at Madison Square Garden and suffered a double fracture of his ankle. After several years coaching in minor leagues, Blake returned to the Canadiens as coach in 1955, launching an illustrious era in the team’s history:  in the 13 years before he retired in 1968, Blake, who died at 82 on a Wednesday of today’s date in 1995, steered Montreal to eight Stanley Cup championships.

In between the end of his captaincy and the start of his career as Canadiens’ coach, Blake bought a bar in Montreal a few blocks east of the Forum. Friday, May 20, 1949 was the day he took ownership, paying $90,000 for the license. “I couldn’t have kept up payments if I wasn’t coaching in Valleyfield in the winter,” he later recalled, “and umpiring baseball in the summer.”

In 1952, Toe Blake’s Tavern moved across St. Catherine Street into the premises it occupied for the next 31 years. It closed in December of 1983, and well past its due, I’ll say, considering that (as a news report in the Montreal Gazette noted at the time) women had never been welcome within.

Gazette columnist Tim Burke didn’t mention that in his requiem for the old boozy bastion. It went, partly, like this:

It was one of the oases in the West End, the sturdy rendezvous along Montreal’s equivalent of the Bowery (St. Catherine street between Atwater and Guy). Solid décor, walls festooned with caricatures of hockey’s all-time greats, good grub, and good company.

Down in the dumps, you could always stroll into Toe’s, and if none of your buddies were around, the best waiters in town — Vic, Gaetan, Frank, Lucien, Roland, Cliff, and the rest — would make you feel like the mayor of Westmount, with fast service and quicker wit.

The best sports debates I’ve ever heard were in Toe’s because anybody in the joint knew what they were talking about, they’d followed everything for one, two, and even three generations. And if they were stuck for some info, all they had to do was drop in on “The Bear” himself in his office, and they’d be straightened out immediately.

In short, Toe ran his tavern like he ran his hockey team, and nobody ran either better.

In the late ’60s, when everybody was grovelling to a rich, spoiled youth gone out of control, Toe had his waiters throw out anybody who came in with a beard. When one guy streaked the place in the mid-’70s, it took all the waiters to restrain him from doing a job on the guy.

Waxing Nostalgic: An Aislin cartoon from 1979 when Toe Blake’s Tavern was rumoured to be closing. It lingered on, in fact, until 1983. (Image: © McCord Museum)

henri richard, 1936—2020

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(Top Image: “Henri Richard” by Aislin (alias Terry Mosher),  January 26, 1974, ink and felt pen on paper, M986.286.179, © McCord Museum)

proto-gritty

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If the Philadelphia Flyers’ brash new mascot Gritty has helped himself to most of the headlines and the #hockeytwitter memes this season, Youppi! will always have the upper hand in terms of … seniority? It’s 40 years since the original shambling orange behemoth made his debut as the mascot for the late Montreal Expos, and so this past weekend the hockey team he defected to in 2005 fêted the anniversary throughout Saturday’s Canadiens game versus the Colorado Avalanche. Never mind that the math proposed by this postcard, team-issued in 2017, doesn’t quite add up. And would it bad form to be recalling a Montreal Gazette columnist’s thoughts on the hockey team’s acquisition of a baseball orphan? Probably so, but an unimpressed Pat Hickey’s ’05 gripe is pretty good. “The moth-eaten bastard Muppet,” he called Youppi!, not to mention “a symbol of everything that was wrong with the Expos.” Approaching its centenary, the hockey team (Hickey felt) was just fine without any such envoy at all. “If the Canadiens did feel the need for a mascot, why not come up with something more original than [sic] Fonzy’s third cousin?”

Years before the actual switch, as the 1988 Expos started their season at a stumble,  Gazette cartoonist Terry Mosher (a.k.a. Aislin) conjured Youppi! putting out feelers to Canadiens’ GM Serge Savard:

“Youppi Calls Serge Savard,” by Aislin (alias Terry Mosher); May 18, 1988; felt pen, ink, printed film, overlay on paper; © McCord Museum

 

a more up-to-date building could hardly be imagined: on this day in 1924, the montreal forum made its debut

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Works In Progress: Construction continues on Montreal’s Forum in September of 1924. Ground was broken on the new rink on Cabot Square in June of the year; Canadiens and St. Patricks first skated on regular-season ice there on the night of November 29. (Image: © McCord Museum)

It was 94 years ago tonight that Billy Boucher scored the first NHL goal in the history of Montreal’s formerly august Forum: it took the Canadiens’ winger just 55 seconds on the night of Saturday, November 29, 1924, to beat Toronto St. Patrick’s goaltender John Ross Roach. Boucher came back for more, too, completing a natural hattrick early in the second period as Canadiens went on to win the night 7-1.

Built in five months at a reported cost of a $1,000,000 — some $14.7-million in modern-day dollars — the Forum wasn’t, in fact, Canadiens’ primary rink in 1924 — they made their main home at the Mount Royal Arena until 1926. It was Montreal’s expansion team, eventually known as the Maroons, who were the key tenants that first year.

Still, Canadiens got first crack at the Forum’s new artificial ice, and in getting that —  well, as the Gazette reported, “two records tumbled.” The crowd of 9,000 was the largest ever to witnessed a game in the city which had, additionally, never seen a professional game played so early as November. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing, in the newspaper’s view: “As might be expected of hockey in November, the game was not a good exhibition,” their correspondent was sorry to say.

The building, on the other hand … “A more up-to-date building for sporting events could hardly be imagined.” An important innovation, for hockey: the new rink did away with “promenade” seats, right up along the boards. This, the Gazette felt, meant not only that spectators farther back would no longer find their views obstructed by promenade-folk standing up when a rush went down the ice; the new “arrangement also eliminates discomfort to the players, who have been frequently ragged and aggravated until they would lose their tempers, which results in arguments between spectators and players.”

On the subject of discomfort to players, an injury to Canadiens’ winger Odie Cleghorn did cloud the occasion. He stopped a foray by his Toronto counterpart Bert McCaffrey, who lost his balance. The Gazette:

In the words of Cleghorn, “quite by accident,” the tip of the stick of the falling player caught Odie in the eye and he had to be assisted from the ice. Medical examination showed that the under part of the eye lid had been cut, but that the eyeball had only been bruised.

The doctors wanted to wait for the swelling to recede before they decided a course of care. In the meantime, Cleghorn was “ordered to remain out of hockey for a few days.”