defencemen

two so blue

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Ranger Rock: Born on a Sunday of this date in 1968 in Corpus Christi, Texas, Brian Leetch is 54 today, so here’s a tap of an Easton Ultralite Graphite stick to him. A veteran of 18 NHL seasons, he was a dominant force on the blueline for the New York Rangers, winner of a Calder Trophy and two Norrises. In 1994, he became the first American-born player to win the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP as the Rangers claimed their first Stanley Cup in 54 years. When, in 2008, the team retired his number, two, long-time teammate Mark Messier called Leetch the, all caps, GREATEST RANGER EVER.

king toot

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Whistleblower: Today marks the 120th anniversary of the birth of King Clancy, superstar NHL defenceman, long-serving referee, sometime coach. Born in Ottawa on a Tuesday of this date in 1902, Clancy played a decade with his hometown Senators in the 1920s, winning two Stanley Cup championships, before joining the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1930. With the Leafs, he skated a further seven seasons and got in on another Cup. The photo here dates to April of 1947, when Clancy was 45 and reffing in the finals that saw Toronto dismiss the Montreal Canadiens four games to two. (Image courtesy of Toronto Public Library)

dr. d

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Oiler Toiler: Born in Edmonton on a Sunday of this date in 1956, Dr. Randy Gregg is 66 today, so salutations to him. A long-time Edmonton physician specializing in sports medicine, in days of yore he played a decade on defence in the NHL, standing 6’4″ and winning five Stanley Cups with the Oilers between 1984 and 1990. Twice he represented Canada at the Winter Olympics, in 1980 and ’88.

sturdy marty burke: small for a defenceman, packs a hefty bodycheck

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Marty On Madison: Born in Toronto on a Saturday of this date in 1905, Marty Burke won a pair of Stanley Cup championships playing the d for the Montreal Canadiens, in 1930 and in ’31. After Montreal wrapped up the latter final by beating the Chicago Black Hawks , the local Gazette lauded Burke’s ability to shut down attacking opponents “quietly and effectively.” He was 5’8″ in those years, 160 pounds: though “small for a defenceman and he packs a hefty bodycheck and his steadying qualities have proved an inspiration to his team.” For seven Canadien seasons, Burke roomed with teammate Howie Morenz, and when Montreal traded the Stratford Streak to Chicago in 1934, Burke went, too, in a deal that also landed the Hawks Lorne Chabot. Burke spent five seasons with the Black Hawks before spending his final NHL season, 1937-38, back in Montreal.

do you want to look fancy, or do you want to get the job done?

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Fancy This: Terry Harper aims a fist at Bruins’ centre Forbes Kennedy at Montreal’s Forum this week in 1964. The Bruins prevailed on the night 6-0. Looking on is Bruins’ #4, defenceman Bob McCord. (Image: La Presse)

“Do you want to look fancy,” Terry Harper was saying in 1978, “or do you want to get the job done?” Harper, who’s turning 82 today, was talking generally about hockey at the time, but he might have been professing his own personal creed, the one that saw him through a 19-year career as highly effective and hard-to-daunt NHL defenceman. Born in Regina, Saskatchewan, on a Saturday of this date in 1940, Harper won five Stanley Cup championships with the Montreal Canadiens between 1962 and 1972. He went on to play for — and captain — the Los Angeles Kings and the Detroit Red Wings in the ’70s. He skated for the St. Louis Blues, too. He was an assistant coach for the Colorado Rockies in 1981 when, as a 41-year-old, injuries saw him drafted into the line-up for a 15-game run. “The game is 95 per cent mental,” Harper opined back in ’78. “A lot of people say it’s less than that, that it takes a lot of ability. It doesn’t. It’s 95 per cent or more here,” he said, tapping a finger to his head.

senator savard

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Ready Room: Born in Landrienne, Quebec, on a Tuesday of this date in 1946, Hall-of-Fame defenceman Serge Savard (a.k.a. The Senator) is 76 today: many happy returns of the rink to him. He played on eight Stanley Cup-winning teams with the Montreal Canadiens from 1968 through to 1979. He won a Conn Smythe Trophy in 1969 as playoff MVP and manned the defence for Canada during 1972’s Summit Series. He served as GM of Montreal from 1983 to 1995. He’s pictured here in the later 1960s in a Forum dressing room, under the gaze of Dick Irvin. (Image: Fonds Antoine Desilets, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)

sight plan: picturing a mask, one of hockey’s earliest

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Eye Test: Princeton’s E.W. Gould shows off his headgear (said to be of his own design) on December 21, 1921.

First hockey goaltender to wear a mask?

It’s a question that has diverted many a hockey researcher, including some here on the Puckstruck campus. This is well back beyond NHL pioneers Jacques Plante and Clint Benedict we’re talking now, before Elizabeth Graham and Corinne Hardman, pre-Eddie Giroux. The 2020 findings of hockey historian Eric Zweig, who’s done the digging, are as definitive as you’re going to come across. He settles us on Ev Marshall, of Calgary, who did the sensible thing and masked up in a game in 1899.

Next question: where to look if we’re seeking the first photograph of a hockey mask and the player who wore it?

While we do have images of both Hardman and Giroux, from 1916 and 1907 respectively, they show goaltenders only, no masks.

So this might well be it, hereabove, from 1921.

The thing is, this isn’t a goaltender we’re facing: E.W. Gould was a defenceman for Princeton University’s hockey team. I haven’t tracked his university record or found much in the way of a civilian biography, but his hockey file is … also thin. I haven’t even been able to glean a full first name. He may only have played a single season with the Tigers, over the winter of 1921-22, when he seems to have seen duty mostly as a substitute.

Gould’s mask got some play that winter, even if he didn’t: this photograph appeared in newspapers across the United States that winter, mostly as a standalone, the novelty of the mask was enough, no need for a whole story. While (to me) it looks like it might be a baseball mask, contemporary captions explain that Gould invented his rig himself.

As it turns out, Gould wasn’t the only one wearing a mask that year: his teammate (and captain), Princeton goaltender Gene Maxwell, sported one of similar design. That’s him above, in 1922, and then in the back row of the team grouping below from Lake Placid, with Gould and his mask kneeling up front.

While Gould may well have donned his mask as a measure of prudent protection, Maxwell wore glasses behind his. He had recent precedent to draw on in this regard: in 1915, Boston A.A. goaltender Ollie Chadwick used what looks like — see an artistic impression below — a pair of motorcycling or aviator’s goggles.

I guess they did work, insofar as Chadwick could have been even more painfully injured if he hadn’t been wearing them. Playing against Hobey Baker and his New York St. Nicholas team in March of ’15, Chadwick took a stick to the eyes. “The Boston goal tender plays with glasses,” the Boston Daily Globe detailed; “these broke and the player was badly cut.” He was patched and returned to his goal — without the glasses.

(Sad to say, Chadwick was killed in action at the age of 28 in 1917, while serving with the Lafayette Flying Corps over Belgium. Baker was with the U.S. Army Air Service when he died in a crash in France just over a year later. He was 26.)

Since we’re skating American ice, it’s worth noting that Chadwick wasn’t the first to wear headgear there. In February of 1911, New York A.C. captain Riley Casselman hit the ice against Crescent A.C wearing a baseball catcher’s mask — “much to the bewilderment of the fans,” as one local newspaper noted.

Casselman, who hailed from Morrisburg, Ontario, was no goaltender, either: in the old seven-man game, he was a free-wheeling rover. Those fans in New York came around to his way of seeing things, I guess: “Some said,” the report continued, “they didn’t see why all the players weren’t equipped with masks, especially when a rough game for the amateur league championship was on tap.”

Whether Gould’s 1921 half-mask was of his own design or not, it does seem to have made a lasting impression, to the point that the apparatus that Franklin Farrell wore a decade later while tending goal for the 1932 U.S. Olympic team — images here — looks like it could have been the very same model.

 

doug harvey: cool, can think, and lift a team

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Born in Montreal on a Friday of this date in 1924, Doug Harvey was a defenceman whose dominance helped the Montreal Canadiens win six Stanley Cup championships between 1953 and 1960. Seven times he won the Norris Trophy as the NHL’s best blueliner, the last of those after his move to the New York Rangers. He’s wrangling here with Lorne Ferguson, winger for Detroit in the later ’50s; the spectacled defenceman in the background is Al Arbour.

In 1958, Montreal Gazette columnist Dink Carroll deemed Harvey and the Boston Bruin’s dauntless Eddie Shore to be the best blueliners in NHL history. “Harvey is the best I’ve ever seen,” Shore himself said. “He’s cool, he can think, and he can lift a team.” Toe Blake, Harvey’s coach with Montreal, was asked to weigh in. He, of course, had played against Shore in the 1930s, when Blake was a winger for the Maroons and Canadiens. “Yes, he’s ahead of Shore,” Blake said. “He can do more things — when he wants to.”

diesel power

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Benchview: Born in Capreol, Ontario, on a Wednesday of this same date in 1933, Doug Mohns started out a defenceman, winning a pair of Memorial Cups with the Barrie Flyers in 1951 and ’53. In the NHL, the man they called Diesel played a decade with Boston, which is where coach Phil Watson converted him to a winger. With Chicago, he made his name as a member of the Black Hawks’ high-yield Scooter Line, lining up alongside Ken Wharram and Stan Mikita and scoring 20 goals or more in four consecutive seasons. He later played for the Minnesota North Stars, Atlanta Flames, and Washington Capitals before setting skates and sticks aside. The Stanley Cup eluded him: all in all, Mohns played 1,484 NHL games without winning a championship. (Artist: Tex Coulter)

making waves on the montreal blueline

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Born in 1902 in Salaberry-de-Valleyfield in Quebec on a Saturday of this date, Albert Leduc was a pillar of the Montreal defence for nine years, starting in the mid-1920s, winning two Cups with Canadiens along the way. (He also played short stints with the Ottawa Senators and New York Rangers.) Accounts of his antics on the ice sometimes included the phrases “his legs working like pistons, Albert dashes down and swerves at no defence” (1931) and “crashed Paul Thompson into the fence so hard in the first period that said fence was broken” (1933). As a 23-year-old rookie, he scored ten goals in 1925-26, second among all NHL defencemen that year, outscoring Lionel Conacher, King Clancy, and Sprague Cleghorn.

The first money he was ever paid for playing hockey? Leduc had a story he told about that in 1935, by which time he was coaching in the Can-Am league. Back in his teenaged years, while he was still a schoolboy during the First World War, Leduc was a bright enough hockey prospect to be invited to play in an exhibition game against the NHA’s barnstorming Montreal Wanderers. The venue was Ormstown, Quebec, about 20 kilometres from home. It was a big opportunity that young Leduc didn’t mean to miss, and so to get to the game, he hired a horse on credit, counting on being paid for his hockey efforts. But: when he arrived, he was told his talents weren’t needed.

“I am stricken,” Leduc recounted in the ’30s, as told in a contemporary newspaper reporter’s rendering of Leduc’s diction, “I protest. I cry out. I cry out so loud that the great Arthur Ross come along and say, ‘Hey, what is all this?’”

A powerhouse defenceman in his own right long before he started with the Boston Bruins, Ross, the Wanderer captain for many of those wartime years, listened to Leduc’s tale of woe and unpaid horse-rental.

“The great Mr. Ross, he tell me: ‘O.K. for the ’orse. Cry no more but shut up. You play for us. We need a guy with a ’orse and maybe you better bring the ’orse on the ice with you.’ But I think he joke, though Mr. Ross always look very stern.”

So Leduc played for the Wanderers in Ormstown, scored a goal, even. “After the game, the great Mr. Ross comes to me and he says: ‘How much for the ’orse?’”

“I say: ‘Five dollar fix everything,’ and what do you think now? The great Mr. Ross say: ‘Here, kid, give those ’orse a few oats,’ and he hand me fifteen dollar. I am broke down at such kindness. I pay for my ’orse, I have a profit.”

clem loughlin: viking elder, coach in chicago, victoria’s stanley cup captain

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Taking Stick Stock: Chicago defenceman Earl Seibert consults with coach Clem Loughlin during the NHL’s 1935-36 season.

As boys growing up in Viking, Alberta, the Sutters knew him well: Brian did odd jobs at Clem Loughlin’s main-street hotel and out on his nearby cattle farm, and Darryl had him as a coach when he played midget in the early 1970s. “We idolized him,” Darryl would say years later, after he’d ended up taking the same job Loughlin had done 57 years before him. “I remember one bus ride to St. Albert or Stony Plain where I got to sit right beside him. I was amazed by all his stories. We didn’t have anybody in our town who’d done the things he’d done.”

Born in Carroll, Manitoba, on a Tuesday of this date in 1892, Clem Loughlin did a lot of hockey things in his time. A defenceman, he won an Allan Cup in 1915 with the Winnipeg Monarchs before turning pro with the PCHA’s Portland Rosebuds. He played a decade in the west-coast league, with the Victoria Aristocrats, who then turned into the Victoria Cougars, and shifted leagues in the WHL.

It was a powerful Cougars outfit that manager Lester Patrick assembled in 1925, with a 33-year-old Loughlin captaining a line-up that also included  Frank Fredrickson, Jack Walker, Frank Foyston, and Hap Holmes. That March, they beat the Montreal Canadiens to take the Stanley Cup in four games, the last time a team not from the NHL claimed the trophy.

Loughlin had a short NHL career after, joining the Detroit Cougars that same fall. After two seasons in Detroit, he played part of the 1928-29 season with the Chicago Black Hawks. After coaching the IHL London Tecumsehs, Loughlin returned to Chicago in 1935, succeeding Tommy Gorman behind the bench a year after Gorman had steered the Black Hawks to their first Cup.

Whatever the challenges of coaching in the NHL in the 1930s, Loughlin had the added burden of working for Major Frederic McLaughlin, the domineering coffee tycoon and former polo star who owned the Black Hawks and couldn’t leave the running of the hockey team to those with experience in the game. It was Loughlin who had to contend with his boss’s 1936 plan to do away with Canadian players and make do with only Americans. (McLaughlin also planned to re-name the team the Yankees.)

Loughlin dealt with the mandate from on high as best he could — and even defended McLaughlin all-American scheme. “It isn’t as silly as it sounds by any means,” he told the Montreal Gazette in early 1937. “I contend that most hockey players are made, not born. The superstars of the game, like Chuck Conacher, Howie Morenz, and Bill Cook, of course, are great athletes and were born to be headliners in hockey. But take some of these other fellows that aren’t athletes in any line of sport except hockey. It’s the only game some of them play, in fact. Coaching and an eagerness to improve themselves in a big-money game is what has made them capable players.”

“Of course,” he allowed, “the Major’s plan will take some time in developing, for we must practically at scratch in this thing. But, you may laugh at me or not, I do believe that the scheme has possibilities.”

Maybe so; we don’t know. It never really launched, and in May of ’37, Loughlin resigned his post. He back in Alberta by then, where he had his farm and his hotel. Major McLaughlin said he regretted the loss to the Black Hawks. “Our relations have been so extremely pleasant,” he said, “and he is a man of such high ideals and splendid character that he will be missed.”

Next up at the Chicago helm was Bill Stewart, the NHL referee and baseball umpire. The following year he did what Tommy Gorman had done and Loughlin, guiding the Black Hawks to another Stanley Cup.

“He was a real gentleman,” Darryl Sutter said in 2001,” always in a fedora and topcoat. He coached me my last year of midget. I don’t think Clem had coached anybody 40 years, but we needed somebody. He used to come out on the ice in his long black trenchcoat. And he had these skates, back to when he played. He had the date right on them. We loved of all of his stories.”

Clem Loughlin died in January of 1977 at the age of 84. It was 1992 when Darryl Sutter, now in his second stint as coach of the Calgary Flames, followed his mentor’s footsteps to the Blackhawks’ bench. In ’01, when he was coaching the San Jose Sharks, he had a photograph of Loughlin hanging on the wall of office. By then, another Loughlin acolyte, Brian Sutter, had taken over as Chicago’s coach.

Coaching Clinic: Clem Loughlin weighs in with Toronto’s Globe in 1936.

big bob + fiery phil

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Lynn Patrick called Bob Armstrong “the most underrated defenceman in the NHL” in 1960, high praise, even if the praiser was Armstrong’s own GM with the Boston Bruins. Armstrong, who died on a Tuesday of this date in 1990 at the too-young age of 59, played 13 seasons in Boston. I’ll personally attest that, post-NHL, he was a much-loved teacher and coach at Lakefield College School, north of Peterborough, Ontario.

Beside him here on the Bruins bench is coach Phil Watson on the night of Watson’s debut as Boston coach, in October of 1961. New York beat the home team 6-2 that night. Watson didn’t get his first Bruins’ win until the team’s ninth game, when his charges dismissed the Detroit Red Wings by a score of 4-0. That happened to be Armstrong’s last game as a Bruin: after the game, GM Patrick announced that he’d traded his 30-year-old veteran to Montreal in exchange for winger Wayne Connelly, 21. Assigned to the EPHL Hull-Ottawa Canadiens, Bob Armstrong played out the season there. While his NHL career had reached its end, he did skate one more year as a pro, 1962-63, with the AHL’s Rochester Americans.

In ’61-62, Phil Watson steered Boston to … well, they finished out of the playoffs, last overall in the NHL standings. He returned the following year, but only lasted 14 games: in November of ’62, Lynn Patrick replaced Watson with his assistant GM, former Bruin great Milt Schmidt — the man Watson had replaced in ’61 behind the bench.