Hack Simpson

unabashed, the germans battered manfully (lacked sadly in cooperation and general hockey craft)

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Crash That Net: Canadians (in white) harry the German net on Saturday, February 6, 1932, at the Olympic Stadium in Lake Placid, NY. Down in the German net is goaltender Walter Leinweber. Canada prevailed 4-1 on the day.

The first time Canada took on Germany at an Olympics was in 1932 in Lake Placid, New York. The teams played twice in that tournament, 90 years ago this month, on Saturday, February 6 and then again on the Monday, February 8. That’s action from the former here, above. “Unabashed by their 7-0 defeat at the hands of the United States last night,” a Canadian Press account went, “the Germans started the game tonight with a fine turn of speed and a great deal of courage that battered manfully at the tough Winnipegs’ defence for two periods before they got anywhere near Bill Cockburn in the Canadian goal.” The game was played outdoors, at the rink at the Olympic Stadium. Canada won by a score of 4-1, with centre Walter Monson leading the way with a pair of goals.

“The husky Teutons” was a phrase of Ralph Allen’s, deployed in the Winnipeg Tribune after the teams’ second encounter, which was played indoors at the Olympic Arena. Another reporter wrote that “what the Germans lacked in hockey skill they made up for with sheer grit.” CP’s Wallace Ward praised their “plucky persistence.”

“They were decisively outclassed, however, and their desperate thrusts lacked sadly in cooperation and general hockey craft.”

The Globe deemed the Germans “stubborn.” Rudi Ball and Gustav Jaenecke were their most dangerous players: “their speed was a revelation if their shooting was clumsy.”

The Canadians rested three of their regulars for that game, including Hack Simpson. Canada’s margin of victory was 5-0 this time out.

Gustav Janaecke, Germany’s dangerous forward.

pole position

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En Rout: Canada beat Poland 9-0 on Sunday, February 7, 1932, on the way to winning a gold medal at the Lake Placid Winter Olympics. Two days later, the teams met again (above) and this time (as one observer wrote it) Canada “submerged” the Poles by a score of 10-0.

The hockey tournament at the 1932 Winter Olympics was an intimate affair, 90 years ago this month, with just four teams taking part. Joining the United States and Canada on the ice at Lake Placid, New York, were teams from Germany and Poland. Scouting for The Winnipeg Tribune just before the pucks plummeted in early February, Paul Warburg advised that “Poland has improved remarkably in hockey, but their likelihood of being a serious contender to either the Canadians or United States teams is small.”

And so it proved. The Poles opened their account with a pairs of losses, 2-1 to Germany and 4-1 to the hosts from the United States. They played an exhibition game next, borrowing a local American goaltender for a 6-2 loss to the Lake Placid Athletic Club.

The Winnipeg Hockey Club was wearing the maple leaf in ’32, and on February 7 the Tribune’s Ralph Allen was on hand to watch “the valiant but futile Polska outfit” show its stuff. It turned out “a nice, easy workout for the Canadians,” Allen reported, as the favourites “showed lots of speed and combination when they felt like uncovering it.”

Poland played cautiously, “adopting a packed defence whenever possible,” and for the first ten minutes the ’Pegs were duly stymied. Eventually they found their way to a 9-0 win. Allen thought they could have netted more in the third period, if they’d felt like it. Leading the way for the Canadians were Romeo Rivers, Walter Monson, and Hack Simpson, who scored a pair of goals each.

Wallace H. Ward was on hand in Lake Placid, reporting for the Canadian Press. “With no knowledge of the bodycheck,” he observed, “the Polish team was helpless when the white-sweatered Canadians were skirmishing in the defensive zone.”

The Poles dropped another game to the U.S. by a score of 5-0. They lost again to Germany, too, 4-1, in a game featuring flurries of high sticks. Somehow, Ralph Allen reported, only two players were injured, including Polish goaltender Josef Stogowski, who suffered “a bad gash under the eye from the stick of a teammate;” the game was paused for ten minutes while he was patched.

When the Poles faced Canada one last time two days after their first encounter, Winnipeg’s eventual gold medallists showed their restraint by keeping the score to 10-0. Every Canadian player but goaltender Stanley Wagner notched a goal on this outing, though they had to work for it. Ralph Allen:

Everything went along smoothly until it was nearly time to go home to supper, and someone discovered that Kenny Moore and Stoney Wise hadn’t had their turn at hitting the button. So everybody joined in and lent a helping hand to the victims of this shocking though unwitting neglect. Kenny and Stoney got their goals, and everybody was happy.

Ready For Action: Polish captain Wlodzimierz Krygier on the ice at Lake Placid in February of 1932.

 

 

twas a close squeeze

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Big day at the Winter Olympics today … in 1932. February 6 was a Saturday at the III hibernal games, which took place in and around Lake Placid, New York, and saw the mushing of 12 teams over a gruelling 40.5-kilometre course for the first of two races that were organized to show of dog-sled racing as an Olympic demonstration sport. Saturday’s race was won by Emil St. Goddard and his seven dogs, from The Pas, Manitoba. Actually, they won Sunday’s race, too, to take the overall title, ahead of the famous Alaskan sledder Leonard Seppala.

Hockeywise, February 6 saw Canada’s team play its third game in three days, though only two of them actually counted in the tournament standings.

Here’s how that worked: on February 4, Canada played the U.S. at Lake Placid’s outdoor Stadium rink. With an eye to selling tickets, American organizers had slotted in a series of exhibition games throughout the Olympics, which is how Canada skated out on February 5 and lost 2-0 to the team from McGill University. McGill got both its goals from centre Nels Crutchfield, who went on to play a single season for the Montreal Canadiens before a skull fracture suffered in a car accident put an end to his hockey career in 1935. At Lake Placid, Canadian management attached no importance to the game. Next morning, February 6, Canada beat Germany 4-1.

It was the Winnipeg Hockey Club representing Canada at the 1932 Olympics, the reigning Allan Cup champions, and despite what you see above, they (a) wore regular shinpads and socks and (b) affected plain old red maple leaves on their sweaters, no exoskeleton needed.

While we’re looking, it’s hard to say what exactly might be going on with the puck in this imaginatively enhanced German photo-illustration of Canada’s February 4 meeting with the United States. (See the original photograph below.)  If the teams did indeed play the game batting about the lid of a teapot, it’s not something any of the newspapers noticed at the time. What we do know is that this was the opening outing of Canada’s least-dominant Olympics up to that point, even if they did — spoiler alert — end up grabbing gold.

Going into these Games, Canadians back home wondered whether the Winnipegs were worthy representatives. Could they get the job done? The team was considered weak, writes Andrew Podnieks in Canada’s Olympic Hockey Teams (1997), not to mention lacking in lustre. I don’t know that it’s fair to say that the country suffered a national sinking feeling as the team rode east out of Manitoba on Canadian National’s Continental Limited flyer, but neither am I ruling it out.

In this first meeting with the U.S., the Winnipegs may have been thrown off by the fact that the game was played outdoors. Goalie Bill Cockburn had sun glaring in his eyes, and the team in general was (said The Globe) “as nervous as an amateur theatrical troupe on ‘the big night.’” Also, did I mention that the rink was disconcertingly small?

Canada was not only “sluggish” for the first two periods, but “wobbly.” In the second, the Americans scooped up a wild Canadian pass in front of Cockburn and Doug Everett scored.

That woke up the Winnipeggers. Time to step it up. In the third, as The Globe told the tale, Franklin Farrell, the U.S. goaler, was on his knees most of the time batting away shots with his elbows and his hands.

Canad’s flag-bearer at the opening ceremonies, left winger Hack Simpson, finally beat him. In the 10-minute (non-sudden-death) overtime, despite taking two penalties, the Canadians prevailed when Vic Lindquist drove at the net, fell, collided with Farrell and, somehow, shoved the lid of the teapot into the net.

“Twas a close squeeze,” Globe sports editor Mike Rodden exhaled next morning.

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face facts: the first men in the masks, winter olympics edition

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Face First: Japanese goaltender Teiji Honma at the 1936 Winter Olympics.

Japan made the first of its eight Winter Olympic hockey showings in 1936 at the Garmisch-Partenkirchen Games in Germany. They played twice there, and lost twice, though by respectable margins. After going down 3-0 to the eventual gold medallists from Great Britain on February 7, they fell again the next day, 2-0 to Sweden. That left them in ninth place in the final standings for the 15-team tournament, tied with Poland, France, and Italy. (Japan’s best showing came in 1960 in Squaw Valley, when they ended up eighth.)

Stopping pucks for the Japanese in 1936 was goaltender Teiji Honma, here above, who also garnered attention for his protective facemask. In those years, of course, most goalies headed into the breach bare-faced. Elizabeth Graham did wear a fencing-mask when she tended nets for Queen’s University in the mid-1920s. A decade before her, Corinne Hardman of Montreal’s Western Ladies Hockey Club donned a baseball catcher’s cage. And Eric Zweig has written persuasively about an even earlier masking, in 1903, by Eddie Giroux of the Toronto’s OHA Marlboros.

In the NHL, Clint Benedict was first (famously) to don a mask in 1930 — unless George Hainsworth beat him to it. (Probably not.)

And at the Olympics? As far as I can determine, Frank Farrell set the precedent in 1932 when he backstopped the host team from the United States at Lake Placid. A Connecticut native, he was 23 when he got the U.S. job after proving himself playing for Yale and New York’s amateur St. Nicholas HC. Like Honma, he wore glasses and hoped, apparently, to protect them from pucks. The crude mask Farrell wore at Lake Placid is (not so clearly) visible in the U.S. team photo below.

In Lake Placid, Ralph Allen from The Winnipeg Tribune singled Farrell out for his communication skills. “Should have been a quarterback,” he wrote. “His leather-lunged method of delivering instructions to his mates would make any gridiron field general turn green with envy.”

Representing Canada on the ice, the Winnipegs came highly touted, but the U.S. gave them a run for their (slightly complacent) money. In the tournament’s opening game, “there was” (said the AP) “scarcely anything to choose” between the two teams. They were tied 1-1 going into overtime. It as Canadian forward Vic Lindquist who decided it, halfway through the non-sudden-death period, with a “blistering” shot.

Both Canada and the U.S. dispensed, and handily, with the other two teams in the tournament, Poland and Germany, and when two teams met again nine days later, the Canadians sat atop the standing two points ahead of the U.S. With a win, the hosts could force a playoff game that would decide the Olympic title; Canada could claim the gold with a tie.

The U.S. looked the stronger team for much of the game, taking the lead two minutes in. Hack Simpson tied the score for Canada before the U.S. scored again in the second on a two-man advantage. Canada left it late to reply: with just 33 seconds remaining in the third, Romeo Rivers snagged the puck and scored with what the Montreal’s Gazette saw as “a snipe shot.” He “stickhandled his way into position and rifled a smoking drive into the far top corner of the United States goal for a beautiful marker.”

The AP correspondent wasn’t quite so impressed, it might be noted. Rivers “let fly a hurried shot from near the boards at the blue line and the curving puck slipped past Goalie Frank Farrell for the tying goal:” that’s what he saw. Yet another (American) account told of “a crazily bounding disc that rolled past Goalie Frank Farrell.”

Thirty minutes of overtime saw no more goals. “With the fat thus pulled out of the fire,” advised the AP, “the Canadians set themselves to repel a series of fierce charges by the determined challengers.” It was good enough for gold, in the end, even if it wasn’t always so pretty. “So tired they could hardly skate,” the Gazette conceded, “the [sic] Winnipegers flung the puck to the other end of the rink whenever they got a chance toward the end of the game.”

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Front row, kneeling, from left to right: Frank Farrell and his mask, Jack Bent, Buzz Hollock, John Cookman, Doug Everett, Ty Anderson, and Ted Frazier. Standing: Coach Ralph Winsor, Ding Palmer, John Chase, Bob Livingston, Frank Nelson, John Garrison, Gordon Smith, Joe Fitzgerald, manager C.J. Gleason, and Tom Murray.