Maroons

whooping things up with the red panthers

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Cup Crew: An array of Montreal Maroons face the camera in November of 1934, five months before they claimed the Stanley Cup. From left, they are: Jimmy Ward, Lionel Conacher, goaltender Alec Connell, Hooley Smith, Allan Shields, and Baldy Northcott. (Image: SDN-077298, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection, Chicago History Museum)

The Montreal Maroons only needed three games to seize the Stanley Cup 89 years ago, and today’s the day they did it: on Tuesday, April 9, 1935, Montreal’s long-gone, lamented second NHL team upended the Toronto Maple Leafs by a score of 4-1 at the Forum to sweep to victory.

This was the Maroons’ second Cup, reviving a tradition they’d last observed in 1926.

“Whooping Things Up With the Red Panthers” was a headline in the next morning’s Montreal Star, and the Maroons did do some whooping. When the game ended, goaltender Alec Connell (“in a high glee”) heaved his goal-stick into the crowd from sheer happiness — though “even in his exuberance,” the Gazette noted, “he turned around, anxious look on his face, to see if he had hurt anyone.” Mayor Camilien Houde was there, and hugged coach Montreal coach Tommy Gorman, who’d won the Cup the previous year with Chicago, and three more times before that, with Ottawa. He said this was the best team he’d ever handled (and that he’d handled a lot). The Mayor invited the team to City Hall for the following day, where he promised to present them with the keys to the city. Someone delivered a box of flowers to the Montreal dressing room, addressed to defenceman Stew Evans.

Oh, and Maroons’ feisty forward Hooley Smith got himself a horse.

Retired Leaf superstar Ace Bailey was the first Torontonian to come by to congratulate the champions. He was soon followed by Charlie Conacher, in civvies, who made a beeline for his big brother, Maroons defenceman Lionel. King Clancy stopped in, too, to clap Connell on the back. Leaf coach Dick Irvin eventually visited, too, to offer his best. Toronto’s managing director and chief agitator? “Conn Smythe,” the Gazette sniffed, “was not to be seen.” The Star, however, did place him in the crowded Montreal dressing room.

The abject Leafs didn’t linger long: they had a train to catch back to Toronto.

Most of the Maroons had been parted from their sticks, as it turned out, before the festive night was over. Many players gave theirs away on the way from the ice to the room after the game ended. Then also, as the Gazette reported:

After [the players] were in the showers, someone opened the door and threw out half a dozen sticks to the waiting crowd. A wild scramble ensued for possession of the prized trophies and tugs-o-war were the order with three or four fans on each end of a stick.

defence department

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You’ve Got Us, Babe: Born in 1904 on a Thursday of today’s date in Plattsville, Ontario, Hall-of-Famer Babe Siebert was a star winger with the Montreal Maroons through the latter 1920s, combining with Hooley Smith and Nels Stewart on the dangerous S Line and winning a Stanley Cup championship in 1926. He eventually dropped back to play defence, and took his talents to New York to play for the Rangers. In December of 1933, Siebert was traded to the Boston Bruins. That’s him in the middle here, in March of 1936, with a couple of Bruin teammates, goaltender Tiny Thompson on the right and an old nemesis going back to the Maroon years (they did make their peace), Eddie Shore on the left. Siebert ended up back in Montreal, with the Canadiens, in the late 1930s, and was named Habs coach before his life was cut tragically short in the summer of 1939. (Image: Leslie Jones Collection, Boston Public Library)

the fixer

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Bill O’Brien started his career as a railway baggageman in Montreal with the old Grand Trunk line, but in the early years of the 20th century he took to the sporting life, making a career as a trainer in baseball, lacrosse, football, and hockey that lasted 38 years.

Rinkside, he went in at the top, tending the Renfrew Creamery Kings, the famous Millionaires, of the NHA in 1909-10, when their line-up featured a galaxy of greats, including Lester and Frank Patrick, Cyclone Taylor, and Newsy Lalonde.

Big and genial and expert in the arts of skate-sharpening, sutures, rubdowns, charley-horse mitigation, and the all-round management of hockey players, O’Brien signed on in the 1920s with the Montreal Maroons, making his name with them.

“Bill O’Brien was more than a trainer of hockey teams,” Red Dutton said when the trainer died in 1944 at the age of 57. “He was an institution in the National League, known by everybody, liked and respected by everybody.”

The Gazette’s Dink Carroll weighed in sorrowfully at that time, too. “Something has gone out of sport in this city with the passing of his enormously kindly and competent man.”

“He had all the technical competence of a first-class man at his job. He knew anatomy and something of osteopathy. His hands were those of a natural healer. He understood the lamps and diathermal machines and kept abreast of every new development along those lines.”

He was an early advocate of fitness training for NHLers at a time when they mostly … didn’t do that. To keep the Maroons trim during the summer months in the late ’20s, he conspired with team captain Dunc Munro to see a full range of gym apparatus installed at the Montreal Forum, along with a rowing machine and a badminton court.

He went over to the Canadiens late in his career, and he was revered on their side of the Forum, too.

Away from the ice, O’Brien tended Ottawa’s football Roughriders, too, in his time, as well as baseball’s International League Montreal Royals and, in the early ’40s, the mighty major-league Brooklyn Dodgers.

In 1938, Marc McNeil of the Gazette asked O’Brien and another multi-tasking trainer, Eddie Froelich, to rate the major North American sports by toughness, which is to say, which was the most punishing on players. O’Brien’s ruggedness rating had hockey at the top, followed by basketball, football, and baseball.

Froelich, who was the trainer for the Chicago Black Hawks as well as baseball’s White Sox, the Boston Red Sox, and the New York Yankees at one time and another, put hockey, football, and baseball on a par. Baseballers didn’t see as much contact, of course, but he felt that it was more difficult for them to return from injury because of the movement needed to bat and throw and field. Hockey players, he said, didn’t generally absorb as much punishment as people thought: on skates, his logic went, they moved too fast to absorb the full force of most blows.

Bill O’Brien and his wife Mary had two sons, who turned out to be distinguished hockey chroniclers both. Larry O’Brien was a reporter for the Montreal Standard as well as the Star, and then a broadcaster of Montreal Royals games before ending up as golfer Jack Nicklaus’ publicist. Andy O’Brien started out as selling programs at the Forum when his dad was working for the Maroons, then graduated to serve as the team’s stickboy the year they won their first Stanley Cup, 1926. He worked for the Standard and the Star, too, covering 12 Olympiads, 45 Stanley Cup finals, and 31 Grey Cups in his time. Andy O’Brien also published a respectable shelf’s worth of hockey books, including Firewagon Hockey: The Story of the Montreal Canadiens (1967), The Jacques Plante Story (1972), which he co-authored with the goaltender himself, as Hockey Wingman (1967), a novel.

o captain my captain

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Mr. Maroon: Dunc Munro died on a Friday of this date in 1958. He was 56. A small but solid defenceman, he had his hockey heyday was in the 1920s when he had the unique distinction of captaining four championship teams in seven years. He won a Memorial Cup with the University of Toronto Schools in 1919, then an Allan Cup with the Toronto Granites, with whom he also represented Canada at the 1924 Winter Olympics in Chamonix. Munro went pro (lucratively) after that, joining the expansion Montreal Maroons and leading them to Stanley Cup glory in 1926. He played football, too, for good measure, starring for the Toronto Argonauts in the early ’20s.

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.

contriving five

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Mapleos: Gordie Drillon and Syl Apps strike poses in 1938. (Image: Leslie Jones, Boston Public Library)

The Toronto Maple Leafs made history tonight in their 6-3 win over the Sabres in Buffalo, even if they did let their guard drop in the third period. Milestone #1: for the first time in the club’s 106-year history, three players registered three points apiece in the first period of a game, as new Leaf Ryan O’Reilly (2 goals + 1 assist), John Tavares (1+2), and Mitch Marner (0-3) went to town. O’Reilly completed his hattrick in the third period with a goal into an empty net, while Tavares added a second-period assist to his total.

Marner, meanwhile, collected five assists in all, the first time he’s done that in his sterling seven-year career as a Leaf.

Prior to that, the last Leaf to helped himself to five assists was Doug Gilmour, 26 years ago, against the Calgary Flames on January 22, 1997. Gilmour had another six-assist game against the Minnesota North Stars in February of 1993, a feat that Babe Pratt pulled off, too, against the Boston Bruins in January of 1944.

Other Leafs to have collected five assists in a game are Börje Salming (vs. Minnesota in December of 177); Babe Pratt, again (vs. Montreal Canadiens in December of 1942); and Pep Kelly (vs. Canadiens in March of 1940).

The first to do it was Syl Apps, on January 30, 1937, on a night when the Leafs flummoxed the Montreal Maroons at Maple Leaf Gardens by a score of 7-4.

Apps, 22, would end up winning the Calder Trophy that season as the NHL’s top rookie. A centreman, he had a pair of formidable wingers in Gordie Drillon (on the right) and Busher Jackson (playing left). Drillon and Jackson scored three apiece on the night, with Art Jackson, Busher’s younger brother, finishing off the scoring. Apps assisted on all three of Drillon’s goals and along with Busher Jackson’s second and third.

Helpmate: Mitch Marner on the move during the 2019-20 NHL season.

the human side of hockey!

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Teddy Graham was a busy man in the winter of 1933. At his day-job, as a frontline defenceman for the Chicago Black Hawks, he and Taffy Abel were expected to do their best preventative work in front of goaltender Charlie Gardiner, keeping opposing forwards at bay, with minimal relief — Chicago was usually dressing just four defenceman at this time.

Then, that January, Graham got a promotion if perhaps not a raise: when the Black Hawks offloaded their captain, the veteran 39-year-old defender Helge Bostrom, Graham, 28, was appointed in his stead.

Still, with things so busy at work, Graham still managed to make a detour in early February of ’33 after the Black Hawks played in Detroit, heading north for a quick visit to Owen Sound, Ontario, his hometown, where he spent his summers playing baseball with the Brooke Millionaires.

Oh, and Graham was writing a syndicated newspaper column, too — well, lending his name and insight, if maybe not actually typing out actual sentences. In a series that would start appearing on newspaper pages across the continent in early March, Graham shared wild and woolly tales from his career. “Written On Ice,” the Tribune in Great Falls, Montana, headed the column, while the Buffalo Evening News touted it as revealing “The Human Side of Hockey!”

As it turned out, being human, Graham would fall to injury later around the same time. Along with several key teammates, he would miss the end of the schedule. Contemporary accounts aren’t clear on what was ailing him, exactly, but let’s assume that it had something to do with the wrapping we’re seeing in the scene here, dated to February, with Graham under the care of Black Hawks trainer Eddie Froelich and the supervision of coach Tommy Gorman.

Chicago finished at the bottom of the NHL’s American Division that month, out of the playoffs. With several games remaining in the regular season, Chicago owner Major Frederic McLaughlin announced that Gorman was the only employee on his payroll whose job was safe. “From today on,” he told the papers, “I will sell or trade any member of the squad, or all of them if necessary, to make certain of a berth in the Stanley Cup series next year.”

“It is apparent that not a few of our players have outworn their welcomes here,” he continued. “New faces are needed, and we’ll get them.”

That was good-bye for Teddy Graham: in October, he was traded to the Montreal Maroons in exchange for Lionel Conacher. (Charlie Gardiner succeeded him as captain.)

McLaughlin, it should be noted, got his wish: by the end of the 1933-34 season, Tommy Gorman had not only steered Chicago into the playoffs, he contrived to win the Cup, Chicago’s first.

 

(Image: © Chicago Sun-Times Media. SDN-074245, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection, Chicago History Museum)

fix you

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Hold Still: Bill O’Brien, on the right, was trainer for the NHA Renfrew Creamery Kings going back to 1910, but it was as a mainstay of the Montreal Maroons’ support staff that he was best known, all the way through the 14 years of their illustrious history. In 1940, he took up as trainer for the Canadiens. Here he’s tending winger Ray Getliffe at the Habs training camp at St. Hyacinthe in October that year. A good glimpse here, too, of Montreal’s alternate white sweater, introduced in 1933. (Image: Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)

 

the tooth and nothing but

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Rink-Ready: Cecil Hart, and his skate-guards.

Charlie Dinsmore played his football with the Toronto Argonauts in the early 1920s (Lionel Conacher and Dunc Munro were teammates); in the NHL, he turned out at centre for Montreal’s new club in 1924, joining Munro and scoring the team’s very first goal when the Maroons-to-be played their very first game, at the Boston Arena, on a Monday of this same date, 98 years ago.

Art Ross’ Bruins were new to the league, too, and they ended up winning that historic first encounter, getting goals from Smokey Harris and Carson Cooper in a 2-1 final. This was one of only six games that the Bruins won that year as they finished at the bottom of the six-team NHL standings with a record of 6-24-0.

Montreal, who started the season with Cecil Hart as coach and manager, did a little better, finishing in fifth place with a record of 9-19-2. Both teams missed the playoffs. Hart didn’t last the season, as it turned out; he parted ways with the team in February of 1925, ceding the bench with nine games remaining to former Ottawa Senators star defenceman Eddie Gerard.

Gerard, impressively, steered the Maroons to a Stanley Cup championship to top off the following year, 1925-26, you may recall. Ross’ Bruins, meanwhile, had to wait until 1929 to claim their first Cup championship. Hart, of course, went on to coach the Canadiens, winning a pair of Cups with them in 1930 and ’31.

Ross and Hart, who would have been old Montreal acquaintances, seem to have laid something of a (friendly?) wager ahead of their inaugural meeting on December 1, 1924. That, according to this Ottawa Journal item published following Boston’s win:

gaineyesque

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“The curly-headed lad from the lakehead has speed, power, and a vicious shot. He revels in the heavy-going and can carry a big load alone when a team is faltering.” That was the Montreal Gazette‘s 1927 scouting report on Jimmy Ward, the young right winger from Fort William, Ontario, who’d just signed with the local Maroons. A steady scorer and tenacious checker, Ward went on to play 11 seasons with the team, becoming one of its most respected players, and winning a championship, to boot, when the Maroons claimed the Stanley Cup in 1935. He suffered a serious concussion that same year after a mid-season collision with Boston’s Eddie Shore. Ward’s luck was better than Toronto’s Ace Bailey, whose NHL career was ended as the result of a 1933 clash with Shore; Ward was back on the ice after a little more than two weeks’ convalescence. After the Maroons folded in 1938, he played his final NHL season with the Canadiens. In the 1980s, Gazette columnist Tim Burke asked a colleague who, as a boy, had watched Ward play whether he was the Bob Gainey of his time. “Yeah, but I think he was better,” Marc Thibeault opined. “He scored more in the clutch.” Ward died on a Thursday of today’s date in 1990, at the age of 84.

maroon six

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Big Ms: Montreal’s storied Maroons played their final game in 1938, whereupon the NHL allowed the financially troubled team to suspend operations. A decade later, there was talk that the dormant franchise might get a re-start in Philadelphia, but that never went anywhere. The Maroons did posthumously reform for a couple of fundraising exhibition games during the 1940s, including one in April of 1948, when a congregation of Maroon and Canadiens oldtimers got together at the Forum to raise money for two Montreal childrens’ hospitals. The result, as the Gazette reported, was a “questionable 5-5 deadlock.” With the Canadiens’ crew leading 5-1 with 30 seconds remaining, the Maroons sent 12 players onto the ice to score four quick goals. Old-time Maroons suiting up on the night included, from left, Paul Haynes, Hooley Smith, Dave Trottier, Russ Blinco, Archie Wilcox, and Nels Stewart. (Image: La Presse)

smoke signal

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Habs no 10 that year 6 Georges Mantha no 14 Maroons 17 Dutch Gainor

Fresh Favourites: A cigarette ad from Montreal’s Forum Hockey Bulletin and Sports Magazine from the NHL’s 1934-35 season with an unknown artist’s impression of Maroons and Canadiens at play. No Canadien wore #10 or #14 on his sweater that year, but #6 was Georges Mantha’s. The regular Canadien goalkeep was Wilf Cude. For the actual Maroons, #14 was Dutch Gainor. The two teams first clashed that season on November 24, ’34, with the Maroons prevailing by a score of 3-1. But while Maroons finished nine points ahead of their local rivals in the final league standings, it was Canadiens who claimed the George Kennedy Cup, awarded annually in those years to the team that won the all-Montreal season series. In 1934-35, Canadiens dominated Maroons with a 4-1-1 record.