Newsy Lalonde

the montreal canadiens play their first ever game, 1910: strenuous hockey + hurt and blood

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How did it go down, 114 years ago, when the Montreal Canadiens played their very first game? Let’s go to the tape — well, the newsprint, how about, by way of the Montreal Daily Star, which had an excited correspondent on hand at the Jubilee Arena on the night of Wednesday, January 5, 1910. To wit:

Five thousand men, women and young people, goading the players by voice and cheers, derisive yells and tumultuous and overwhelming encomiums, precisely as did other people (long since dust and ashes) their young athletes for the sake of strength and beauty; fourteen young men battling for victory, with as much passion and eagerness as was ever expressed in war; a tension painful in its acuteness, a struggle which took every ounce of power and endurance, every atom of skill, out of as athletic a set of fellows us could be imagined: an enormous expectancy which communicated itself to every soul in the Jubilee Rink, and which became, as the struggle progressed, well-nigh intolerable — this was the match, this the hockey, these the conditions, which marked the initial contest between the Canadians [sic] and the Cobalts last night, and which resulted in a victory for the Canadians [sic] by 7 goals to 6.

The Canadiens had been established a month earlier, you might remember, by the friendly Renfrew, Ontario, millionaire Ambrose O’Brien. O’Brien was in Montreal in December of 1909 and had gone to the Windsor Hotel in the hopes of seeing about the admission of another team, the Renfrew Creamery Kings, into the Canadian Hockey Association. Turned down, he then conspired, possibly in the corridor, with the manager of the Montreal Wanderers, Jimmy Gardner, to start up a whole new operation, the National Hockey Association.

O’Brien launched Les Canadiens soon afterwards to be a part of that, handing over the recruiting and running of the team to Jack Laviolette.

There was a subsequent attempt to merge the two leagues, CHA and NHA, but negotiations broke down. And so the NHA launched on Wednesday, January 5, at Montreal’s east-end Jubilee Arena, with the Canadiens hosting the Cobalt Silver Kings.

The Star counted 5,000 fans, but there were other estimates: Montreal’s La Patrie put the crowd at 2,500. Games were still divided into halves at this point, and teams played with seven players apiece, icing a rover, hence the “fourteen young men battling for victory.”

The Canadiens line-up was 43 per cent Quebec-born (three of seven players) while the rest hailed from Ontario. One of the Quebeckers was Didier Pitre, a mighty shooter and legendary scorer who would end up in the Hall of Fame, though at this point in 1910 the issue of the moment was that he had a court order against him to keep him out of the Canadiens’ line-up, seeing as how he’d also signed a contract with a CHA team, Le National.

He ignored the injunction and played on, falling back, it seems, to partner on defence with Laviolette, another future Hall-of-Famer. Canadiens had another of those in the great Newsy Lalonde, 23 years old, who played rover that night. Joe Cattarinich was the Canadiens’ goaltender. He later ended up as an owner of the team.

Cobalt had some skilled players on their side, including rover Steve Vair and centreman Herb Clarke.

The game actually got going at 8.38 p.m., according to the detail-oriented North Bay Nugget. It was Lalonde who scored the game’s first goal, which also would be the very first in Canadiens’ history. The teams were at even strength; seventeen minutes had passed. “Lalonde went up the ice alone,” the Gazette reported, “worked his way through the Cobalt defence and scored from the left of the Cobalt stage. He was down on his knees when he pushed the disc into the twine.” Joe Jones was the disappointed Cobalt goaltender.

They weren’t tracking assists in those years, but it was Lalonde’s shot just after that rebounded out for his teammate Skinner Poulin to bat in. Lalonde scored another goal before the half ended with Canadiens leading 3-1.

Riley Hern was the referee, the Hall-of-Fame goaltender for the Montreal Wanderers and noted haberdasher. He was aided, as referees were in those years, by a judge of play, who watched for infractions from the safety of the sidelines; on this night, Reg Percival was on the job. Cobalt apparently felt hard done by, but the Gazette’s verdict was that Hern and Percival “did their work well.”

They called a lot of penalties, with Laviolette being the main offender for Montreal, Lorne Campbell for Cobalt. The view from North Bay: “The home team were very dirty.”

It was a rough game, by all accounts, with the players hitting one another so hard that the dull thuds of collision were heard out on St. Catherine Street East. The crowd was all in, apparently. “Was there more tumult at the ancient gladiatorial or Olympic games, one might wonder, ” the loquacious correspondent from the Star did, in fact, wonder.

He was on a bit of a roll, you have to admit.

“And thus it came to pass that in the frightful collisions of the men going at breakneck pace, there was hurt and blood, and stoppage of play, and temporary retirement, and the leading this or that disabled player off for rest and care.”

The toll was fairly dreadful. “Practically every player of the two teams came off the ice showing signs of the struggle he had been through. The Cobalt men, without exception, were cut about the face. Although it was strenuous hockey and there were a good many delays as a result of injuries, only one player had to leave the ice for the match.”

That was Lalonde: he was the casualty in question. In the second half, he took a shot on the left ankle and, “touché douloureusement” (La Patrie), departed the ice. With Canadiens down to six men, Cobalt duly withdrew one of their players to even things up.

The game ended tied, 6-6. The band struck up “God Save The King” and the fans began to troop out. Four or five hundred had left, the Gazette estimated, when word spread that in fact would a sudden-death overtime would be played. The NHA had adopted the old ECHA rulebook, which called for overtime; I guess it took some time for Hern and Percival to straighten that out.

The teams returned to the ice, playing five-and-a-half minutes before Skinner Poulin ended it in Montreal’s favour. Final score: Canadiens 7, Cobalt 6.

It was all in vain, in the end, or, at least, didn’t count. The NHA was just then in the process of winning its war with the CHA. On January 15, after the latter absorbed two of the former’s teams (Ottawa and the Montreal Shamrocks), the CHA collapsed. The new triumphant seven-team league decided to start fresh, tossing out the games played to that point.

Montreal’s first game of the new schedule came on Wednesday, January 19, in Renfrew. The result was not so pleasant: Canadiens lost that one to Cyclone Taylor and Lester and Frank Patrick and their fellow Millionaires by a score of 9-4. With Jack Laviolette ill and out of the line-up, Newsy Lalonde stood in as Montreal captain for that game. Just for good measure, and to keep the records clean, he scored his team’s first goal that night, too, and another pair besides.

Lalonde’s speed and flash wasn’t enough for Montreal in their debut season: they won just two of the 12 games they played that re-started season, finishing last in the NHA standings, out of the playoffs. He kept at it with Montreal: along with Laviolette and Pitre, he was still around with the team when, after another Windsor Hotel coup, the Canadiens jumped out of the NHA and into the newborn NHL.

Opening Night: The Montreal Daily Star sent a sketch artist to the Jubilee the night Montreal made their debut on January 5, 1910.

 

 

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.

outstanding in his field

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Jolting Joe: “They say, as a puck-carrying defenceman, there never was another hockey player who came close to Joe Simpson in his prime.” That was Jim Coleman writing in 1973, on the occasion of Simpson’s death on Christmas day that year at the age of 80. Here he is in 1921 when he was starring for the WCHL Edmonton Eskimos. He was 28 by then, a decorated veteran of the First World War. Coleman suggested that his best years came before he went to war, and that may have been so, but the fact is, too, that in 1923 Newsy Lalonde told NHL President Frank Calder that Simpson was the greatest hockey player on the planet, bar none. Simpson eventually made it to the NHL, playing with and coaching the New York Americans in the later ’20s. (Image: McDermid Studio, courtesy of Glenbow Library and Archives Collection, Libraries and Cultural Resources Digital Collections, University of Calgary)

old eagle-eye

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A son of Pembroke, Ontario, Hugh Lehman started his career playing with some exalted company as a young goaltender. Born on a Tuesday of today’s date in 1885, he suited up with the Canadian Soo Algonquins of the old International Hockey League in 1906-07 alongside Newsy Lalonde and the McNamara brothers, Hal and George. He was a Berlin Dutchman after that, and a Galt Pro, too, before heading west. By 1914, he was stopping pucks for the PCHA Vancouver Millionaires with whom, skating with Cyclone Taylor and another prodigious Pembroke product, Frank Nighbor, he backstopped (in 1915) the team to a Stanley Cup championship.

“Old Eagle Eye” they called him in those years and ever after, for his ability to spy out incoming pucks through the on-ice chaos. He and his Millionaires challenged for the Stanley Cup again in 1921-22 (when they lost out to the Toronto St. Patricks). The following year (with the Vancouver Maroons) he was stopped in the semi-finals by the Ottawa Senators, the eventual winners.

Late in the day — he was 41 — Lehman made his way to the NHL, signing for the 1926-27 season with the Chicago Black Hawks. He played two seasons for Major Frederic McLaughlin’s team, taking on duties, briefly, in the latter as playing coach, during which his team compiled a dismal record of 3-17-1. Hugh Lehman was elevated to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1958. He died in 1961 at the age of 75.

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.

george hainsworth: looks like the goods

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Glove Hand: George Hainsworth thwarts a Detroit Red Wing attack in the mid-1930s. Shooting for the corner (#15) that’s (possibly) Pete Kelly, though it might also be Wilf Starr, Lloyd Gross, or even Ronnie Hudson, too. Looking on could be Detroit’s Herbie Lewis. No question about the Leaf #9 turning away from his own net: that’s Charlie Conacher.

“Of great interest to Saskatoon fans will be that their goaltender George Hainsworth looks like the goods.” That was the Saskatoon Daily Star’s appraisal in the fall of 1923, sizing up the man that Newsy Lalonde had brought in to mind the nets for his WCHL Crescents. Born on another Monday of this same date in 1893, Hainsworth had been playing for his hometown OHA Senior Greenshirts in Kitchener, Ontario. He was already 30, longish in the tooth for a goaltender making his professional debut, particularly when you take into account that Hainsworth’s illustrious 12-year NHL career was still all in the future in 1923.

He went on, of course, to win two Stanley Cup championships with Montreal’s Canadiens (a team he also captained) along with three Vézina trophies as the NHL’s best goaltender. He subsequently played parts of four seasons with the Toronto Maple Leafs before his NHL career came to a close in 1936, when he was 43.

In Saskatoon in 1923, the Daily Star also noted that he was a bit of an on-ice orator. “Another thing about him,” the paper reported, “ is an incessant line of chatter that reminds one of the talk of Hughie Lehman, Hap Holmes, and Heck [sic] Fowler, the great coast trio of goalies. He talks all the time while on the ice but off it he seldom has much to say. When the writer saw the boys at their hotel this morning, he had little to say while the rest of the boys talked freely.”

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.

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.

spit take: nels stewart, newsy lalonde, and a jolt of tobacco juice in jakie forbes’ eye

/ puckstruck

Poison Control: A 1952 magazine ad for Pleasant Moments whisky celebrated Nels Stewart’s 1931 record-setting outburst with this imaginative view of one of the two goals he scored within four seconds to lead his Montreal Maroons to a win over the Boston Bruins. (Artist: John Floherty Jr.)

By early afternoon, the signs at Montreal’s Forum were already up: Standing Room Only. “And long before the referees called the teams together at centre ice to start the game, all this space had been grabbed up,” the Gazette’s Marc McNeil would recount. “It was a complete sell-out Saturday night. And those 13,000 fortunates witnessed a mighty spectacle that crammed action and thrills into every minute of play.”

Playing a leading role that night in January of 1931: Nels Stewart, star centreman for Montreal Maroons and the reigning Hart Trophy winner as NHL MVP. In a battle between two of the NHL’s best teams, Stewart, who was born in Montreal on a Monday of yesterday’s date in 1902, powered his team to a win over the visiting Boston Bruins with a third-period outburst, setting a record for speedy scoring that stands to this day.

That being the case, today’s another day that I’ll be pleased to gripe that Stewart doesn’t get the recognition he deserves. His absence from the NHL’s 2017 list of the 100 Greatest Players in league history tells you everything you need to know about that marred memorial. Stewart won a Stanley Cup with the Maroons in 1926 and was the first man to win the Hart Trophy twice. Along with his seven seasons in Montreal, Stewart played another five for the New York Americans along with four for Boston where, though the Bruins themselves have forgotten it, he captained the team. In 1937, the man they called Old Poison overtook Howie Morenz as the NHL’s all-time leading goalscorer, a height he held until Maurice Richard overtook him in 1952. Stewart was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1962.

Toronto Telegram columnist Ted Reeve grew up with Stewart in the Beaches, in Toronto’s eastern end. “The best natural all-round athlete I have ever seen in Canada,” Reeve called him.

“Extremely deceptive,” was Frank J. Selke’s verdict, “the brainiest player I have ever known.”

Selke also testified that Stewart “couldn’t backcheck a lick.”

“He is worthless as a defensive player, always has been,” Herb Manning wrote in the Winnipeg Tribune in 1939. “There is nothing streamlined about him. He lumbers along like a truck on a steep grade. He always seems to be ten feet behind the play, whether they are going backward or forward.”

But?

“But a split second is all the time he requires to complete a chore in the enemy zone.”

He got his chores done, scoring 324 goals in 650 regular-season NHL games, nine more in 50 playoff games.

In Montreal, he centred the famous S line, flanked by Hooley Smith and Babe Siebert. “Babe and Hooley did most of the work,” Stewart later said, “because I was a shambling six-footer who took relays from the corners.”

In 1938, the Ottawa Journal wrote about his “careless, almost lazy style,” noting also that “no goalie ever feels at ease while he is lurching and wandering around the vicinity of the net.”

Ottawa Senators goaltender Clint Benedict: “Nels liked to park and take a puck and fire it quick.”

“Nels was one helluva hockey player,” New York Rangers centreman Frank Boucher said. “He was almost impossible to move once he got in front of the net.”

Harold Burr of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle consulted former Senators star defenceman Eddie Gerard on Stewart’s virtues in 1932, when Gerard was coaching the New York Americans.

“Big and wide of beam,” was Burr’s description of Stewart, whose playing-days metrics came in at 6’1’’, 200 pounds.

No other player in the National Hockey League practices his loafing around the nets of the enemy. He doesn’t look dangerous. He isn’t a fast skater or a hard shot. But he does all his playing from the other fellow’s blue line.

“Watch him lift his shoulder to draw the goalie out,” warns Gerard, his old Montreal boss. “That’s why he scores so frequently — he makes the goalminder make the first move. But watch further. Nels never shoots from the shoulder. He just flips his wrist.”

Boston bought him in 1932. “He is a two-fisted fighting player,” coach Art Ross said at the time, “and the greatest inside player in the game.”

Greatest Inside Player in the Game: Montreal Maroons’ star Nels Stewart as he actually looked in the early 1930s.

Which brings us back to that night at the Montreal Forum in 1931, Saturday, January 3. Nearly halfway through the season’s schedule, the visiting Bruins were heading up the league’s American section, while the Maroons were atop on the Canadian side, neck-and-neck with the Canadiens, defending Cup champions.

Maroons prevailed, 5-3, despite going into the third period trailing 3-1. D.A.L. MacDonald wrote up the game for the Montreal Gazette, and he speculated that if the frenzied Montreal fans had any regrets, they might have centred on the hurry with which the home team turned the game around.

First winger Jimmy Ward scored. Six minutes later, Stewart stepped up after Hooley Smith slammed a shot into Tiny Thompson’s pads. “The rebound dropped barely a foot in front of the Boston goalie and big Nelson Stewart was in like a flash to flip the puck over his prostrate form,” was how MacDonald saw it. “If Nels had scooped it up with a dessert spoon he couldn’t have done it more neatly.”

That tied the game. Four seconds later, Stewart scored the winner. It went like this:

From the face-off once again, Stewart slipped a pass over to Smith that left the Boston front rank behind and at the defence back came the disc to Nelson. The big fellow rode right in on Thompson and the goalie never had a chance. Another flip of those steel wrists and Maroons were in front to stay.

Two goals in four seconds. “Shades of Frank McGee!” MacDonald enthused. “For quick scoring feats and high-powered excitement, Nelson the Great has few equals.” It would, indeed, take 64 years for another NHLer to match Stewart’s record. No, not Gretzky or Lemieux: in1995, Winnipeg Jets defenceman Deron Quint scored a pair of goals in four seconds versus the Edmonton Oilers to slip into the record book alongside Stewart.

Is there any indication that in scoring his brisk brace, Stewart might have distracted or disabled Tiny Thompson by spitting tobacco juice into his unsuspecting eye?

No, none. Though that is a stratagem that is persistently attributed to Stewart in latter-day accounts of his career. Mostly it’s offered up as passing proof of his cunning and/or outright nastiness, often with a hint of admiration — if not any specificity.

The general tobacco-spitting charge shows up in Stewart’s Wikipedia profile, for instance. Floyd Conner slots it into Hockey’s Most Wanted (2002), with his own twist: the eye-spitting was motivated by Stewart’s “contempt” for goaltenders. In his 2012 book, Next Goal Wins, Liam Maguire goes out on a limb of his own to venture that the nickname Old Poison derived directly from “his habit of spitting chewing tobacco into the eyes of opposing goaltenders.”

Stan Fischler has been one of the more enthusiastic purveyors of the expectorating story over the years; it repeats throughout his broad oeuvre. Here it is in his The All-New Hockey’s 100 (1998):

It was not uncommon for Stewart to chew a wad of tobacco, produce juice, and then spit it unerringly in the eyes of a goalie as he shot the puck.

None of the above mentions is sourced; not one identifies a particular instance which any first-hand accounting to back up the chewing/juicing/spitting combo that Stewart is reputed to have employed to such (purported) devilish effect. None of the authors cited above seems to have done any digging of their own. If they had, they’d have found that no-one seems to have been taking note of Stewart’s spitful habit when he was actually playing: my scourings of contemporary newspaper accounts from Stewart’s active years in the 1920s and ’30s haven’t turned up even a fleeting mention of any tobacco-chewing let alone spitting.

The legend does (fittingly?) crop up in the five-part hockey-history TV series that Vancouver’s Opus Pictures produced in 1996, Legends of Hockey, and my guess (it’s mostly a guess) is that it’s from this (also unsourced) documentary that the subsequent literary mentions originated and proliferated. (Wikipedia’s mention of Stewart’s adventures in chaw footnotes it.) The second episode includes short biographies of several colourful hockeyists, including Eddie Shore, Red Horner, and Ol’ Poison himself. You can click in to review it here, starting at the 27:26-minute mark, where you’ll soon hear narrator Alan Maitland intone:

As well as being poison around the net, the Montreal Maroons’ Nels Stewart had the nasty habit of spitting his chewing tobacco in the goalie’s eyes. Never a great skater, never a great checker, he was still a lethal goalscorer.

As Garth Woolsey of the Toronto Star wrote back in 1996, Legends of Hockey is, as a whole, a delightful confection. Specifically citing Stewart and his alleged spitting, Woolsey also notes that “in the off-hand fashion of such productions, this pungent detail is presented without elaboration. Legends delivers with more similar tidbits of history, whetting the appetite. What it might not explain meatily, the series suggests delectably.”

Is it possible that there’s truth at the root of the legend, wherever that might lie? Of course. But without any first-hand account of where Stewart might have been chewing his tobacco and loosing it on contemptible goaltenders, or when, or who the goaltenders might have been, I’ll be wary of treating the tale as fact. I don’t mind James Marsh’s formulation in his biography of Stewart in The Canadian Encyclopedia:

The story that he spat tobacco juice in the eyes of opposing goalies may be apocryphal but apparently is in keeping with his temperament on the ice.

If Newsy Lalonde merits a mention here (and he does), it’s because he’s a, well, key witness in the larger case — as well as a prime suspect.

Lalonde, of course, was one of hockey’s greatest talents, as well as another fairly glaring absentee from that centenary list from 2017. His pro career on ice started as early as 1906, and he went on to play seven NHL seasons, mostly with the Montreal Canadiens, before it was over in the late 1920s. He was famously uncompromising — which is one generous way of saying that he played the game violently and often with what still looks like, over the distance of years, breathtaking spite.

Not that he was (apparently) alone in his willingness to twist rules or (as the case may be) soak them in tobacco juice in those early decades. Long after he’d hung up his skates he was still recalling the transgressions of opponents like Paddy Moran, Stanley-Cup-winning goaltender for the Quebec Bulldogs and a fellow Hall-of-Famer. Here’s Lalonde reminiscing in 1951, as reported in the Montreal Gazette:

“Paddy chewed tobacco,” Newsy said, “and he could hit a keyhole at 40 paces. You had to duck when you skated behind his cage or he’d get you right between the eyes.”

Lalonde elaborated on this theme a decade later. This time he was talking to Andy O’Brien for a feature on hockey malice for Weekend Magazine.

“Paddy [Lalonde said] was in a class by himself by himself when it came to chopping toes of opposing forwards who came within range, and in those days the skate toes weren’t  so well padded. But his pet skill was squirting tobacco in your eye.”

In 1961, Newsy Lalonde implicated Paddy Moran for his chaw crimes.

What would it have cost Any O’Brien to press for just a few more details? As it is, I guess Lalonde’s long-range memories do get us closer to a confirmed case of tobacco-juice-in-the-eye without pinpointing anything precisely. The best we might be able to hope for on that count focusses again on Newsy Lalonde, though he’s not (and probably shouldn’t be expected to be) implicating himself this time. It’s another goaltender of old giving evidence here, Jakie Forbes, who was playing for the Toronto St. Patricks in the early 1920s when Lalonde was skating for — and captaining and coaching — the Canadiens.

Forbes’ news wasn’t exactly fresh when he got around to reporting it: one version I’m looking at dates to 1969, 50 years after the fact, when Forbes was 72, and the other is from Trent Frayne’s 1974 book The Mad Men of Hockey.

Both accounts are, it has to be said, fairly vivid, even if they don’t perfectly match up.

The first, from a genial Globe and Mail retrospective, has Forbes telling his tale this way to writer James Young:

The game is much faster now, but not nearly as rough as it was. In one game at the old Mount Royal rink in Montreal, Newsy Lalonde came around the net and caught me in the eye with his stick. I went skating out to protest to the referee and skated right into him, knocking both of us down. He said he had not seen the incident and sent me back to the net.

The next time Lalonde came down to my end of the ice I went out to stop him, using a high stick if possible. He skated to the side of me, spit his tobacco juice in my face and when I fell skated around me to score in the open net.

Trent Frayne’s framing of this same tale five years later isn’t quite the same; it does up the colour balance.

“He was,” Forbes says this time, by way of introducing Lalonde, “the dirtiest son of a bitch I ever played against.”

In Frayne’s version, Forbes stopped Lalonde and the puck was headed back the other way. As Lalonde rounded the net to follow it, he paused to punch Forbes squarely — and hard — in the face.

“Blood spurted from the goaler’s nose,” Frayne writes, “and he took off after Lalonde, brandishing his stick like a lariat.”

The referee is named as Cooper Smeaton, and he does get knocked down. Jumping up, he’s quoted threatening Forbes:

“Get back in the goal, you crazy little bugger,” he shouted at the five-foot-five goaltender, “or you’re out of the game.”

Frayne adds some fine points to the final act of the piece, too. Near the end of the game, with Canadiens leading 4-1, Lalonde broke in with the puck. Forbes was ready for him, “readying an axe-swing at Lalonde’s head.”

But at the last instant the flying Lalonde spat a long stream of tobacco juice into Jakie’s face, circled the net laughing, and pushed the puck into the goal past the sputtering Forbes.

Triangulating with a few of the details provided by Frayne, it’s possible to key in a couple of games from the two seasons Forbes spent with Toronto. The first time he played Canadiens in Montreal was on Wednesday, March 10, 1920, a night on which the local Gazette found plenty in his performance to praise: “Forbes the Youngest Goaler in NHL Made Many Brilliant Stops at Mount Royal Arena,” reads a subhead from the next morning’s dispatch.

Too bad for Forbes, Montreal won, 7-2, with Lalonde scoring a hat trick. But contemporary accounts mention no high sticks, punches, or other hijinks. Also, the referee that night was Harry Hyland. So that’s probably not the night in question.

A better bet altogether is a game from almost a year later, a Monday-nighter played on February 28, 1921. It was noteworthy affair on several counts. A former U.S. president was one of the 5,000 spectators on hand, for one thing: what’s more, William Howard Taft was “in position to have a good view” of a first-period fight between Toronto’s Ken Randall and Didier Pitre of Montreal.

It was a thoroughly bad-tempered occasion even before the teams hit the ice. Toronto was lending winger Cully Wilson to Canadiens that season, but just before the game, with centreman Corb Denneny ill and unable to play, the St. Pats tried to claim Wilson back for their own line-up.

NHL President Frank Calder was in the building and presided over a summit in the referee’s room. The Montreal Star mapped the terrain:

If he played with Canadiens, Toronto would protest him. If he played with Torontos, Canadiens would no doubt protest him, and if he refused to play with Torontos, whose property he was, he would be suspended. The president, however, refused to counsel him what to do, and told him to suit himself, bearing in mind that he was Toronto’s property.

Wilson sat out and, indeed, never suited up for either Montreal or Toronto again: the following season he turned out for the Hamilton Tigers.

In Montreal in 1921, the game went sourly on without him. “There were many unparliamentary clashes,” the Star reported. The Mount Royal Arena’s natural ice deteriorated as the game continued, too. In the second interval, the Star’s reporter watched as “the men who were supposed to scoop the snow off the ice only got water for their pains, and when the third period began, the ice was like mud. When a man fell he got up sopping wet.”

It was in the second period that Forbes and Lalonde first sparred, though whether it was a high stick or a punch that the latter perpetrated isn’t clear. Press reports make no mention, either, of a collision between Forbes and Smeaton. “Lalonde was given a minor for charging Forbes,” is as much as we get from the Gazette, though with an interesting coda: “Lalonde was booed for his attack on the net custodian.” (Le Droit: “Lalonde was hissed when he jostled Forbes.”)

In Trent Frayne’s telling, the game ended 5-1 for Montreal, which wasn’t the case on this night. Lalonde did score Canadiens’ final goal, towards the end of the third, to complete a 4-0 Montreal win (and Georges Vézina shutout). As the Star had it, “Lalonde’s brilliant lone-handed shot finished the scoring.”

But if reporters present saw Lalonde score, none of them would seem to have noticed him spit his tobacco or laugh, and nor did they catch Forbes’ sputtering as he failed to foil him. That doesn’t mean that a spit-assisted goal isn’t part of hockey history which remains, after all, mostly a matter of the many moments, savoury or not, that go unrecorded.

Famous Five: Lined up from left, Newsy Lalonde, Lester Patrick, Odie Cleghorn, Frank Calder, and Cooper Smeaton, circa the … early 1930s? (Image: La Presse)

 

 

 

joe canadien

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Born in Quebec City on a Sunday of this date in 1881, Joe Cattarinich was 29 in 1909 when he signed up to play goal for Montreal’s newest hockey outfit, Le Club de Hockey Le Canadien, in the newly hatched NHA. A month later, on January 5, 1910, he skated out on the ice of the Jubilee Arena to stop the first pucks in the history of Montreal’s mightiest franchise, ending up a winner in overtime, as the Canadiens beat the Cobalt Silver Kings 7-6. The Gazette reported next morning: “The deciding goal in the overtime was scored by [Skinner] Poulin after Cattaranich [sic] had made two good stops at Canadiens end of the rink.” Ructions in the birth of the new league resulted in this game being nullified, and the season re-started. Montreal’s second debut wasn’t so inspiring: in Renfrew, powered by Lester and Frank Patrick and Cyclone Taylor, the local Creamery Kings beat Cattarinich and his mates by a score of 9-4.

Cattarinich’s Canadiens career lasted just two more games after that, losses both at the sticks of the Ottawa Hockey Club. Teddy Groulx took over after that; by the following season, Montreal had drafted in Georges Vézina to take good care of the goaltending, which he did for the next 16+ years.

When he wasn’t stopping pucks, Cattarinich was a successful businessman, starting as as a hotel manager in Lévis, then prospering as a tobacco wholesaler. A busy sports promoter, he was an owner of racing tracks and many of the horses who ran them in Montreal, Cleveland, Chicago, and New Orleans. Leo Dandurand was a partner in some of those equine ventures, and it was with him (and Louis Letourneau) that Cattarinich bought the Canadiens for $11,000 in 1921, following George Kennedy’s death. When the partners sold the team in 1935 to other Montreal interests, the price was $165,000.

“During their ownership,” the Gazette noted in 1938, following Cattarinich’s death at the age of 57, “the Canadiens thrice won the Stanley Cup and during that period some of the players never signed a contract at a stated figure, depending on Cattarinich to pay them a just salary, and in each case that player finished the season more than satisfied with his treatment.”

Origin Story: The Gazette reports on the beginnings of Montreal’s (eventually) mighty Canadiens in December of 1909.

 

newsy bulletin

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Old Guard: A collection of former Canadiens’ greats gathers on Forum ice in December of 1953. From left, they are Pete Morin, Georges Mantha, a 66-year-old Newsy Lalonde, Claude Bourque, and Sylvio Mantha.

“One of the brainiest hockey players in the game,” Toronto’s Daily Star tagged him: “not one of the showy type of player, but is very effective and has a wicked shot.”

He was Newsy Lalonde, one of hockey’s true greats, a dominant centreman in his day, who happens also to have been one of the best lacrosse players Canada has ever produced. Born in Cornwall, Ontario, on a Monday of this same date 134 years ago, in 1887, Lalonde was elevated to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1950 and the lacrosse pantheon in 1965.

On the ice, Lalonde was a force unto himself, a goalscoring engine, who was also known, it has to be said, for his merciless temper and violent tendencies. That Star appraisal dates to 1916, when Lalonde, then 29, was named playing coach of the Montreal Canadiens, the team he’d been starring for since 1912, helping Montreal to win its first Stanley Cup championship in 1916.

Lalonde was coach and captain of the Canadiens when the NHL dawned in 1917, scoring a goal in the Habs’ NHL debut and continuing on from there: he would score 16 goals in Montreal’s initial eight games that year. Lalonde led the NHL in scoring in 1919 and again in 1921. Departing Montreal in 1922, he went west to play for the WCHL Saskatoon Sheiks before making a return to the NHL to coach again. He steered the New York Americans for a season, 1926-27, and took another turn in Montreal, for the 1932-33 season.

hamby shore: away he goes like a flash

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He started as a forward, and he was a good one, at that: in 1905, as what one newspaper would call “a wiry stripling of 17,” Hamby Shore was summoned to play left wing for the mighty Ottawa Silver Seven as the team fended off the challenge of the Rat Portage Thistles to hold on to the Stanley Cup they’d made a habit of winning in the early years of the new century.

An Ottawa boy, born and bred, Shore would play a part in three Cup championships over the course of his career, which included a season in the fledgling NHL in 1917-18, during which he anchored the (original) Senators blueline. His death on a Sunday of this date in the fall of 1918 jarred hockey’s tight-knit community. A victim of the virulent Spanish flu pandemic that killed some 50,000 Canadians between 1918 and 1920, Shore was just 32 when he contracted the virus as he nursed his sickened wife, Ruby. She seems to have recovered, but by early October, her husband was under care at the Rideau Street Hospital, where he died of pneumonia that October 13, a Sunday.

When he wasn’t on the ice, Shore was, like many a star of Ottawa’s early hockey scene, a faithful civil servant, working a job in the federal Department of Interior. On the ice, he made the switch to defence in 1909 when Cyclone Taylor departed Pete Green’s Ottawa concatenation to sign with the Renfrew Creamery Kings in the old NHA, and Shore dropped back from the left wing work from the old cover-point position. The report from the rink early on that winter: “His shooting, checking, passing, and skating were all to the merry.” That same winter he also seems to have had a close call, falling through the ice of the Rideau Canal and being saved from drowning by a friend.

In 1912, when Art Ross put together a team of all-stars from eastern Canada to take on the best of the west, Shore partnered the future Bruins supremo on the Eastern d. (Paddy Moran tended the goal they defended; Joe Malone, Odie Cleghorn, Skene Ronan, and Jack Darragh worked the forward line, with Sprague Cleghorn and Cyclone Taylor standing by as substitutes. For the West, Hugh Lehman played behind Frank Patrick and Moose Johnson, with Newsy Lalonde, Harry Hyland, Tommy Dunderdale, and Ran McDonald on attack.)

The Ottawa Citizen may not have been an entirely independent authority, but in 1917, the paper declared Hamby Shore “the most effective chassis in the NHA” and “easily the most spectacular player in the game.”

“He rushes from end to end with more speed than he ever showed previously,” a hockey correspondent advised, “is blocking in clever style, and his shooting has been fatal to opposing goalkeepers.”

The key to his success? His take-off, apparently. “The average defenceman is slow in starting,” the Citizen’s man noted. “Not so with the Ottawa boy. One strike toward the puck, a neat sidestep, and away he goes like a flash.”

“He gets 15 yards on the other players before they know he is off,” added the distinguished referee Cooper Smeaton.

Shore played his final game in February of 1918, when his Senators overwhelmed the Montreal Canadiens by a score of 8-0 at Ottawa’s Laurier Street Arena towards the end of the NHL’s inaugural season. Ottawa released him a few days later: it’s not entirely clear why. The Ottawa Journal reported at the time that he himself was declaring that his career was finished and that “he would not attempt a comeback.”

Following his death eight months later, the Senators organized a memorial game in Shore’s memory and to raise money for his family. With the NHL season over, as the Montreal Canadiens prepared to depart for Seattle for their ill-fated (and never-completed) Stanley Cup series, the game was scheduled at the Laurier Street Arena for the end of March of 1919.

“Two of the fastest and strongest teams that have ever stepped out on the ice lined up,” the Ottawa Journal reported, “they being the All-Ottawas, a team consisting of thoroughbred home brews, and the Imported Stars.

Ottawa’s line-up featured Senators from stem to stern, with Clint Benedict in goal, Eddie Gerard and former Senator Horace Merrill (a former defensive partner of Shore’s) on defence, and a forward line of Jack Darragh, Punch Broadbent, and Buck Boucher. A former NHA Montreal Wanderer, Archie Atkinson, was Ottawa’s sub.

Toronto’s Bert Lindsay tended the other goal, with Ottawa’s Sprague Cleghorn and Harry Cameron on defence, and a forward line featuring Senators’ stars Frank Nighbor and Cy Denneny alongside Toronto’s Dave Ritchie, with Art Ross standing by as a sub.

Canada’s governor-general was on hand, the Duke of Devonshire, with a party of guests from Rideau Hall, and His Excellency brought along the band of the Governor-General’s Foot Guards to strike up a tune.

I haven’t seen word on how much money was raised on the night, but the crowd was reported to have been duly entertained, despite the sticky surface underskate: “the poor ice made the exhibition more of a burlesque than a contest,” the Citizen said. The Ottawas prevailed by a score of 8-3, with Buck Boucher busting out with six goals for the winning side.

The Journal noted that the GG was delighted by the hockey, taking “keen delight in the antics of the players.” Also? “The event was not without its excitement as a real fist-fight started in the bleachers and the police had to take a hand.”