Leo Bourgault

eddie shore: perfectly built for hockey

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Born in 1902 on a Sunday of this date in Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, northeast of Regina, the volatile Eddie Shore won a pair of Stanley Cup championships with Boston; four times he was handed the Hart Trophy as the NHL’s most valuable asset.

“Undoubtedly the greatest individual player in the game,” Niven Busch called Shore in 1929, when Boston’s number 2 was in full fettle.

“This Eddie Shore is an odd chap,” Busch pronounced in the pages of The New Yorker. “He was born at a Hudson Bay Station, and as soon as he had made some money playing hockey, he went back to Saskatchewan and bought a big farm there. He works on his farm in the summer, and does well at it for a fellow whose agricultural experience after boyhood consisted of such glimpses of the country as he was able to get from the locomotive cabs in which he was a fireman. Last year Boston paid him twelve thousand dollars and this year he asked for five thousand more, and got most of it — how much was not announced. At seventeen thousand dollars, if that’s what they pay him, he is the highest-paid player in hockey, as well as the ablest. In spite of what you can say for Dutton, Bourgault, Johnson, or Lionel Conacher, he is the only defenceman who also ranks as a great forward. He is perfectly built for hockey; not particularly heavy in the shoulders, but with a solid, barrel-shaped trunk, tremendous legs, and wide hips. He and Conacher are natural rivals. Both about the same size and equally aggressive. Conacher, an all-round athlete, good at baseball and lacrosse, and one of the best football players in Canada, is far better known in the North than Shore, who has made the most of his reputation in the United States.”

(Image, from 1937: Richard Merrill, Boston Public Library)

 

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

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

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

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

leo bourgault: it irked him to just defend

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Newspaper accounts of Leo Bourgault from his days as an NHL defenceman sometimes — often, even — spelled his name Bourgeault, and called the town he came from Spurgeon Falls. Bourgault, who was born on this day in 1903 in Sturgeon Falls, Ontario, near North Bay, died in 1978 at the age of 75.

He started his professional career with Newsy Lalonde’s Saskatoon Crescents in the old WHL in 1924-25 before leaping to the NHL, where he spent most of his eight-year career as a New York Ranger, he helping them win a Stanley Cup in 1928. He had stints, too, in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. As a Canadien, he was a close friend of Howie Morenz’s, and may well have been one of the Habs who wore a sweater numbered 99 during the 1934-35 season.

They said he had the heart of a forward. Harold Burr did, hockey correspondent for the old Brooklyn Daily Eagle. “He’s forever breaking loose from a tangle of players and streaking away on running runners,” he wrote in 1929. “It irks him to just defend.”

“The wide-spreading stocky little youth” is a string of epithets referring to Bourgault you might come cross, if you go searching: another is “stocky little blue-shirted meteor.” The damage he suffered as a hockey player included a 1929 lump on the face (courtesy of the Montreal Maroons) that Burr described as “the size of an Easter egg as vari-colored.” In 1927, a collision with Reg Noble of the Detroit Cougars broke his nose doubly, which is say two nose-bones fractured, and needed surgery.

In New York, he shared an apartment with goaltender John Ross Roach. Sometimes when he talked to a local reporter he said, “In the fall at home I go after moose — just another fellow and myself. We head in for a lumber camp in the heart of the wilderness, where they cut pulp wood, with just a blanket, paddle, and tent.”

“It’s a great way to keep in physical trim,” he told Burr — hunting, that is. The newspaperman lapped it up, filling a column with Bourgault’s off-season exploits “around his home in the far Canadian country,” where he enjoyed his “mother’s home cooking of juicy steaks, wild ducks, and big fat trout.”

Some other summers Bourgault spent at Jasper Park Lodge, in Alberta, where he had a job as manager of the transportation desk. I don’t know whether he did any hunting out west, but he was working out, certainly, and golfing. That’s him on the course here, negotiating a porcupine hazard in 1927. A year later, he met a black bear. Good to see that Bourgault was wearing his Rangers’ sweater.

 

the almost leafs

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The Toronto St. Patricks team up in 1926-27, the season they turned into the Maple Leafs. Back row, left to right: coach (short-lived) Mike Rodden, unknown. Middle: Bert McCaffrey, Ace Bailey, Bill Brydge, Danny Cox, coach and manager Charlie Querrie, John Ross Roach, Butch Keeling, trainer Tim Daly, unknown. Front: Bill Carson, Pete Bellefeuille, Hap Day, Bert Corbeau, Corb Denneny, Leo Bourgault.

the shape you’re in

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shaping up

Summer ends, eventually, and that’s when the hockey starts. If the months before that happens seem to go on forever, what can you do but keep yourself trim? That’s Leo Bourgault, above, on the rowing machine, at Alberta’s Jasper Park Lodge in July of 1931. Born in Sturgeon Falls, Ontario, he’d started his NHL career in Toronto in 1926 before moving on to the New York Rangers for five seasons. He played the 1930-31 season for the Ottawa Senators; later he joined Montreal’s Canadiens. Spotting him, golf club in hand, is Bud Cook, brother of the Rangers’ famous Bun and Bill. He’d spent the previous season starring at left wing for the Providence Reds before Boston manager Art Ross came calling to buy him for the Bruins. He only lasted a season there. His other NHL stints were in Ottawa and St. Louis before he settled in to a lengthy career with the farm-league Cleveland Barons.