Headmanning: A would-be Cody Ceci skates the puck forward in January of 1926 down on the ice of Edmonton’s North Saskatchewan River, overlooked by the Hotel Macdonald. Forget Cody Ceci, actually: Edmonton’s pro team that year was the Eskimos, who were playing out their final season in the old WHL with a formidable line-up that included Eddie Shore, Barney Stanley, and Duke Keats. (Image: McDermid Studio, courtesy of Glenbow Library and Archives Collection, University of Calgary)
Last Line of Defence: It’s all happening here on the outdoor ice in Edmonton, Alberta, as this skater — a little distracted, perhaps? — looks to seal the deal against a pair of focussed opponents in January of 1929. (Image: McDermid Studio. Courtesy of Glenbow Library and Archives Collection, University of Calgary)
M&Ms: From February of 1926, here’s the Manitoba Ladies Hockey team — no specifics, unfortunately, on who they are or exactly where they posing, let alone what the story might be with the mascot monkey in the goaltender’s clutch. (Image: McDermid Studio. Courtesy of Glenbow Library and Archives Collection, University of Calgary)
“Hockey has been played by nearly every man and boy in Winnipeg this winter,” the local Tribune advised in March of 1893, “and not only by them, but a number of ladies, and nearly every school-girl who can skate — are adepts in the art. Matches of every conceivable kind have been played, and some of them very amusing ones.”
Three years later, in 1896, Winnipeg’s thriving hockey community would send the Victorias to Montreal to challenge for and win the Stanley Cup, marking the first time a team not from Montreal had carried off hockey’s most coveted prize.
Skating along with everybody else in the Manitoba capital of the early 1890s was the soldiery. Going back to 1893, for instance, the Tribune reported on a late winter match-up in which the officers of the local garrison’s Royal Dragoons prevailed over those skating for the 90th Battalion of Rifles.
The hockey then and there was a seven-man game, and the score ended up 5-3 for the cavalry. That the reporter on the scene decided to go all-out on the battle analogies I guess isn’t so surprising. “Fire flew from the eyes of Col. Knight and Capt. Boswell as they faced off in the second half,” he prattled. “Then there was Capt. Evans, bearing the scars of many a hard-won field, dealing destruction at every blow. Lieut. Verner dashed into the thick of every fray like the bolt from a Roman catapult; while Capt. Gardiner wore through it all the haughty air that marks the soldier’s calm disdain of death.”
A Lieutenant Lang seems to have been tending the 90th net, and “like the warrior of old, directed the sheaf of deadly shot into his own bosom, that the goal might be saved. And saved it was, except when the puck went between his legs or outside the territory of his spread-out overcoat.”
The soldiers pictured here date to an earlier outing, in 1891. Some of the players could be the same, possibly, but the archives don’t name the line-up seen here, so who knows. It doesn’t look like a formal game, more like a practice or scrimmage — or sorry, properly I guess that should be skirmish.
The setting is (probably) Winnipeg’s Mounted Infantry School, which was established in 1883 at Fort Osborne on the banks of the Assiniboine River on grounds that are today home to the Manitoba Legislature. “Hockey is the principal sport at the barracks,” the Tribune noted in December of 1891. “A large sheet of ice upon the Assiniboine had been cleared, and was much used by the hockey players until the late big storm, but the ice is cleared again.”
On Sale: Advertisement from a Toronto sporting-supply shop in December of 1898.
What makes the photograph particularly notable in the annals of hockey history is that it would seem to be the very first (known) photograph showing a goaltender sporting leg-guards — cricket pads, in this case, worn by the lance-corporal sixth from the left.
George (Whitey) Merritt of the abovementioned Winnipeg Victorias is the goaltender generally recognized as hockey’s goalie-pad pioneer, and the not-quite-cricket pads he wore in 1896 do seem to have been an innovation unseen in competitive hockey in Eastern Canada when he donned them in Montreal in the Cup challenge that February. (It’s not impossible, of course, that some goaltender somewhere in Quebec or Ontario with an instinct for self-preservation strapped on a handy pair of cricket pads before that.) Either way, pads do seem to have caught on quickly enough after that, and are common to see in team photographs from 1897 on.
Who was the first goaltender to pad up in Manitoba? There’s no telling. Could have been 1891, but maybe it was earlier, too.
Rummaging through the archives, I did come across an account of a game on Saturday, January 16, 1892, in which the Victorias beat the Infantry School by a score of 7-2. Four of the seven players skating for the Victorias that day would be on the ice in 1896 when the team won the Stanley Cup, including goaltender Whitey Merritt. As for the soldiers, their goaltender is listed as a Corporal Wood. Maybe he’s the man in the photograph? No word in the game summary on whether Wood or Whitey was wearing pads.
Padded Up: The Orillia Hockey Club in 1897, featuring a cricket-padded goaltend, along with assorted shinpadded teammates.
(Top image: Henry Joseph Woodside/Library and Archives Canada/PA-016009)
Skateaway: A Friday shinny festival in Toronto’s Riverdale Park, photographed by the City’s official photographer, Arthur Goss, on February 2, 1934. That’s the General Steel Wares building in the background. (Image: Arthur Goss, Fonds 200, Series 372, Subseries 52, Item 1648, City of Toronto Archives)
Same Time Next Year: Not enough ice means no 2024 World Pond Hockey Championships in Plaster Rock, New Brunswick.
The pond wouldn’t freeze: it’s as simple and dispiriting as that. Organizers of the World Pond Hockey Championships in Plaster Rock, New Brunswick, had no choice but to announce, earlier this month, that the tournament was a no-go for 2024. Co-founder Danny Braun made the call nobody wanted to hear: the winter had been too warm. Without a foot of “good blue ice,” it just wasn’t viable to be hosting 120 teams over four days on 20-odd rinks on Roulston Lake, and by early February, they just didn’t have it. And so the 22nd edition of these pond playoffs will have to wait until 2025, climate change permitting.
COVID-19 shut down the 2021 edition of the Championships, but other than that, the tournament has been going for 21 years. In 2004, when it was in its third year, I teamed with my friends Mike, Evan, and Nick to mount a Toronto challenge for the big wooden faux Stanley Cup that they award to the victors. We (spoiler alert) weren’t them, but it was a glorious adventure that I wrote about in my 2014 book Puckstruck. Here’s a version of that, in tribute to Danny Braun and the good people of Plaster Rock and the fun we had on their ice when it was good and blue and ice.
We flew to New Brunswick from Toronto, four of us, in a February freeze. Fred from the Tobique Lions Club was waiting for us with his big white van at the airport in Fredericton and once we’d collected our sticks and our gear, we were on the road north for the two-hour drive to Plaster Rock.
I’d heard the organizer of the World Pond Hockey Championships, Danny Braun, talking on the radio about what it was all about: “It’s carving skates, sticks and pucks and laughter,” he said. That sounded like fun, these World Pond Hockey Championships, so I’d signed us up, me and my friends Nick and Mike and Evan, paid the money, made arrangements. I ordered sweaters, red with black and white trim, and a big exclamation mark on the front, to intimidate people who are scared of punctuation. We were in our 30s, veterans all of many men’s-league campaigns in countless bad-smelling rinks across the years, who took the game just seriously enough but no more than that. Nick and Mike and Evan are all, I should say, better hockey players than me and, looking back, maybe I thought that was enough of a winning formula. As it turned out, we probably should have taken the time to practice together, maybe come up with a plan for how to play, some four-on-four strategies. But in the end, no, that’s not what we did.
There are pond-hockey tournaments everywhere now, but the one at Plaster Rock was one of the earliest to organize, and it’s still the most venerable. No-one, yet, has made the journey from Plaster Rock to the NHL. A thousand or so people live there, amid forests and ferns. The local sawmill is the biggest employer in town; the ferns are principally fiddleheads, which are celebrated at their own annual festival. If you didn’t know that Plaster Rock is the fiddlehead capital of Canada, you must have missed the giant fiddlehead statue that guards the town limits.
They dropped a puck out of a helicopter to get the tournament started. We missed that, but Fred got us to town and down to Roulston Lake in time to take the ice for the first of our Friday-night games. Snow was blowing down through the glare of big lights they’d trucked into that oasis in the boreal dark. They had 24 rinks cleared, and there were games underway on most of them when we skated out to face the team from the Moosehead brewery in Saint John’s. The whole lake was hockey, and if you closed your eyes to listen, you could hear it carefully quoting the work of hockey writers from Betsy Struthers (“the shush of skates”) to Peter Gzowski (“the thwock and clack of the puck”) to R.J. Childerhose (“the shoo-oonk! of skate blades as someone stops”).
I may have fallen into a reverie. From an early age, I’ve had a tendency to narrate the game as I’m playing it, a ponderous muttering habit that I’m sure inhibited my development as a player. To me, the need to describe what’s happening on the ice, to find the right words, has always seemed just as important — maybe more so? — as making it happen.
We were down quickly, 3-0. There were no goalies here. The nets were low and wide-mouthed, a mailbox for posting pucks. All this way we’d come without any real thought of how we wanted to play, or what the conditions might demand. We were slow and bunched-up: the word for us was glacial. We tried to learn from the beer-making boys as they were whomping us, but it was hard to learn lessons and be losing both at the same time. The game went fast. I was trying to think of the right word to describe Nick’s dogged checking when the game ended. Terrier … ish?
Lacking vocabulary and goals, we lost 15-6.
Team Punctuation: Mike and Evan and Nick line up on Plaster Rock ice.
Next game, we tried sending Mike forward on his own while the rest of us stayed back. That worked for a while: Mike poached some goals and we took the lead. Then we got tired, and maybe nervous — it was a hometown team we were up against, with lots of fans by the snowbank. New plan: one man back, everybody else to the attack. That worked to the extent that we only lost that game 14-6. We ate our suppers with our skates on, sitting on hay bales, in the big rinkside tent, where the beer was.
Firemen flooded the rinks with the town truck while we slept Friday night. Saturday morning we sat on our hastily made beds in the suite at the Settler’s Inn & Motel, taped our sticks, tied our skates, and when the time came we clomped through the snow into the woods to find the firemen were back out, giving the ice a final spritz with potato sprayers. It was, we were all agreed, fucking cold: there was a sense that just by showing up you were consenting to a cryogenic future.
In the brisk and the bright we played a team with a mixed Montreal/Cornerbrook lineage and managed to tie them, the Quebec Newfoundlanders, 19-19. Then we started to win. Squaloid might be the word for the way Nick was hunting the puck — it’s a good hockey word, anyway, right up there with temerarious, which describes Evan’s burst of enthusiasm in the final few minutes. Mike just scored, with swagger. I remained semi-glaciated, for my part, but with a nagging persistence in my checking that irked our rivals into making mistakes with a helpful consistency. We were finding our adjectives, now, and we used them to beat another Plaster Rock team, 14-6, followed by a faculty of teachers from Oakville 18-7.
Ice Capacious: Roulston Lake, in happier, icier Championship times.
At the tournament dance that night, at the high school, we didn’t dance so much as limp around the lockers-lined corridor nursing our Mooseheads until we were surprised by the news that we’d made the playoffs. It was hard-to-believe and happy news, though we were too sore to do more than nod before we took our aches back to the Settler’s Inn.
Sunday morning when we woke up it was minus-WTF in the woods outdoors: the thermometer made Saturday’s cold seem like a joke. We had to keep checking to see if our hands were still there in our hockey gloves, because we couldn’t feel them. The players on the team from Washington weren’t just young and just fast, they were serious (and young, and fast). The Frozen Four, they were called. No fooling around with these guys. They made our makeshift attack look like a game for clowns. They had different plans, at least four of them, all elegant and effective, which they switched up with subtle nods. A small dense mass of extra-cold had settled into the slot in front of our net, a micro-climate that we may have briefly hoped might re-inforce our defensive structure, but it didn’t faze the Americans. They were good guys, I have to say, even as they went on smoking us — 21-7 was the final score — and we were pleased for them.
Skates off, boots on, we stood by to watch them play in the semi-final later that polar afternoon, against an even younger, faster, quicker-nodding team from Boston called the Danglers, who edged them by a score of 18-17. In the final, the Danglers (all of whom were, in fact, Canadians) took on the Pepsi Vipers, locally favoured because their captain had once lived in Plaster Rock. Didn’t matter: it was the Danglers who zoomed to a 24-7 victory.
Boston Strong: In the aftermath of the 2004 final, the victorious Boston Danglers (white sweaters) lined up to receive their faux Stanley Cup.
I don’t know that we were as happy, heading for home, as those Danglers, but we were pretty happy. We’d travelled the land to skate on a big New Brunswick lake where, in a forest, blurred by snow, we were as cold as we’d ever been for three days of mostly losing and very little winning. We were still thawing on the flight home to Toronto, and still aching. If there were lessons we’d learned, what were they? It was hard to remember. But we’d been happy the whole time, laughing as we went, win or lose, feeling lucky. Maybe there are actual words for the joy you generate on skates, with a stick in your hand, while trying to corral a puck, among friends, but then again maybe it’s only a feeling you have to try to hold on to.
Pond Hockey Championship co-founder and tournament director Danny Braun in February of 2006.
Cupwinners: Toronto’s championship Davisville Hockey Club, ca. 1911-12 — and their puck. (Image: Courtesy of Toronto Public Library)
Running Up That Score: Canada keeps up the pressure on the Czech goal on this day 100 years ago. Is that Canadian goaltender Jack Cameron heading in on goal, second from left? I think so. Visible in the background is the second rink at the Stade Olympique.
What’s one paltry goal among 30?
A century-old mystery is what it is. On Monday, January 28, 1924, when Canada played its first game of the Olympic tournament at Chamonix, France, the defending champions ran up a mighty score of 30-0 against the toiling team from Czechoslovakia. It was, at the time, the biggest tally of goals in the tournament’s brief history, with the Canadians exactly doubling the bounty Canada’s 1920 team had bagged against Czechoslovakia.
How much of a rout was it, out there on the open-air rink beneath Mont Blanc? Enough that the last goal Canada scored in the first period — the eighth — happened so quickly after the seventh goal that the official scorer didn’t see who scored it, leaving a hole in the summary, a blank that lasts to this day.
Could the scorer not have asked the Canadians whodunit? You’d think so, but apparently that didn’t happen. Paging back through historical newspapers doesn’t clarify anything. Dispatches that reached Canadian papers tend to mention Harry Watson scoring the seventh, followed by “another Canadian.”
W.A. Hewitt, who was on hand as both manager of the Canadian team and sporting editor of the Toronto Daily Star, credits Hooley Smith with three goals in the first period and Watson with five. But then most other accounts give right winger Bert McCaffrey a goal in the first while limiting Watson to just three.
Papers in the U.S. reported the score, but they were more interested in the outcome of the American game that same day against the Belgians. European papers that were covering the Olympics didn’t bother reporting names of goalscorers at all.
So: the mystery persists.
Chamonix Set-Up: Map of the Olympic venue in 1924. Speedskaters and skiers raced around the perimeter of the hockey and figure-skating rinks while curlers kept to their own ice, at bottom right.
Until it’s solved definitively, the consensus is that Harry Watson scored 11 goals that afternoon 100 years ago, Hooley Smith 4, Bert McCaffery 3, Dunc Munro 3, Beattie Ramsay 3, Harold McMunn 3, Sig Slater 2, unknown 1.
None of the contemporary reports of the trouncing mention any of the Czech players, so let’s at least name Vladimir Stransky, the goaltender. This was his first Canadian onslaught, though several of his teammates had played in the 1920 undoing by the Winnipeg Falcons, including Josef Sroubek, Otakar Vindys, and Vilem Loos.
There were some good skaters among the Czechs, Hewitt allowed, and they checked “very strenuously at times.” The Canadians weren’t much scathed — “except Hooley Smith, who had his tongue cut slightly in a tumble.”
The game got going around 3.30 in the afternoon, in daylight, but it didn’t end there: it finished under lights — distant lights, mostly, according to Hewitt. “Darkness falls very quickly in the valley, and it was pitch dark when the game finished.”
The French enjoyed our Canadian vim and vigor. Here’s Paris-Soir:
The matches played yesterday Monday allowed us to see the teams of the United States and Canada play, which we will certainly see again, because it is not going too far to predict that we will find them battling in the final. It is also certain that in this next part, the advantage will remain with the Canadians who yesterday proved a truly overwhelming superiority. It is true that they only played against Czech-Slovakia; but they still inflicted 30 goals to 0! This Canadian team combines remarkable power with skill and virtuosity which are truly a feast for the eyes.
Why did Canadian players run up such big scores? Billy Hewitt addressed this very question in a Toronto Daily Star column headlined
WHY CANADIAN PLAYERS RAN UP SUCH BIG SCORES
in which he explained that, under tournament rules, goal average would count in the final in case of a tie: there would be no overtime. “It was most important, therefore, to get as many goals as possible in the 60 minutes.”
Man About Olympics: Billy Hewitt (Foster’s dad) was a busy man in Chamonix, managing Canada’s team, filing reports home to the Toronto Daily Star, and refereeing a couple of games.
The week before the games got going, the Olympic hockey committee had re-iterated that the tournament would be played mostly by “Canadian rules,” which is to say OHA regulations, as had been the case in 1920. This time, though, the U.S. introduced an amendment that would forbid goaltenders from falling to their knees or lying down, and won the day on this: as had been the rule (briefly) in the NHL until a week into the inaugural 1917-18 season, goaltenders in France had to stay on their feet or risk penalty. Canada voted against this amendment, as did Great Britain and Sweden: they lost.
U.S. coach and manager William Haddock had also lobbied to play three 15-minute periods, which was the custom in the U.S., but the committee voted him down on that, so the games played with 20-minute stanzas.
What else? The Olympic rink was, as mentioned, outdoors. And big: 230 feet long by 98 feet wide, bigger than the North American indoor norm (NHL rinks would eventually settle on dimensions of 200 x 85). In Chamonix, there were two of these side by side on the vast expanse of ice that made up the Olympic stadium. The nets were Canadian-pattern, but rickety — “very unstable,” Hewitt said.
Rather than regular boards familiar to the North Americans, the rinks were surrounded by six-inch bumpers. This surprised the Canadians, but didn’t faze them. Hewitt:
The players found they could play the sides by keeping the puck low, and it was extraordinary how few times the puck left the ice at the sides. No time was lost when it did, as the Canadians had a good supply of the best Canadian-made pucks along, and kept the referee supplied with sufficient to keep the game going all the time. Netting was put up at the ends of the rink and saved many a long chase after a puck when the shot was wide. The committee had men on skates stationed on all sides of the rink to retrieve the puck, and only one was lost the first day, when three games were played.
First up, in the morning, Sweden opened the tournament with a 9-0 win over Switzerland. “The Swiss seemed to know little more than the rudiments of the game,” was the gist of one report; an unattributed Toronto Daily Star dispatch classed it a “a tame affair.” That might have been Billy Hewitt saying that: he refereed the game, so maybe preferred not to put his name to an opinion.
The U.S. took the ice next, at 1.30, with Canada’s captain, Dunc Munro, as referee. The Americans carried the day easily, winning by a score of 19-0. Coach Haddock complained that while he was pleased by the win, he thought his players had relied too much on individual efforts and needed to play more as a team. “A passing game will be required when stiffer opposition is encountered, he pointed out,” according to the Associated Press.
Leading the way for the Americans was centreman Herb Drury, who scored six goals. (He stayed on the ice to referee Canada’s game.) Wingers Willard Rice, Frank Synott, and Jerry McCarthy scored five, three, and two goals, respectively, with defenceman Taffy Abel chipping in two past the Belgian goaltender, whose name no North American report mentioned.
Alphonse Lacroix was the American goaltender, or Frenchy, as they called him back home. Like Drury and Abel, he’d make it to the NHL. The circumstances weren’t optimal for Lacroix: he was the man Leo Dandurand drafted to fill the Montreal Canadiens’ net when legend Georges Vézina fell ill in the fall of 1925.
Backing up Lacroix in France was a goaltender named John Langley. With three minutes left in the U.S. lambasting of the Belgians, he petitioned coach Haddock to let him take the ice as a forward. When the coach agreed, Langley doffed his pads and skated into the action. Before he could touch the puck, though, Belgian captain Andre Popliment raised his objection. According to Olympic rules, goaltenders were only eligible to play goal. Langley, it was reported, “retired gracefully.”
Winterland, 1924: The Stade Olympique at Chamonix, in the valley below Mont Blanc.
Ice Time: A group of skaters and shinnyists on the ice at Seba Beach, Alberta, on the ice of Wabamun Lake, west of Edmonton, in 1912. (Image: Courtesy of Glenbow Library and Archives Collection, Libraries and Cultural Resources Digital Collections, University of Calgary)
Puck Battle: Photographer Frederick Bertram Cooper caught these skaters in his lens circa 1912—14, out for a skate and a shinny on the Elbow River at Calgary, Alberta. Those are the domes of St. Mary’s Catholic Church off in the distance. (Image: CU173688, Courtesy of Glenbow Library and Archives Collection, Libraries and Digital Collections, University of Calgary)
Out And About: A young would-be Jean Béliveau was tromping the streets of Quebec City in the 1950s, presumably, when photographer Rosemary Eaton paused him for a portrait. The Christmas-coloured Quebec Aces of the QSHL were, of course, Béliveau’s team in the early ’50, before he joined the Montreal Canadiens for the 1953-54 NHL season. (Image: Rosemary Gilliat Eaton, Library and Archives Canada)
Foothills Face-Off: Women on the rink, under the mountain, at Banff, Alberta, circa 1904-05. (Image: Glenbow Library and Archives Collection, Libraries and Digital Collections, University of Calgary)
puckstruck 