Georges Vézina

tale of the tigers

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Eyes On The Tigers: The challengers from Calgary endure the Montreal snow in March of 1924. They are, in the back row, from left to right,  Lloyd Turner (owner and coach), Rosie Helmer (trainer). Middle:  Bobby Benson, Bernie Morris, Rusty Crawford, Charlie Reid, Herb Gardiner. Front: Ernie Anderson, Red Dutton, Cully Wilson, Harry Oliver, Eddie Oatman.

“Canadiens Now World Champions In All Reality,” the headline in the Montreal Daily Star read, and it was true, and real: a century ago, on a Tuesday of this date in 1924, the Montreal Canadiens did claim the club’s second Stanley Cup championship, their first of the NHL era. They did so with a potent roster that included Howie Morenz, Georges Vézina, and the Cleghorn brothers, Odie and Sprague.

Their opponents in the finals were the Calgary Tigers, champions of the WCHL, who iced an impressive line-up of their own. Owned and coached by Lloyd Turner, the team featured a defence anchored by Herb Gardiner, who’d soon enough end up a Canadien himself, and the redoubtable Red Dutton, the future (interim) president of the NHL. At forward they counted on Bernie Morris, the former Seattle Met who missed the foreshortened 1919 Stanley Cup finals due to having been jailed at Alcatraz by the U.S. Army for evading the draft, and Harry Oliver, who was destined for the Boston Bruins. They also counted on veterans Rusty Crawford, Cully Wilson, and Eddie Oatman, Cup-winners all. Spare defenceman Bobby Benson had won a gold medal at the 1920 Olympics as a member of the Winnipeg Falcons.

Cup Champions: The 1924 Canadiens lined up (from left) captain Sprague Cleghorn, Sylvio Mantha, Aurèle Joliat, Leo Dandurand (manager), Howie Morenz, Eddie Dufour (trainer), Billy Boucher, Billy Coutu, Odie Cleghorn, Georges Vézina. Malone retired midway through the season and didn’t participate in the playoffs or championship final; his name was not engraved on the Cup.

Canadiens finished second to the Ottawa Senators in the final NHL standings that year, but then beat Ottawa in a two-game series to move on. They next had to deal with the PCHA Vancouver Maroons, who featured Frank Boucher, Helge Bostrom, and Hughie Lehman in their line-up. Having beaten them in a two-game series in Montreal, the Canadiens went on to dispense with the Tigers in a two-game sweep, beating them 6-1 at the Mount Royal Arena on March 22 and then wrapping up the Cup with a 3-0 win three days later.

The decisive game was actually played in Ottawa, at the Auditorium, due to the softening of the ice in Montreal. Art Ross was the referee on the night, and Morenz distinguished himself by scoring the game’s winning goal. He also got into a bad collision with Red Dutton, which sent him to hospital in the second period with an injured chest and torn ligaments in his shoulder.

“We are naturally disappointed in losing out in the final series,” Turner said, “but we have no complaints to make. Canadiens have a fine team. We hope in time that we will gather together a team which will come down east and lift the Stanley Cup. We’ll do it eventually. We’re not going to lose heart because of the setbacks we have received.”

The Tigers caught a train headed west, though they got off in Winnipeg on the way home, stopping off to cheer on the junior Calgary Canadians as they played the Owen Sound Greys for the Memorial Cup. Like the Tigers, the Canadians fell at the finish, losing their two-game series to the team from Ontario.

The two vanquished teams stepped off the train in Calgary on the evening of Sunday, March 30, where they were met (as the Calgary Herald noted) “a great mass of enthusiastic sport fans who appeared in a highly excited mood.”

The Herald thought the Tigers should have beaten the Habs but allowed that the Montrealers were a game bunch who showed “indomitable spirit” in their victory. In the youngsters Morenz and Joliat, the western paper added, Canadiens had two rising stars. That’s not to say that the Herald didn’t have a finger to wag. Several fingers, actually:

While Morenz displayed a flashier style in dashing speed and clever stick-work, Joliat proved to the hockey world that he is a youth of wonderful hockey brain power, supported by a wealth of speed, clever stick play, and an accurate shot. He is the ideal looking hockey performer, probably a trifle too “cocky” and somewhat disposed to “grandstand” his stuff.

Morenz and Joliat are both too eager to create trouble with small, scrappy tactics that spoilt herm as finished products. It may be that this habit has grown on them in their ambitious spurt to prominence in Montreal hockey circles. Experience will modify their conduct, no doubt, and when purged of these habits they should blossom forth as great lights in the hockey orbit.

 

 

(Images, top and bottom: Courtesy of Libraries and Cultural Resources Digital Collections, University of Calgary)

with a beaver on top

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Glory For Goalers: The Vézina Trophy was first awarded (beaver and all) in 1927.

And so to the question of the winter: what’s with the beaver marooned atop the Vézina Trophy?

Well, it was a question, last month, when Jeff Marek of Sportsnet pronounced his puzzlement as he and Elliotte Friedman went to air with their 32 Thoughts podcast from Victoria, B.C., ahead of the network’s annual Hockey Day in Canada jamboree.

Around the 50-minute mark is where you’ll hear the discussion, if you’re tuning in.

“If you’ve listened to the podcast long enough, you know that I have these white whales, these questions that I’m obsessed with,” Marek confessed. “In 1926, they put a beaver on top of the Vézina Trophy, Elliotte.”

“I cannot figure out why there’s a beaver on top of the Vézina Trophy.”

Marek said he’d asked Phil Pritchard, VP of the Hockey Hall of Fame and renowned “Keeper of the [Stanley] Cup,” but even he (“Phil knows everything”) had no idea.

Friedman, who did not sound similarly obsessed, offered his humouring take: “Big Canadian symbol.”

“No,” Marek assured him, “this was before it was the national animal, though. This is years before it became the national symbol.”

That was all there was to it. But before moving on to the next item of hockey interest, Marek appealed for help in solving the  mystery of the Vézina beaver.

First thing I’d say? I get it. I’m a fan of white whales, by which I mean, I guess, albino rodents: I have a whole menagerie of those. Marek’s preoccupation is an absolutely worthy one.

As an enthusiast of hockey oddments and eccentricities, I also endorse what I’m guessing might be his wish for a more or less outlandish origin story. I myself would like nothing more than to discover that Georges Vézina’s family, back in Chicoutimi, were prodigious beaver wranglers going back centuries. Or what if — even better — the goaltender himself kept a buck beaver as a pet in  Montreal during the hockey season, and that this beaver was named Samuel Hearne?

Alas, I have no such revelations to unleash here. To be clear: I come to you with no definitive evidence related to the choices made in designing the trophy in the 1920s much less the origin of the Castor canadensis Vézina. What I can offer, and will, are some fairly straightforward general speculations leading to a narrower possibility regarding the origin of the Vézina beaver relating to a second prominent NHL trophy. The possibility, I think, is a strong one.

So here goes.

First, Elliotte Friedman is right.

War Effort: Poster advertising Canadian Victory Bonds in 1918 or a national Hire-A-Beaver campaign? (Image: Library and Archives Canada)

The beaver was indeed emblematic of all things Canada and Canadian in the 1920s, had been for years. When Marek says that the Vézina was minted years before the beaver was a national symbol, I think he’s probably talking about the official status that Canada’s Parliament granted our dampest and most beloved rodent as a representative of our sovereignty. The National Symbols of Canada Act received royal assent on March 24, 1975.

But as the government points out on its helpful symbols info page, the beaver has been a part of our identity for so much longer, to the point that in our enthusiasm for beavers, and for wearing them as hats, we nearly, as a developing British colony, wiped them out with the lustiness of our fur trading. Beaver pelts, it’s been said, were our first currency; also, as per Margaret Atwood, “Canada was built on dead beavers.”

In 1987, it’s not necessarily salient to mention, but still, back then when Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government was negotiating a free trade agreement with the eagle-associated United States, Atwood testified before a parliamentary committee about what she saw as the potential dangers of such a pact.

 “Our national animal,” she memorably said that November day, “is the beaver, noted for its industrious habits and co-operative spirit. In medieval bestiaries, it is also noted for its habit. When frightened, of biting off its testicles and offering them to its pursuers. I hope we are not succumbing to some form of that impulse.”

 Startling stuff, if not actually borne out by facts: beavers do not do this. Still, it’s a myth that goes back beyond medieval times, to the ancient Greeks and Roman; while it’s not one of his fun ones, Aesop has a fable about this. The thinking was that the beaver, much hunted for its store of valuable castoreum oil carried in a nether gland, would make the dreadful choice to surrender its testicles to save its life.

 Back on the all-Canadian symbolism of beavers … well, I probably don’t need to go on, but I will.

A beaver adorned Canada’s very first stamp, the Three-Pence Beaver, issued in 1851.

Beavers have served long and honorably on the badges of many Canadian Army regiments, including the Royal 22e Régiment, the infantry’s storied Van Doos. Going back to peltries, the venerable old Hudson’s Bay Company may now just be a holding company, but featured on its coat of arms that hasn’t changed since the 17th century are no fewer than four beavers (flanked by two mooses).

As reader Matthieu Trudeau points out, another foundational Canadian company, the Canadian Pacific Railway had a recumbent beaver atop its arms from 1886 to 1968.

The Bank of Montreal lodged a beaver within its original coat of arms in 1837. When the bank officially registered its arms in 1934, it doubled its beavers — adding, too, a pair of what the bank describes today as “Indigenous figures.”

Toronto’s 1834 coat of arms.

And then there are cities, of course, lots of those, including Montreal and Toronto. When William Lyon Mackenzie designed the latter’s original coat of arms in 1834, Montreal had already had its first edition in place for a year, designed by the first mayor, Jacques Viger, featuring double beavers.

Interestingly, in 1921, when government officially authorized (with King George V’s approval) the Arms of Canada, a stout unicorn, rampant lions, and a bosomy harp all made the cut, but no beaver. (The harp lost its bust in later renovations.)

No-Beaver Zone: The Arms of Canada, officially authorized in 1921, shunned our best-loved sodden, ratty rodent. (Image: Library and Archives Canada)

Regarding the beaver deficit, Thomas Mulvey, undersecretary for state and a member of the design committee, addressed this at the time. You don’t have to like it, but I don’t know if you can fault the reasoning. “The Committee having charge of the recommendation of Arms,” he said,

considered fully the suggestion that the Beaver should be included, and it was decided that as a member of the Rat Family, a Beaver was not appropriate and would not look well on the device. One example of the objections raised is quite well known. The Canadian Merchant Marine displayed a Beaver on their House-Flag, and they have ever since been colloquially known as ‘The Rat Line.’ As your correspondent says, the Lion is not the representative of Canada except in so far as Canada is a part of the British Empire, and in this connection it was considered appropriate to have the Lion hold the Maple Leaf.

I don’t know if heraldry has coined a term for a self-harming animals, but it does have one for those posing in the position that Georges Vézina’s beaver has assumed, which is couchant, “lying down with head raised.”

An upright (begging?) beaver tops hockey’s John Ross Robertson Cup (Intermediate) from 1910.

I should say, also, before we go too much further, that hockey trophies did regularly adorn themselves with beavers in the sport’s early era. John Ross Robertson, newspaper publisher, MP,  and president of the OHA, donated three trophies for amateur hockey in his time, including a John Ross Robertson Cup for intermediate hockey in 1910 that features a beaver on top. He is definitely non-couchant, I would note, affecting more of an upright, supplicating posture. (The 1899 senior-hockey JRR Cup features fearsome clambering lions.)

First presented in 1921, when the Dominion Bank prevailed, the Canadian Bankers Hockey Association Challenge Cup also boasts a beaver. He is couchant, but in an alert kind of way, as though he’s ready to leap at any moment to a safer perch.

The Canadian Bankers Hockey Association Challenge Cup, first awarded in 1921.

As of January, both of these beavered trophies are on display at Toronto’s Hockey Hall of Fame, just downstairs from the Great Hall where the Vézina (and the Prince of Wales) reside.

Turning to the specific case of the trophy that the NHL awards annually to the most puck-resistant of its goaltenders, here’s where I posit my theory that the Vézina beaver took its cue from the ornamentation of another NHL trophy that came to be in the mid-1920s.

Georges Vézina’s shocking death came in March of 1926, when he was 39. Already, by then, the NHL’s collection of silverware was in a full-on growth spurt.

The proud old Stanley Cup (b. 1893) was firmly established, of course, at the top of the food chain, and the O’Brien Trophy was still kicking around. Simple as it was in its early incarnation, the Stanley Cup had a grandeur to it, battered through it was. The O’Brien (1910), by comparison, was more exuberant —  grandiloquent, even. Commissioned by Senator Michael J. O’Brien, the logging and mining magnate who helped launch the NHA, it was fashioned from silver from a Cobalt, Ontario, mine of his, as well as bronze reliefs, and wood, with hunkered hockey players on top.

When the NHA disappeared in November of 1917 and was instantly resurrected as the NHL, the new league stocked its trophy cabinet with just those two. There were no trophies, yet, recognizing individual achievement.

The first came along in in March of 1924, when Montreal physician Dr. David A. Hart (father of Canadiens’ director and soon-to-be coach Cecil Hart) donated a cup to celebrate the NHL’s most valuable player. Frank Nighbor, captain of the Ottawa Senators won the first of those. A year later, when Her Excellency The Lady Byng of Vimy donated her cup, honouring (and hoping to further encourage) gentlemanly hockey, Nighbor was the winner again.

In design, both of those cups were serviceable if fairly rudimentary.

Not so the next trophy to arrive on the NHL scene. In the fall of 1925, when the future King Edward VIII saw fit to bestow a trophy on the NHL, the one he sent over from London was a lavish one, said to be valued at C$2,500 — about $43,000 in today’s dollars.

What was he up to? Why the sudden interest in hockey?

Well, the then-Prince of Wales was Canada’s king-in-waiting, and that might have been reason enough to attempt to ingratiate himself with the population for sending over a hockey trophy. He was a keen sportsman, too, and actually had demonstrated a not so new keenness for hockey as recently as February of 1924, when he received the Canadian Olympic hockey team, who’d just won gold at Chamonix, in his residence at St. James’ Palace in London.

The Prince had an arm in a sling from an unspecified accident, so he had to shake with his left, which he did, whereupon he “started a general conversation about hockey on  which he showed himself well posted,” the Toronto Daily Star remarked. He a was a skater, he said. He told them that he liked hockey, but whenever he was in Canada, it was the wrong season for attending a game. These were the Granites he was meeting, Dunc Munro, Hooley Smith, et al., so the Prince played to his crowd and told them that he though Toronto “must be a wonderful hockey centre.”

It’s worth remembering that the Prince of Wales was also in the 1920s a Canadian homeowner, having bought a ranch in Pekisko, Alberta (near High River) in 1919. He spent time there after seeing our Olympians, during a North American tour in the summer of ’24, which meant that he still didn’t get to a hockey game. This Canadian jaunt may well have focussed his thinking, though.

Did he ever get to an NHL game? I don’t know about that; I don’t think so.

H.R.Hockeyness: The Prince of Wales Trophy made its debut in 1925.

It was a year later that the Prince of Wales Trophy, tall and silvery, arrived on the scene.

It had its coming-out party in New York, where it debuted on opening night for the NHL at the old Madison Square Garden as the brand-new New York Americans took on the Montreal Canadiens in December of 1925. The winner of that game would claim the trophy, and keep it until the end of the season, it was announced. After that, it would be awarded to the NHL champion, annually. (The Stanley Cup remained hockey’s ultimate prize, with teams from the western leagues still in the running, for another year.)

The mayor-elect of New York, Jimmy Walker, presented the new trophy to the Canadiens when they beat the Americans by a score of 3-1. This might have been the Prince’s best chance to get himself to a hockey game but, no, he was otherwise occupied, in London, where he was presiding that day back at St. James’ Palace in his role as Grand President of the League of Mercy, something that the NHL of this era was definitely not.

The Prince of Wales Trophy would, in subsequent years, shift its identity. After the NHL took over the Stanley Cup for its very own in 1927, it became the reward for the team finishing atop the standings of the NHL’s American Division while the O’Brien went to the top team on the Canadian side. In subsequent years, its meaning changed no fewer than five more times

In the meantime, the Canadiens took the P of W with them back to Montreal. Leo Dandurand was the co-owner and managing director and so it was under his watch that the new trophy was sent to the engravers, to have the team’s name etched upon it … twice. Sounds like a bit of a liberty, but the Canadiens saw fit to recognize not just that single-game 1925 win, but also, retrospectively, their 1923-24 NHL championship.

In the spring of 1926, the Prince of Wales Trophy went on public display in downtown Montreal, in the window of Mappin & Webb, the fancy English jeweller and silversmiths, at 353 St. Catherine Street West, east of the Forum.

The Canadiens’ new silverware notwithstanding, this was a sad season in Montreal. Vézina had played just a single period in the team’s opening game in November of ’25. He was diagnosed soon after with tuberculosis and in early December, departed Montreal for his hometown of Chicoutimi. By the time Montreal got to New York in December, the team was on its second replacement, having just signed Herb Rheaume (who made his debut the night the won the Prince of Wales) to see whether he was an improvement over Frenchy Lacroix, who’d been trying to hold the fort.

Vézina’s wife, Stella, was soon writing to Dandurand with what seemed like hopeful tidings. “Georges was getting right down to obeying doctor’s orders,” was how the Montreal Daily Star reported the somewhat awkward upshot of her letter. “He was keeping to his bed and sleeping outdoors right along. Her husband had no fever at the time Mrs. Vézina penned her message, she said.”

He didn’t recover, of course. Georges Vézina died in hospital in Chicoutimi on March 27, 1926 at the age of 39.

And the beaver? Yes, getting there. At some point in the months that followed, Dandurand and the Canadiens decided to donate a trophy in his name. Maybe this was already in motion during the last months of his illness. This is where I think — and this, I emphasize, is only conjecture on my part — I’m proposing that the Vézina’s design was influenced by that of the Prince of Wales Trophy.

Again, there’s no public record of the decision-making process, nothing on who designed the trophy itself. A Montreal newspaper did describe the opulence of the Prince of Wales Trophy on view that month to passersby of Mappin & Webb:

The cup, emblematic of the National Hockey League championship, is of solid silver; stands, with base, over three feet, and is surmounted with silver fleurs-de-lys, under which is engraved the Prince’s motto, “Ich Dien.” The main body of the trophy is supported by four silver hockey sticks, which are “taped” with strips of gold. Resting on the base are four gold hockey pucks, while a block of crystal, rough-cut to represent a small lump of ice, is placed in the centre of the stand, underneath the cup. On the face of the trophy, in raised letters on a silver plate, is the inscription. “H.R.H. the Prince of Wales Trophy.” The Canadian arms in gold are inserted on the reverse, while a silver frieze of pine-cone design encircles the cup.

It really is something to see. The only thing missing in that description is the fact that the American arms appear, too, in gold, on the front of the trophy, complete with resplendent eagle and scrolled U.S. motto (in Latin), “E pluribus unum,”(“Out of many, one”) to go with the Prince’s German maxim, “I serve.”

Canada’s own Latin reminder, I will note, is missing from the Prince of Wales Trophy, “A Mari Usque Ad Mare” “From Sea to Sea.” I don’t know why that is, but I can speak to the absence of any castor canadensis: because, as discussed, the beaver was left off the Canadian arms for its rattiness, none features on the Prince of Wales Trophy among the profusion of thistles, maple leaves, galleons, lions, or fishes depicted there.

So here’s my thinking. As Leo Dandurand considered what a Vézina Trophy might look like, the Prince of Wales was on his mind. For all its lustre, it was lacking Canadian motifs. Did that catch his attention? The description of the Cup in the window forgets to mention that the P of W is topped by a silvery rendering of three ostrich feathers encircled by a gold coronet, another royal enhancement.

It’s just possible that Dandurand was in a conversation with those feathers when he decided on the design of the new Vézina. (If it was, indeed, him.) If he wasn’t going to match the Prince of Wales in extravagance, maybe it was enough to answer its symbols. I’m not going to call the Vézina’s design a repudiation of the Prince of Wales and its ostrich plumage, but if you were in a repudiating mood, how better to express it than with a puck and a beaver? Are there two better assertions of Canadian sovereignty?

There is, of course, the problem of scale: that is the question of the moment, for me, about the Vézina (Jeff Marek is welcome to join in any subsequent investigation): why is the beaver atop the Vézina dwarfed by the puck he’s summited?

The first public notice that was trophy was a reality came in May of 1927, at a post-season banquet in Montreal honouring another Hab superstar, Howie Morenz.

The Montreal Daily Star was there to report it: “Leo Dandurand told those present that the directors of the club had held a meeting and definitely decided the conditions under which the cup would be won. It will be called the Georges Vézina Memorial Cup, and will go to the goalkeeper in the National Hockey League, who is adjudged best. He must have the best all-round average.”

It doesn’t sound like the trophy itself attended that event in May. It would seem to have been out and about not so long afterwards, though: in August of 1927, Vézina’s hometown paper weighed in with a review. “The Vézina Trophy is one of the finest works of art the league can boast and is a worthy tribute to the legacy of the famous Vézina,” declared the Progrès du Saguenay from Chicoutimi.

The first winner was, fittingly, the man who’d taken over Vézina’s net at the beginning of the 1926-27 season, Montreal’s own George Hainsworth. His ongoing excellence might be considered as another tribute to Vézina’s legacy: Hainsworth hung on to the trophy for a further two seasons after that.

boston legend … howie morenz? in 1926, it’s true, montreal’s eternal star was briefly a bruin

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Hurtling Howie: With his Canadiens eliminated from the NHL playoffs in the spring of 1926, he played in exhibitions for the New York Americans and Boston Bruins.

To note that Howie Morenz was a better New York American, on balance, than he was a Boston Bruin doesn’t change the fact that Stratford’s own Streak played his best hockey for the Montreal Canadiens, but it does register as a bit of a surprise, doesn’t it?

Yes, it’s true: while you won’t find it notated in any official hockey reference, there was a frenetic stretch in 1926 when Montreal’s young superstar ended up playing for three different NHL teams in four days, including the Americans and the Bruins. He wasn’t supposed to be playing at all that spring: in the many-chaptered book of Morenz’s painful medical history, this was the year he injured and re-injured an ankle that probably could have done with an early retirement that season.

All but forgotten in the hurry of years, the games in question were only exhibitions, which is why they don’t show up in any duly constituted ledger of hockey achievement, wherein Hall-of-Famer Morenz is correctly shown to have played out his foreshortened NHL time with the Canadiens (14 seasons), Chicago’s Black Hawks (parts of two seasons), and New York’s Rangers (one season).

Morenz’s brief Bruins career wasn’t enough to get him recognized this fall as one of Boston’s legendariest 100 players. He wouldn’t make any Americans’ pantheon, either, if there were such a thing (the Amerks, of course, reached their sad NHL end in 1942, after 17 seasons in the league). He does still have the statue in front of Montreal’s Bell Centre, so that’s a solace.

Here’s how it all went down in 1926.

Morenz was 23 that year. Montreal’s hurtling superstar was in his third NHL season. He had a new number on his back, incidentally: for some reason in 1925-26, Morenz switched for one year only to the number six sweater from his famous seven, which centreman Hec Lepine inherited. (Lepine was out of the league the following year, and Morenz was back to his old seven.)

In his rookie season, Morenz and his Canadiens had claimed the Stanley Cup by beating the WCHL’s Calgary Tigers.  A year later, Montreal was back to defend its title, though on that occasion Lester Patrick’s WCHL Victoria Cougars prevailed. For 1925-26, the Canadiens might have been expected to challenge again for a championship, even with several key skaters having been subtracted from the squad, including the talented (and fearsome) Cleghorn brothers, Sprague and Odie.

The season did not, however, go as planned. Goaltender Georges Vézina was taken sick in Montreal’s first period of regular-season hockey that November. It was, shockingly, the last game he ever played: diagnosed with tuberculosis, the veteran star returned to his hometown of Chicoutimi, where his condition worsened as the winter went on.

That tragic recap is by way of background and goes some way to explaining how the Canadiens found themselves languishing at the bottom of the seven-team league’s standings as the calendar turned to March of 1926 and the end of the 36-game regular-season schedule. Archival records reflect that the players were making do on the ice as best they could in front of the contingency goaltending of Herb Rheaume; there’s no way of calculating the emotional weight they were carrying as their friend and teammate struggled for his life.

With the season winding down, the Canadiens played in Toronto on Thursday, March 11. Only the top three teams in the NHL would play in the post-season that year and Montreal had no chance, by then, of making the cut. They could, possibly, rise out of the cellar to surpass the St. Patricks, who they were set to face in two of their three final games that year.

The morning’s newspapers that same day broke the bad news from Chicoutimi that Vézina was close to death. A priest had administered the last rites and the goaltender (as the Montreal Daily Star reported) was “awaiting the sound of the last gong.”

The paper couldn’t resist framing the moment in sporting terms — and graphic detail. “Bright mentally, and fighting as hard against the disease which has him in its grip, as if he were still in the Canadien nets, his end is near, and physicians in attendance at his cot in the Chicoutimi Hospital, report that the slightest physical shock, which might result in the bursting of a small blood-vessel, would cause a fatal hemorrhage.”

The hockey went on, of course, as it usually tends to do. Morenz, interestingly, didn’t play, as the St. Patricks beat the visiting Canadiens 5-3 at the Mutual Street Arena, even though NHL records (erroneously) have him in the line-up for the game.

He stayed home to nurse his right ankle, injured originally in a February game against the Montreal Maroons when Babe Siebert knocked him down. The Gazette described the aftermath of that collision: “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. Later examination revealed that, besides being severely jarred, Morenz had the tendon at the back of his ankle badly wrenched. With his departure from the game went the team’s one big scoring punch”

Morenz missed four February games after that before returning to the ice. But then in a March 9 game in Montreal against the Pittsburgh Pirates, he banged up the same ankle running into locomotive Lionel Conacher. Again he was carried from the ice.

When he missed the Maroons game, several newspapers reported that Morenz’s season was over. “His ankle is swollen up about twice its usual size and rest is the big thing for him now,” advised the Montreal Star.

Morenz himself didn’t get the message. He and his ankle missed the March 13 game against the Maroons, but returned to the ice for the Canadiens’ final game on March 16. They whomped the St. Patricks that night at the Mount Royal Arena by a score of 6-1. Morenz scored two goals, including the game-winner, and ended the season as Montreal’s top goal-getter (with 23), tied for most points (26) with linemate Aurèle Joliat.

The season may have been over, but Morenz was just getting going.

The Ottawa Senators, Montreal Maroons, and Conacher’s Pirates from Pittsburgh were the NHL teams that prospered that year: they were the ones, at least, that made the playoffs that would determine a league champion who would then take on the winner from the West for the Stanley Cup. (1926 was the final year for that model; in 1927 and ever after, only NHL teams played for the Cup.)

But just because the rest of the NHL was out of the playoffs didn’t mean they were finished. While there was still ice to be skated on, there was still money to be made: cue professional hockey’s busy barnstorming season. Extended series of post-season exhibition games were a staple of the 1920s and ’30s for NHL teams, and 1926 was particularly active.

First up for the Canadiens was a pair of games with their familiar rivals the Toronto St. Patricks. Two days after their final regular-season-ending game in Montreal, the two teams convened in Windsor, Ontario, to do battle again in pursuit of cash money offered by the owners of the city’s new rink, the Border Cities Arena. Windsor had a hankering for high-level hockey, and in the fall of ’26, the expansion Detroit Cougars would make the rink their home for the inaugural NHL season. In March, local fans packed the stands to the tune of 7,000 a night, witnessing the Canadiens beat Toronto 3-2 on Thursday, March 18 and 8-2 on Saturday, March 20 to take most of the prize money on offer. In the second game, Morenz put a pair of goals past Toronto netminder John Ross Roach.

He wasn’t finished. By Monday, Morenz was in New York, suiting up for Tommy Gorman’s New York Americans against Pete Muldoon’s WHL Portland Rosebuds a whole new raft of barnstorming games launched in U.S. rinks.

The Americans had just completed their first NHL season. With his star defenceman Bullet Joe Simpson out for the season with an ailing appendix, Gorman arranged to draft in Boston captain Sprague Cleghorn to take his place. There were conflicting accounts over the weekend on this count. It was reported that Morenz would play for the Rosebuds, also that Gorman had promised to line up Cleghorn and Morenz without having first consulted their respective managers, Art Ross and Léo Dandurand.

In the end, Cleghorn was ruled out with a bad knee and Morenz suited up for New York at Madison Square Garden. It’s not clear what he was paid for his one-and-done appearance in New York’s starry-and-striped uniform. The Rosebuds and Americans played a three-game series that week vying for $2,000 in prize money and a silver cup (supposedly) sponsored by the married (and 50 per cent Canadian) movie-star couple Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.

Portland’s line-up was formidable, with Dick Irvin and Rabbit McVeigh leading the offense. They’d borrowed some players, too, from Vancouver and Calgary, respectively, in goaltender Hugh Lehman (a Stanley-Cup-winner and future Hall-of-Famer) and defenceman (and future Leafs’ coach) Art Duncan.

Morenz played centre and left on the night, lining up alongside Billy Burch and Shorty Green. Even on his aching ankle, he proved his mettle. “Morenz was decidedly the fastest on the ice,” Seabury Lawrence wrote in the New York Times. He scored both goals in New York’s 2-0 win. He later noted that he’d sweated off five-and-a-half pounds on the night, too, in Manhattan’s famously overheated rink, adding that he wouldn’t play an entire season in New York even if he were paid $10,000.

Morenz was back in Montreal colours the following night, Tuesday, March 23, when his Canadiens took on a revived Sprague Cleghorn and the Bruins at the Boston Arena. Art Ross, Boston’s 41-year-old coach and manager, got in on the fun, taking the ice as a winger for his team in the latter stages of Montreal’s 4-2 win. Morenz was kept off the scoresheet.

The two teams played again the following night at Providence, Rhode Island, one of the prospective sites for a team in the new minor American League. If anyone had any illusions that these exhibition were played in a friendly spirit, they would have set those aside after this 3-3 tie. “Bitter feeling developed between the teams shortly after the beginning of the second period,” the Boston Globe reported, and Art Ross (back on the bench for this game) threatened to withdraw his team from the ice after Canadiens captain Billy Coutu knocked Boston winger Carson Cooper unconscious.

The NHL championship was still to be decided: the Montreal Maroons didn’t wrest that from the clutches of Ottawa’s Senators until Saturday, March 27, and it would be a week-and-a-half later before they overcame the Victoria Cougars to claim the Stanley Cup.

Meanwhile, the barnstormers kept up their furious schedule, with several further cash prizes at stake in addition to the one at stake in New York. Portland won $1,200 of that by taking the second and third games against the Americans. In Windsor that same week, the WHL’s Saskatoon Sheiks lost out in the $5,000 two-game series they played in Windsor against the NHL’s Pittsburgh Pirates. Gorman’s Americans and the Rosebuds went to Windsor, too, the following week, playing another two-game, total-goal series and splitting their $5,000 pot. The Americans kept on going west after that: in April of 1926, they played a further five games against Tom Casey’s Los Angeles All-Stars at the year-old Palais de Glace arena. The NHLers won three, lost one, and tied another against L.A.’s finest, who featured former Seattle Metropolitans scoring star Bernie Morris and five-time-Stanley-Cup-winner Moose Johnson.

The Boston Globe‘s glad tidings in March of 1926.

But back to Morenz and his turn as a Bruin. That came on Friday, March 26, when the Bruins took on the Portland Rosebuds in Boston. Morenz played left wing and was joined in the line-up by his Canadiens’ teammate Billy Boucher. The Boston Globe wasn’t overly impressed: while the two Montrealers were seen to play fast hockey at points, the word was that they were conserving themselves for Montreal’s game the following night against the New York Americans in Providence. Final score: Rosebuds 2, Bruins 1. Rabbit McVeigh and Bobby Trapp scored for the winner, while Boston got its goal from Sailor Herbert. And just like that, underwhelmingly enough, Howie Morenz’s career as a Bruin was over.

The Montreal newspapers barely paid the game any attention at all. They were, it’s true, otherwise occupied, as the news broke overnight that Georges Vézina had died. That was the news in Montreal on Saturday, March 27, and it most likely the reason that the game Canadiens were supposed to play that night in Providence didn’t (so far as I can tell) go ahead.

Vézina was buried in his hometown on Tuesday, March 30, 1926. “The whole town was in mourning,” Le Droit reported, “and thousands of people attended the funeral.” He was, Le Soleil eulogized, “not only an incomparable hockey player, but also a model citizen, active, intelligent, industrious, and full of initiative.” There were floral tributes from Frank Calder of the NHL, the Mount Royal Arena, and the Toronto St. Patricks. Former teammates Joe Malone, Newsy Lalonde, Amos Arbour, Bert Corbeau, and Battleship Leduc sent telegrams of condolence. In Chicoutimi, the club whose nets Vézina had guarded for 15 years was represented by the team’s managing director Léo Dandurand, defenceman Sylvio Mantha, and trainer Eddie Dufour. No-one else? There’s a bit of a mystery there. “His teammates esteemed him highly, Le Progrès de Saguenay mentioned, cryptically. “A number of them were prevented by a setback from attending his funeral.”

And the hockey went on. At Montreal’s Forum, the Maroons and Cougars played for the Stanley Cup that weekend. Morenz and his teammates, meanwhile, skated out for one-and-two-thirds more games, too, taking the ice at the Mount Royal Arena on Sunday, April 4 and Monday, April 5. The rink was loaned for these occasions at no charge, as the Canadiens took on Newsy Lalonde’s WHL Saskatoon Sheiks in successive benefit games.

The first, on Sunday, raised money for Georges Vézina’s family. A crowd of 3,500 was on hand. Art Ross of the Bruins and Victoria Cougars’ manger Lester Patrick paid $25 each to referee the game, and Maroons president James Strachan gave $200 to drop the evening’s opening puck. The puck from the final game in which the goaltender had played in November of ’25 was auctioned off, as was the stick he’d used: Canadiens director Louis Letourneau secured the former for $200 and Canadiens winger Aurèle Joliat paid the same amount for the latter. All told, $3,500 was raised that evening — about $60,000 in 2023 terms.

Before the Vézina’s game began, the players stood bareheaded at centre ice while the band played “Nearer My God To Thee.” In goal for Saskatoon was George Hainsworth, who’d sign on to play for Montreal the following year. Along with Lalonde, Harry Cameron, Leo Reise, Corb Denneny, and Bun Cook featured for the Sheiks, who had a ringer of their own in the line-up in Ottawa Senators’ star defenceman King Clancy. The Canadiens prevailed on the night, winning the game by a score of 7-4 with Joliat scoring a hattrick. Howie Morenz scored their opening goal.

Monday night the teams met again for another worthy cause. The previous Tuesday, in the opening game of the Stanley Cup finals, Victoria winger Jocko Anderson had been badly injured in a collision with Babe Siebert of the Maroons. He was already playing with a broken hand that night; removed to hospital that night, he underwent surgery for a fractured right thigh and a dislocated hip. At 32, his hockey career was over.

A crowd of 3,000 turned out for Anderson’s benefit, raising some $1,500. Fans saw two partial games, both of which were refereed by Sprague Cleghorn and Léo Dandurand. To finish the night, a team of referees, active and retired, played a collection of former Montreal Wanderers for a two-period game that ended in a 2-2 tie. Art Ross led the old Wanderers, scoring both their goals, and they had 47-year-old Riley Hern in net, the goaltender who’d backstopped the team to four Stanley Cup championships starting in 1906. The team of refs featured Joe Malone, Cooper Smeaton, Cecil Hart, and Jerry Laflamme. The great Malone who, at 36, had been retired from the NHL for two years, scored a goal; he also tore a ligament in his right foot.

The Canadiens and Sheiks played another two-period game that night, with Montreal outscoring Saskatoon 8-4. The Sheiks were augmented by Ottawa defenceman Georges Boucher and his centreman brother, Frank, who’d soon be joining the fledgling New York Rangers. The unstoppable Howie Morenz scored a pair of goals on Saskatoon’s stand-in goaltender on the night, a local minor-leaguer named Paul Dooner.

Morenz’s tally for the post-season? After those reports in March said that he was finished for the season, he’d gone on to play almost-nine games for three different teams in 21 days, scoring nine goals.

Morenz still had a busy summer ahead of him. In June, he married Mary McKay at her parents; house in Montreal, at 2255 Rue Jeanne Mance. The Reverend J.G. Potter officiated; guests included Dandurand and his wife, along with Canadiens co-owners Letourneau and Joe Cattarinich; Cecil Hart, manager of the Stanley Cup champion Maroons; Canadiens captain Billy Coutu and Billy Boucher (and their wives); and brothers Odie and Sprague Cleghorn.

After the evening ceremony, the newlyweds caught an 11 p.m. train at the Bonaventure Station for points west: their honeymoon, the Montreal Star reported, would take them to “Stratford, Toronto, Niagara Falls, Chicago, and other parts.”

The Happy Couple: Montreal’s Star with the nuptial news in June of 1926.

vézina n’est plus

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Georges Vézina’s health had been failing for months, and it was on a Saturday morning of this date in March of 1926 that he died, aged 39, in the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in his hometown, Chicoutimi. “Vézina n’est plus,” Horace Lavigne mourned in the pages of La Patrie. “Although foreseen from the first days of his illness, four months ago, loses none of its cruel and painful side.” He’d started his last game for the Montreal Canadiens as the NHL season opened in November of 1925, but he was already desperately ill, and left the ice after the first period. He was subsequently diagnosed with the tuberculosis that killed him.

Above, Montreal’s goaltending great poses with his Canadiens’ teammates during the 1914-15 National Hockey Association season. That team had some talent, as you can see, with future Hall of Famers Didier Pitre and Jack Laviolette joining Vézina in the line-up. It didn’t work out, though, that year: Canadiens ended up bottom of the six-team NHA standings when it was all over. A note on back-up goaltender Ray Marchand, seen here on the left at the back, who never saw any game-action that year. Canadiens could have used him in a game in Quebec, when Vézina took a penalty and, as per the rules then, went to serve his time, but Marchand had stayed home in Montreal, and defenceman Laviolette ended up strapping on Vézina’s pads — and conceding the goal that decided the game in Quebec’s favour. Marchand would return to the team in 1920, when he signed on again as Vézina’s understudy in the NHL. Once again, he was never called on to play in a game.

In 1926, in Vézina’s absence, Canadiens once again finished the season in last place, sunken down at the bottom of the seven-team NHL standings. Montreal’s other team, the Maroons, fared better that year, and on this night 96 years ago, they took on the Ottawa Senators in the final of the two-game, total-goals NHL championship at the Ottawa Auditorium. A crowd of 10,000 stood in honour of Vézina before referee Lou Marsh dropped the puck to start the game, while the band of the Governor-General’s Foot Guards played “Nearer My God To Thee.”

Coaches and players paid tributes of their own. The former Senators’ star defenceman Eddie Gerard was coaching Montreal. “Vézina was the hardest man to beat that I ever played against,” he said. “There was only one Vézina,” said Maroons’ goaltender Clint Benedict.

In the game that followed, Benedict shut out Ottawa’s shooters — with the help, as the Montreal Daily Star imagined it, below, of Vézina’s spirit. Montreal’s Babe Siebert, meanwhile, scored the only goal on Ottawa’s Alec Connell. That was enough to send the Maroons on to play for the Stanley Cup, taking on the WCHL Victoria Cougars later that week at the Forum and beating them three games to one to claim their first championship.

goldie’s rush

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From The Front: News of Goldie Prodger’s shrapnel wound reached Canada in October of 1918.

The goal came late, with four minutes left in the game.

With the visiting Rosebuds tied 1-1 with the hometown Montreal Canadiens, Portland winger Smokey Harris shot the puck, which Montreal goaltender Georges Vézina saved: that’s where things got started. Vézina cleared it to the corner, where Newsy Lalonde picked it up, the Canadiens centreman. He left it for a defenceman who then, well — Goldie Prodger skated through just about the entire Portland team, is what Goldie Prodger did.

It was a “rough journey,” the Montreal Gazette noted, but Prodger kept going. He beat Harris at centre ice, then barged into defenceman Del Irvine: “his weight toppled the Portland player over.” He evaded the second Portland defender, Moose Johnson, with some ease, and by then he only had the goaltender, Tom Murray, to hoodwink. He paused, to test Murray’s patience. “As the Portland goaltender came out to meet him,” the Gazette narrated, “Prodgers [sic] skated around him and lobbed the puck into the nets.”

And that was it: with Montreal leading 2-1, they fell back into defence to see out the decisive game of the Stanley Cup Finals, which they duly did on the penultimate day of March in 1916, to outlast the PCHL Rosebuds and take the series 3-2 at Montreal’s Westmount Arena.

It was, of course, Canadiens’ very first Stanley Cup championship, and 25-year-old Goldie Prodger, who was born on a Wednesday of today’s date in 1891, was the man who clinched it.

He was from London, Ontario, where he was christened George. Though his surname was often pluralized throughout his career (and continues to be, in many of the standard references, including at NHL.com), his birth registration and other vital documents confirm that it was, properly, Prodger.

Goldie? He owed that sobriquet, a press profile from 1912 helpfully explained, to “his sunny complexion.”

That was the same year Prodger won his first Cup, playing for the NHA Quebec Bulldogs, whose formidable line-up also featured Joe Malone, Joe Hall, and goaltender Paddy Moran.

In May of wartime 1916, Prodger flocked to his country’s colours, enlisting with the Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force. He was soon following Howard McNamara, his captain with the Canadiens, into the highly hockey-focussed 228th Battalion. Just how puck-minded was the 228th? Later that year, having recruited to the unit’s ranks some of hockey’s best talents, the 228th iced a team in the NHA alongside the Canadiens et al. (I’ve written about that whole fantastical finagle before, over here, if you’re interested.)

Prodger’s military career began with trip to the hospital: that August, probably while the battalion was in training at Camp Borden, north of Toronto, he broke an ankle playing baseball. That didn’t end up interfering with his skating: once hockey season got going in late December, he would play in all 12 of the 228th’s NHA games.

Along with many of his teammates, Prodger did eventually make it overseas, in 1917. The battalion was converted from an infantry to a railway construction unit; Prodger, for this part, was soon promoted corporal and then company sergeant-major. He took time to write home to remind friends just how vital hockey was, as the Ottawa Journal reported in a morale-boosting column:

Even if we are at war [Corporal Prodger rationalized] with an enemy that threatens our very existence, it is no reason why the great winter sport should be allowed to die. In fact, just such diversions are required at this time to keep the minds of those at home away from the horrors of war.

In 1918, as noted in the clipping from that October presented above, Prodger was added to the casualty list again, suffering a shrapnel wound in the back in (I think) France while attached to an Australian field artillery battery.

Battle Bulletin: Casualty report from Montreal’s Gazette in October of 1918.

He recovered, again. Following his CEF discharge in 1919, Prodger headed back to the ice, though not before some dramas played out, both medical and contractual. Another baseball injury befell him that fall, and this one got complicated when he came down with blood poisoning and had to have a finger amputated.

Meanwhile, in the fledgling NHL, Prodger’s rights were owned by the Quebec Hockey Club. He wanted to play in Toronto, and for a while it seemed as though he would sit out the season rather than report to Quebec. In December, Quebec traded him to his old team, the Canadiens, in exchange for Eddie Carpenter. But Prodger didn’t want to play there, either, so he waited until mid-January when Montreal’s George Kennedy worked a deal to send him the Toronto St, Patricks for Harry Cameron.

After finishing the season with the St. Pats, a trade took him to Hamilton the following season, and it was there with the Tigers that he played the rest of his NHL career, five seasons, through to 1925.

Goldie Prodger died in October of 1935 at the age of 44.

Habs Have It: Goldie Prodger and the rest of the 1915-16 Stanley Cup champions.

 

joe malone, 1920: a scoring spree unto himself

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Sevn-Shooter: Joe Malone in 1945, the year he turned 55.

An icy night in Quebec City; a hot hand, and a cold one.

That was the story, in sum, of a Saturday night 103 years ago last night, January 31, 1920, when, as the Quebec Chronicle put it, “Joe Malone had a scoring bee all by himself.”

Malone, 29, scored seven goals that night as his Quebec Bulldogs bamboozled the visiting Toronto St. Patricks by a score of 10-6; no-one since has scored more in an NHL game.

A review of the night’s events might include a mention that the crowd at the old Arena in Quebec was the smallest crowd of the season across the league in what was the NHL’s third season: just 1,200 spectators showed up.

It was a frigid night, to be fair, outside the rink as well as in. “The cold was so intense,” the Chronicle advised, “that [Corb] Denneny, the Toronto centre, had his right hand badly frozen during the game.”

Both teams made do with just eight skaters, I’ll mention, and while Quebec stuck with Frank Brophy in goal for the duration, Toronto switched out Ivan Mitchell after two periods in favour of Howie Lockhart. Mitchell allowed six goals, four of them by Malone, while reliever Lockhart saw four pass him by, three from Malone.

Malone might have had an eighth goal. Just before the first period expired, a shot of his hit Mitchell on the chest before trundling up and over his left shoulder and dropping down behind him. The goal judge wasn’t convinced that it had crossed the line, so no goal.

The other NHL game on the schedule that night in 1920 had the Senators hosting the Montreal Canadiens at Ottawa’s Laurier Street Arena, and that one ended 11-3 for the home team. Punch Broadbent scored a hattrick for Ottawa on Canadiens’ goaltender Georges Vézina; three other Senators, including Frank Nighbor, helped themselves to a pair.

Joe Malone’s outburst gave him 20 goals in 12 games, setting him up to win the NHL scoring title that season. In 24 games, he finished with 39 goals and 49 points, two goals and three points ahead of Montreal’s Newsy Lalonde.

Lalonde had actually scored six in a game against those same two Toronto goaltenders earlier in January of 1920, while Malone followed up by scoring six of his own on Ottawa’s Clint Benedict in March of that same season. The following year, Toronto’s (thawed-out) Corb Denneny and his older brother Cy (for Ottawa) each scored six of their own. Three other players have repeated that six-goal feat since: Syd Howe (in 1944, for the Detroit Red Wings); Red Berenson (1968, St. Louis Blues); and Darryl Sittler (1976, Toronto Maple Leafs).

Syd Howe’s double hattrick in ’44 came 24 years after Joe Malone’s bonanza, which you’d think might have stuck in the NHL’s historical memory. No. For a little while there, the league forgot all about it.

il est malade

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Old Goaler: Georges Vézina outside Montreal’s Mount Royal Arena in November of 1925.

Heading into the NHL new season in November of 1925, Montreal Canadiens managing director (and co-owner) Léo Dandurand wasn’t sure whether Georges Vézina was going to play or not. The goaltender was 38 that fall, and he had a cabinetry business to run in Chicoutimi, his hometown. He’d served his time with Montreal down through the years, maybe earned his rest, nobody could argue otherwise: since 1911, Vézina had, astonishingly, been the one and only goaltender to defend the Canadiens’ net. He’d seen the NHA come and go in that time, and the rise of the NHL in 1917, and had suited up for every competitive game for the Canadiens in the eight years since then. The only break Vézina had taken in 14 years came in 1922, when he’d ceded his net to serve a slashing penalty against Ottawa, with teammate Sprague Cleghorn filling in on an emergency backstop.

In 1925, Vézina left it late to agree to play another season. Dandurand finally got him to agree to it on November 10, after (as the Montreal Star reported) “some busy long-distance telephoning.” This was to be his swansong. “There is little doubt that this is to be Georges’ last season in hockey,” the newspaper noted. “His business in Chicoutimi needs his attention more and more, and it was only in view of the fact that he had given the Canadiens the impression earlier that he would be with them again that he has made special arrangements for this season.”

Showrunner: Léo Dandurand

Dandurand was making contingency arrangements of his own, signing an understudy in 28-year-old Alphonse (a.k.a. Frenchy) Lacroix, the Newton, Massachusetts-born goaltender who’d backed the U.S. Olympic team to a silver medal at the 1924 Chamonix Olympics. “Even though Canada scored six goals against him in the Olympic hockey final,” the Star advised, “he was given credit for staving off a worse defeat than that.”

Vézina arrived in Montreal the following Monday, November 16. He saw his first action two days later, in an exhibition match-up with Lester Patrick’s Victoria Cougars, the same WCHL team that had beaten the Canadiens in four games the previous March to claim the Stanley Cup. The Cougars prevailed again this time out, outlasting Montreal by a score of 5-3. Despite the loss, the hometown Gazette reported that Vézina’s “eagle eye” was intact, rating some of his first-period stops “heart-breaking to the Victoria attacking division.” A defenceman, Gord Fraser, scored Victoria’s last goal in the third period — the final goal ever to be scored on Vézina.

The following week, with their goaltender reported to be suffering from “a severe cold,” Montreal cancelled a series of further exhibition games against Tommy Gorman’s New York Americans in Hamilton, Ontario.

Still, Vézina was in his net at the Mount Royal Arena on the night of Saturday, November 28, when the Canadiens took on Pittsburgh’s mighty Pirates. Steered by a former Canadien, Odie Cleghorn, who served both as right wing and coach, with Roy Worters in goal, the Pirates ended up winning the game, 1-0, on a goal by Tex White. The Pittsburgh Press carried a lively narrative next day, in which Montreal’s Howie Morenz featured both for storming offense and pugnacity. In the first period, he took a penalty for “bumping;” in the second he had “a fist fight in the corner” with Jesse Spring.

Only briefly did the Press note a line-up change at the start of the second period:

 Lacroix was in the nets for [sic] Canadians at start of second period. Vézina was reported ill.

 Montreal’s Gazette carried a more detailed report under the sub-head “Vézina Was Shadow:”

But the high spot of the evening for the Canadien supporters came at the beginning of the second period when Lacroix, former United States Olympic goalkeeper went into the Canadien goal in place of Georges Vézina. The veteran goalkeeper started the game with a high temperature. He was pale and haggard looking as he turned shots aside in the first period. At the rest interval it was decided to replace him and for the first time since he took up hockey eighteen years ago, the veteran goalkeeper was forced to drop out of play. He remained in the dressing room with only his pads off hoping to pick up a little and get back into the game. But he was not in condition and with Lacroix well settled in the play, the former amateur was left in to the last.

The Star detailed an even more desperate scene:

His temples throbbed with fever, his face, while on the ice, was flushed, pale and drawn, and though he should have been home and in bed, he insisted on remaining till the end, impatiently sending out [Canadiens assistant trainer] Pat Kennedy and ither messengers, to find out how the battle progressing.

When the Canadiens went to Boston for their next game, Vézina stayed home. “Dandurand left instructions with a doctor here,” the Star reported on December 1, “to give Georges a thorough examination today to see if anything really serious is the matter with him.”

By the end of the week, the verdict was out: Montreal’s iconic goaltender had been diagnosed with tuberculosis. The Star ran a long story under the headline

Greatest Hockey Goal Keeper of Past
Decade Will Never Play Again

that featured Leo Dandurand’s (more or less?) embroidered account of Vézina’s turbulent final weeks in Montreal.

Sick List: A Montreal newspaper with the Vézina news in November of 1925.

It was Dandurand, remember, who’d played a large party in fashioning his famous goaltender’s image over the years, certainly in the English press, in Montreal and beyond. Vézina wasn’t interested in publicity, kept mostly to himself and to the French language, allowing (or suffering) Dandurand to fill the void. It was the Canadiens’ owner, for instance, who’d launched the myth, a persistent one that still, today, comes back to life from time to time, that Vézina was the father of 22 (or maybe was it 17?) children.

Dandurand’s account from this week in 1925 may be the straight goods; it does have, it has to be said, an air of having been over-crafted.

Tuberculosis isn’t mentioned, oddly: instead, Dandurand is quoted as saying that “poor Georges has the battle of Christy Mathewson to fight.” That would have held no mystery for sports fans: news of the great New York Giants pitcher’s death from the disease at the age of 45 had rippled across North America that same October.

Announcing the goaltender’s retirement, Dandurand added the news that Vézina had left for Chicoutimi without bidding farewell to his teammates, who had returned to Montreal to meet the Maroons on Thursday, December 3. Dandurand framed this as “Vézina’s last act of devotion to the club he loved so well,” quoting the goaltender himself. “Perhaps they will play better if they think I am coming on,” he’s supposed to have said. “When I’m not on they will soon forget about me in the excitement of the play.”

Dandurand had more to disclose. “I had known from the first that Vézina was not the Vézina of old. He did not look well when he reported, but assured me he would improve. That too was typical of him. But he lost weight in an alarming fashion, and it was not by accident that we signed Lacroix. I saw Vézina was nearly done, and though he insisted on going through his last game with a temperature of 102 degrees, and even then gave a good account of himself, he never recovered. Perhaps his insistence on playing the game spelled his doom. He was taken to bed that night, stayed there for a week, and when doctors examined him, it was found he had lost 35 pounds since coming to the city. Further examination revealed that his lungs were in bad shape ….”

Dandurand described the goaltender’s final visit that Thursday to Montreal’s Mount Royal Arena dressing room. Vézina found his usual corner. “I glanced at him as he sat there, and saw tears rolling down his cheeks. He was looking at his old pads and skates that [trainer] Eddie Dufour had arranged in George’s corner thinking that probably Vézina would don them that night. Then he asked one little favour — the sweater he wore in the last world series. Then he went. I doubt if hockey will ever know his like again.”

Vézina was soon home in Chicoutimi. Within four months, before the end of March of 1926, just 39, he was dead.

gaoledtenders: a short history of time served

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Box Seats: Chicago’s Mike Karakas was the last NHL goaltender to serve out a penalty, in New York in 1936. That’s Rangers’ trainer Harry Westerby standing by and, in the hat, Ranger coach and GM Lester Patrick.

Clint Benedict’s violations were out in the open, many of them, whether he was upsetting Corb Denneny behind the net or (another time) dropping Toronto captain Frank Heffernan “with a clout on the dome.”

In the decisive game of the 1923 Stanley Cup finals, with Benedict’s Ottawa Senators on the way to beating the WCHL-champion Edmonton Eskimos to claim hockey’s ultimate trophy, referee Mickey Ion sanctioned the goaltender for a first-period slash on Edmonton defenceman Joe Simpson. “Benedict tried to separate Joe from his legs behind the goal,” Andy Lyle wrote in the Edmonton Journal. This particular game was being played under eastern (NHL) rules, so Benedict headed for the penalty bench.

Foul but no harm: with Ottawa nursing a 1-0, Benedict’s teammates were able to defend the lead without their goaltender’s help. This was at the end of the famous series during which Senators defenceman King Clancy ended  playing defence, forward, and goal. In a 1997 memoir written with Brian McFarlane, Clancy describes the moment that he headed for the latter: Benedict chucked over his goalstick and said, “You take care of this place ’til I get back.”

After that, Clancy’s time was mostly an exercise in standing around, though not entirely. In the memoir, Clancy recalls that when, at one point, he smothered the puck near the net, Ion threatened him with a penalty.

But while Clancy says that he didn’t face a single Edmonton shot, contemporary accounts tell a different tale. By Ottawa manager Tommy Gorman’s account, Clancy faced down two Edmonton shots. “Once Joe Simpson whipped in a long one,” he wrote, “whereupon ‘King’ dropped his stick, caught the puck with the skill of a baseball catcher, and tossed it aside while the crowd roared its approval.”

Count it, I guess, as the first shared shutout in Stanley Cup history.

Nowadays, when it comes to penalties for goalies, the NHL rule book gets right to the point with Rule 27:

Minor Penalty to Goalkeeper — A goalkeeper shall not be sent to the penalty bench for an offense which incurs a minor penalty, but instead, the minor penalty shall be served by another member of his team who was on the ice when the offense was committed. This player is to be designated by the Coach of the offending team through the playing Captain and such substitute shall not be changed.

But for the first three decades of NHL history — in the regular season as well as in Stanley Cup play— goaltenders themselves served the penalties they were assessed, departing the ice while a teammate did his best to fill in.

This happened more than a dozen times in those early years, and was cause for considerable chaos and excitement. In the 1920s, Clint Benedict was (as mentioned) often in the mix, while in the ’30s, Lorne Chabot featured prominently. Among the temporary goaltenders, King Clancy continued to stand out, along with Sprague Cleghorn. Goals would have been easy to score in these circumstances — you’d think. In fact, none was scored on the first eight occasions — it wasn’t until 1931, when Chicago’s Tommy Cook punished the Canadiens, that anyone was able to take advantage of an absent goaltender to score.

Despite what you may have read in a recent feature on NHL.com, the last time a goaltender went to the box wasn’t in March of 1932, after a particular fractious game in Boston, though the NHL did adjust some language in the rule book that year.

No, the final goaltender to do his own time would seem to have been Mike Karakas of the Chicago Black Hawks at the end of December in 1936. After that — but we’ll come back to the shifting of the rules that went on for more than a decade before goaltenders were fully and finally excused from going to the box.

Ahead of that, herewith, a helpful review of the NHL’s history of goaltenders who were binned for their sins, listed chronologically from earliest to last, starting in the league’s second season on ice and wandering along to its 20th.

None of the six goalies who tended nets during the NHL’s inaugural season, 1917-18, was penalized. That’s worth a note, if only because, until the rule was changed a couple of weeks into the schedule, goalies were forbidden, on pain of penalty, from falling to their knees to stop the puck. Benedict, again, was front and centre in the discussion that led to the change. In the old National Hockey Association, his collapses were as renowned as his penalties. Indeed, in announcing in January of 1918 that goaltenders would now be allowed to “adopt any attitude” to stop the puck, NHL President Frank Calder made specific mention of Benedict before going on to explain the rationale for the change. “Very few of the teams carry a spare netminder,” Calder explained, “and if the goaler is ruled off it means a long delay in equipping another player, and in a close contest would undoubtedly cost the penalized team the game. The old rule made it hard for the referees, so everybody will be helped.”

Free to flop, Benedict was left to find other means of catching the attention of referees. Which he duly did:

Tuesday, February 18, 1919
Ottawa Senators 4 Toronto Arenas 3 (OT)
Mutual Street Arena, Toronto
Referees: Lou Marsh, Steve Vair

The NHL was a three-team affair in its second season, and not exactly robust, at that: the anemic Toronto Arenas ended up dropping out before the season was over, suspending operations with two games left to play in the schedule. Their sparsely-attended penultimate game — no more than 1,000 fans showed up — saw Ottawa’s goaltender penalized with ten minutes left in the third period. Yes, this was unruly Benedict once again: with Toronto leading 2-1, he was sanctioned for upsetting Corb Denneny behind the Ottawa net, incurring a three-minute penalty (that was a thing, then).

Ottawa defenceman Sprague Cleghorn took over Benedict’s net. The Ottawa Journal: “Torontos tried hard but their sharp shooters were kept at long range by the defensive work of the Senators. Finally goalkeeper Cleghorn himself secured the puck and made an end to end rush, almost scoring.” An added detail from the Citizen: with Cleghorn absent on his rush, Senators’ winger Cy Denneny took to the net where he stopped at least one shot. After Benedict’s return, Toronto stretched their lead to 3-1 before Ottawa got goals from Frank Nighbor and (not one to be denied) Sprague Cleghorn before Punch Broadbent sealed the win for the Senators in overtime.

Hors De Combat: Seen here in the first uniform of Montreal’s Maroons, Clint Benedict was an early protagonist when it came to goaltenders serving time in penalty boxes.

Saturday, January 24, 1920
Ottawa Senators 3 Toronto St. Patricks 5
Mutual Street Arena, Toronto
Referee: Cooper Smeaton

The call on Clint Benedict this time, apparently, was for slashing Toronto captain Frank Heffernan. Referee Smeaton had already warned him for swinging his stick at Corb Denneny before sending Benedict to the penalty bench. The Ottawa Citizen described the goaltender as having swung his stick “heavily,” catching Heffernan across the forehead, while the Journal saw Heffernan go down “with a clout on the dome.” The Toronto faithful, the Globe reported, weren’t pleased: “the crowd hissed and hooted him.” Sprague Cleghorn was still manning the Ottawa defence, but this time it was winger Jack Darragh subbed in while Benedict served his three minutes. The Journal noted several “sensational stops,” and no goals against.

Wednesday, February 1, 1922
Montreal Canadiens 2 Ottawa Senators 4
Laurier Avenue Arena, Ottawa
Referee: Lou Marsh

“At times,” the Ottawa Journal reported, “Sprague Cleghorn played like a master and at other times like a gunman.” It was Cleghorn’s violence that made headlines this night, drawing the attention of Ottawa police, who showed up in Montreal’s dressing room after the game. Cleghorn was a Canadien now, turning out against his old teammates (including Clint Benedict in Ottawa’s goal), and proving a one-man wrecking crew. He accumulated 29 minutes in penalties for transgressions that included cutting Ottawa captain Eddie Gerard over the eye with a butt-end; breaking Frank Nighbor’s arm; and putting Cy Denneny out of the game in its final minutes. For the latter, Cleghorn was assessed a match penalty and fined for using indecent language. Canadiens managing director Leo Dandurand turned back the police who tried to apprehend Cleghorn, telling them to come back when they had a warrant.

Amid all this, Cleghorn also stepped into the Montreal net after Georges Vézina was sent off for slashing King Clancy. Notwithstanding the Ottawa Citizen’s verdict, calling Cleghorn “the present day disgrace of the National winter game,” Montreal’s Gazette reported that as an emergency goaltender he “made several fine stops.”

Saturday, March 31, 1923
Ottawa Senators 1 Edmonton Eskimos 0
Denman Arena, Vancouver
Referee: Mickey Ion

Clint Benedict’s Stanley Cup penalty was for a second-period slash across the knees of Edmonton’s Bullet Joe Simpson. (The Citizen: “the Ottawa goalie used his stick roughly.”) After multi-purpose King Clancy, stepped in, as mentioned, to replace him, his Senator teammates made sure that Edmonton didn’t get a single shot on net.

Saturday, December 20, 1924
Montreal Maroons 1 Hamilton Tigers 3
Barton Street Arena, Hamilton
Referee: Mike Rodden

Montreal Daily Star, 1924.

Clint Benedict, again. He was a Montreal Maroon by now, and still swinging; this time, in Hamilton, he was sent off for (the Gazette alleged) “trying to get Bouchard.” Eddie Bouchard that was, a Hamilton winger. Maroons captain Dunc Munro stepped into the breach while Benedict cooled his heels, and temper. The Gazette: “nothing happened while he was off.”

Saturday, December 27, 1924
Ottawa Senators 4 Toronto St. Patricks 3
Mutual Street Arena, Toronto
Referee: Lou Marsh

For the first time in NHL history, Clint Benedict wasn’t in the building when a penalty was called on a goaltender. He was in Montreal, for the record, taking no penalties as he tended the Maroons’ net in a 1-1 tie with the Canadiens that overtime couldn’t settle.

Offending this time was Senators’ stopper Alec Connell, who was in Toronto and (the Gazette said) “earned a penalty when he took a wallop at big Bert Corbeau. The latter was engaged in a fencing exhibition with Frank Nighbor late in the second period when Connell rushed out and aimed a blow at the local defence man. Connell missed by many metres, but nevertheless, he was given two minutes and Corbeau drew five. ‘King’ Clancy then took charge of the big stick and he made several fine saves, St. Patricks failing to score.”

During the fracas in which Connell was penalized, I can report, Ottawa’s Buck Boucher was fined $10 for (the Toronto Daily Star said) “being too lurid in his comments to the referee.” The Star also noted that when, playing goal, Clancy was elbowed by Jack Adams, the temporary Ottawa goaltender retaliated with a butt-end “just to show the rotund Irish centre player that he wasn’t at all afraid of him and wouldn’t take any nonsense.”

Saturday, February 14, 1925
Hamilton Tigers 1 Toronto St. Patricks 3
Mutual Street Arena, Toronto
Referee: Eddie O’Leary

In the second period, Hamilton goaltender Jake Forbes was penalized for (as the Gazette saw it) “turning [Bert] Corbeau over as the big defenceman was passing by the Hamilton goal.” Hamilton winger Charlie Langlois was already serving a penalty as the defenceman Jesse Spring took the net, but the Tigers survived the scare: “Both Langlois and Forbes got back on the ice without any damage being done while they were absent, the other players checking St. Pats so well that they could not get near the Hamilton net.”

Wednesday, December 2, 1931
Montreal Canadiens 1 Chicago Black Hawks 2
Chicago Stadium
Referee: Mike Rodden, Bill Shaver

Montreal Gazette, 1931.

A first for Chicago and indeed for the USA at large: never before had an NHL goaltender served his own penalty beyond a Canadian border. Notable, too: after seven tries and more than a decade, a team facing a substitute goaltender finally scored a goal. On this occasion, it was a decisive one, too.

The game was tied 1-1 in the third period when Montreal’s George Hainsworth tripped Chicago winger Vic Ripley. With just three minutes left in regular time, Ripley, who’d scored Chicago’s opening goal, hit the boards hard. He was carried off.

Hainsworth headed for the penalty bench. He had a teammate already there, Aurèle Joliat, so when defenceman Battleship Leduc took the net, the situation was grim for Montreal. The Gazette:

Albert Leduc armed himself with Hainsworth’s stick and stood between the posts with only three men to protect him. His position was almost helpless and when [Johnny] Gottselig and [Tommy] Cook came tearing in, the former passed to the centre player and Cook burned one past Leduc for the winning counter. Then Joliat returned and Leduc made one stop. When Hainsworth came back into the nets, Canadiens staged a rousing rally and the final gong found the champions peppering [Chicago goaltender Charlie] Gardiner unsuccessfully.

Tuesday, March 15, 1932
Toronto Maple Leafs 2 Boston Bruins 6
Boston Garden
Referee: Bill Stewart, Odie Cleghorn

Boston saw its first goaltender-in-box when, three minutes in, Toronto’s Lorne Chabot was called for tripping Boston centreman Cooney Weiland. “The latter,” wrote Victor Jones in the Boston Globe, “entirely out of a play, was free-skating a la Sonja Henie in the vicinity of the Leaf cage.” Toronto’s Globe: “The Leafs protested loudly, but Stewart remained firm.”

It was a costly decision for the Leafs. At the time, a penalty didn’t come to its end, as it does today, with a goal by the team with the advantage: come what might, Chabot would serve out his full time for his trip.

Victor Jones spun up a whole comical bit in his dispatch around Leaf coach Dick Irvin’s decision to hand Chabot’s duties (along with his stick) to defenceman Red Horner. The upshot was that Bruins’ centre Marty Barry scored on him after ten seconds. Irvin replaced Horner with defenceman Alex Levinsky, without discernible effect: Barry scored on him, too, ten seconds later. When King Clancy tried his luck, Boston captain George Owen scored another goal, giving the Bruins a 3-0 lead by the time Chabot returned to service.

There was a subsequent kerfuffle involving Toronto GM Conn Smythe, a practiced kerfuffler, particularly in Boston. He’d arrived late to the game, to find his team down by a pair of goals and Clancy tending the net. Smythe ended up reaching out from the Toronto bench to lay hands on referee Bill Stewart, who (he said) was blocking his view. Backed by a pair of Boston policemen, the Garden superintendent tried to evict Smythe, whereupon the Toronto players intervened.

“For some minutes,” Victor Jones recounted, “there was a better than fair chance that there would be a riot.” Bruins’ owner Charles F. Adams arrived on the scene to keep the peace and arrange a stay for Smythe who was allowed to keep his seat on the Leaf bench (in Jones’ telling) “on condition he would not further pinch, grab, or otherwise molest” the referee.

Boston didn’t squander its early boon, powering on to a 6-2 victory.

A couple of other notes from Jones’ notebook: “Stewart may have ruined the game, but he called the penalty as it’s written in the book and that’s all that concerns him.”

Also: “The best crack of the evening was made by Horner, after the game in the Toronto dressing room: ‘You fellows made a big mistake when you didn’t let me finish out my goal tending. I was just getting my eye on ’em, and after four or five more I’d have stopped everything.”

Leaf On The Loose: Lorne Chabot was a habitual visitor to NHL penalty boxes in the 1930s.

Sunday, November 20, 1932
Toronto Maple Leafs 0 New York Rangers 7
Madison Square Garden III, New York
Referees: Eusebe Daigneault, Jerry Goodman

The Leafs were the defending Stanley Cup champions in the fall of 1932, but that didn’t help them on this night in New York as they took on the team they’d defeated in the championship finals the previous April. This time out, Lorne Chabot’s troubles started in the second period, when he wandered too far from his net, whereupon a Rangers’ winger saw fit to bodycheck him. Cause and effect: “Chabot was banished,” Toronto’s Daily Star reported, “for flailing Murray Murdoch with his stick.” (Murdoch was penalized, too.)

Leafs’ winger Charlie Conacher took to the net, and in style. “He made six dazzling stops during this [two-minute] time,” Joseph C. Nichols reported in the New York Times, “playing without the pads and shin-guards always worn by regular goalies.” When Chabot returned, Conacher received a thundering ovation from the New York crowd. Chabot worked hard on the night, too, stopping a total of 41 Ranger shots. Unfortunately, there were also seven that got past him before the game was over.

Thursday, March 16, 1933
Toronto Maple Leafs 0 Detroit Red Wings 1
Detroit Olympia
Referee: Cooper Smeaton, Clarence Bush

Lorne Chabot’s next visit to the penalty box came during what the Montreal Gazette graded one of the wildest games ever to be played at the Detroit Olympia. In the third period, when Detroit centreman Ebbie Goodfellow passed the Leaf goalmouth, Chabot (wrote Jack Carveth of the Detroit Free Press) “clipped him over the head with his over-sized stick.”

“That was the signal for Ebbie to lead with his left and cross with his right,” Carveth narrated. “Chabot went down with Goodfellow on top of him.”

Both players got minor penalties for their troubles, which continued once they were seated side-by-side the penalty box. “After they had been separated,” wrote Carveth, “a policeman was stationed between them to prevent another outbreak.”

Just as things seemed to be settling down, Detroit coach Jack Adams threw a punch that connected with the chin of Toronto’s Bob Gracie, who stood accused of loosing “a vile remark” in Adams’ direction. “Players from both benches were over the fence in a jiffy but nothing more serious than a lot of pushing developed.”

Toronto winger Charlie Conacher took up Chabot’s stick in his absence. “But he didn’t have to do any work,” according to the Canadian Press. “King Clancy ragged the puck cleverly,” and the Wings failed to get even a shot at Conacher. They were already ahead 1-0 at the time, and that’s the way the game ended, with the shutout going to Detroit’s John Ross Roach.

Tuesday, November 28, 1933
Montreal Maroons 4 Montreal Canadiens 1
Montreal Forum
Referees: Bill Stewart, A.G. Smith

Lorne Chabot may have moved from Toronto to Montreal by 1933, but he was still battling. On this night, he contrived to get into what the Montreal Daily Star called a “high voltage scrap” with Maroons centreman Dave Trottier. The latter’s stick hit Chabot on the head as he dove to retrieve a puck in the third period, it seems. “Thinking it intentional,” the Gazette reported, “Chabot grabbed one of Trottier’s legs and pulled him to the ice with a football tackle. They rose and came to grips.” Later that same brouhaha, Chabot interceded in a fight between teammate Wildor Larochelle and the Maroons’ Hooley Smith, whereupon (somehow) Trottier and Larochelle were sentenced to major penalties while Smith and Chabot earned only minors.

With two minutes left in the game and Maroons up by three goals, Canadiens’ coach Newsy Lalonde elected not to fill Chabot’s net. Maroons couldn’t hit the empty net, though winger Wally Kilrea came close with a long-distance shot that drifted wide.

Sunday, December 27, 1936
Chicago Black Hawks 0 New York Rangers 1
Madison Square Garden III
Referee: Bill Stewart, Babe Dye

“One of hockey’s rarest spectacles,” New York Times’ correspondent Joseph C. Nichols called the second-period tripping penalty that was called when Chicago’s Mike Karakas tripped New York’s Phil Watson. Filling in for Karakas was none other than Tommy Cook who, you might recall, scored a goal against Battleship Leduc in 1931 when he’d replaced Montreal’s George Hainsworth. This time, Nichols reported, the net might as well have been empty for all the chances the rangers had to score. With Chicago’s Johnny Gottselig, Paul Thompson, and Art Wiebe doing yeoman’s work on the defensive, Cook faced no shots during his stint as a stand-in — the last one, as it turned out, in NHL history.

Both Sides Now: Chicago centreman Tommy Cook was the first NHLer to score a goal with a goaltender in the box, in 1931. In 1936, he was also the last player to take a penalized goaltender’s place.

Tracing the evolution of the NHL’s rule book generally involves a certain amount of sleuthing. James Duplacey’s The Rules of Hockey (1996) is helpful up to a point, but it’s not it’s not without bugs and oversights.

This is specifically the case, too, when it comes to goaltenders and their penalties. When in 1918 goaltenders were freed to fall to their knees without risk of punishment, this freedom never enshrined in writing. For most if not all of the league’s first decade, the only language in the rule book governing goaltenders had to do with holding the puck — not allowed — and the face-off arrangement that applied if they dared to commit this misdemeanor.

This changed in 1932, after that Leaf game in Boston in March when Toronto’s three emergency goaltenders yielded three goals and Conn Smythe got into (another) melee. Did he draft or drive the addition of the paragraph that was added to the rule book that year? It’s possible. It was procedural only, and didn’t change the way things had been done since the beginning. The language added to Rule 12 read:

If a goal-keeper is removed from the ice to serve a penalty the manager of the club shall appoint a substitute and the referee shall be advised of the name of the substitute appointed. The substitute goal-keeper shall be subject to the rules governing goal-keepers and have the same privileges.

The last part does suggest that stand-ins would be within their rights to strap on goaltending pads, and maybe that happened, though I’ve never seen any archival or anecdotal evidence that it did in any of the instances cited above.

Goaltenders were boxed on four more occasions (as we’ve seen) after this change in rule-book wording. It was six years later that the sentencing of rule-breaking goaltenders changed materially, in September of 1938. No goaltender had, to date, ever been assessed a major penalty, but if that were to happen, the new rule stipulated that he would go to the box, with his substitute accorded all the privileges of a regular netminder, “including the use of the goal-keeper’s stick and gloves.”

And for lesser infractions? Now The Official Rule Book declared that:

No goal-keeper shall be sent to the penalty bench for an offence which incurs a minor penalty but instead of the minor penalty, a penalty shot shall be given against him.

It didn’t take long for the statute to get its first test, once the 1938-39 season got underway. There was, it’s true, some confusion on the ice when the Detroit Red Wings hosted the Chicago Black Hawks, the reigning NHL champions, on Thursday, November 24.

It was a busy night for referee Clarence Campbell. The future NHL president wasn’t a favourite in Detroit, as Doc Holst of the local Free Press outlined:

Anytime Mr. Campbell is referee on Mr. [Jack] Adams’ ice, you can wager your grandma that there will be plenty of difficult problems and that he will never solve them to the satisfaction of the Red Wings. He’s their ogre, no matter how the other club praises his abilities.

Campbell infuriated both teams on this night. In the first period, he disallowed a goal that the Wings’ Marty Barry thought he’d score. Next, Campbell awarded the Wings a penalty shot after Hawks’ defenceman Alex Levinsky held back the Wings’ Ebbie Goodfellow on his way in on Chicago’s Mike Karakas. Levinsky objected so vociferously that Campbell gave him a ten-misconduct. Mud Bruneteau took Detroit’s penalty shot: Karakas saved.

Things got even more interesting in the third. It started with Detroit’s Pete Kelly skating in on the Chicago net and colliding with Karakas. Doc Holst: “The two of them came out of the net and started to roll, Pete holding on to Mike for dear life. The only thing Mike could think of was to tap Pete on the head with his big goalie stick.”

Campbell penalized both, sending Kelly to the box for holding and awarding Detroit a penalty shot for Karakas’ slash. The Wings weren’t having it — they wanted the Chicago goaltender sent off. “Campbell pulled the rule book on the Wings,” a wire service account of the proceedings reported, “and showed them goalies do not go to penalty boxes” Once again Mud Bruneteau stepped up to shoot on Karakas and, once again, failed to score. The Red Wings did eventually prevail in the game, winning 4-2, despite all the goals denied them.

Goaltenders did keep on taking penalties, some of them for contravening a new rule added to the books in 1938 barring them from throwing pucks into the crowd to stop play. In Detroit, if not elsewhere, this rule was said to be aimed at curbing the Red Wings’ Normie Smith, who’d been known in his time for disposing of (said the Free Press) “as many as a dozen pucks a night over the screen.” Chicago’s Karakas was, apparently, another enthusiastic puck-tosser.

And so, in February of 1939, Clarence Campbell called Wilf Cude of the Montreal Canadiens for flinging a puck over the screen against the New York Americans. Cude took his medicine and kicked out Johnny Sorrell’s penalty shot. In January, 1941, when Toronto’s Turk Broda tripped Canadiens’ Murph Chamberlain, he was pleased to redeem himself by foiling a penalty shot from Tony Demers.

The NHL continued to tweak the rule through the 1940s. In September of ’41, the league split the penalty shot: now there were major and minor versions. The major was what we know now, applied when a skater was impeded on a clear chance at goal. The player taking the shot was free to skate in on the goaltender to shoot from wherever he pleased. A minor penalty shot applied when a goaltender committed a foul: he would be sentenced to face an opposing player who could wheel in from centre-ice but had to shoot the puck before he crossed a line drawn 28 feet in front of the goal.

By 1945, the rules had changed again, with a penalty shot only applying when a goaltender incurred a major penalty. That meant that when, in a February game in New York, referee Bill Chadwick whistled down Rangers’ goaltender Chuck Rayner for tossing the puck up the ice (just as prohibited as hurling it into the stands), Rayner stayed in his net while teammate Ab DeMarco went to the penalty box. From there, he watched  Chicago’s Pete Horeck score the opening goal in what ended as a 2-2 tie.

This continued over the next few years. Boston’s Frank Brimsek slung a puck into the Montreal crowd and teammate Bep Guidolin did his time for him. Detroit’s Gerry Couture went to the box when his goaltender, Harry Lumley, high-sticked Boston’s Bill Cowley. In the October of 1947, in a game at Chicago Stadium between the Black Hawks and Red Wings, Chadwick saw fit to call (in separate incidents) penalties on both team’s goaltenders, Lumley for tripping (Red Kelly went to the box) and Chicago’s Emile Francis for high-sticking (Dick Butler did the time).

A few days later Francis was penalized again, this time against Montreal, after a “mix-up” with Canadiens’ winger Jimmy Peters. By some accounts, this was an out-and-out fight, though Peters and Francis were assessed minors for roughing. Is it possible that referee Georges Gravel downgraded the charge to avoid the spectacle of Francis having to face a penalty shot for his temper?

The rule does seem generally to have fallen into disrepute in these final years before it was rewritten. Witness the game at Maple Leaf Gardens in January of 1946 when the Leafs beat the Red Wings 9-3 in a game refereed by King Clancy. Late in the third period, Detroit’s Joe Carveth took a shot on the Leaf goal only to see it saved by goaltender Frank McCool. The Globe and Mail’s Vern DeGeer described what happened next:

The puck rebounded back to Carveth’s stick as a whistle sounded. Carveth fired the puck again. It hit McCool on the shoulder. The Toronto goalie dropped his stick and darted from his cage. He headed straight for Carveth and enveloped the Detroiter in a bear hug that would have done credit to one of Frank Tunney’s mightiest wrestling warriors, and bore him to the ice.

DeGeer’s description of the aftermath came with a derisive subhed: Who Wrote This Rule?

The sheer stupidity of major hockey rules developed out of the McCool-Carveth affair. Carveth was given a two-minute penalty for firing the puck after the whistle and an additional two minutes for fighting. A major penalty shot play was given against McCool. Carl Liscombe made the play and hit the goalpost at McCool’s right side. There’s neither rhyme nor reason for such a severe penalty against a goaltender, but it’s in the rule book.

Carveth was in the penalty box when the game ended. First thing the former Regina boy did was skate to the Toronto fence and apologize to Frank for taking the extra shot after the whistle.

The NHL made another change ahead of the 1949-50 season: from then on, major penalties, too, that were incurred by goaltenders would see a teammate designated to serve time in the box rather than resulting in a penalty shot.

just breathe

/ puckstruck

To Air Is Human: An illustrator for the Montreal Daily Star imagines the Canadiens’ new pick-me-up machine in February of 1912.

A felicitous find by Mikaël Lalancette, writer at Quebec City’s Le Soleil and author, last year, of an insightful biography, Georges Vézina: L’Habitant Silencieux. As detailed in a column published in Le Soleil this past Thursday, Lalancette’s Vézina research took him deep into the century-old annals of Montreal Canadiens history, which is where he came across an early effort by management to breathe energy, endurance, and victory into a flailing team.

“In 113 years of history, the Montreal Canadiens have tried everything,” he writes, with a nod to the recent struggles of the current edition of the team. “Every means, good or not, to get the club out of its torpor has been tested by its leaders over time. As we know, reviving a losing team is not easy in professional sports and the most recent slide of Quebecers’ favourite club is a good example.”

The column is here (it’s in French, and paywalled). The upshot is this: early in the winter of 1912, with his team mired in a four-game losing streak, Canadiens manager George Kennedy had doctors dose his players with oxygen during a game at the Jubilee Arena.

According to Lalancette’s source material, an item in the Montreal Daily Star, the effect was negligible. According to history, too: Canadiens lost that game by a score of 9-1 to their local rivals, the Montreal Wanderers. The season, too, was a bust, with the not-yet-Glorieux finishing dead last in the four-team NHA standings.

Into just the third season of their existence, Canadiens had yet to flourish in the old National Hockey Association. Going into the 1911-12 season, they’d lost their leading goal-getter: Newsy Lalonde had departed for more lucrative horizons in the west, joining the PCHA’s Vancouver Millionaires. Still, Montreal featured Vézina in goal, along with a couple of other future Hall-of-Famers on the ice in front of him in Jack Laviolette and Didier Pitre.

The man overseeing them, George Kennedy, was a former wrestling champion who was well-known, too, as a manager of wrestlers and lacrosse teams. He also happened to own the Canadiens.

On a trip that winter of 1912 to the United States, he’d heard tell of “the wonderful effects of the oxygen treatment.” After consulting with medically minded friends in Montreal, he decided to give it a go. “In his desire not to let anything prevent his team from,” the Star reported 110 years ago, he soon acquired “a hundred gallons of the purified air,” along with a pair of doctors to administer it in the Canadiens’ dressing room.

Jaded Canadiens: A Vancouver newspaper picked up the news from Montreal in March of 1912.

The players were … wary. Another report from the rink noted that “the majority of the team did not seem to take kindly to it, in fact, some of them seemed to be afraid of it,” even with the doctors taking charge. The only player “who really tried it thoroughly,” the Star said, was forward Eugène Payan, “and though there was some improvement in his gait, it did not amount to much.”

As Lalancette notes in Le Soleil, while inhaling pure oxygen on an ad hoc basis might refresh a gasping hockey players, there’s no particular magic in it, particularly not for athletes in whose blood oxygen saturation is already maximized.

In 1912, the Star listed champagne as the between-periods tonic of choice for hockey players, while hinting vaguely “of even more dangerous stimulants … used occasionally.” One columnist from Ottawa’s Journal suggested that Canadiens would soon be back on the bottle, while another framed it as a question of sporting morality.

Any such artificial devices to excite temporary energy has its reaction, and must, in the long run prove injurious. When athletes reach a state of fatigue where the administration of oxygen is necessary, then it is neither to their advantage nor to that of the sport in which they participate to continue. Sportsmanship and the oxygen treatment are miles apart.

A coda (or three) to Lalancette’s report, offered in passing.

First, just a month after Montreal aerated its players, the Montreal Daily Star carried news of a letter that had appeared in a European newspaper concerning track events at the forthcoming 1912 Olympic Summer Games slated for Stockholm. Would a runner competing there, the writer wondered, be permitted to partake of “oxygen gas from a bag carried by him?”

It would be extremely interesting to see whether such breathing is of material assistance to the runner, and as oxygen gas is not a drug, but as natural an article of consumption as water, there seems to be no reason why the runner should be disqualified for refreshing himself with it as he may with water or soup.

I can’t say whether anything came of this: I have no further information, I’m afraid, on whether any of the results in Stockholm were oxygen- or soup-assisted.

Made Good: The Daily Star profiles Canadiens winger Eugène Payan in 1911.

I can recount (second) that back in Montreal, at the rink, Canadiens played their penultimate game of the 1911-12 season as March began, taking on the Wanderers again. This time they eked out a 2-1 win, thanks to a pair of goals by Jack Laviolette.

Further unhappy news headlined a column —

Payan Is Injured
Left Wing of Canadien Team
Taken to Hospital as Result
of a Collision

— in next morning’s Montreal Gazette.

Skating at high speed in the first period, Eugène Payan had collided, head-to-head, with the Wanderers’ Odie Cleghorn. Payan went down, but got up, and went on playing.

It was between periods in the Canadiens’ dressing room that he collapsed. From there, he was taken to Montreal’s Western Hospital, where he was deemed to have suffered a serious concussion, though no fracture of the skull.

As the Star told it, there was for a while some doubt  in the immediate aftermath about whether he would survive, which made the scene as he departed the Arena all the more piteous: as the game carried on “amongst thundering applause, poor Payan still persisting in a half unconscious way: ‘I want to finish my game! I want to finish my game!’ was carried to the waiting ambulance.”

By the time the game was over, Payan was reported to be out of danger. The following day, the Daily Star carried tidings that he was “a good deal better.”

Through this ordeal, in the dressing room at the Jubilee Arena, it would seem, the Canadiens still had their oxygen apparatus at the ready. It featured notably in the Star’s dramatic description of intermission scene when Payan first collapsed:

He had gone in when suddenly he exclaimed in an awestruck voice, “I am paralyzed,” and began to sway. They grabbed him before he could fall and laid him on the table where they administered as much oxygen as they dared to revive him, not knowing exactly what had happened.

Suddenly his arms and legs began to twitch as if he had taken a violent dose of strychnine and a hurried examination showed that he had been hurt on the side of the head where the bone is as thin as letter paper.

Last (third), a flash forward to April of 1949, and what would seem to be the NHL debut of oxygen.

The Toronto Maple Leafs were hosting the Detroit Red Wings that year, and with the Leafs leading the series three games to none, Jack Adams’ Wings were open to anything that might lend them a lifeline.

With George Kennedy’s 1912 experiment long forgotten, the Canadian Press was claiming that the very first use of oxygen in a hockey game in Canada had come a month earlier, in March of 1949, when players with the Dartmouth College Indians had partaken as they surrendered the International Intercollegiate title in Montreal to the University of Montreal Carabins.

Then in April, Montreal’s junior Royals used oxygen at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto as they defeated the Barrie Flyers to win the Eastern Canada Junior championship. It was the Royals’ tanks, tubes, and masks that the Red Wings borrowed to try to oxygenate their hopes for a Stanley Cup comeback.

In vain. “Even mechanical strength-reviving gadgets have their limitations when the cause is hopeless,” Jim Vipond wrote in his dispatch for the Globe and Mail after Toronto duly wrapped up a 3-1 win to take the Cup. “The Leafs looked more impressive than ever, playing at the finish as if they, and not the weary Detroiters, had been inhaling at an oxygen tank at their bench.”

Breathless: The Detroit Red Wing tried the oxygen treatment in the last game of the 1949 Stanley Cup finals.

george the first

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Here’s George Hainsworth in all his ratty glory at some point during the 1929-30 NHL season, by the end of which he and his Montreal Canadiens had commandeered the Stanley Cup. Born in Toronto on this date in 1893 — it was a Monday, then — Hainsworth and the Habs defended their championship the following season. He had, of course, taken up the Montreal net in 1926, following  Georges  Vézina’s tragic death, whereupon he claimed the first three editions of the trophy that was instituted in Vézina’s name to recognize the NHL’s outstanding goaltender. In 1928-29, Hainsworth set a record (it still stands) for most shutouts in a season, posting a remarkable 22 in 44 regular-season games for the Canadiens. Another season of his ranks sixth on that same list: in 1926-27, Hainsworth kept a clean sheet in 14 of 44 regular-season games.

herb gardiner: in 1927, the nhl’s most useful man

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It was on a Friday of this same date in 1891 in Winnipeg that Herb Gardiner was born in 1891. If you haven’t heard of his stardom as a defenceman on the ice in Calgary and Montreal, well, here’s an introduction to that. Gardiner, who died in 1972, aged 80, was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1958. A quick browse across his biography shows that the adjectives stellar and two-way and consistent were sometimes applied to his efforts on the ice, along with the noun rock. Also? That he won the Hart Memorial Trophy as the NHL MVP in 1927, edging out Bill Cook on the ballot, as well as the impressive likes of Frank Frederickson, Dick Irvin, and King Clancy.

Browsing the Attestation Papers by which Gardiner signed up to be a soldier in Calgary in 1915 at the age of 23 and the height of just over 5’ 9”, you may notice that the birthdate given is May 10, which is two days late, must just be an error, since a lie wouldn’t have made any difference to Gardiner’s eligibility. Listing the profession he was leaving behind to go to war as surveyor, he started a private with the 12th Battalion of the Canadian Mounted Rifles, went to England, was taken on strength with the 2nd CMR, who went unhorsed to fight in France in 1916. Gardiner was promoted corporal that year and then lance-sergeant, and we know that he was wounded in June, probably near Hooge in the Ypres Salient in Belgium. The nature of the wound is inscribed in Gardiner’s medical record as “GSW Nose” — i.e. Gun Shot Wound Nose. That’s as much as I know about it, other than it seems that he was brisk in his recovery, and kept on winning promotion as 1916 went, to company sergeant-major, then temporary lieutenant. The following year he spent a lot of time in hospitals with (as per the medical file) bronchitis, pleurisy, catarrhal jaundice. He was invalided back to Canada, eventually, where he was playing hockey again for various Calgary teams before he was demobilized in 1919.

Most of the starring he did in those post-war years was on defence for the Calgary Tigers of the old Western Canadian Hockey League, where he played with Red Dutton and Rusty Crawford, Harry Oliver, Spunk Sparrow. In 1926, when the league disbanded (it was the WHL by then), Cecil Hart of the Montreal Canadiens bought Gardiner’s contract.

Gardiner took Georges Vézina’s number 1 for his sweater in Montreal, which is a little surprising, but there it is: the team didn’t retire it from circulation after the iconic goaltender’s death in March of 1926. (Herb Rheaume, Vézina’s successor in Montreal’s net, inherited the number before Gardiner arrived; the following year, 1926-27, Montreal’s new goaltender was George Hainsworth, who wore 12.)

Gardiner played his first NHL game in November of 1926 at the age of 35 in the old Boston Arena on a night when another WHL import was getting his start on the Bruins’ defence: 23-year-old Eddie Shore. Boston won that contest, 4-1, and even in the Montreal papers it was Shore’s debut that rated most of the mentions, his rugged style, and some pleasantries he exchanged with Canadiens’ Aurèle Joliat. Oh, and goaltender Hainsworth was said to be hindered by the fog that blanketed the ice. “The heat in the rink,” the Gazette noted, “was fearful.”

Along with Hainsworth and Joliat, Canadiens counted Howie Morenz in their line-up that year, and Art Gagne and Pit Lepine, along with a talented supporting cast. Gardiner joined Sylvio Mantha and Battleship Leduc on the defence — and that was pretty much it, other than Amby Moran, who played in 12 of Montreal’s 44 regular-season games. Gardiner, for his part, was not so much busy as ever-present, relied on by coach Cecil Hart to play all 60 minutes of each game. With the four games Canadiens played in the playoffs, that means he played 48 games — italics and respectful props all mine — in their entirety that year.

“And sometimes it was 70 or 80 minutes,” he recalled years later. “We played overtime in those days, too. But it wasn’t as hard as it sounds. I never carried the puck more than, say, eight times a game. And besides, I was only 35 years old at the time.”

By February of 1927, Elmer Ferguson of The Montreal Herald was already touting Gardiner as his nominee to win the trophy for league MVP that was named for the father of Montreal’s coach. Another hometown paper called Gardiner “the sensation of the league.” When in March sportswriters around the NHL tallied their votes, Gardiner had garnered 89, putting him ahead of the Rangers’ Bill Cook (80) and Boston centre Frank Frederickson (75). I like the way they framed it back in those early years: Gardiner was being crowned (as The Ottawa Journal put it) “the most useful man to his team.” For all that, and as good as that team was, those Canadiens, they weren’t quite up to the level of the Ottawa Senators, who beat Montreal in the semi-finals before going on to win the Stanley Cup.

With Hart in hand, Gardiner asked for a pay raise in the summer of ’27. When Montreal didn’t seem inclined to offer it, he stayed home in Calgary. He was ready to call it quits, he said, but then Canadiens came through and Gardiner headed east, having missed two weeks of training. He wouldn’t say what Montreal was paying him for the season, but there was a rumour that it was $7,500.

So he played a second year in Montreal. Then in August of 1928 he was named coach of Major Frederic McLaughlin’s underperforming Chicago Black Hawks, the fourth in the club’s two-year history. Gardiner had served as a playing coach in his days with the Calgary Tigers, but this job was strictly benchbound — at first.

As Gardiner himself explained it to reporters, Montreal was only loaning him to Chicago, on the understanding that he wouldn’t be playing. The team he’d have charge of was a bit of a mystery: “What players they will have; what changes have been made since last winter, and other matters pertaining to the club are unknown to me,” he said as he prepared to depart Calgary in September.

The team trained in Winnipeg and Kansas City before season got going. When they lost five of their first six games, Gardiner got permission from Montreal’s Leo Dandurand to insert himself into the line-up, but then didn’t, not immediately, went to Ottawa and then Montreal without putting himself to use, and remained on the bench through Christmas and January, and Chicago was better, though not at all good, moping around at the bottom of the league standings.

He finally took the ice in February in a 3-2 loss to New York Rangers, when the Black Hawks debuted at their new home: due to a lease kerfuffle back in Chicago, the team was temporarily at home at Detroit’s Olympia. Gardiner played a total of four games for Chicago before Montreal, up at the top of the standings, decided that if he was going to be playing, it might as well be on their blueline, and so with the NHL’s trade-and-transaction deadline approaching, Canadiens duly ended the loan and called him back home.

Well out of the playoffs, the Black Hawks finished the season with (best I can glean) Dick Irvin serving as playing-coach, though business manager Bill Tobin may have helped, too. Major McLaughlin did have a successor lined up for the fall in Tom Shaughnessy. Coaches didn’t last long with McLaughlin, and he was no exception. While Gardiner oversaw 32 Black Hawk games, Shaughnessy only made it to 21 before he gave way to Bill Tobin, whose reign lasted (slightly) longer, 71 games.

Gardiner finished the season with Montreal, who again failed to turn a very good regular season into playoff success. In May of 1929, Canadiens sent Gardiner to the Boston Bruins, a clear sale this time, in a deal that also saw George Patterson and Art Gagne head to Massachusetts. Gardiner was finished as an NHLer, though: that fall, the Philadelphia Arrows of the Can-Am League paid for his release from Boston and made him their coach.

Sont Ici: A Pittsburgh paper welcomes Canadiens Herb Gardiner and goaltender George Hainsworth in 1927, along with (between them) Gizzy (not Grizzy) Hart, who in fact played left wing rather than defence. Canadiens and Pirates tied 2-2 on the night after overtime failed to produce a winner.

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

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

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

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

There’s more:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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