Frank Boucher

brother boucher

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Pep Talking: Born in Ottawa on a Saturday of this date in 1895, George, a.k.a. Buck, was one of four Boucher brothers who played in the NHL. Bobby and Billy were no slouches, winning a Stanley Cup together as forwards with Montreal in 1924, but Frank and Buck were in another class, Hall-of-Famers both. Frank, of course, won seven Lady Byng trophies in eight years, while Buck anchored the Ottawa Senators’ defence while they were winning four Stanley Cups between 1920 and 1927. Buck went on to coach four NHL teams: Maroons in Montreal, his hometown Senators, Eagles in St. Louis, Bruins in Boston. That’s where we find him here, on the left above, ahead of a 1949 pre-season exhibition game in Providence, RI. That’s Bruins’ captain Milt Schmidt by his side, along with goaltender Jack Gelineau, and defenceman Bill Quackenbush. Boucher lasted just a single season in Boston: after they missed the playoffs that year, he was succeeded by Lynn Patrick.

first: socko! next: rangers win

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“Syl Apps had counted for Toronto in the first session, Nick Metz in the second and 14,894 were all excited over a series-tying triumph from their heroes when Rangers started to ride the icy plains. Socko! Neil Colville shook Red Horner out of his hair and made it 2-1. One minute, 54 seconds later in the third period, Alf Pike feinted goalie Turk Broda out of position and delivered the tying goal.” That’s how Gene Ward opened his New York Daily News dispatch describing the Saturday-night soiree that saw the Rangers win the third of their four Stanley Cups on this very date in 1940. With the circus ensconced at Madison Square Garden, four of the series’ six games were played at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens, and it was there in overtime in the decisive game that New York’s Bryan Hextall beat Broda for the winner after two minutes.

Seen here receiving the stove-pipe Stanley Cup are, from left — well, Rangers’ goaltender Dave Kerr is all but missing from the frame (his pads are present and accounted for). In view next to him is Dutch Hiller alongside Lynn Patrick, Clint Smith, coach Frank Boucher, Babe Pratt, captain Art Coulter, Bryan Hextall, Madison Square Garden president Colonel John Reed Kilpatrick, an unidentified obscured Ranger, NHL president Frank Calder, Ranger manager Lester Patrick, another hard-to-identify Ranger, Neil Colville, Alf Pike, and Phil Watson.

the goalkeeper is generally favoured (they keep a special ambulance for him)

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Though it’s dated to 1933, I’m going to venture that this short and magnificent British Pathé newsreel of the antique New York Rangers is in fact a little older than that, and that the show of scurrying, leaping, and colliding that the players enact for the cameras goes back to either 1926-27, the team’s first season in the NHL, or its second, 1927-28.

Though it’s unusual to see them skating at full fling, many of the original Rangers who figure in the action here are unmistakable, whether it’s Frank Boucher steaming in on Ching Johnson, or Bill Cook going after the puck when Boucher goes flying in another sequence. Who’s the defender on the latter play? His sweater shows number 12, which in those initial Ranger seasons belonged to Leo Bourgault. It’s the goaltender who would seem to confirm that this is footage of earliest Rangers. While the camera gives us a good gaze at his gear, it doesn’t linger on his face. The cap you see in the long shots is familiar, and the stance, too, which is to say the crouch he assumes waiting for the play to approach. And yes, Lorne Chabot, who guarded the Ranger nets for most of their first two seasons in the NHL, did sport the number 2 on his sweater. It’s only towards the end of the clip that you get a good look at Chabot’s long, mournful mug. Crashing the net are wingers Murray Murdoch (#9) and Paul Thompson (#10).

Whether or not there was a special ambulance waiting for him, Chabot was famously unfavoured in April of 1928, during the second game of the Stanley Cup finals, when a shot by Nels Stewart of the Maroons caught him in his unprotected eye, and he was taken to Montreal’s Royal Victoria Hospital. That was the night the Rangers’ 44-year-old coach, Lester Patrick, took an emergency turn in the net — more on that here. With Joe Miller taking Chabot’s place for the remainder of the series, the Rangers won the Cup. Chabot never played another game for the Blueshirts. Convinced that his career was over, the Rangers sent him to the Toronto Maple Leafs in exchange for John Ross Roach. Far from finished, Chabot played another decade in the NHL before he retired in 1937. Only 11 other goaltenders in NHL history have recorded more career regular-season shutouts than Chabot’s 71.

frank boucher: his noodle is packed with hockey savvy

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Breadliners: Frank Boucher between his long-time Ranger wingers, brother Bill (right) and Bun Cook.

Here’s to Frank Boucher, born in Ottawa, Ontario, on a Monday of this date in 1901, one of the greatest centres the NHL has ever seen, even if — outrageously — the league forgot him when it dreamed up an anniversary list of its 100 best players in 2017, and despite the fact — are you kidding me? — that the Rangers have only seen fit to recognize the number Boucher wore in New York, 7, in Rod Gilbert’s honour.

Frank was one of four Boucher brothers to play major-league hockey: in 1923, while he was starring for the PCHA’s Vancouver Maroons, his elder brother Buck was anchoring the Ottawa Senators’ defence while two other siblings, Billy and Bobby, were forwards for the Montreal Canadiens. Following a two-year career as a constable with the Northwest Mounted Police, Frank had made his professional debut with Ottawa before making his way west to Vancouver. When the western league dissolved in 1926, Boucher’s rights were sold to Boston. It was on Conn Smythe’s short-lived Ranger watch that Boucher came to the Rangers before playing a single game for the Bruins. Having made his debut in New York in 1926, he soon found himself skating between brothers Bill and Bun Cook on the famous “Bread Line.”

With their help, New York raised two Stanley Cups, in 1928 and 1933. Seven times he won the Lady Byng Trophy as the NHL’s most gentlemanly player, and by the time he retired (for the first time) as a player in 1938, he was the NHL’s all-time leader in assists. Succeeding Lester Patrick as coach of the Rangers in 1939, he steered the team to another Stanley Cup in 1940. He wasn’t quite finished playing: in 1943, aged 42, he returned to the Rangers’ line-up for 15 games. Elected to hockey’s Hall of Fame in 1958, Frank Boucher died in December of 1977 at the age of 76.

Arranging a Boucher miscellany, I’d make sure to mention:

• His adjectives. If you look him up in old newspapers, you’ll find that these included scintillant (1925) and burglarious (1923). The latter refers to his skill in stealing pucks from opponents, the art of which he studied playing alongside the master himself, Frank Nighbor, when they were teammates in Ottawa. Hence Boucher’s nickname, Raffles, borrowed from the novels of E.W. Hornung, and most eagerly applied by newspapermen when Boucher was playing in Vancouver. As the local Sun explained in 1924, “The original ‘Raffles’ was the most gentlemanly burglar known to fiction and Vancouver’s ‘Raffles’ is the most picturesque and polite puck thief in hockey.”

Here’s Ed Sullivan hymning his praises in a 1931 syndicated column — yes, that Ed Sullivan, back in his New York Daily News days:

Boucher has been up in the big leagues of hockey for ten years now. He could stay up in the top flight for ten additional years. Even if his speed were to desert him, Boucher could get by on his smartness. His noodle is packed with hockey savvy.

• Boucher’s recollection that the contract that manager Tommy Gorman of Ottawa’s (original) Senators signed him to in 1921 paid C$1,200 for the season — about C$17,000 in today’s money. “I leaped at the chance,” he later recollected, “little knowing what a terrible year was in store for me. I spent practically the whole season on the bench.”

The problem was the Ottawa line-up. In front of Clint Benedict’s goal, the Senators lined up Frank Nighbor, Punch Broadbent, Cy Denneny, Eddie Gerard, and Frank’s brother Buck. “They were all 60-minute men. In those days you didn’t come off the ice unless you were carried off.”

Dey’s Arena in Ottawa was, in those years, unheated, so along with fellow spares Billy Bell and King Clancy, Boucher petitioned Gorman and coach Pete Green to allow them to wait in the warmth of the Ottawa dressing room until they were needed. Management wasn’t keen on that, but they did finally relent, installing a buzzer system by which the bench could call forth replacements as needed. Boucher:

One buzz meant Clancy, two buzzes meant Bell and so on. So, for the balance of the season we sat in the dressing room, in full uniform, playing cards, with the roar of the crowd and the stamping of feet over our heads.

• The circumstances under which Boucher came to own the original Lady Byng Trophy in 1935. Nighbor was the first to win it, in 1925 and again in ’26, followed by Billy Burch in ’27. Boucher was next, and next, and next, and … next. Joe Primeau relieved him of his crown in 1932, but the following year Boucher was back for another winning run, this one lasting three consecutive years.

After Boucher won his seventh Lady Byng in 1935, Ottawa Journal columnist Walter Gilhooly wrote an open letter to the trophy’s donor patron respectfully suggesting, well, “that the cup be withdrawn and your trustees be instructed to turn it over to Frank Boucher to become his permanent possession” as a “well-earned keepsake of his time and his achievements in the National League.”

And so it happened. Within a week, the wife of Canada’s erstwhile governor-general had written from England to express her desire to see it done. NHL President Frank Calder saw to it. That’s how a new Byng came to be born in 1936, when Doc Romnes of the Chicago Black Hawks was voted the winner. We’ll never know whether, on merit, Boucher’s reign should have continued: having collected the original trophy for his mantelpiece, Boucher voluntarily withdrew his name from consideration for future Byngs.

• A partial inventory of the swag presented on “Frank Boucher Night” in February of 1951, when the Rangers celebrated the man and his service to the club at Madison Square Garden.

“Boucher had enough gifts to make a jackpot on a radio quiz program,” the Globe and Mail reported. “The fans gave him a 1951 Studebaker, the team a television set. The hockey writers presented him with a typewriter. His hometown friends at Mountain, Ont., contributed an oil burner for his farm.”

• A coda: in 1962, February, fire swept through the farmhouse, burning it to the ground. Boucher was in Regina, where he was serving as commissioner of the Saskatchewan Junior League; his son Earl and family escaped the flames. Not so Boucher’s hockey mementoes, most of which were destroyed, including the original Lady Byng Trophy.

The cause of the fire was thought to be mice chewing through electrical wires.

Bench Boss: Frank Boucher, hatted at left, coaches the New York Rangers to a Stanley Cup championship in April of 1940 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. On the bench before him, that’s Neil Colville (6), Muzz Patrick (15), and Alex Shibicky (4).

trophy case: three bygone nhl awards you’ve (probably) never heard of

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Won And Done: Ace Bailey of the Toronto Maple Leafs with the one-and-only Paul Whitman Cup.

With the Stanley Cup having found a new home last week, it was, last night, time for the Hart and the Lady Byng (along with all the rest of the NHL’s trophies for individual achievement) to make their matches. And so they did, of course, tonight, at the (big breath) 2019 NHL Awards presented by Bridgestone at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas.

As you may have heard, Nikita Kucherov of the Tampa Bay Lightning won the Hart Memorial Trophy, which goes to the player deemed to be the league’s most valuable. Originally called the Hart Trophy, it’s the league’s oldest individual award, donated in 1924 by Dr. David A. Hart, a distinguished Montreal medical man, soldier, and sportsman whose son Cecil was a long-time coach of the Montreal Canadiens. That first year, by a plurality of votes cast by a panel of sportswriters, Frank Nighbor of the Ottawa Senators finished just ahead of Canadiens’ Sprague Cleghorn.

As Aleksander Barkov of the Florida Panthers may or may not have been told, the former Evelyn Moreton donated a second trophy to the NHL’s cabinet in 1925. It was as the wife of Viscount Byng of Vimy, Canada’s governor-general, that Lady Byng had arrived in Ottawa and become, in time, a hockey fan, and she meant for her trophy to aid in the calming and cleansing of the game she learned to love. Rewarding the league’s “cleanest and most effective” practitioner, it was originally supposed to be called the Lady Byng of Vimy Cup, though the Lady Byng Trophy is what stuck and then, subsequently, the Lady Byng Memorial Trophy. Sportswriters would again do the deciding, but only from 1926 on: for the first Lady Byng, Lady Byng herself chose the winner, Ottawa’s Frank Nighbor once again.

One by one over the years the NHL added the trophies that will be handed out tonight. The Vézina was first awarded in 1927 (to Montreal’s George Hainsworth), the Norris not until 1954 (Detroit’s Red Kelly was the inaugural winner). The NHL did start recognizing a Rookie-of-the-Year in 1933, when the recognition went to Carl Voss of Toronto, though the Calder Trophy wasn’t actually awarded until 1937 (to Toronto’s Syl Apps). The Art Ross Trophy for the league’s leading regular-season scorer didn’t appear on the scene until 1947-48 (Elmer Lach of Montreal claimed it that year).

For all that familiar silverware, the list of NHL trophies that didn’t make it to Vegas is a surprisingly lengthy one. While the Harts and Byngs and Calders have endured through much of the league’s century+ on ice, many others have appeared only to disappear again — usually all in an unexplained hurry. Here, quick-like, a look at three trophies that briefly recognized the best of the NHL’s best.

The Paul Whiteman Cup

Bandleader Paul Whiteman (a.k.a. the King of Jazz) was a big North American deal in the 1920s and ’30s. Bing Crosby had his first number one hit singing “Ol’ Man River” in front of Whiteman’s orchestra; another version, with Paul Robeson on vocals, is in the Grammy Hall of Fame along with several other Whiteman recordings. News of Whiteman’s death in 1967 — he was 77 — made the front page of The New York Times. “In the era of the Stutz Bearcat,” Alden Whitman wrote there, “the raccoon coat, and the hip flask, Mr. Whiteman was the hero of flaming youth.”

King of Crease: Bandleader Paul Whiteman taking a late-1920s practice turn with Tex Rickard’s New York Rangers.

He was also something of a hockey fan. Born in Denver, Colorado, in 1890, Whiteman seems to have taken to the ice at some young point in his upbringing (“on the Pacific Coast,” according to one account). Flash forward to the fall of 1928 and you’ll find him donating a trophy to the NHL to recognize the league’s leading scorer 20 years before the Art Ross came to be.

By the time the 1928-29 season had wrapped up the following March, Toronto’s Ace Bailey had surged to the top of the heap, compiling 22 goals and 32 points to nudge past Nels Stewart of the Maroons and his 29 points.

Whiteman was on hand at Madison Square Garden when the Leafs met the Rangers in a playoff semi-final, handing over the cup before the puck dropped. According to the uncharitable account of New York’s Daily News, Whiteman “wisely kept to the sideboards while doing so. The ice is too slippery for a 300-pounder to entrust himself to it.”

The Whiteman only seems to have been awarded that once: there’s no evidence that Boston’s Cooney Weiland was recognized in 1930 when he led the league in scoring, or indeed anyone else after that.

Desker: Ace Bailey at his Maple Leaf Gardens’ desk in 1969, with his Paul Whiteman Cup displayed in the corner.

Bailey kept the trophy he’d won, and proudly. In the 1969 photograph here, below, you can spy it in the corner of the former Leafs’ sniper’s office at Maple Leaf Gardens. Today, the one-and-only Paul Whiteman Cup resides in Bailey’s hometown of Bracebridge, Ontario, where it’s on display in a cabinet at the Bracebridge Sports Hall of Fame with the town’s Memorial Arena .

The Roosevelt Hotel Clean Play Trophy

The Roosevelt Hotel is today where it was in 1928: at 45 East 45th Street, near Madison Avenue, in midtown Manhattan. That’s not too far away from where boxing impresario and promoter extraordinaire Tex Rickard opened his Madison Square Garden in 1925, on Eighth Avenue, between 49th and 50th. Three years later, Rickard had two hockey teams, Americans and Rangers, as tenants. While it’s not clear how the Roosevelt Trophy came to be, it’s likely that Rickard was somehow involved, if not directly then through the efforts of his Madison Square marketing machinery.

New York was positively awash in new (short-lived) hockey trophies in ’28. The Paramount Theatre Trophy recognized the MVP of the two New York teams, as determined by a vote among the New York Hockey Writers Association, while the Belvedere Hotel Trophy honoured the leading local regular-seasons scorer. Rangers’ defenceman Ching Johnson took Paramount that spring while his teammate Frank Boucher claimed the Belvedere.

When it was first announced in late 1927, the Roosevelt Trophy was styled (on New York newspages at least) as succeeding the Lady Byng in rewarding the NHL’s “cleanest” player. The Roosevelt Hotel was a hive of sporting activity as the trophy made its debut, with baseball commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis presiding over his sport’s winter meetings on the property the same December week that a fancy dinner party was convened to hand over hockey’s newest prize. Hosted by Edward Clinton Fogg, managing director of the company that owned the hotel, the hockey ceremonies were broadcast live over the airwaves of New York radio station WRNY.

Cup Christening: Posing with the brand-new Roosevelt Hotel Clean Play Cup in December of 1927 are, from left, Joseph Hannon, president of the New York Americans (and New York’s deputy fire commissioner); Edward Clinton Fogg, managing director of the Roosevelt; Tex Rickard, president of Madison Square Garden; and Colonel John S. Hammond, president of the New York Rangers.

With NHL president Frank Calder unable to attend, Tex Rickard took the trophy into his keeping. As spelled out in the press at the time, the conditions governing the Roosevelt were less subjective than those by which the Lady Byng was defined. “At the close of the season,” the Brooklyn Daily Eagle advised, “it will be awarded to the player who receives the least number of penalties during the campaign.”

The three new New York trophies were awarded once that had played out, in early April of 1928, just before the Rangers opened what was to be a successful Stanley Cup run against the Maroons of Montreal. The party, this time, was at the Belvedere Hotel, on West 48th Street. Presiding over the evening’s proceedings was none other than the man the Daily Eagle had no problem calling the “corpulent bandleader:” Paul Whiteman. (Next to him, bulky Ching Johnson looked a mere “mite.”)

For any who might have lamented the demise of the Lady Byng, well, no, it had not given way to the new trophy. A week before the party at the Belvedere, it had been conferred as usual, with Frank Boucher of the Rangers beating out Detroit’s George Hay; Frank Nighbor from Ottawa; Boston’s Harry Oliver; Normie Himes of the New York Americans; and Canadiens’ Herb Gardiner for the honour.

When it came to the Roosevelt, Boucher was only second-best. Surveying all those NHLers who’d played at least 1,000 minutes that season, NHL referee-in-chief Cooper Smeaton did the math, drawing on what a Brooklyn Daily Eagle report called his “private records” to determine that while Boucher had been penalized for 14 minutes of the 1674 he’d skated that season, Pittsburgh Pirates’ winger Harold Darragh had been sanctioned for just 10 of his 1620 minutes.

I don’t know that Darragh was on hand to receive his hardware, but I’m assuming it was delivered to him eventually. Like the Paramount and the Belvedere, the Roosevelt Trophy seems to have been a tradition that ended as soon as it started. None of the trophies in the room at the Belvedere that night appears to have survived its infancy. I haven’t come across any further mention of any of them beyond 1928, let alone a hint of any subsequent winners.

The Greyhound Cup

The Greyhound may be the most enigmatic of lost NHL trophies. How did it come about? Who did the voting? Was it awarded with any ceremony? Where did it end it up? Was Red Dutton truly as thrilled to receive it as he looks here?

Historian Andrew Ross says that the Greyhound was sponsored by the bus company, which makes more sense than a dog-backed scenario. Spend some time sifting through old newspapers and you’ll find … not much more in the way of answers. In recognizing the NHL’s MVP it seems to have been flooding ice that the Hart was already taking care of — had been, as mentioned, for seven years.

Like the Whiteman and the Hotel Roosevelt, the Greyhound only seems to have been awarded once, in 1931, which is when defenceman Red Dutton of the New York Americans collected it and posed for the photograph here. Dutton, 33 that year, was a formidable force on the blueline throughout his ten-year NHL career and, before that, with the Calgary Tigers of the old WHL. He would go on to coach and manage the Americans and, after Frank Calder’s death, served time as interim president of the NHL. It’s not really for me to say how good Dutton was during the 1930-31 season, but I might point that when it came to the voting for the Hart that year, he didn’t rate in the top five. Montreal’s Howie Morenz tallied best on the ballot, going away, followed by Boston’s Eddie Shore; the Leafs’ King Clancy; Ebbie Goodfellow of the Detroit Falcons; and Nels Stewart of the Montreal Maroons.

jimmy jamieson: recalling another of the nhl’s indigenous trailblazers

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October, 2019: Originally asserting that Jimmy Jamieson was almost certainly the second Indigenous player to take to NHL ice, this post has been updated to reflect … a  certain lack of certainty about that ranking. Joe Benoit preceded him onto NHL ice, and possibly others, too. Johnny Harms made his NHL debut in April of 1944.

Born on a Monday of this date in 1921, Jimmy Jamieson was a hard-hitting defenceman who played just a single big-league game, with the New York Rangers, in 1944. Suiting up that winter for duty on the bluelines of Madison Square Garden, Jamieson was one the NHL’s earliest Indigenous players, hitting the ice 13 years after Buddy Maracle debuted in Rangers’ blue in 1931, nine years before Fred Sasakamoose skated for the Chicago Black Hawks in 1953.

During his hockey career, newspapers tended to refer to Jamieson’s Cayuga background, though Canadian government records seem to show that his family was Mohawk. He was born in Brantford, Ontario, though his family lived on the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve, probably near Ohsweken. His father, Venus, was a farmer who’s said to have chased pucks in his own right, plying a stick on outdoor rinks as a youth.

His son’s eight-year career as a minor-league defenceman took him to New York and Baltimore in the Eastern Amateur Hockey League, out to Pasadena for a stint in the Pacific Coast Hockey League, and to Milwaukee and Akron in the International Hockey League. While we have have his physical specs from those years (5’9” and 170 pounds), and the usual bare-bones statistical reporting, there’s no detailed descriptive accounting of Jimmy Jamieson’s hockey years.

He played one full season, 1943-44, with the Rangers’ farm team, the EAHL New York Rovers, and it looks to have been a solid one. The Rangers took him to their pre-season training Winnipeg that year, but he didn’t make the cut. With the Rovers his teammates included goaltender Al Rollins, who was later a Leaf and a Black Hawk, as well as defenceman Fred Shero, a Ranger-to-be who’d eventually win a pair of Stanley Cups coaching the Philadelphia Flyers. In 40 games, Jamieson was the highest-scoring defenceman, with six goals and 16 points, and led the team in penalty minutes with 73.

Frank Boucher was in his fifth year coaching the New York Rangers in 1943. While he’d steered the team to a Stanley Cup in his first year behind the bench, things had slipped since then. As the new year replaced the old, the team was, as the local Daily News put it, firmly cellared, dead last in the six-team NHL standings, 13 points adrift of Chicago. Though Boucher’s stellar career on the ice had ended five years earlier, the situation was so desperate in New York — and the Ranger roster so depleted by wartime manpower shortages — that Boucher had returned to the ice at the age of 42.

It wasn’t enough. Heading into a mid-January home game against the Black Hawks, New York was mired in a five-game losing streak. Trying to jolt the team’s fortunes, manager Lester Patrick announced that he was adding three new players to the roster, including winger Kilby Macdonald, who’d been on that 1940 Stanley Cup team and won the Calder Trophy as the league’s top rookie. With centre Hank Damore, acquired from the Brooklyn Crescents of the EAHL, he’d do his best to boost the Rangers’ attack. Jamieson was summoned from the Rovers to bolster New York’s blueline.

Macdonald didn’t make it to New York in time for the Chicago game, but the other two suited up. It’s possibly (probably?) a coincidence that Jamieson wore the number 14 that night — the same one that Buddy Maracle had borne on his sweater during his stay with the Rangers 13 years earlier. (No-one seems to have noticed at that time; in fact, I can find no mention of Maracle and his achievement at all in the coverage from the 1940s.)

Against Chicago, when Damore rifled a second-period shot past Black Hawks’ goaltender Mike Karakas, the assists went to Ab DeMarco and Jamieson. That made the score 4-1 for Chicago, and the visitors did end up winning 5-2 to push New York’s unhappy streak of losses to six games.

And that was all for Jim Jamieson in the NHL. Macdonald would stick, playing out the season in New York and returning for one more; Damore lasted four games in all, the only ones he played in the NHL before returning to the minors.

For Jamieson, it was one and done: following the Chicago loss, he was returned to the Rovers. The coming-and-going was nothing new, Harold Burr wrote that same week in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle; the way it was with the Rangers that year, he quipped, trainer Harry Westerby didn’t know half of the players’ first names.

Other factors that may have been at play: by adding three new players, Patrick does seem to have exceeded the NHL roster limit. With centre Chuck Scherza out injured, the Rangers’ long-serving captain Ott Heller had been moved up to the forward line. With Scherza’s return, Heller was shifting back. So it may have been a matter of numbers that bumped Jamieson back to the Rovers.

The American papers did take note of Jamieson’s background, even if they weren’t quite so sure what it was they were talking about, variously identifying him as “a full-blooded Cherokee Indian;” “a full-blooded Iroquois Indian;” “a full-blooded Cayuga, Indian;” and a plain old “full-blooded Indian.”

Several reports did note that his status eased his travels between Canada and the U.S., which was often a complicated process for hockey players in wartime. “His people,” the Daily Eagle advised, “have numerous peace treaties with the Canadian Government that make it easy for Jimmy to cross the border where other players are held up by yards of red tape.”

Accounts of Buddy Maracle’s career from a decade earlier make the racism he faced, in rinks and in newsprint, all too insidiously clear. That there’s nothing so explicit in the press attending Jamieson’s years as a professionally hockey player doesn’t mean that he didn’t experience any, just that it may not have been written down and reported as it once so casually was.

I can’t tell you much about Jim Jamieson’s post-hockey life, other than that he seems to have done some coaching in Brantford in the 1950s. He died at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Brantford in December of 1985 at the age of 64. He’s buried in a family plot at Six Nations.

Also worth a note: Jamieson’s brother, elder by seven years, was also a talented hockey player. Mostly a right winger, Wendell Jamieson was (somewhat confusingly) also mostly known as Jimmy during his hockey-playing days. He never made it to the NHL, but he did have a long career as a minor-leaguer through the 1930s and ’40s, much of it in the old American Hockey League.

In 1938-39, the elder, non-NHL Jimmy Jamieson joined the Detroit Holzbaugh of the Michigan-Ontario Hockey League. At 24, he was described as a fast skater and accomplished stickhandler, and seen as one of his team’s prime offensive threats. Anchoring the defence of one of the teams he faced that year, the Detroit Pontiac Chiefs, was a 34-year veteran with “an oft-broken nose” who’d converted from left wing to blueliner: Buddy Maracle.

best in show

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The promise the cover seems to make doesn’t quite pan out — Liberty’s slate of picks of the best of the NHL’s best doesn’t, in fact, include a single Montreal Maroon. One does feature in the jury the magazine convened in 1936 to do the selecting, so maybe that counts for something — Maroons’ captain Cy Wentworth joined a distinguished panel that also included coaches Clem Loughlin (Chicago Black Hawks); Red Dutton (New York Americans); Sylvio Mantha (Montreal Canadiens); and Frank Patrick (Boston Bruins); along with fellow captains Hap Day (Toronto Maple Leafs); Doug Young (Detroit Red Wings); and Bill Cook (New York Rangers). In a feature article that advises under the headline that it’s going to cost you 12 minutes and 35 seconds to read, their picks are revealed. Allowing itself a little latitude on left wing, the jury decided this way:

Goal
Tiny Thompson (Boston)

Defence
Eddie Shore (Boston)
Ching Johnson (Rangers)

Centre
Frank Boucher (Rangers)

Left Wing
Paul Thompson (Chicago) or Busher Jackson (Toronto)

Right Wing
Charlie Conacher (Toronto)

About the Charlie Chaplin Jinx, fyi: in a mere seven-and-a-half minutes I learned that a couple of Liberty’s writers had a theory on why several actresses who’d starred in movies with and/or got married to Chaplin didn’t end up succeeding in Hollywood. It wasn’ta jinx at all, they felt: “a much more likely explanation of why Chaplin’s leading ladies have not gone farther is that he doesn’t pick them for their acting ability.”

ivan irwin: think twice + avoid

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It took defenceman Ivan Irwin a couple of tries before he stuck in the NHL. Boston and Montreal both took a look in the early 1950s, but he was deemed too awkward, not strong enough a skater. He finally caught on in New York at the age of 26, playing four seasons with the Rangers. Born in Chicago to Canadian parents on a Sunday of this date in 1927, Irwin died last month in Toronto, on February 11, at the age of 91. Contemporary articles recounting his exploits on the Ranger defence feature words like thump and bash and bop. “There’s a crudeness to his form when he’s in action,” Stan Saplin wrote in a 1955 profile for Hockey Blueline magazine, “and yet, if this makes any sense, there is a polish to Irwin’s crudeness. As he says, he’s far from an accomplished skater and often he looks like a first-timer on blades as he hurries to respond to a distress signal. There’s nothing amateurish about his defensive work.” His coach, Frank Boucher, thought that even as a newcomer to the NHL, he played like a veteran. “He gives you that little opening and then closes it,” Boucher said. “And when he hits you, you know it. I’ve noticed time and again that forwards bringing the puck in don’t drive against us as they did before Irwin joined us. They think twice and look to avoid him.”

severely jarred, badly wrenched: the life and sore times of howie morenz

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Bedridden: Chicago’s Mush March sent Howie Morenz crashing into the boards in March of 1934, sending Montreal’s star centre to hospital with a gash in his wrist and a broken thumb. Seen here the next day in a Chicago hospital alongside nurse Ruth Johnson, Morenz was said to be talking of retiring from hockey, though he soon denied that. “You can say,” he told reporters, that I am good for five — make it four, just to be sure — years more.”

An unhappy anniversary, Friday: 82 years ago, on March 8, 1937, Montreal Canadiens’ legendary centre Howie Morenz died of a coronary embolism at Montreal’s Hôpital Saint-Luc. He was 34. In the pages of my 2014 book Puckstruck, I wrote about the hurts and hazards Morenz endured during his 15-year NHL career, on the ice and off it. An updated and expanded version of that would look like this:

I don’t think goalposts hated Howie Morenz — there’s no good proof of that. From time to time they did injure him, but you could reasonably argue that in those cases he was as much to blame as they were. Did they go out of their way to attack him? I don’t believe it. What, possibly, could the goalposts have had against poor old Howie?

Morenz was speedy and didn’t back down and, well, he was Morenz, so other teams paid him a lot of what still gets called attention, the hockey version of which differs from the regular real-life stuff in that it can often be elbow-shaped and/or crafted out of second-growth ash, graphite, or titanium. But whether your name is Morenz or something plainer with hardly any adjectives attached to it at all, doesn’t matter, the story’s the same: the game is out to get you.

In 1924, his first season as a professional with Canadiens, Montreal battled Ottawa for the NHL title, which they won, though in the doing Morenz developed what the Ottawa Citizen diagnosed as a certain stiffness resulting from water on the knee.

That drained away, or evaporated, or maybe it didn’t — in any case, Morenz played on as Montreal advanced to vie for the Stanley Cup against Western challengers from Vancouver and Calgary. In a March game against the Vancouver Maroons, he was badly bruised about the hip, I’m not entirely sure how, perhaps in a third-period encounter with Frank Boucher that the Vancouver Sun rated a minor melee?

Canadiens beat the Calgary Tigers in Ottawa to win the Cup, but not before Morenz went down again. He made it back to Montreal before checking into the Royal Victoria Hospital. Montreal’s Gazette had the provisional report from there. The ligaments in Morenz’s left shoulder were certainly torn and once the x-rays came back they’d know whether there was any fracture. What happened? The paper’s account cited a sobering incident without really going into detail:

His injury was the result of an unwarranted attack by Herb Gardiner in the second period of the game, following a previous heavy check by Cully Wilson.

(Wilson was and would continue to be a notorious hockey bad man, in the parlance of the time; within three seasons, Gardiner would sign on with Canadiens.)

Subsequent bulletins reported no fractures, though his collarbone had relocated, briefly. Morenz would be fine, the Royal Victoria announced, though he’d need many weeks to recuperate. Those came and went, I guess. There’s mention of him playing baseball with his Canadiens teammates that summer, also of surgery of the nose and throat, though I don’t know what that was about. By November was reported ready to go, signing his contract for the new season and letting Montreal manager Leo Dandurand that he was feeling fine.

In 1926, January, a rumour condensed in the chill air of Montreal’s Forum and took shape and then flow, and wafted out into the winter of the city, along Ste. Catherine and on through the night, and by the following morning, a Sunday, it had frozen and thawed and split into smaller rumours, one of which divulged that Howie Morenz has broken his neck, another blacker one still, Howie Morenz is dead.

The truth was that in a raucous game against the Maroons he ran into Reg Noble. With two minutes left in the game he carried the puck into enemy ice, passed by Punch Broadbent, was preparing to shoot when … “Noble stopped him with a body check.”

Not a malicious attack, said the Gazette. Still,

Morenz went spinning over the ice. He gathered himself together until he was in a kneeling position after which he collapsed and went down, having to be carried from the ice.

In the game’s final minutes, with Noble serving out punishment on the penalty bench, Maroons’ centre Charlie Dinsmore’s efforts to rag the puck, kill off the clock, so irritated some Canadiens’ fans that they couldn’t keep from hurling to the ice their bottles, their papers, many of their coins — and one gold watch, too, such was their displeasure, and their inability to contain it. Police arrested five men who maybe didn’t expect to be arrested, though then again, maybe it was all worth it, for them.

Dinsmore kept the watch for a souvenir.

In February, when the Maroons and Canadiens met again, this time at the Mount Royal Arena, Maroons prevailed once more. It was the third period when, as the Gazette recounted it,

Morenz had got clear down the left aisle. He tore in at terrific speed on Benedict but before he could get rid of his shot, Siebert and Noble tore in from opposite directions. Siebert bodied Morenz heavily. The Canadien flash came up with a bang against the Montreal goal post and remained on the ice doubled up. He had taken a heavy impact and had to be carried off the ice.

The diagnosis: not only was Morenz (and I quote) severely jarred, a tendon at the back of his ankle proved badly wrenched.

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fifteen games a ranger: buddy maracle, in and out of the nhl

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In A Minors Key: The Springfield Indians, probably in their 1928-29 configuration. Back row, from the left, best as I can tell, that’s coach Frank Carroll, Frank Waite, Harry Foster, Leroy Goldsworthy, and Laurie Scott (?). Front, from left: Buddy Maracle, Wilfrid Desmarais, Andy Aitkenhead, Clark Whyte (?), Art Chapman.

The turn of the calendar from January to February brings Hockey Is For Everyone™ — “a joint NHL and NHLPA initiative celebrating diversity and inclusion in hockey.” There’s a hashtag, there are websites (here and here), a mobile museum; there are events and programs planned around the league, throughout the month. Ambassadors have been named, one for each NHL team; others are drawn from women’s hockey, the media, as well as from the ranks of the league’s distinguished alumni.

Fred Sasakamoose is one of the latter. His story and achievements have both been widely chronicled, and there’s no questioning his contributions or commitment as a hockey pioneer and change-maker. Last year, he was a worthy (and past due) recipient of the Order of Canada. To point out (again) that Sasakamoose doesn’t seem, in fact, to have been the NHL’s first Indigenous player doesn’t diminish his achievements, or affront his dedication to many causes, hockey and otherwise, over the years. The NHL doesn’t want to get into it, apparently: in recent months, the league’s position on its own history so far as it involves Buddy Maracle and his apparent breakthrough has been — no position at all. You’ll find his statistics archived on NHL.com, but no word of his story, beyond those bare numbers. I’ve asked both the league and the New York Rangers, for whom Maracle played in 1931, about whether they have plans to recognize and/or honour his legacy. They don’t.

Maybe there’s a debate to be had, maybe not: the NHL is nothing if not steadfast in staying as aloof as possible from the history. This month, still, wherever he’s introduced in the league’s Hockey Is For Everyone outlay, Fred Sasakamoose remains “the NHL’s first Canadian indigenous player.”

Here (again): Buddy Maracle’s story. A version of this post first appeared in the January 7, 2019, edition of The Hockey News.

Buddy Maracle’s time as an NHLer lasted not quite two months in 1931, and when it was over it quickly subsided into the thickets of history and statistics. A review of the records indicates that, beyond the big league, he played all over the North American map in a career that lasted nearly 20 years. What they don’t so readily reveal is why now, 60 years after his death, Maracle is being recognized as a hockey trailblazer. That has to do with something that the NHL itself has been reluctant to acknowledge: Maracle’s legacy as the league’s first Indigenous player.

For years, Fred Sasakamoose has been credited as having been the man who made that breakthrough when he skated as a 19-year-old for the Chicago Black Hawks in 1953. Now 85, Sasakamoose, from Saskatchewan’s Ahtahkakoop Cree Nation, has been justly celebrated for his hockey exploits and as a mentor to Indigenous youth. Last year, he was named a Member of the Order of Canada, the nation’s highest civilian honour.

And yet history suggests that at least two other Indigenous players preceded Sasakamoose into the NHL. The oversight has a long if not exactly distinguished history: those who’d gone before had already been all but forgotten by the time Sasakamoose joined Chicago for the 11 games he played over the course of the 1953-54 season.

The question of just who might have been the NHL’s original Indigenous player goes back to the league’s very beginnings. According to NHL records, Paul Jacobs lined up for the Toronto Arenas for a single game in the league’s second season in 1918. Jacobs, who was Mohawk from Kahnawake, near Montreal, did indeed practice with Charlie Querrie’s team in the pre-season, but the evidence that he actually made it to regular-season ice is sparse, at best.

Taffy Abel, who played defence for the 1924 U.S. Olympic team, had Chippewa background, though it’s not clear how much. When New York launched its first NHL team in 1925, the Americans, someone had the bright idea of pretending that a non-Indigenous Montreal-born centreman, Rene Boileau, was in fact a Mohawk star by the name of Rainy Drinkwater. Manager Tommy Gorman might have been behind the stunt, though he later said it was all co-owner Tom Duggan’s idea; either way, it quickly flopped.

When the New York Rangers joined the league the following year, Conn Smythe was the man briefly in charge of assembling a roster. The man who’d go on to invent and shape the destiny of the Toronto Maple Leafs was fired from his first NHL job before his fledglings played an NHL game. Smythe did recruit Taffy Abel before he ceded his job to Lester Patrick, and he seems to have had an eye on Maracle, too, who was by then skating in Toronto’s Mercantile League. As it was, 22-year-old Maracle found a home with a Ranger farm team that fall.

There’s much that we don’t know about how Maracle got to that point. Much of what is known of his earliest years has been pieced together by Irene Schmidt-Adeney, a reporter for The Ayr News who took an interest in the Maracle story early last year.

A town of 4,000 in southwestern Ontario, Ayr is arranged around a curve of the Nith River, a frozen stretch of which, just to the south, Wayne Gretzky skated as a boy. It’s by way of Schmidt-Adeney’s researches that we understand that young Albert Maracle and his family, Oneida Mohawks, seem to have moved close to town after departing the nearby Six Nations of the Grand River reserve in the early 1900s. At some point Albert married Elsie Hill; their son, Buddy-to-be, was born Henry Elmer Maracle in Ayr in September of 1904.

The family subsequently headed north, to Haileybury, which is where Henry got his hockey-playing start, first at high school, then as a junior with the North Bay Trappers. He seems to have gone mostly by Elmer in those years, though the course of his career he began to show up in contemporary newspapers as Bud, Clarence, Moose, and (inevitably) Chief. Buddy seems to have taken hold by the time, in 1926, that he found himself farmed out to New York’s Can-Am Hockey League affiliate team in Springfield, Massachusetts — which just happened to be nicknamed the Indians.

Accounts of him from his hockey heyday in the late 1920s and early ’30s note his size and his speed, his deft stickhandling, his “tireless” checking. “Comes at you from all directions,” was one opponent’s assessment of his play on the left wing. “Maracle is so big that stiff body checks hurt the checker more than they do him,” The Boston Globe enthused. “Players just bounce off him.”

He’d end up playing six seasons in Springfield, captaining the team, and becoming a favourite with the fans for his industry and failure to quit. Watching him play in Philadelphia, one admiring writer decided that he “personified the ideal of American sportsmanship.”

For all the admiration Maracle garnered in his playing days, many contemporary newspapers had trouble getting his heritage straight: over the years, he was variously identified as Iroquois, Blackfoot, Sioux, Sac Fox, and “the last Mohican.”

“Redskin Icer” was another epithet that featured in press reports of Maracle’s exploits. Recounting his hockey deeds, reporters were also only too pleased to couch their columns with references to warpaths and wigwams, war whoops, tomahawks, and scalps.

Assessing just how much of this was idle stereotyping and how much pointedly racist is beside the point: casual or otherwise, it’s all more or less insidious. As nasty as it reads on the page in old newspapers, how much worse must it have been for Maracle in the moment? When Springfield visited Boston Garden in 1929 to play the hometown Tigers, local fans singled out Maracle for abuse: whenever he touched the puck, a local columnist blithely reported, “there were shouts of ‘Kill him.’”

Maracle got his NHL chance towards the end of the 1930-31 season. “Those who used to boo the Noble Red Man in the Canadian-American League can now boo him in the National Hockey League,” The Boston Globe advised, “though, of course, it will cost more.”

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victory lap: in 1942, the nhl’s aged all-stars lined up in boston

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Elder Flair: The NHL All-Stars who lined up to play the Bostons Bruins on Friday, February 6, 1942 in support of the U.S. Army Relief Society: Back row, left to right: Boston Olympics trainer Red Linskey, Marty Barry, Frank Boucher, Bill Cook, Tiny Thompson, Bun Cook, Ching Johnson, Major-General Thomas A. Terry, George Owen, Cy Wentworth, Red Horner. Front: Busher Jackson, Charlie Conacher, Hooley Smith, Herbie Lewis, Larry Aurie, Joe Primeau, Eddie Shore.

The NHL didn’t play its first official All-Star Game until 1947, in Toronto, though the league’s marquee players were involved in a little-remembered all-star series in Cleveland in 1918 at the end of the NHL’s very first campaign. Between those dates, the best of the NHL’s best did also convene for several benefit games — in 1934, for one, after Toronto’s Ace Bailey had his career ended by Eddie Shore of the Boston Bruins, and in 1937 and ’39 (for two more) after the sudden, shocking respective deaths of Howie Morenz and Babe Siebert.

The wartime winter of 1942 saw another gathering of premier players — though in this case, many of them were retired from regular NHL duty. Then again, at the Boston Garden on that Friday, February 6, the stars who turned out to play when the senescent All-Stars met the (not-yet-retired) Boston Bruins were only asked to play two 15-minute periods mixed into a regular-season game the Bruins’ farm team, the EAHL Boston Olympics, were playing against the Johnstown Bluebirds. A crowd of 14, 662 showed to see the evening’s program, which raised more than US$14,000 for military widows and orphans supported by the U.S. Army Relief Society.

Major-General Thomas Terry the evening’s military patron, a man who, for his day job, was in command of what was known as the First Corps Area, and thereby largely in charge of defending New England against enemy invasion. Meeting in January of ’42 with Boston sportswriters to announce the All-Star exhibition, he explained the good work that the Army Relief Society did and thanked the Bruins for supporting the cause. To those who wondered whether the NHL and other sporting organizations might be forced to suspend operations because of the war, his message was … equal parts mildly reassuring and grimly ominous.

“Go ahead and plan your sports as you have before,” General Terry said. “Go along until something happens to cause a curtailment. There is no reason to get panicky, but take reasonable precautions at all times. If it does become necessary for a curtailment, it will be apparent to all of us.”

To the Bruins that NHL mid-season, what might have seemed apparent was that their chances of repeating as Stanley Cup champions had already been all but suspended. They were still lodged in second place in the seven-team standings, behind the New York Rangers, but there was a sense that winter that health and international hostilities were working against them.

Centre Bill Cowley was out with a broken jaw and goaltender Frank Brimsek had just missed a game with a broken nose. The week of the Army benefit the Bruins went north to play the Maple Leafs, and did beat them — but left two forwards behind in Toronto General Hospital, Herb Cain and Dit Clapper, to be tended for a fractured cheek and a badly cut ankle, respectively.

Adding induction to injury, Bruins’ manager Art Ross was about to lose his top line, the famous Krauts, to the war effort: after Friday’s benefit, Milt Schmidt, Woody Dumart, and Bobby Bauer would play one more NHL game, against Montreal on February 10, before departing the ice to join the Royal Canadian Air Force.

For all that, the abridged All-Star exhibition of February, 1942, was a success. A few notes on the night, which ended in a 4-4 tie, might include these:

• The referee on the night, Bill Stewart, had retired from NHL whistleblowing, but he was glad to partake. “I was in the Navy in the last war,” he said, “and I stand ready to do anything I can to help a cause which benefits any servicemen.”

• Tickets for the best seats — in the boxes, on the promenade, and some along the sides —were priced at $2.50 each. Lower-stadium and first-balcony tickets went for $1.65 and $1.10. An unreserved place in the upper balcony would set you back 55 cents.

• The Garden was dark for the introductions, except for a pair of spotlights that followed the players as they skated out to the blueline accompanied (the Boston Globe recorded) by “a fanfare of drums.”

Eddie Shore, who appeared last, got a two-minute ovation, and gave a little speech. “Everyone has special thrills in their lives,” he told the faithful, “but none of you know how much I appreciate this welcome or how I feel this evening. It’s like a fellow whom you haven’t seen for a long time walking up to you, holding out his hand, and slapping you on the shoulder. Then he says, ‘Gee, it’s nice to see you.’ That’s how I feel tonight, and thank you very much.”

• Also warmly received: former Bruins Tiny Thompson and Cooney Weiland along with Charlie Conacher and Ching Johnson, “whose bald dome glistened beautifully under the klieg lights.” Former Leaf Red Horner got cheers and boos — “and the big redhead showed the combination made him feel right at home by breaking out with a broad smile.”

• At 39, Shore was still skating professionally, the playing coach for his own AHL Springfield Indians. Busher Jackson, 31, was the only other active player on the All-Star roster — he was a serving Bruin. Both Shore and Jackson had, incidentally, played in all four benefit games cited above — the Bailey, Morenz, Siebert, and Army Relief.

• Jackson reunited with his old Maple Leaf Kid Line linemates on the night, Charlie Conacher, 32, and Joe Primeau, 36. Oldest man in the game was Bill Cook, 46, who lined up with his old New York Ranger linemates, brother Bun (44) and Frank Boucher (40). For some reason, no Montreal Canadiens alumni appeared in the game. The lack didn’t go unnoticed: a letter from a hockey purist published in the Globe that week complained that organizing a game like this without Aurèle Joliat or any Hab greats was like “having an American League old-timers’ game without including Ty Cobb or the New York Yankees.”

• Marty Barry and Larry Aurie said they hadn’t skated in, oh, a year. The Globe: “Large Charlie Conacher weighed in at 245 pounds for the affair, although Marty Barry looked plenty hefty at the 215 to which he admitted.”

• Warming up, the veterans all wore sweaters of the teams they’d last played for in the NHL — except for Shore, who showed up in his Springfield duds. For the game, the whole team wore the bestarred V (for Victory) sweaters shown in the photograph. Hooley Smith was pleased to learn he could keep his: in all his 17 years in the NHL, he said, he’d never kept any of his sweaters.

• Just before the opening puck-drop, as they’d always done in their Boston years together, Weiland and Thompson “went through their old Bruins’ custom of having Cooney put the last practice puck past Tiny.”

• “Believe it or not,” The Globe noted, “the old-timers actually had a wide territorial edge during the first period.”

• Injured Bill Cowley was called on to coach the Bruins, while Cooney Weiland took charge of the All-Stars. To start the second period, he put out five defencemen: Horner at centre between Cy Wentworth and George Owen, Shore and Johnson backing them on the blueline.

• Globe reporter Gerry Moore: “While truthful reporting demands the information that the glamorous old-timers were aided by some lenient officiating and no bodychecking from the Bruins in pulling off their garrison finish, the All-Stars displayed enough of their form from glory days to make the night not only the best financially of any single event staged for the Army Relief Fund, but one of the most interesting presentations ever offered in the Hub.”

• The Bruins went up 3-0 in the first half, on a pair goals from Bobby Bauer and one by rookie Gordie Bruce. In the second, the All-Stars went on a run, with Bill Cook twice beating Frank Brimsek and George Owen and Busher Jackson following his example.

• With “the rallying old men” ahead by 4-3, the game … failed to end. “At 15:56, or 56 seconds after the final gong should have been sounded,” Bruce again beat Tiny Thompson to tie the score. All the players hit the ice after that, with all 32 players playing “shinny in an effort to break the stalemate without success.”

• Eddie Shore was deemed the star of the night. “The crowd yelled for the Edmonton Express to pull off one of his patented rushes, but Eddie played cagily in the opening session.” Eventually he gave the people what they wanted, though he didn’t score. Thompson, too, was a stand-out.

And: “Bald Beaned Ching Johnson also came up with several thrilling gallops,” Gerry Moore wrote.

buddy maracle, in 1931: swept through everybody to leave cude helpless with a wicked shot

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Lestermen: The New York Rangers line up in 1931. Back row, from left they are: Bill Cook, Butch Keeling, Frank Peters, coach Lester Patrick, Ching Johnson, Buddy Maracle, Joe Jerwa, Bill Regan. Front, from left: Bun Cook, Paul Thompson, Murray Murdoch, Cecil Dillon, Frank Boucher, John Ross Roach.

Out now in The Hockey News — online and at the newsstand, paywalled in both places — my profile of Buddy Maracle and the case for recognizing him as the NHL’s first Indigenous player. He was 27 and a minor-league veteran when the New York Rangers called him up from the Springfield Indians. “Those who used to boo the Noble Red Man in the Canadian-American League can now boo him in the National Hockey League,” a column in The Boston Globe advised, “though, of course, it will cost more.” Maracle played his first NHL game in Detroit on February 12, debuting in the Rangers’ 1-1 tie with the local (pre-Red Wings) Falcons. He didn’t figure on the scoresheet that night, and also failed to score in New York’s next two games. Hosting the lowly Philadelphia Quakers on February 22, the Rangers cruised to a 6-1 win. Maracle assisted when Cecil Dillon scored New York’s fifth goal in the second period; in the third, Dillon returned the favour when Maracle beat the Quakers’ Wilf Cude to score his lone major-league goal. One newspaper accounts rated it “clever;” getting the puck from Dillon, Maracle “swept through everybody to leave Cude helpless with a wicked shot.”

He would notch two more NHL assists. In a March 3 game against Boston, he abetted Bill Regan on a third-period goal, the only one the Rangers scored in a 4-1 loss. March 17, he helped on another Dillon goal in the Rangers’ 3-1 win over the Ottawa Senators. In four playoff games that year, Maracle registered no points, took no penalties.

Not all of his achievements were logged for the statistical archives. In a March 7 game against the Toronto at Maple Leaf Gardens, his penalty-killing caught the fancy of the local cognoscenti. By Bert Perry’s account in The Globe, Maracle “gave quite an exhibition of ragging the puck while [Ching] Johnson was off, displaying stick-handling of a high order that merited the applause of the fans.”

(Image: New York Rangers)