captains

o captain my captain

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Mr. Maroon: Dunc Munro died on a Friday of this date in 1958. He was 56. A small but solid defenceman, he had his hockey heyday was in the 1920s when he had the unique distinction of captaining four championship teams in seven years. He won a Memorial Cup with the University of Toronto Schools in 1919, then an Allan Cup with the Toronto Granites, with whom he also represented Canada at the 1924 Winter Olympics in Chamonix. Munro went pro (lucratively) after that, joining the expansion Montreal Maroons and leading them to Stanley Cup glory in 1926. He played football, too, for good measure, starring for the Toronto Argonauts in the early ’20s.

show and tell with nels stewart

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Have Stick, Will Travel: Hall-of-Fame centreman Nels Stewart was born in Montreal on this date, another Friday, in 1899. He was a Montreal Maroon in the 1920s, and a dominant one, leading the NHL in scoring in 1926, as his team surged to  a Stanley Cup championship. He won the Hart Trophy that year, too, as league MVP, adding a second Hart to his quiver in 1930. After seven years in Montreal, his contract was sold in 1932 to the Boston Bruins, for whom he played in parts of four seasons, serving as team captain in 1934-35. He’s pictured here in ’34 among fans and friends at a Boston community hockey clinic. Nels Stewart finished out his NHL career with the New York Americans before calling it a career in 1940. (Image: Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection)

the way we were

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“In his heyday,” the Montreal Star enthused in 1940, “he received plaudits from many NHL forwards as the hardest man to pass in the league.” That’s what defenceman Walt Buswell did, steadily, over the course of his career: he didn’t score much, or set up his teammates, he got in the way, stymied, impeded his rivals. He started his career as a major-league obstacle with the Detroit Red Wings in 1932 before joining the Montreal Canadiens in 1935 for a run of five seasons culminating with his appointment as Habs captain on November 5, 1939, on the eve of his 32nd birthday.

Born in Montreal on a Wednesday of this date in 1907, Buswell did his best that ’39-40 season to lead Montreal through the difficult time that followed the drowning death, in August of ’39, of his predecessor as captain, Babe Siebert. The team struggled on the ice that year, languishing to a last-place finish in the seven-team league in the spring of 1940. Buswell was released at the end of the season and though he was invited back to Montreal’s training camp later that same fall, he ended up refusing GM Tommy Gorman’s offer to stay with the team but take a pay cut of $250.

“I told him that after ten years in the National League, I preferred to pick up a shovel rather than accept a reduction in salary. I left and made a living with my ten fingers.” That was a 59-year-old Buswell reminiscing in the fall of 1967, when (as seen above) he got together with a couple of old Montreal teammates, wingers Armand Mondou (left) and Aurèle Joliat (middle). That’s Buswell on the right, and in the photo in the photo.

Buswell went on to coach junior hockey after his playing days ended; later, he ran into some health challenges. He died in 1991 at the age of 83 in the off-island Montreal suburb of Saint-Eustache, where today a local arena bears his name.

“In our time, we played hockey because we loved hockey,” Buswell said in 1967, visiting with Mondou and Joliat. “I particularly remember a match against Toronto. Two days before, I had fallen headfirst against the boards. I was sent to the hospital. I suffered from a concussion. In a morning newspaper, I read that Babe Siebert and another defenceman were injured. Canadiens were playing a game against Toronto in the evening. I left the hospital at five in the afternoon and played. It was a very tough game, but we won, 2 to 1.”

(Image: Réal St. Jean, Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)

ed sandford, 1928—2023

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Saddened to see news today that former Bruins left winger Ed Sandford has died at the age of 95. Born in Toronto in 1928, he skated as a junior in his hometown for the St. Michael’s Buzzers and then the Majors, with whom he won a Memorial Cup in 1946-47 as well as the Red Tilson Trophy as OHA MVP.

That fall, he signed with the Boston Bruins. Seen here in January of 1949, he went on to play in five NHL All-Star games in the 1950s. He was a Bruin captain, succeeding Milt Schmidt in 1954-55. Sandford’s best offensive year came in 1953-54, when he finished the regular season with 16 goals and 47 points in 70 games. After eight seasons with the Bruins, Sandford split his final year in the NHL, 1955-56, between the Detroit Red Wings and the Chicago Blackhawks.

 

(Image: Louis Jaques/Library and Archives Canada/e002343753)

lost and found in the legacy: c is for correcting the record

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So today’s the day the Boston Bruins got around to remembering six forgotten captains.

To say that the team took its time in correcting oversights (six of them) involving some of the most famous players in Bruins’ history for which evidence was (and is) abundant and in plain sight, is  … well, all true. But give the Bruins this: the lapses they let slip into their legacy have been put right just in time for the team’s own 100th anniversary, which is coming up in November. Also, plus, there was the matter of today’s naming of a new captain, Brad Marchand, to succeed their last one, Patrice Bergeron, appointed in 2021, who announced his retirement in July.

Marchand, as the team now proudly notes, is the 27th Bruin to wear the C.

Which is at odds with the math from two-and-half years ago: back then, the Bruins were touting Bergeron as the 20th captain.

So what gives? Independent Bruins historian Kevin Vautour had been pointing out since 2008 that the team had somehow lopped Bobby Bauer off its list of captains going back to the early 1920s. I mentioned that too in January of 2021 in this space. I also noted that five other distinguished Bruins had been disappeared from the record: the Bruins had further forsaken Marty Barry, Nels Stewart, Eddie Shore, Red Beattie, and Bill Cowley. They were also confused about some of the tenures of the captaincies of players they did recall, like Cooney Weiland, Jack Crawford, and Milt Schmidt. (More here on that.)

Much as I’d love to go through it all again here, I’ll just direct you to what I wrote in 2021, after I contacted the team and tried, in vain, to spark their interest in … getting their own history right. That’s here. I wrote a follow-up piece — here — in which I did my best to trace the history of the Bruins’ forgetting, as well as the who (sorry, Herb Ralby).

I never heard a word from the team directly after my brief exchange in 2021 with Heidi Holland, the Bruins’ Director of Publications and Information. There were, earlier this year, murmurs of a coming course correction, the most prominent of which I noted in July, when Bergeron retired.

Today, all in a swoop, amid the Marchand reveal, the Bruins fixed their online overview of captains (here) and posted the handsome graphic that’s reproduced at the top of the post. There’s also a new (old) feature on the team’s website in which Bruins writer Eric Russo profiles all 27 captains. It’s a revised version of a feature originally published in 2021, on Patrice Bergeron’s appointment. An attached Editor’s Note reads, in part:

At the time, Bergeron was tabbed as the 20th captain in club history, but during the club’s extensive research surrounding the Bruins’ Centennial – as well as with assistance from several independent hockey historians, including Hockey Hall of Fame volunteer Jeff Miclash, and the NHL’s Stats and Research Department – it was discovered that six other men have also been captain of the Black & Gold over the course of the franchise’s 100-year history.

As such, the Bruins are now recognizing Marty Barry, Nels Stewart, Eddie Shore, Red Beattie, Bill Cowley, and Bobby Bauer as former captains of the club.

boston’s castaway captains: history takes time

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Captain, My (Former) Captain: On the day he announced his retirement, the Boston Bruins celebrated Patrice Bergeron with this portrait. “A career to cherish” was the caption alongside when it was posted this afternoon on the app formerly known as Twitter.

The Boston Bruins are finally coming around to acknowledge their own history. I don’t know if grudgingly is the word — diffidently might be closer to the mark. Maybe both?

So yes, it’s true, we here at Puckstruck have been keeping up a clamour (to the point of occasional clangour) regarding the Bruins’ forgotten captains for, what —why,  it’s been more than two years now. True enough, it was on the occasion of Patrice Bergeron’s appointment to the role, in January of 2021, that we pointed out, in one of our regular paroxysms of historical hockey punctiliousness, that Bergeron was not, as the Bruins were saying, the team’s 20th captain, but its 26th.

Captain, My (New) Captain: The Bruins introduced Patrice Bergeron as their 20th captain in 2021: wrong.

This wasn’t particularly controversial or, for that matter, disputable: the history, not to mention the math, was all there for anyone to examine, and add up. It was straightforward enough: somehow, somewhere, six distinguished Bruins who’d served the team as captains — Marty Barry, Nels Stewart, Eddie Shore, Red Beattie, Bill Cowley, and Bobby Bauer — had had their names effaced from the official list. The evidence of their respective tenures wasn’t hard to find: there are photographs, newspaper articles, game reports, programs, plenty of all of those. I wrote about all of this, the history, the math, the evidence — and the Bruins’ surprising lack of interest in hearing about any of that.

Others, like Bruins historian Kevin Vautour, a tireless advocate for recognition of Bobby Bauer’s captaincy, have been trying to correct the record for years. The Bruins weren’t having it, based on — well, what the team told me was that Bruins centre, coach, GM, captain, and all-round legend Milt Schmidt had been asked years ago about Bauer’s captaincy and he didn’t remember it, so that was what they were going with. (It was never really clear whether he’d opined on the rest of them.)

You can read my original Puckstruck barrage here. If you’re interested, there’s this follow-up, in which I tried (and, I think, succeeded) in tracing just who it might have been who originally forgot about the missing six. A corrected list of the team’s early-era captains is here.

Why am I back to barracking the Bruins again now?

Not to point out that the good people at Hockey Reference, the go-to non-league resource for NHL statistics, adjusted their online page in December of 2021 after I shared evidence of the Bruins’ forgotten few with them. (I’ve already raised a ruckus about that, after all.)

And it’s not because I’ve heard from several unofficial sources that, after all the years of neglect, the Bruins have a plan to (finally) acknowledge the facts and the math as a present to themselves on the occasion of the team’s centenary, which is coming up this fall. That makes sense, I guess, and if it’s true, many happy returns of a hundred years to the Bruins, along with congratulations for (better late than never) taking the trouble to pay attention to their own history.

Richard Johnson from Boston’s Sports Museum has put together an official book to help the team celebrate: Boston Bruins: Blood, Sweat & 100 Years (Triumph) is due out in November. I suppose that’s where we’ll see the Bruins (at long last) give Barry, Stewart, Shore, Beattie, Cowley and Bauer their due. Maybe we’ll learn more about the whys and what-happeneds, though I suspect that if there is a correction, it will come without fanfare or further explanation.

In the meantime, the Bruins could adjust the record now on the official NHL page where they keep track of their honoured leaders, just as they could have done at any time in the past two years. I just checked, and the missing six are still missing — although the list of Bruin captains has been amended to reflect Patrice Bergeron’s retirement today: as of now it reads “(No Captain): Present.” [See Update below.]

Also new, and the point (also better late than never at all) of this entire post: the Bruins today, belatedly, got around to correcting the count on Bergeron’s captaincy. If you study the banners overhanging Bergeron’s honoured head in that portrait at the top of this post, the one the Bruins posted this afternoon on Twitter, you’ll see that the one on the right numbers him (tinily, blurrily) “26th Captain In Boston Bruins History.” That’s the first time the team has used that number in a public way, as far as I know. It would suggest that the list of captains will duly be (can it be true?) recalibrated.

Call it a soft opening of a correction. If anyone but me noticed it, they managed to keep their excitement safely stowed. It’s a start, I guess. And if the Bruins don’t at some point blare the news of the sudden proliferation in the number of their captains, you know where to be listening for that.

Correction: A detail of the banners hanging in the Bergeron portrait posted by the Bruins today acknowledges him as the team’s 26th captain.

Update, September 20, 2023: In announcing the appointment of the, um, yes, 27th captain in franchise history, the Boston Bruins today corrected the record on its missing captains. A review by Eric Russo of the history of the captaincy posted on the team’s website includes an Editor’s Note that explains that it was originally written in 2021, when the Bruins announced that Patrice Bergeron was the new captain. And continues:

At the time, Bergeron was tabbed as the 20th captain in club history, but during the club’s extensive research surrounding the Bruins’ Centennial – as well as with assistance from several independent hockey historians, including Hockey Hall of Fame volunteer Jeff Miclash, and the NHL’s Stats and Research Department – it was discovered that six other men have also been captain of the Black & Gold over the course of the franchise’s 100-year history.

As such, the Bruins are now recognizing Marty Barry, Nels Stewart, Eddie Shore, Red Beattie, Bill Cowley, and Bobby Bauer as former captains of the club.

bless this bruin

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NBCSN beatifies Bergeron, circa 2016.

The farewell that Patrice Bergeron deserves is a fond one: for 19 NHL seasons, he plied his trade as a centreman for the Boston Bruins with a combination of skill, determination, and grace that was positively Béliveau-esque. (And, of course, that’s the farewell he’s getting.) You didn’t need to be a black-and-gold evangelist to admire Bergeron’s composure, leadership, and ability to change the course of a game, or indeed to approve his many successes. He was one of those players, rare enough, who seemed to elevate the game he excels at, confirming its dignity even as he was lifting you, too, as you watched him, to a vantage from which it seemed like he was choreographing the way the game could and ought to be played.

Bergeron, who’s 38, and a son of the western Quebec City suburb of L’Ancienne-Lorette, announced his retirement this morning. “As hard as it is to write,” he said in a statement, “I also write it knowing how blessed and lucky I feel to have had the career that I have had, and that I have the opportunity to leave the game I love on my terms. It wasn’t a decision that I came to lightly. But after listening to my body, and talking with my family, I know in my heart that this is the right time to step away from playing the game I love.”

Bergeron, of course, played his entire NHL career with Boston. After a junior stint in the QMJHL with the Acadie–Bathurst Titan, he was plucked by the Bruins, 45th overall, in the 2003 NHL Entry Draft. The long list of his (approved) successes features a Stanley Cup championship, in 2011, as well as a constellation of international gold medals won playing for Canada, including at the Olympics in 2010 and 2014. No-one has claimed the Frank J. Selke Trophy, which honours the NHL’s best defensive forward, more than Bergeron, who’s won it six times, including for the past two seasons; not Bob Gainey (he won it four times), not Pavel Datsyuk (three times). How did Bergeron never win the Lady Byng? Too many penalty minutes to his name, I suppose, but then Jean Béliveau never won a Byng, either.

Bergeron was named captain of the Bruins in January of 2021. Regular readers of this digest might suspect that there’s be something further to be said on that subject, and there is, but because it’s more of a Bruins thing than a Bergeron, let’s leave that for a separate follow-up post.

It’s here, if you’re interested.

Done and Done: After 19 NHL seasons, Bergeron announced his retirement this morning.

the human side of hockey!

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Teddy Graham was a busy man in the winter of 1933. At his day-job, as a frontline defenceman for the Chicago Black Hawks, he and Taffy Abel were expected to do their best preventative work in front of goaltender Charlie Gardiner, keeping opposing forwards at bay, with minimal relief — Chicago was usually dressing just four defenceman at this time.

Then, that January, Graham got a promotion if perhaps not a raise: when the Black Hawks offloaded their captain, the veteran 39-year-old defender Helge Bostrom, Graham, 28, was appointed in his stead.

Still, with things so busy at work, Graham still managed to make a detour in early February of ’33 after the Black Hawks played in Detroit, heading north for a quick visit to Owen Sound, Ontario, his hometown, where he spent his summers playing baseball with the Brooke Millionaires.

Oh, and Graham was writing a syndicated newspaper column, too — well, lending his name and insight, if maybe not actually typing out actual sentences. In a series that would start appearing on newspaper pages across the continent in early March, Graham shared wild and woolly tales from his career. “Written On Ice,” the Tribune in Great Falls, Montana, headed the column, while the Buffalo Evening News touted it as revealing “The Human Side of Hockey!”

As it turned out, being human, Graham would fall to injury later around the same time. Along with several key teammates, he would miss the end of the schedule. Contemporary accounts aren’t clear on what was ailing him, exactly, but let’s assume that it had something to do with the wrapping we’re seeing in the scene here, dated to February, with Graham under the care of Black Hawks trainer Eddie Froelich and the supervision of coach Tommy Gorman.

Chicago finished at the bottom of the NHL’s American Division that month, out of the playoffs. With several games remaining in the regular season, Chicago owner Major Frederic McLaughlin announced that Gorman was the only employee on his payroll whose job was safe. “From today on,” he told the papers, “I will sell or trade any member of the squad, or all of them if necessary, to make certain of a berth in the Stanley Cup series next year.”

“It is apparent that not a few of our players have outworn their welcomes here,” he continued. “New faces are needed, and we’ll get them.”

That was good-bye for Teddy Graham: in October, he was traded to the Montreal Maroons in exchange for Lionel Conacher. (Charlie Gardiner succeeded him as captain.)

McLaughlin, it should be noted, got his wish: by the end of the 1933-34 season, Tommy Gorman had not only steered Chicago into the playoffs, he contrived to win the Cup, Chicago’s first.

 

(Image: © Chicago Sun-Times Media. SDN-074245, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection, Chicago History Museum)

boston’s captain clam

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Gang’s All Here: Marty Barry is the Bruin on the right here, alongside teammate Dit Clapper, the man he succeeded as Boston captain in 1934. The players were on the ice here at Boston Garden (not, as the original caption suggests, in Newton, Massachusetts), conducting a clinic for prospective players. (Image: Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection)

A friend with impeccable Bruins sources tells me that Boston management aims to correct the record on their missing captains … just not quite yet.

The team’s centennial is coming up, in 2024, and a book and a documentary are planned, and so in one future fell swoop the errors that the Bruins have for so long refused to acknowledge let alone correct will be no more.

So that’s something to look forward to … in two years’ time.

The news from Quebec in November of 1933.

Meanwhile, it was on a Friday of today’s date in 1905 that Marty Barry, one of Boston’s mislaid captains, was born in Saint-Gabriel-de-Valcartier, north of Quebec City. A centreman, he made his NHL debut with the New York Americans in 1927. The Bruins claimed him from the Americans’ Can-Am league team in the NHL’s intra-league draft in 1929 and he played six seasons in Boston.

Barry was 27 when he succeeded Dit Clapper as Bruins’ captain in November of 1933. It was a bit of a homecoming for the new skipper: Art Ross’ team had convened in Quebec City that year for its training camp.

“Some athletes talk a wonderful game,” a dispatch from the Boston Globe began early that month, but that wasn’t “one of the failings of the newly appointed captain of the Boston Bruins hockey club.”

It continued:

Marty “Clam” Barry, following a meeting of the players and Manager Ross late here this afternoon, was asked to make a speech. Barry, who never utters a word in the dressing room, as usual had nothing to say, but his playmates insisted, so Marty stood up and made the longest speech of his career.

“Thanks, fellows.” Then he sat down.

That is Marty Barry, no bluff, no talk, but a man of action on the ice as he was always an outstanding performer of the Bruins since he was drafted from New Haven Eagles four years ago, and he topped an admirable record last season by being leading scorer of the Bruins and one of the top pointmakers of the NHL.

Barry scored 27 goals and 39 points in 48 games as Boston captain, which tied him for the team points total with Nels Stewart. He finished fourth in NHL scoring. The Bruins didn’t fare so well, finishing out of the playoffs in the nine-team league.

The Bruins’ captaincy was, in that era, a one-year appointment, and Barry was duly succeeded in the fall of 1934 by Stewart.

With Art Giroux, the Bruins traded him in 1935 to the Detroit Red Wings, getting back Cooney Weiland and Walt Buswell. In his four years in Detroit, Barry won a pair of Stanley Cup championships (in ’36 and ’37) and a Lady Byng Trophy. He played one last year in the NHL in 1939-40 for the Montreal Canadiens.

Marty Barry died in 1969 at the age of 64.

just play the game

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Slapper: Born in 1941 on a Friday of this date in Big River, Saskatchewan, Jim Neilson made the switch from left wing to defence as a junior in Prince Albert. Loosing a shot here in 1971, when he was a veteran of 30, Neilson made his debut with the Rangers in 1962, and manned the blue line in New York for 12 years before joining the California Golden Seals for the 1974-75 season. He was captain in California and for the Cleveland Barons, too, after the Seals moved north. He finished his career with a season in the WHA with the Edmonton Oilers. “I’m an easygoing guy,” he said in the ’80s, looking back on his career. “I never look far ahead and I’ve used that philosophy all my life. I just play the game. It’s over, and there’ll probably be one again tomorrow.” Jim Neilson died on November 6, 2020, at the age of 78.

chicago’s opening act, 1926: the going was sticky

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A crowd of 7,000 was on hand at Chicago’s Coliseum on a night like this 96 years ago as the Chicago Black Hawks made their NHL debut on Wednesday, November 17, 1926 against the Toronto St. Patricks. The two captains shook on it before the game got going: that’s Chicago centreman (and future NHL coaching great) Dick Irvin on the left along with Toronto’s Bert Corbeau. “The Chicago team showed better combination and condition than their opponents,” was the report wired back to Toronto’s Globe after the expansion Black Hawks had prevailed by a score of 4-1.

Hughie Lehman was manning the Chicago net that night; the goals came from George Hay, Irvin, Gord Fraser, and Rabbit McVeigh. John Ross Roach did his best between the Toronto pipes. Scoring for the St. Pats was another coach-to-be, Hap Day, playing the right wing as he did in those days before he dropped back to the defence.

“The ice in the second period started to melt a bit,” the Chicago Tribune noted, “and the going was sticky and the puck jumped and rolled frequently making shots difficult and accuracy in passing almost impossible.” Trib correspondent Frank Schreiber wasn’t overly impressed by either aggregation, all in all. “Both teams fought hard,” he wrote, “but neither displayed more than an average attack or defence.”

leading from the crease

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Cord Captain: Born in Edinburgh, in Scotland, Charlie Gardiner was raised in Winnipeg. Pictured here in an illustration for La Presse from 1932, he was 28 in October of 1933, going into his seventh — and final — season with Chicago, when he was named captain of the Black Hawks, the fifth goaltender, at that point, to be appointed skip in NHL history. Chicago owner Major Frederic McLaughlin, for one, had high hopes. “Never have I made such a pre-season prophecy as I’m about to make now,” he said. “I am confident that this team will bring Chicago its first Stanley Cup.” And he was right.