hook-check

by hook or by crook

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This is wrong, of course: when it comes to checks, the hook and the sweep are not the same — they’re just not. It’s a hook-check that Stan Mikita, dressed up here in All-Star garb in the late 1960s, is demonstrating for the camera, though whether or not he resorted to it in actual game-play with any regularity is open for debate, the once-popular manoeuvre having faded out of the NHL by the 1930s. The Chicago Black Hawk superstar was born on a Monday of today’s date in 1940, in Sokolče, east of Bratislava in what today is Slovakia. He was Stanislav Guoth in those years, before making a move with an aunt and an uncle in the late 1940s to St. Catharines, Ontario, where he got a new name and found a new wintry sport waiting for him to discover it.

outdistanced, outpaced, outclassed: on this day in 1917, montreal’s shortwinded canadiens yielded the stanley cup to seattle’s mets

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Scoring Star: Seatte’s Bernie Morris scored six goals in his team’s 9-1 win over Montreal in the game that clinched the 1917 Stanley Cup, collecting 14 in all in the four games of the finals.

“About all that needs to be said is that Seattle took the puck at the face-off in the first period, and kept it practically all the rest of the game with the exception of a few intervals when they loaned it to the Montreals.”

On this night, 104 years ago, a Monday on the west coast, the Seattle Metropolitans dismissed the Montreal Canadiens to become the first American team to claim the Stanley Cup. It was the fourth game of the best-of-five series and, as abridged by the Seattle Star, the Metropolitans did it in dominant style, running the score to 9-1 on their way to wresting the Cup from the defending champions.

Seattle’s Bernie Morris was the star of the game, slotting six goals past Montreal’s Georges Vézina. A centreman and son of Brandon, Manitoba, Morris had led the PCHL in scoring through the 1916-17 season, and didn’t let up in the championship series, in which he scored a total of 14 goals in four games. A fascinating figure, Morris: when Seattle and Montreal reconvened for the ill-fated (never-completed) 1919 Cup finals, Morris was in U.S. military custody, charged with dodging his draft registration, and soon to be sentenced to two years in prison. He served his sentence on San Francisco’s notorious Alcatraz Island, from which he seems to have been discharged early. He was free and clear, in any case, this month in 1920, and returned to the ice when the Mets went to Ottawa at the end of March to take on the Senators for that year’s edition of the Stanley Cup.

Seattle had a strong team in 1917, featuring Hap Holmes in goal, with Frank Foyston, Bobby Rowe, and the inimitable Jack Walker working on the frontlines with Morris. They did line up one American: defenceman Ed Carpenter was from Hartford, Michigan. Otherwise, the Mets were mostly from middle-Canada, with five of the nine players on the roster Ontario-born, and coach Pete Muldoon, too. At 29, Muldoon was then ¾ and remains ¾ the youngest coach to win the Cup.

What was Montreal’s problem? The Canadiens themselves might have (and did) complain about the refereeing, and they were stymied again and again by Jack Walker’s relentless hook-checking. The Montreal line-up was impressive in its own right, with Newsy Lalonde, Didier Pitre, and Jack Laviolette arrayed in front of Vézina. To be fair, George Kennedy’s Canadiens did have to cross continent to play, and while they did take the first game of the series by a score of 8-4, they flagged in the final three. As the Calgary Herald’s correspondent wrote after the final drubbing, Seattle “outdistanced and outpaced the shortwinded Canadiens.”

The only exception? “Jack Laviolette, the veteran star of the eastern club, who played like a whole team himself, saving the Canadiens’ goal from distress time and time again, and making all the big rushes for the Red Shirts. Pitre never got into his stride … till late in the game, and he was puffed out then. Lalonde was not there at all. [Harry] Mummery could not stand on his feet, and [Bert] Corbeau couldn’t hang onto the puck.”

The Seattle Star was pleased to report George Kennedy’s declaration that the final game “was the most wonderful exhibition of the ice game he had ever witnessed” while confirming that “he has seen many.”

“We were outclassed,” Kennedy admitted in the pages of the Vancouver Sun, “and you can say for me that Seattle deserved to win the Cup.”

Pete Muldoon agreed, no doubt, but he was gracious. “The Canadiens were worthy opponents,” he said. While we did defeat them, I believe that the fact that they were playing under strange conditions and in a different climate had a lot to do with their being so decisively beaten. We are glad to have won the coveted honour for the Pacific coast.”

from pembroke, a peerless percolator

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To A T: Toronto’s Blueshirts as they lined up for the 1912-13 NHA season. From left, they are: Cully Wilson, Harry Cameron, Frank Foyston, manager Bruce Ridpath, a 20-year-old Frank Nighbor, Archie McLean, and Hap Holmes.

A birthday today, yes, for Wayne Gretzky, who’s 60, and many happy returns to him. But another extraordinary (if under-remembered) talent born on this date, in 1893, when it was a Thursday? The pride and glory of Pembroke, Ontario, centreman and hook-check artist extraordinaire Frank Nighbor. The Peach, they used to call him, as well as the Percolator and Peerless; sometimes, in contemporary accounts of his hockey exploits, all three words show up in alliterative aggregate. He won his first Stanley Cup in 1915, when he played with Vancouver’s Millionaires, before returning east to star with the Ottawa Senators, with whom he won four more Cups, in 1920, ’21, ’23, and ’27. In 1924, was the first ever recipient of the Hart Trophy as NHL MVP. The following year, when Lady Byng decided to donate a trophy to the league in the name of gentlemanly hockey played with supreme skill, Nighbor won that, too. Just for good measure, he won it again the following year, in 1926.

hooley hoorah

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Born in Toronto on a Wednesday of this date in 1903, Hooley Smith grew up the city’s east-end Beaches. He won Olympic gold playing for Canada in 1924, then joined the Ottawa Senators, where he learned to hook check at Frank Nighbor’s knee. (The hook, of course, is not to be confused or conflated with the poke, though it often is, here included, I think — though Smith was, no doubt, a formidable poker, too.) His time in Ottawa ended in suspension: he was suspended for a full month in 1927 after swinging his stick at the head of Harry Oliver of the Boston Bruins in the Stanley Cup finals that year. He played nine seasons for the Montreal Maroons after that, captaining the team to a Cup in 1935, whereupon, for efforts, he was also rewarded with a horse. The depiction here dates to 1930; Tim Slattery is the cartoonist. Smith also skated for Boston and the New York Americans before calling it quits in 1941. He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1972.

a bang-up checking brand of hockey

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A birthday today for the king of the hook check, Jack Walker, who was born on a Thursday of this date in 1888 in Silver Mountain, Ontario, which is west of modern-day Thunder Bay. Actually, Frank Nighbor may have been the monarch of all the hook checkers: it’s said that he once hook-checked Howie Morenz so effectively that the Montreal star never made it past centre-ice all night, and finally burst into tears in frustration. (If you’re in need of a hook-check primer, that’s here.) Walker was annoyingly efficient, too, and, what’s more, he may (possibly) have been the one to have devised the hook check in the first place, back before the First World War when he was getting started in hockey in Port Arthur. (That’s not settled fact, it has to be said: a couple of other players who skated up at the Lakehead, Bud Sorel and Joel Rochon, are sometimes said to have shown Walker the way.)  

Walker won three Stanley Cups in his day, with Toronto of the NHA in 1914, with the PCHA Seattle Metropolitans three years later, and then finally as a member of the WHL Victoria Cougars in 1925. He was voted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1960, a decade after his death at the age of 61 in 1950. Walker might have won a fourth in 1919, but for the deadly pandemic that shut down the Stanley Cup final that year between Walker’s Seattle and the Montreal Canadiens before a champion could be decided. 

Earlier that winter, in January, the Mets paid tribute to their doughty 30-year-old checker ahead of a game at the Seattle Arena against the Victoria Aristocrats. Victoria prevailed on the night by a score of 1-0, with Eddie Oatman making the difference. “Jack Walker played a bang-up checking brand of hockey,” the Seattle Star noted, “that stopped many Victoria rushes. His hook check was well-oiled and in fine working order last night.” 

Victoria’s Daily Times was a little more grudging in its praise. “Jack Walker arose to the occasion,” their correspondent reported. “The crack forward was everywhere with his bothersome stick.”

movie stars, playing hockey players, in hospital beds: seems like a man oughta have a regular job

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Faking It: Johnny Hanson on his way from New York’s Polar Palace to Roosevelt Hospital.

John Wayne’s hockey movie was supposed to be called Hell On Ice, originally, before Hollywood’s self-censoring prudery police at the Hays Office objected, which is when it shifted to Idol of the Crowds. Already an established star of the saddle and six-gun, Wayne was trying to spread his wings in the mid-1930s, broaden his audience — well, Universal was, anyway, when they signed him to a six-movie deal, not one of them a western. Conflictcast him as a boxer, Sea Spoilers as an upstanding officer of the U.S. Coast Guard (both 1936); he played a trucker in California Straight Ahead, a pearl diver in Adventure’s End, and a newsreel cameraman in I Cover The War! (all 1937).

I haven’t seen any of those, so I can’t say whether they’re more or less ridiculous than Idol of the Crowds, which was also released in ’37. I can report that Wayne sinks himself into the role of Johnny Hanson, a former hockey star now living in northern Maine, raising prize chickens. When the manager of the big-league New York Panthers shows up with his chequebook to see if Johnny will sign up, save the team, Johnny turns him down. “Thanks just the same, but I think I’d better stick with the chickens,” is actually the line he delivers, and I quote. “New York — it’s too big, too many people. Besides, I’d feel kinda foolish goin’ clear down there just to play hockey. Seems like a man oughta have a regular job. I want to build something and see it grow.”

But of course, the chickens can wait: the money’s too good to refuse, so off Johnny goes. From there on in, the plot is cut from hoary old cloth, the one with the gamblers-lean-on-him-to-throw-the-finals-but-no-way-is-he-going-to-bend-to-their-nefarious-will-plus-of-course-in-thwarting-their-plot-he-also-gets-the-girl pattern. At one point in a pivotal game against the Wizards, he fakes a fall into the boards, gets hauled off the ice by his teammates, rushed out to a waiting ambulance, and over to Roosevelt Hospital where — surprise! He’s fine, not concussed at all, nary a contusion on him, pretending he’d been knocked out was all part of his clever plan to fool and thereby foil the bad guys.

It’s all as fabulously hokey as it sounds. And the hockey? Some of the wide shots of the action at the Polar Palace borrow NHL footage from (I’m assuming) Madison Square Garden, showing actual Detroit Red Wings battling authentic New York Rangers. I think they’re Red Wings; the unmistakable bulk and baldness of Ching Johnson is enough to confirm the Rangers.

Closer in, when director Arthur Lubin turns his camera to his own cast … well, like most of the hockey you see in movies — and it’s even more pronounced in the many that came out in the ’30s — it’s just absurd. That John Wayne couldn’t really skate is apparent from the first stride he takes. To his credit (if not the movie’s), he knew it, and felt kinda foolish about the whole thing. “I’m from Southern California,” he’s quoted as having said in Scott Eyman’s 2015 biography, John Wayne: The Life and Legend, “I’ve never been on a pair of goddamn skates in my life.”

“He always remembered the experience with a sense of burning humiliation,” writes Eyman, who rates Idol of the Crowdsa “real stiff.”

An ice skating rink had been rented for 24 hours, during which all the hockey scenes would be shot. Wayne’s memory was that he could not skate at all. “My ankles are rubbing on the ice, and I can’t even stand up, but they pushed me around … I was in the hospital for two fucking days after that.”

Wayne did it, because, “This was the Depression. If you wanted work, you did what they told you to do.”

Hook-Checked: Johnny Hanson does his best to best to keep the puck — and stay on his skates.

 

a horse for hooley

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S & S: Hooley Smith (right) spent a single season with the Boston Bruins, in 1936-37, after starring for the Ottawa Senators and Montreal Maroons. Here he poses with his old Maroon linemate, Nels Stewart. (Image: Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection)

Before he got going on a 17-year NHL career that would see him elevated to the Hockey Hall of Fame, Smith was the youngest member of the Canadian team that brought back hockey gold from the 1924 Winter Olympics in Chamonix, in France, and one of its leading scorers. Aged 21, he netted an impressive 18 goals in five games. Of course, Canada’s schedule did include a 33-0 drubbing of Switzerland and a 30-0 squeaker over Czechoslovakia, and Smith’s bounty of goals was only half as many as that of his teammate Harry Watson — but still, gold is golden, and when Smith got home to Toronto that March, the neighbourhood where he’d grown up fêted him on a scale — well, I’m not sure that any local hockey player has seen the likes of the welcome that the Beach organized for Smith.

Born on a Wednesday of this date in 1903, Smith started out under the name Reginald. As a toddler, the story goes, he had a thing where he navigated the family backyard with a tin can balanced on his head, just like the namesake of the popular American cartoon The Happy Hooligan, which is how his father started calling him Hooligan which, soon enough, diminished to Hooley.

Out on the ice, it was as a centreman that Smith helped the Toronto Granites win the 1923 Allan Cup, which is how they ended up representing Canada at the Olympics in ’24. Arriving home triumphant in Toronto a month after vanquishing the United States for gold, the team climbed aboard a bus that paraded them from Union Station up Yonge Street to City Hall. Mayor W.W. Hiltz was one of the speechifyers there: paying his tribute, the Star reported, he mentioned “fine calibre of young manhood which composed the team” and “the manly attributes of the Canadian athlete” before expressing “hopes of continued success.” Engraved gold cufflinks were the gift the city gave the players. Before they were released, they also received three cheers and a couple of anthems, “The Maple Leaf Forever” and “God Save The King,” for their troubles.

Later, at a winter carnival in the city’s east-end Kew Gardens, Smith was honoured with displays of fancy skating and fireworks. His appreciative neighbours also unveiled a 400-ton likeness of their hockey hero that they’d sculpted out of ice and illuminated with coloured lights. One of my dearest new year’s wishes is to find a photograph of that — I’m still looking.

NHL clubs were eager, post-Olympics and ice-statue, to sign Smith to a pro contract. The Montreal Canadiens maintained that he’d agreed to join them, and the Toronto St. Patricks were eager to lure him, too, but in the end he chose Ottawa’s Senators. He played three seasons in Canada’s capital, where he learned how to hook-check from the maestro himself, Frank Nighbor, while helping the team win a Stanley Cup in 1927. He subsequently joined the Montreal Maroons, for whom he played nine seasons, captaining the team to a Cup in 1935. It was as a Maroon that Smith played on the famous S line alongside Nels Stewart and Babe Siebert. After a single season with the Boston Bruins, Smith played his final four seasons in the NHL as a New York American. Hooley Smith died in 1963 at the age of 60.

I think that just about covers it, though maybe is it worth mentioning also his gift for, well, getting gifts? When he played for the Senators, Ottawa owner Frank Ahearn gave him a fur coat. I’ve seen it reported that as a Maroon he was given a Rolls Royce and a yacht. Because he wasn’t a sailor, he’s supposed to have returned the yacht in exchange for a farm. Kenneth Dawes might have been the generous donor in question in both these cases, though I can’t confirm that. What I do know is that Dawes, a brewing magnate who served on the Maroons’ executive committee, did promise Smith a horse if the team won the Stanley Cup, which it duly did. The presentation of the black Percheron went ahead in Montreal in April of 1935 in front of a crowd of some 3,000. Smith got the horse, but it was Maroons’ coach Tommy Gorman who climbed aboard to take the first ride.

pembroke’s peach

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Peerless P: Born on this day in 1893, the great and underappreciated Frank Nighbor was the pride of Pembroke, Ontario. Seen here in hometown kit in 1909, Nighbor would go on to win five Stanley Cups. Nighbor perfected the hook-check, and was a dab hand when it came to the poke- and the sweep-, too. In 1924, he won the first Hart Trophy ever awarded to an NHL MVP.  A year later, when Lady Byng decided she wanted to  donate a trophy to the NHL in the name of gentlemanly hockey played with the utmost skill, it was Nighbor she invited to Rideau Hall to present him with the inaugural edition in person.

flour-pot

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Let’s be honest: caught up in the chaos of Christmas, we all forgot. That today’s Ottawa Senators missed a chance to mark an important historical milestone doesn’t seem so strange, I guess, in this year of capitalized turmoil — though can we grant Eugene Melnyk & co. the benefit of the doubt and surmise that they skipped the celebrations on purpose, preferring to do it up properly when next year’s centenary rolls around? Assuming that’s the case, let’s keep our observance of the 99th anniversary here brief, recognizing, simply, that on the night of December 23, 1919, as the Ottawa Senators hosted Toronto’s St. Patricks to open the NHL’s third season, the great Frank Nighbor put his famous hook-check to use in the first period to thief the puck from Ken Randall and slap it decisively past goaltender Howie Lockhart. The goal itself was important, winning a game for Ottawa that would end 3-0, and the Senators would use this auspicious start to go on to both NHL and Stanley Cup championships that year. Those should be duly venerated when the time comes, but our business here, today, is to honour and revere the truly first-class way in which Nighbor’s goal was celebrated that winter’s night in 1919. In those days, when Ottawa still knew how to treat a superstar, Nighbor was called to centre ice after the game to receive his rightful due. For having scored that inaugural goal that season, Pembroke’s own peerless peach received from the hand of Mr. A. E. Ford of the Interprovincial Flour Mills Company a reward such as a modern-day hockey sharpshooter might only dream of taking home from the rink:

 

jack walker, hook-check artist (can get a little tiresome)

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Sultan of Swish: Jack Walker, at the ready, in Seattle Metropolitans’ stripes, circa 1917.

If you want to talk hook-checks, as you well might, the man you need to know about is Jack Walker, born on this date in 1888, when it was a Tuesday, in Silver Mountain, Ontario, up on the Lakehead, not far from what was then Port Arthur — modern-day Thunder Bay. He died in 1950, aged 61.

If he’s not now a household name, he was in his day, a century or so ago. Three times teams he skated for won the Stanley Cup: the Toronto Blueshirts in 1914, the Seattle Metropolitans in 1917, and the Victoria Cougars in 1925. Mostly Walker played on the west coast, in the PCHA; his NHL career was a slender one, lasting 80 regular-season games over two seasons in the mid-1920s when he joined the Detroit Cougars.

Walker did ascend to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1960, which is to say he was voted in. Hard to know from here how much of the case for his place in the pantheon has to do with the hook-check, but as a hook-check enthusiast I’m going to err on the side of a lot.

I wrote about the hook-check in my 2014 book Puckstruck — also over here, where I did some explaining about definitions and techniques. While Frank Nighbor is sometimes credited with having been the first to ply it on a regular and efficient basis, it seems clear that Walker was in fact the progenitor, and that when Nighbor joined Port Arthur in 1911, the Pembroke Peach learned if from him. Nighbor said as much himself, later on, sort of, talking about Walker’s poke-check, which is related but different, though they’re often conflated, even by the Hall-of-Famers who used them to best effect.

You don’t see much mention of hook-checking in accounts of that earliest Cup, but by 1917, Walker’s name was synonymous with it. Hook check star is an epithet you’ll see in the weeks leading up to the championship series. That came in March, when the NHL’s Montreal Canadiens travelled west to play for all the hockey marbles with a roster that featured Georges Vézina, Harry Mummery, Newsy Lalonde, and Didier Pitre.

Lining up Hap Holmes, Cully Wilson, and Frank Foyston, Seattle prevailed in four games, with Montreal’s only victory coming in the opening game. The score therein, 8-4, doesn’t exactly have the ring of a defensive struggle, but Walker was said to have stood out. This from the wire report in The Ottawa Citizen:

In purely defensive play, Jack Walker, with his clever hook-check, was [sic] the Seattle’s star. Walker took the puck away from the best stick handlers the Flying Frenchmen could produce as easily [as] taking off his hat and it was his work that spilled most of the offensive hopes of the Canadiens.

It was apparently contagious: all the Mets were hooking the second game. After Seattle won that one 6-1, The Vancouver Sun’s Royal Brougham opened his dispatch this way:

“Beaten by the Hookcheck,” might be an appropriate title of tonight’s struggle because it was the clever of this bit of hockey strategy combined with sheer speed and aggressiveness that put the Mets on an even basis with the invaders for the Stanley Cup.

“Every time,” he continued, “a visiting forward got the puck and ankled up the ice, swish, some local skater would slide along and hook the elusive pill from the Canadiens stick leaving the duped player bewildered.”

Seattle won the third game by a score of 4-1. It was the same story. “Jack worked his old hook-check so well and so frequently,” was the word in Vancouver’s Daily World, “that he checked the very life out of the Frenchmen’s offence.”

Going into what was the final game, Royal Brougham was already handing out laurels. “If Seattle wins the Stanley Cup, the glory should go to Jack Walker, the hook-check artist of the Metropolitans who, during the last two games has practically stopped every Frenchmen’s rush.”

Seattle went out in style, taking the decisive game and the Cup with a 9-1 win. Let’s leave the Daily World to give the man his due, if that’s what this does:

Jack Walker’s work has been an outstanding feature of the entire series, and Jack was up to all his tricks last night. He kept the hook-checking working with such monotonous regularity that it almost got tiresome, and he finally succeeded in making one of his shots good and broke through for a goal.

man down

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Crawlspace: You’ve made the team, finally, they’ve handed you your uniform, now they want to take the photograph that shows — and will go on showing — that you’re an NHLer. Your call: do you lean in your stick in a classic tripod pose, or maybe skate full-bore towards the camera, showering snow? Or — no. Maybe what you do is you get don on the ice and make like a happy crab. Why not? I truly don’t know what was on Red Conn’s mind when he posed here. He wasn’t a New York American for long, just two seasons, starting in 1933. He scored a few goals in that time — nine — and took a few penalties. I guess this could be his hook-check he’s showing off — though ideally, as a hook-checker, you only want to go down on a knee, so you can get up quickly and get going once you’ve hooked the puck. Unless the puck has slipped under the refrigerator — in that case, this is exactly as low as you’d want to go.

 

hello, mr. nighbor

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I and I: Frank Nighbor looks himself in the eye on a 1960s visit to the Hockey Hall of Fame display chronicling his distinguished career. (Photo: Hockey Hall of Fame/ Library and Archives Canada/PA-048874)

I and I: Frank Nighbor looks himself in the eye on a 1960s visit to the Hockey Hall of Fame display chronicling his distinguished career.
(Photo: Hockey Hall of Fame/ Library and Archives Canada/PA-048874)

Nobody remembers Jack Walker now, though he’s in hockey’s Hall of Fame. He’s the man who originated and perfected the hook-check, though that’s not something hockey people talk about now, either, much less try on the ice. It’s lost like Atlantis. I wrote about Walker and the hook-check between hardcovers in Puckstruck and since then I’ve tried to explain it in more detail, too.

Mike Rodden said that hook-checkers invariably made better centreman. They tended to be more popular with their teammates, too, he said, naming names like Frank Nighbor, Joe Malone, Billy Burch, and Hooley Smith. He doesn’t explain it further, the connection between hook-checking and popularity. I guess it makes sense: if you’re a forward who makes the effort to skate back and help with the defending, yes, that’s going to endear you to your mates.

Nighbor is a favourite of mine. He’s better remembered than Walker, partly because he played so long and so well in the NHL while Walker stuck mostly to the Pacific Coast Hockey League. Nighbor won five Stanley Cups before he retired in 1930, not to mention — although I think I will —the first ever Hart Trophy and the first two Lady Byngs.

You Don't Know Jack: Third from the left, hook-checking Jack Walker poses with Seattle Metropolitan teammates in 1915.

You Don’t Know Jack: Third from the left, hook-checking Jack Walker poses with Seattle Metropolitan teammates in 1915. With him is (1) Bernie Morris, (2) Eddie Carpenter, and (4) Cully Wilson.

Nighbor partisan though I am, I do take issue with Mike Jay of the Vancouver Daily World and will seek here to correct his error of January, 1914, when he profiled Nighbor as though Jack Walker never existed and he was the man who developed the hook-check. In Jay’s defence, Nighbor was on the west coast at the time, playing for the Vancouver Millionaires, while Walker was still in Toronto, playing for the Blueshirts, and wouldn’t join the Seattle Metropolitans. Nighbor, we know, had learned the hook-check from Walker when they were teammates, first in Port Arthur and later as Blueshirts — but I guess nobody told Mike Jay so. Nighbor tried to, sort of, as you’ll see, but it didn’t really take.

To his credit, Jay did get Nighbor talking about his methodology, to an extent that I haven’t seen anywhere else, which makes this excerpt from Jay’s effusive ambulatory Daily World interview with a 20-year-old Frank Nighbor an important addition to the hook-check archive.

“Hello, Mr. Nighbor!” greeted the interviewer.

“Oh, hello! How are you?” returned the gentleman addressed, and he fell into step with the interviewer and continued up the street.

“Fine, never felt better in my life. How’s your arm?” And the scribbler of notes indicated the injured member.

“Getting better now. Doctor says I can play on Friday, but it’s taking chances.” The tape was off the hand, and Nighbor demonstrated the fact that he could move his hand well enough.

“So you don’t know whether or not you will play?” The pencil pusher got ready to take notes.

“I don’t know just when I’ll play again. I am not certain,” replied Nighbor, working his fingers to get the joints in action.

“Oh, by the way,” said the interviewer, as if he had suddenly remembered the reason of his walk in the rain, and as if he had had no previous intention of getting any notes, “can you give me an outline of your hockey career?”

“Sure! I come from the Ottawa Valley. I first played hockey with Pembroke, in Ontario. We won the championship that year. Then the next year I played in Port Arthur. We won the championship that year. In nineteen hundred and twelve I played with the Torontos.”

“Did you win the championship that year? asked the interviewer.

“No, we took a change and lost it. In the spring of last year I was out here and — well, this year I am here,” concluded Frank Nighbor.

“Good! Now, can you give me some sidelights of your career — that is, little incidents that — ? asked the interviewer.

“Sorry, old man, but I am not guilty,” interrupted the hockey player.

“Well, then, tell me about your shot — no, never mind that — tell me about your method of checking. I believe that you are the originator of the ‘hook’ check, are you not?”

“I have always used it, if that’s what you mean,” answered Nighbor.

“No; what I mean is, give me an account of how you work it.”

“Well, I always skate low and lay my stick close to the ice. I have a long reach and I put my stick out and take the puck,” explained Nighbor.

“That easy?” queried the interviewer, incredulously.

“That easy,” smiled Nighbor.

“Gee! Simple when you know how, isn’t it?” the interviewer remarked. Nighbor still smiled. The ‘hook’ check is so hard that only the originator is able to use it. Nighbor is the only man in either the Coast or the National hockey leagues that uses it.

The method is to follow the opponent who has the puck and as that opponent starts to go to the side of a man coming towards him from the goal, the man coming from behind lays his stick almost flat on the ice and hooks the puck away suddenly and turns up the ice towards the other goal. Frank Nighbor is the only player who can successfully use it. Others have tried and failed. It requires a long reach, a quick eye and the ability to stop suddenly while skating fast in one direction and take a directly opposite direction.

Then another style of back checking which Nighbor uses, but which is used by several other players like Ernie Johnson and [Didier] Pitre, is the ‘poke.’ This consists of skating backwards before a rushing forward and then suddenly jabbing the stick on the farther side of the opponent’s stick and taking the puck away.

The ‘poke’ style has been used for many years but the ‘hook’ check is a new innovation. Newsy Lalonde said that after the Torontos beat the Canadiens in 1912 that it was due to Nighbor’s style of back checking that won the game for Toronto. The way Newsy worded it was: “Frank Nighbor beat the Canadien hockey team.”

Then Frank Nighbor has a shot that tells, but he does not figure in the scoring so much as he does in the assist column. He is the cleanest player in the Pacific Coast Hockey League and his title to clean playing is acknowledged by every player in the league. Besides that he is the youngest hockey player in professional hockey in Canada and he takes care of himself. Just on account of that reason Pete Muldoon, the Vancouver hockey team trainer, says that “Nighbor will be playing hockey long after other players start drawing their pensions.”