Pete Muldoon

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.

seattle, 1919: jack mcdonald caps a comeback

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La Sainte-Flanelle: Montreal winger Jack McDonald scored the last goal (a game-winner) in the 1919 Stanley Cup championship series before it was abandoned.

Canadiens owner and coach George Kennedy was (and I quote) tickled as a schoolboy. That’s what the Montreal Gazette reported after an epic Stanley Cup finals win for his team on a Saturday of this same date 103 years ago. “I always claimed I had a game team,” Kennedy effused in the aftermath, “and the boys certainly proved it last night. I expect them to win the championship now.”

This was the fifth game of the infamous 1919 championship series, in which the NHL Canadiens were in Seattle to take on the PCHA’s powerhouse Metropolitans. Going into the game on March 29, Seattle was up two games to one, with the teams having tied (and set aside) another game.

After falling behind by three goals, Montreal had bustled back to score four in a row in the third period, setting up an overtime that veteran Canadiens winger Jack McDonald settled by scoring Montreal’s winning goal.

For all of George Kennedy’s optimism, the local Mets were generally thought to have the upper hand going into the deciding game, which was scheduled for Tuesday, April 1, given that it would be played under west-coast rules.

It wasn’t to be, of course. With players and officials from both teams suffering from symptoms of Spanish flu, the deciding game was abandoned. Kennedy actually declared that Montreal was forfeiting the game, which would have meant a Seattle win, but Mets coach Pete Muldoon refused to accept it. Kennedy’s suggestion that Montreal borrow players from the PCHA’s Victoria team went nowhere. For the first time since the Stanley Cup’s inception in 1893, no winner was declared.

On Saturday, April 5, a week after the teams had skated in that last game, 37-year-old Montreal defenceman Joe Hall died of the pneumonia he’d developed after contracting the flu. He was buried three days later in Vancouver.

Jack McDonald, who was 32 in 1919, had been a teammate of Hall’s with the Stanley-Cup-winning 1912 Quebec Hockey Club. McDonald was ill that spring in Seattle, too, though he and the rest of the hockey players survived. He would have known how fortunate he was: in early March of 1919, he’d earned that flu had killed a brother of his, Emmett, in Siberia, where he’d been serving as a bombardier with the Canadian Expeditionary Force.

 

amazons prime

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Banff Bosses: The 1922 Vancouver Amazons. Top rank, from left: Betty Hinds, Florence Johnson, manager Guy Patrick, Phoebe Senkler, Amelia Voitkevic. Bottom, from left: Lorraine Cannon, Kathleen Carson, Nan Griffith, Nora Senkler, Mayme Leahy. (Image: City of Vancouver Archives)

“In all Canada — the land of scenic grandeur and romance — there are no events that portray the national spirit to a greater extent than the Banff Winter Carnival.” So ran the marketing, anyway, for the annual Alberta jamboree that in 1922 embraced the winter in late January and into February with a festival of curling, “art” (i.e. figure) skating, snowshoe-racing, “ski running and jumping,” tobogganing, swimming (in the warmth of the local sulphur pools), and hockey.

The Banff women’s hockey tournament featured three teams, as far as I can tell, a pair from nearby Calgary, the Byngs and (the Alpine Cup holders) the Regents along with the Vancouver’s Amazons. The latter were owned by Frank Patrick, who was (along with brother Lester) the founder of the PCHA and all-round baron of West-Coast hockey. The team’s coach was a younger Patrick brother, Guy, who served in the First World War with the Canadians Expeditionary Force before retiring to manage Vancouver’s (Patrick-built) Denman Arena. Also attending the team at Banff, though she doesn’t appear in the team portrait above: the team’s chaperone, Mrs. B.E. Green.

The Amazons lost their opening game 1-0 to the Byngs, with Lucy Lee scored the deciding goal for Calgary. “Fine goalkeeping on either side made the game an interesting one to watch,” the Vancouver Daily World decided.

“The mainstay of the Vancouver team is undoubtedly Kathleen Carson, who played a speedy game on left wing,” according to the Calgary Albertan. Vancouver captain Phoebe Senkler was (said the Vancouver Sun) “a tower of strength on defence,” though she eventually had to leave the game after falling and injuring a knee. “For the Byngs, Miss [Helen] Tees in goal could show many men how the nets could be guarded as Miss Carson’s shots were equal to those of Tommy Phillips of Rat Portage fame, so said some fans.”

I’m not sure that the Byngs and the Regents met in Banff; the Amazons duly claimed the Alpine Cup by beating the Regents 2-1 in overtime in what the Albertan called “one of the fastest games ever witnessed at the mountain resort.” With Phoebe Senkler unable to play, the Amazons used Helen Tees of the Byngs as a substitute on defence.

Syd Brewster was credited Calgary’s goal, though the puck seems to have gone in after a Vancouver pass hit a Vancouver skate. For the Amazons, it was Kathleen Carson scoring a pair to decide the matter.

The game was not, as they say, without incident. Here’s the Vancouver’s Province on a first-period fracas:

Florence Johnson [of the Amazons] was penalized for two minutes after being hit on the head by one of the Regents, to which she retaliated. After going to the penalty box she collapsed and had just reached the dressing room when [teammate] Nannie Griffiths was laid out, leaving the Amazons with only six players. Although shot after shot was rained in, it was impossible for the Regents to penetrate the Amazons goal, owing to the “eagle eye” of Amelia Voitkevic, who played a magnificent game.

One last social note: Kathleen Carson and Guy Patrick were married in Vancouver in September of 1922. Lester Patrick was on hand, though I don’t know that Frank was. Standing up as best man was Pete Muldoon, a former coach of the Vancouver Ladies Hockey Team who also steered the PCHA’s Seattle Metropolitans to a Stanley Cup championship in 1917 and, in 1926, was named the very first coach of the Chicago Black Hawks.

seattle’s first pick (1915 edition)

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First To The Stripes: Seattle’s original Met, Bobby Rowe. ((David Eskenazi Collection)

“We wanted players with character,” Seattle Kraken GM Ron Francis told the TV audience. “We certainly wanted players that compete hard.” It was just past 5 p.m. in the west-coast afternoon yesterday as Francis prepared to disclose the (already leaked) rosterful of players with which the NHL’s newest team makes its way toward a fall debut as the league’s 32nd team. The first name to be announced in this latest NHL Expansion Draft was that of Jeremy Lauzon, the 24-year-old defenceman from Val-d’Or, Quebec, who was last seen plying pucks and d-zone coverage for the Boston Bruins. 

It’s been a two-and-a-half-year road that Seattle’s new team has followed to this point: since, that is, the NHL granted the city its franchise in December of 2018. It’s not Seattle’s first foray into big-league hockey, of course: the Metropolitans were a thriving concern in the pre-NHL years of the old Pacific Coast Hockey Association during and beyond the tumultuous years of the First World War. They even contrived to win the Stanley Cup in 1917, just two years after they’d launched, becoming the first U.S. team to claim hockey’s most coveted trophy.

The panjandrums behind the PCHA were the industrious Patrick brothers, Lester and Frank, and they were thinking of a Seattle team right from the start. The hitch, in 1912: Seattle didn’t yet have a rink to skate in. It was 1915 before that was rectified, and that March, Frank Patrick, the PCHA president, announced that the city would be joining Vancouver (Millionaires), Victoria (Aristocrats), and Portland, Oregon, (Rosebuds) in hosting teams for the upcoming season. 

That was scheduled to start in early December. By November, the new team, which was owned by the Patricks, had a coach in Pete Muldoon; a name, Metropolitans, borrowed from the company that built the Seattle Ice Arena; and uniforms. “If he has nothing else,” the Victoria Daily Times reported, quoting Muldoon, “he has the loudest uniforms in the circuit. They are light green, crimson, and white, with sox to match. It is a striped affair.”

The first player to sign on? Therein lies a tale we might tell here. 1915 was the year that competition between the PCHA and the eastern NHA burst into all-out chequebook war. As Craig Bowlsby smartly details in his definitive history Empire of Ice: The Rise and Fall of the PCHA, 1911-26 (2012), the hostilities would end up defining the identity and fortunes of Seattle’s team on its road to the Stanley Cup championship of 1917. In 1915, it translated into the Mets raiding the roster of the 1914 Cup champions, Toronto’s NHA Blueshirts, to poach the talented likes of Frank Foyston and Jack Walker along with goaltender Hap Holmes and the ruthless defenceman Cully Wilson.

But before any of them inked a Seattle contract, Frank Patrick did some wheeling and dealing with … himself. Just 29, he was still playing in 1914-15, working the defence for another team he owned, the Vancouver Millionaires, and helping them claim the 1915 Stanley Cup. To help Seattle find its feet, he decided to cede Vancouver’s rookie sensation to the expansion team, right winger Barney Stanley. Just 22, Stanley, a son of Paisley, in Ontario’s southwestern Bruce County, had made a distinct impression in Vancouver’s championship run, scoring six goals in the team’s three-game sweep of the NHA Ottawa Senators, including four in the deciding game. Elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1963, he would subsequently star with the WCHL’s Calgary Tigers and Edmonton Eskimos. He played a single game in the NHL, for the Chicago Black Hawks, a team he also coached, briefly and unsuccessfully, in 1927-28.  

So Barney Stanley was the first Seattle Met. Except that, well, he never played a game for the team. Back in the Pacific-coast pre-season of 1915, the war of the contracts saw Frank Patrick’s Millionaires lose one of their biggest stars, centreman Frank Nighbor, whom the Ottawa Senators were able to lure back east. When that happened, Patrick revoked his generosity and cancelled the Stanley-to-Seattle deal, clawing him back for service in Vancouver. 

Next up, for Seattle, was another right winger, Bobby Rowe. A son of the hamlet of Heathcote, Ontario, south of Collingwood, he was 30 in 1915, a veteran (former teammate) of the Patrick brothers on the NHA’s Renfrew Creamery Kings. He was described in his day as “exceedingly fast” (1911) and a “wonderful hockeyist” who practiced “a clever, hard-working game at all times” (also ’13). Rowe had skated in four seasons, subsequently, for Lester Patrick’s PCHA team in Victoria, the Aristocrats, when the Patricks decided that he’d best be bound for Seattle.

Rowe spent the summer of 1915 working on a Prairie farm, arriving in Victoria ready to skate at the start of November. “Rowe had a good year harvesting,” the local Daily Times duly reported, “working 50 odd days, and could have stayed until close to Christmas had he cared to. Upon his arrival … he was informed of his transfer to the Seattle Ice Hockey team, and immediately signed a contract.”

Muldoon added Foyston, Walker, Wilson and Holmes later that same week, along defencemen Roy Rickey and Eddie Carpenter; later in the month, he’d snag another Victoria Aristocrat, scoring sensation, Bernie Morris. As mentioned, all of these players (and Muldoon, too) would figure in Seattle’s 1917 historic Stanley Cup championship.

Though maybe let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves, in the past. 

Before all that, on the Tuesday night of December 7, 1915, Seattle played its very first major-league, beating the Victoria Aristocrats at the Seattle Ice Arena by a score of 3-2. That old rink is no more, but it was situated near the present-day Seattle Public Library, about 2.4 kilometres southeast of the Climate Pledge Arena where the Kraken will be playing their games. 

“A strenuous game throughout,” is what the correspondent from Victoria’s Daily Times saw that night in 1915. “It was the introduction of the premier Canadian winter sport to the Seattle public, and it took well. Some 2,500 persons were seated in the new structure, and nine-tenth [sic] of this number had never seen the game before. But the game had only been in progress a few minutes when they were up in their seats yelling advice to the home players.”

Bernie Morris scored the deciding goal for Seattle in the third; Victoria’s Albert Kerr and Seattle’s Cully Wilson were ejected from the game by referee Mickey Ion that same frame for what the Times classified as “rough work.” 

That leaves just one more detail from night to be added. In the interest of restoring a lost fragment of hockey history to the game’s annals (a specialty of the house, here, along with all manner of icy obscurities), could we note the presence on the ice of a player who seems to have been all but effaced from the records, threadbare as they may be when it comes to the PCHA? 

I’m thinking here of Leo Haas, a centreman, who was 24 in 1915. He was from Houghton, Michigan, which is where he learned his hockey, playing for his high-school team and, later, turning heads for the Portage Lake team that won a state championship. “He can handle the stick with the best men yet seen here,” the Calumet News reported in 1913, “while his skating and combination play are excellent.”

It’s not clear how Pete Muldoon got wind of him, but early that November in 1915 west-coast newspapers were reporting that Haas had been summoned for service with the fledgling Mets. With no pro experience, he seems to have been on trial, which apparently didn’t work out so well: by mid-December, Muldoon had released him. Beyond that, the trail of his hockey career goes cold.

Still, Haas’ short stay with Seattle isn’t without distinction. He did play in that inaugural Seattle game on December 7, 1915, taking the ice as the Mets’ lone substitute in the second period after Jack Walker hurt his ankle while scoring Seattle’s second goal. And he was back in the line-up for Seattle’s next game, too, in Victoria, on December 10.

That would make Haas the very first American born and trained player in Seattle’s major-league hockey history. His Mets teammate Ed Carpenter, it’s true, was another Michigander, from Hartford, but his family had moved to Lachute when he was just young, so he learned his hockey in Quebec. 

Not Quite A Met: Barney Stanley in Vancouver Millionaires garb, in a print from c. 1919 doctored by an editor for newspaper publication. (Image: Stuart Thomson, Vancouver Public Library)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a fine argument on the ice

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Coastal Crew: The Vancouver Ladies Hockey Team line up on the steps of the Denman Street Arena circa 1914. Back row, left to right (as originally captioned) they are Connie Smith (right wing), Betty Hinds (rover), Pete Muldoon (manager), Nellie Haddon (centre), Miss Matheson (left wing). From, from left: Mrs. French (coverpoint), Mrs. L.N. McKechnie (goal), Mrs. Percival (point). (Image: Stuart Thomson, City of Vancouver Archives)

“Mr. Muldoon is of the opinion that there is sufficient class among the Vancouver ladies to give either of the opposition teams a fine argument on the ice.” This was February of 1914, and Pete Muldoon was looking to raise a women’s team in Vancouver to challenge those already on skates elsewhere in British Columbia that winter. Come one, come all, the word went out: first practice would be held on  Monday the 9th at the Denman Street Arena between 11 and noon.

In 1911, hockey’s famous Patricks — father Joseph along with sons Frank and Lester — put the family’s lumber fortune into building rinks and launching professional hockey in Canada’s westernmost province. When the three-team Pacific Coast Hockey Association got going in January of 1912, it counted in its ranks players whose names today figure among the most famous in the annals of the game, Cyclone Taylor, Newsy Lalonde, and the Patrick brothers among them.

Pete Muldoon played for Frank Patrick’s Vancouver Millionaires, but it was as a manager and coach that he’d make his name. His PCHA Seattle Metropolitans played three times for the Stanley Cup, winning it in 1917. In 1926, when Major Frederic McLaughlin bought the Portland Rosebuds and turned them into the NHL’s Chicago Black Hawks, Muldoon was their first coach. He resigned after a year, unless he was fired — either way, the legend goes that he cast the curse that kept the Hawks out of first place in the NHL for 41 years when the spell was lifted/broken/proved to be bunkum.

Back to 1914 and the women’s game. As Wayne Norton’s Women On Ice: The Early Years of Women’s Hockey in Western Canada (2009) explains, when women’s teams from New Westminster and Victoria played each other in Victoria that February, Muldoon hatched the idea that he’d put together a Vancouver team to challenge the winner for the B.C. championship. Never mind that there were various other women’s teams playing elsewhere in the province — Muldoon and company conveniently forgot about them.

Following that first February practice at the Denman Street Arena and several more besides, the team made its debut on February 20. Wearing the the maroon-and-white sweaters of the PCHA Millionaires and playing seven-a-side, the Vancouver Ladies beat Victoria 1-0 on a goal by Betty Hinds. The intermission entertainment included a performance by Coach Muldoon skating on stilts. The newspaper coverage was as casually and tiresomely sexist as you might expect, with the Vancouver Daily World reporting that

The game was exciting from start to finish and it was not all “butter fingers” playing at that. Some of the hockey exhibited by one or two of the local ladies and some of the Victoria ladies would certainly make many hockey players take notice.

Victoria and New Westminster had previously tied their game, so that when the Millionaires travelled to play the final game in the series, a win by New Westminster gave them the not exactly inclusive) title of provincial champions.

returning to stanley cup play, 1919 edition

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Messrs. Met: After battling Montreal’s Canadiens in 1919’s abandoned Stanley Cup finals, the Seattle Metropolitans returned in 1920 to represent the PCHA against the NHL’s Ottawa Senators. That 1919-20 line-up featured, up front, left to right, are Jack Walker, Frank Foyston, Bernie Morris, and Jim Riley. Backing them, from left: coach Pete Muldoon, Bobby Rowe, Charles Tobin, Muzz Murray, trainer Bill Anthony, Roy Rickey, Hap Holmes.

Spanish flu stopped the Stanley Cup finals in their tracks in Seattle in April of 1919, when players from both the visiting Montreal Canadiens and the hometown Metropolitans were stricken before the deciding game could be played.

That wasn’t the worst of it, of course: within a week of the series having been abandoned, Canadiens defenceman Joe Hall died in a Seattle hospital of the pneumonia he’d developed. He was 37.

Hall was buried in Vancouver in early April. Some of his teammates stayed on in Seattle to convalesce after their own bouts with the killer flu; most trundled home on eastbound trains.

Canadiens coach and captain Newsy Lalonde was back in Montreal by mid-April, where he told the local Gazette that Canadiens had received the best of care during their illnesses. “The games were the most strenuous I have been in,” he added, “and I would not like to go through another such experience for any amount.”

In the year that COVID-19 has made of 2020, hockey’s 100-year-old experience of another pandemic has been much discussed. But while the deadly unfinished finals of 1919 have been documented in detail, hockey’s subsequent plans for returning to play — for resuming the series that sickness had interrupted, and for making sure the Stanley Cup was indeed awarded that year — have been all but forgotten.

Most recent accounts of the events of that first post-war Stanley Cup encounter keep their focus narrowed on those tragic April days of 1919 and not beyond. When they do consider what happened next — well, Gare Joyce’s big feature for Sportsnet earlier in our locked-down spring spells out the common assumption. In 1919, Joyce posits, “There was never any thought about a replay or rematch.”

That’s not, in fact, the case.

With the modern-day NHL marching inexorably towards ending its 2020 coronavirus interruption, let’s consider, herewith, those 1919 efforts to finish up Seattle’s never-ended Stanley Cup finals and how they kept the parties involved talking, back and forth, for nearly a year.

There was even a plan, if only short-lived, whereby two Stanley Cup finals, the 1919 and the 1920, would have been played simultaneously.

No-Go: Seattle Star ad for the final. never-to-be-played game of the 1919 Stanley Cup finals.

That final fated game in Seattle in 1919 was scheduled for Tuesday, April 1. But before a puck could be dropped at 8.30 p.m. sharp, with the players on both teams too ill to play, workers were in at the Seattle Ice Arena at noon to break up the ice in preparation for the roller-skating season ahead.

For the next week, all the pro hockey news in Canada was grimly medical, tracking which of the suffering players and officials were improving and who among them might be waning. After Joe Hall’s shocking death on Saturday, April 5, and his funeral in Vancouver the following Tuesday, the news moved on altogether.

Occasionally, in the ensuing weeks, a medical update popped up: towards the end of June, for instance, when Canadiens winger Jack McDonald was finally well enough to leave Seattle and head for home while still recovering from his illness. He’d been Hall’s roommate during the finals, and his own case of influenza was serious enough to have required surgery on his lungs.

Mostly through the summer the hockey world stayed quiet.

Until August. That’s when the first public suggestions that the Stanley Cup series might be revived started to appear. The reports were vague, no sources named. The Ottawa Citizen carried one such, towards the end of the month:

It is stated there is a great possibility of the Canadien Hockey team going to the Pacific Coast to play off the Stanley Cup series which was interrupted by the influenza epidemic last spring.

Whatever negotiations may have been happening behind the scenes, Toronto’s Globe had word a few days later that optimism for a resumption of the finals wasn’t exactly surging out on the west coast. “It is pointed out that the Seattle artificial ice rink does not open until late in December,” that dispatch read, and so any games after that date would clash with the regular PCHA schedule. Also: “the expense of the trip is an important consideration.”

Frank Patrick, president of the PCHA, was on the same page. “There will be no East vs. West series on the Pacific coast in December,” he said as summer turned to fall, “nor will there be any Stanley Cup series, until after our regular series.”

“Such a series is impracticable,” he went on. “The Seattle rink will not be open until December 26.  … There is absolutely no chance for a series with the East until next spring.”

As definitive as that sounds, the prospect of a return to Stanley Cup play continued.

In This (Western) Corner: PCHA president Frank Patrick.

In October, a report that appeared in the Vancouver Daily Worldand elsewhere cited unidentified Montreal sources when it reported that in the “scarcity of hockey rinks” out east, there was a “very strong probability” that Canadiens would indeed head to the Pacific coast to decide the thing for once and for all.

Names were named: Montreal coach and captain Newsy Lalonde was definitely up for the journey, as was teammate Didier Pitre. Passively voiced assurance was also given that there would be “no trouble about the remainder of the team.”

Canadiens’ owner George Kennedy was not only on board, he was happy to drive: “… it is even understood he is even considering to take the team, or at least part of it, to the Coast by automobile along the Lincoln Highway, which runs from Brooklyn to Spokane.”

The plan, apparently, was to play only a best-of-three series to decide the 1919 Cup, theWorldexplained. “The matches would be played about the second week in December.”

But for every flicker of affirmation, there was, that fall, an equal and opposite gust of denial. A few days further on into October, Vancouver’s Province was once again declaring the whole plan, which it attributed to Kennedy, defunct, mainly due to the persistent problem that Seattle Ice Arena wouldn’t be getting its ice until after Christmas.

“And furthermore, a pre-season series would kill off interest in the annual spring clashes.”

Towards the end of the month, Seattle coach Pete Muldoon confirmed that the plan hadbeen Kennedy’s and that it had been rejected. Under the proposed scenario, neither team would have been able to practice before an agreed date, whereafter the Montreal and Seattle squads would each have had a week or so to play themselves into shape before facing off.

“There was considerable merit to the proposal,” Muldoon said, but again, alas — Seattle would have no ice to play on before the end of the year, whereafter the regular 1920 PCHA season would be getting underway.

“Accordingly,” said Muldoon, “the proposition was turned down.”

With that, the certainty that the 1919 Stanley Cup would remain unfinished was … well, only almost established, with one more last hurrah still waiting to take its turn five months down the road.

In the meantime, as hockey’s two big leagues prepared to restart their new respective regular seasons, they found a new point of Stanley Cup contention to wrangle over.

There were many subjects on which the two rival leagues didn’t agree in those years. The eastern pro loop was the National Hockey Association before the advent, in 1917, of the NHL, while the western operation was a project of Frank and Lester Patrick’s. While there had been periods of cooperation and consultation between east and west through almost a decade of cross-continental co-existence, there had also been plenty of conflict.

Year after year, the rivals competed, not always scrupulously, for hockey talent. On the ice, they each played by their own rules. PCHA teams iced seven men each, played their passes forward, took penalty shots on rinks featuring goal creases and blue lines. They didn’t do any of that in the six-aside east — not until later, anyway, as the western league ran out of steam and money in the 1920s and was absorbed by the NHL, along with many of the Patricks’ innovations that hadn’t already been embraced.

Since 1914, one thing the two leagues hadagreed on was that with their respective champions meeting annually to play for the Stanley Cup, they would alternate venues between central Canada and the west coast.

That’s how the 1919 finals ended up in Seattle. If they couldn’t be completed, then the time had come to look ahead to 1920, the second-last year of the alternating deal.

The problem there? At the end of 1919, both leagues maintained that it was rightly their turn to host.

When the PCHA was first to argue the case, when it convened its league meeting towards the end of November in Vancouver. “The directors decided,” the Daily World’s reporter noted, “that in view of the fact that the series last spring was not completed, the series this season should be played on the coast. President Patrick was authorized to arrange, if possible, with the National Hockey League for the eastern champions to come west.”

There were scheduling and weather aspects to this position, too: with the PCHA season continuing through the end of March, the directors worried that the NHL’s natural-ice rinks wouldn’t be playable by the time the western champions made their way cross-country.

In This (Eastern) Corner: NHL president Frank Calder.

The NHL read the reports and issued a statement. “No official request has come to us intimating that the Stanley Cup series should be played in the west again this year,” president Frank Calder said. As for ice concerns, he noted that in fact Toronto’s Arena Gardens did indeed have an ice plant, and in the event of thawing elsewhere, the finals could always be played at the Mutual Street rink.

Meanwhile, both leagues continued to prepare to launch their own regular seasons. In the west, the same three teams would play among themselves, with Seattle’s Metropolitans in the running again along with the Vancouver Millionaires and Victoria’s Aristocrats.

For the NHL, it would be a third season on ice. The league’s 1919 session had ended, let’s remember, with a bit of a bleat. Having started the year with just three teams, the NHL reached the end of its second year with just two, after the defending Stanley Cup champions, Toronto’s Arenas, faltered and folded in February, leaving Canadiens and Ottawa Senators to play for the right to head to Seattle.

Ahead of the new campaign set to open just before Christmas, there was a rumour that Toronto might return to the NHL fold with two teams, and that Montreal could be getting a second team, too, with Art Ross reviving the Wanderers franchise that had collapsed in 1918, early in the NHL’s inaugural season. Quebec was another possibility.

By another report, Toronto was a no-go altogether — the city had never been a viable hockey market, anyway, the story went, and the league would be much better off concentrated in eastern Ontario and Quebec.

In December, when the music stopped, Quebec did get a team, the Athletics. So too did Toronto, when Fred Hambly, chairman of the city’s Board of Education, bought the old Arena franchise. Reviving the name of an early NHA team, they were originally called the Tecumsehs. On paper, at least: within a couple days the team had been rebranded again, this time as the Toronto St. Patricks.

One More Time? Speculation from August of 1919 that the Stanley Cup finals would resume.

Nothing had been resolved on the Stanley Cup front by the time the NHL’s directors met for their annual get-together in Ottawa on December 20. They did now have in hand correspondence from Frank Patrick confirming the PCHA’s provocative position. “The matter was brought up,” the Daily World duly reported, “but the Eastern delegates could not give Patrick a concession on his letter.”

George Kennedy of the Canadiens was “particularly riled:” was it Montreal’s fault that the finals had to be abandoned? Obviously not. (Kennedy was also said to be “het up.”)

There was a suggestion that the matter would be referred to William Foran, the secretary of Canada’s Civil Service Commission who’d served as a Stanley Cup trustee since 1907 and was the go-to arbiter in disputes between the two pro leagues. “His services will likely be called on in a short time,” devotees of the ongoing drama learned.

On it went, and on. By the end of February, the race for the NHL title had Ottawa’s Senators tied atop the standing with Toronto, with Montreal not far behind. Ottawa was feeling confident enough, or sufficiently outraged, to put out a public statement that the club was adamantly opposed to going west to play for the Cup.

“Patrick’s claim,” an unnamed team director said, “that the games should be played elsewhere than in one of the National League teams [sic] is based on a technicality and is a most unreasonable one.”

Asked for his view, William Foran “did not care to express any opinion as to the dispute.” He was willing to opine on the quality of the winter’s hockey that the NHL was displaying:, it was, he declared, “the finest and cleanest on record.”

Maybe was the answer in … Winnipeg?

That was an idea that Frank Patrick had floated earlier in February. W.J. Holmes, the owner of the city’s naturally iced Amphitheatre rink, was on board, and he had been in contact with Frank Calder, hoping to coax him and his league to a prairie compromise with a promise of hard ice through the end of March.

“We certainly could not play in the east before March 22,” Patrick said, “but would ready to play in Winnipeg no later than March 19. It is now up to the east.”

But the NHL’s governors put a nix on a Manitoba finals during a special February meeting at Montreal’s Windsor Hotel, where the league had been born just over two years earlier.

And so the debate trudged on in March. Out west, all three PCHA teams were still locked in close contention for the league championship, while in the east, Ottawa claimed their place in the finals, wherever they might be played, with three games remaining in the schedule. The season was divided, still, in those years into halves, but with the Senators having prevailed in both, there was no need for a playoff.

Frank Patrick still didn’t think an eastern finals was going to work. Apart from issues related to melting ice, his teams worried that they’d be undermanned. Vancouver, for instance, would be without Cyclone Taylor and Gordie Roberts, whose non-hockey jobs would keep them from travelling.

Ottawa’s position hadn’t changed. “The Ottawas feel that in fairness to their supporters,” a local report reported on March 3, “they ought to have the matches played here.” William Foran was now, apparently, involved, and though the team had no news of developments, officials remained confident that the western champions would yield and travel east.

If not, well, they had job-related problems of their own: several key Senators players, including captain Eddie Gerard and goaltender Clint Benedict, wouldn’t be able to get away for a western sortie.

This, despite a report from Calgary — on the very same day — that Ottawa had been inquiring about playing exhibition games in Alberta on their westward way to the coast.

The whole was just about resolved by the end of the week. “We will be in the east by March 22,” Frank Patrick was quoted as saying on March 6. “That has all been settled.”

And so it was. Still, the prospect that the 1919 Stanley Cup might actually yet be completed nearly a year after it failed to finish did rear its head one last time. With all three teams in contention for the PCHA title in mid-March of 1920, Montreal’s George Kennedy let it be known that Newsy Lalonde had been talking to his Seattle counterpart, Pete Muldoon, about the possibility of reviving the 1919 series even as the 1920 finals were getting underway.

One Last Try: A final whisper of a possibility, from March of 1920.

Seattle would have to lose out on the current year’s PCHA title, of course, for the plan to move forward. If that happened, Canadiens were said to be ready to head west to finish out the previous year’s finals while Victoria or Vancouver went the other way to take on Ottawa. Playing just a single make-up game wouldn’t be viable, in terms of cost, so as previously, the teams would settle the matter of the 1919 Cup with a three-game series.

Duelling Stanley Cup finals would have been something to see, but as it turned out, Seattle put an end to the possibility by surpassing Vancouver to win the right to vie for the 1920 Cup.

William Foran had been keeping the Stanley Cup safe ever since Toronto won it in the spring of 1918. (It seems that the vaunted trophy didn’t even make the journey to Seattle in 1919.) Now, as Ottawa prepared to host the finals, he loaned it to the Senators so they could put it on display in the shop window of R.J. Devlin’s, furrier and hatter, on Ottawa’s downtown Sparks Street.

The weather was mild in Canada’s capital the week of March 15, prompting one more last-ditch offer from Frank Patrick to switch back west. Ottawa was quick to decline, and by Saturday, temperatures had sunken well below freezing.

Along with the weather, the Spanish flu was still in the news. Back in 1919, Joe Hall had died during the pandemic’s third wave. Now, almost a year later, alongside the inevitable ads for cure-alls like Milburn’s Heart & Nerve Pills and Hamlin’s Wizard Oil (“a reliable anti-septic preventative”), newspapers across Canada continued to log the insidious reach of the illness.

In late January of 1920, influenza cases were surging in Detroit and New York. In February, an outbreak cut short an OHA intermediate hockey game and closed the Ingersoll, Ontario, arena. In the province’s north, near Timmins, another caused the popular annual canine race, the Porcupine Dog Derby, to be postponed.

By mid-March, daily influenza deaths in Montreal were down to seven from 265 a month earlier. “Epidemic Shows Signs of Breaking,” ran the headline in the Gazette.

Ottawa papers from the middle of that March are mostly flu-free, though it is true that the federal minister of Immigration and Colonization was reported to be suffering the week Seattle and Ottawa were tussling for the 1920 Stanley Cup. J.A. Calder was his name, no relation to Frank: the Ottawa Citizen reported that the minister was planning to “go south” to recover.”

The Senators, meanwhile, were in receipt of a telegram on Wednesday, March 17, from Seattle coach Pete Muldoon:

Left Vancouver last night. Coming by way of Milwaukee and Chicago. Will arrive in Ottawa Sunday afternoon. Ready for first game Monday night.

P.R. Muldoon

William Foran was on hand at Dey’s Arena for that first game and he addressed the players on the ice before dropping the puck for the opening face-off, “expressing the hope” (reported the Citizen) “that the traditions of the Stanley Cup would be honoured and that the teams would fight it out for the celebrated trophy in the spirit of fair play.”

Seattle’s team was almost the same one that had faced Montreal the year before. Hap Holmes featured in net, Frank Foyston and Jack Walker up front. “That irritating couple,” the Ottawa Journal called the latter pair, “the centre ice wasps,” warning that they would cause the Senators more worry than any of the other Mets.

Ottawa’s formidable line-up included Benedict and Gerard along with Sprague Cleghorn, Frank Nighbor, Jack Darragh, Punch Broadbent, and Cy Denneny.

The home team won that first game, played under NHL rules, by a score of 3-2. They won the next game, too, 3-0, when the teams went at it seven-aside. The weather was warming, and by the time they met again on March 27, players were sinking into the slushy ice as the Metropolitans found way to win by 3-1.

The teams made a move, after that, to Toronto, where the final two games were played out on the good, hard, artificial surface of Arena Gardens.

Seattle won the next game, 5-2, but Ottawa came back two nights later, a year to the day that workers had broken up the ice in Seattle, to earn a 6-1 victory and, with it, the Stanley Cup. The Senators’ first championship since 1911, it heralded the opening of a golden age in Ottawa, with the team winning two out of the next three Cups through 1923.

Games On: Ottawa Journal ad ahead of the 1920 Stanley Cup finals.

 

series not completed

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“The odds will be in our favour,” Pete Muldoon declared this week, a long 101 years ago, “and we’ll use them to good advantage. We are due to win and I am as confident as I am of standing here that the Mets will give the Frenchmen a licking.”

As coach of the Seattle Metropolitans in the spring of 1919, Muldoon had watched his charges, the powerful PCHA champions, battle the NHL’s Montreal Canadiens for the Stanley Cup through five gruelling games. Each team had won a pair of games, while another had ended, goalless, with no decision. Though the Canadiens had prevailed in the fifth game, taking a Saturday-night game on March 29 by a score of 4-3, the hometown Mets were presumed to have the upper hand going into the deciding game on Tuesday, April 1, given that it would be played under west-coast rules.

The game, of course, was never played. With members of both teams suffering from symptoms of Spanish flu, Muldoon announced that the game was off: the series would remain undecided. From Seattle’s Ice Arena, the focus now shifted to the city’s Providence Hospital, to which several of the local Mets were transferred. As for the Canadiens, five players were ill, along with manager George Kennedy. While Habs’ coach and captain Newsy Lalonde, Bert Corbeau, and Louis Berlinguette were under medical care in their rooms at the Georgian Hotel, the team’s two worst cases, Joe Hall and Jack McDonald, were admitted to the Columbus Sanitarium. As has been much discussed in this strange, unsettling we’re living through a century later, all the hockey patients but one survived the 1919 virus. On Saturday, April 5, a week after he’d skated in his last hockey game, Joe Hall died of pneumonia. He was 37. He was buried three days later in Vancouver.

Commemorating the grim anniversary of those incomplete Stanley Cup finals, illustrator Robert Ullman has a graphic feature, Skating On Thin Ice, up this week at The Nib, the online journal of political and non-fictional comics out of Portland, Oregon: you can find it here. A hockey fan ever since the day, as an 8-year-old, he watched the U.S. Olympic team overthrow the mighty Soviets in 1980, Ullman lives and draws in Richmond, Virginia. His ongoing series of puckish history books, Old-Timey Hockey Tales, is worth tracking down.

(Images courtesy of Robert Ullman)

called off, 1919

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With the NHL looking like it will today follow the NBA’s decision last night to suspend its season indefinitely due to the coronavirus pandemic, a grim glance back to 1919 when the Stanley Cup Finals were abandoned in Seattle before a winner could be decided. As reported here in a Vancouver newspaper, on Tuesday, April 1 of that year, with the Montreal Canadiens and Seattle Metropolitans set to play a sixth and deciding game for hockey’s championship, the series was called off as an outbreak of the virulent Spanish flu sickened players from both teams. It was the first time since the Stanley Cup was inaugurated in 1893 that it went unwon. (The only other Cupless year — to date — was 2005, when a labor dispute wiped out the NHL season.) For Montreal defenceman Joe Hall, the outcome was as dire as it could have been — on April 5, 1919, at three o’clock in the afternoon, he died at Seattle’s Columbus Sanitarium.

abandon cup: bad joe hall and the fatal stanley cup final of 1919

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Seattle Strong: The Seattle Metropolitans and Montreal Canadiens line up in April of 1917 for a post-Stanley Cup exhibition at San Francisco’s Winter Garden rink. Seattle prevailed that year to become the first U.S. team to win the coveted trophy. In 1919, when the rivals met again, Seattle came close to winning a second championship before the series was abandoned.

The last hockey game Joe Hall ever played, he bloodied no-one with his stick, which he also failed to smash across anyone’s passing head. He kicked no referees; no fines or suspensions did he incur. The police, too, saw no reason to arrest him in the dressing room.

Instead, with the Stanley Cup on the line on that late-March night in 1919, the 37-year-old Montreal Canadiens defenceman made what was, for him, a meek showing. Bad Joe Hall’s reputation had added an outlaw’s epithet to his name, but on this night he was ailing, unable to play beyond the first period of Montreal’s thrilling come-from-behind overtime win over the hometown Seattle Metropolitans.

The victory was in vain. Within days, the championship series was abandoned, marking the first time since the Stanley Cup was inaugurated in 1893 that it had gone unwon. (The only other Cupless year was 2005, when a labor dispute wiped out the NHL season.)

A hundred years ago, an outbreak of the virulent Spanish flu sickened players from both teams. For Joe Hall, the outcome was as dire as it could have been — on April 5, at three o’clock in the afternoon, he died in his bed at Seattle’s Columbus Sanitarium.

English-born, in Milwich, Staffordshire, Hall was the oldest player in professional hockey in 1919, and still one of the game’s most effective — and feared — figures.

His family had emigrated to Canada when he was a boy, and in the early years of the 20th century he started making a hockey-playing name for himself in the prairie city of Brandon, Manitoba. His skills soon took him farther afield: to Winnipeg first, then south and across the border to Houghton, Michigan, where he joined the world’s first professional hockey league.

He was a fleet forward, then, touted as the fastest in the dominion. He remained a regular goal-scorer even after he shifted back to defence, moving to eastern Canada to star in the pre-NHL National Hockey Association. When the Quebec Bulldogs won back-to-back Stanley Cups in 1912 and ’13, Hall was a dominant force.

Dangerous, too.

Throughout his career there would be those who vowed that Hall was never so dastardly as all that, only ever retaliated when wronged; referees persecuted him. Some argued that his skullduggery was at least honest: he never tried to hide his merciless swiping, spearing, and slashing.

But even by the unruly standards of early hockey, Hall does seem to have played the game with a singular ferocity. His name was often at the centre of discussions on how to rid hockey of what was called, in the parlance of the times, rowdyism.

A columnist aiming to classify his unsubtle style wrote that “he was a wielder of the broad-axe, not the rapier.” He battled all comers, often with his trusty rock-elm stick. Another witness to Hall’s early career predicted he’d keep going until he killed someone.

His non-lethal charge-sheet included a 1910 fracas during which he kicked a referee named Rod Kennedy. There was talk then that Hall would be banned from hockey for life, but in the end he was fined $100 and suspended for a pair of games. Learning that Kennedy’s trousers had been torn in the fracas, Hall offered to pay a further $27.50 to buy Kennedy a new suit, but the referee told him not to worry about it.

Bad Rap: Joe Hall poses outside Montreal’s Forum circa 1917.

In 1913, Hall kicked another referee, Tom Melville, and swung his stick at his head. (Melville ducked.) Sentenced to another two-game suspension, Hall paid a fine of $150 this time — two thirds of which was imposed by his own team. A Montreal newspaper approved: “This will be a lesson to other players in future that rowdyism will not be tolerated.”

Hall’s most famous feud was with a fellow future Hall-of-Famer, Newsy Lalonde. In 1914, when he hit the captain of the Montreal Canadiens in the mouth with his stick, Lalonde lodged his protest by walloping Hall over the head. Eight stitches closed the cut.

There was more talk of expelling Hall for good, but nothing came of it. When the NHL debuted in 1917, he signed with Lalonde’s Canadiens. The two old adversaries became roommates, and good friends.

Not that Hall had trouble finding new antagonists. In a game in Toronto the following March, a local reporter noted that every opposing player who approached Montreal’s net “received a jab in the face or head from Hall.”

“It was a disgraceful exhibition and a discredit to any league or city,” a local critic complained. If the NHL continued to tolerate “players of the Hall type,” he foresaw, “the league is certain to die a natural death.”

The league was a lean and somewhat shaky operation as it launched into its second season in the fall of 1918. For Hall, it was business as usual on the ice: he would end up leading the league in penalty minutes, accumulating more than twice as many by the end of the season as anyone else in the league.

Not figured into that ledger was the time that Hall spent in police court in January of 1919. Toronto’s Alf Skinner seems to have started it, driving his stick into Hall’s mouth, whereupon Hall clubbed Skinner to the ice, continuing to chop at him while he lay unconscious.

Toronto police arrested both players, on charges of disorderly conduct. Both would plead guilty in court, though the magistrate presiding decided that the $15 fines already imposed on them by the referee was punishment enough for their crimes.

In those early NHL years, the Stanley Cup final brought together the best professional teams from east and west. As eastern champions, the Canadiens boarded the Canadian Pacific Railway’s Imperial Limited in mid-March for the journey to the Pacific coast.

There was discussion, briefly, of convening a four-team tournament, with Ottawa and Vancouver Millionaires joining in to vie for the Cup, but by the time Montreal reached Vancouver, it was confirmed that they would meet the Pacific Coast Hockey League-champion Seattle Metropolitans in a best-of-five series for the title.

Montreal’s line-up was a seasoned one, anchored in goal by Georges Vézina. Joining Hall on defence were Bert Corbeau and Billy Coutu. Up front Montreal counted on Lalonde and Didier Pitre, Odie Cleghorn, Jack McDonald, and (playing in his fifth final) Louis Berlinguette. Seattle counted on veteran goaltender Hap Holmes and forwards Jack Walker, Cully Wilson, Bernie Morris, and Frank Foyston.

The teams were familiar rivals. Two years earlier, Seattle had beaten Montreal to become the first American team to claim hockey’s premier prize. Most of the players involved in the 1919 series were the same. Personal connections interwove the rosters, too: Seattle’s leading scorer, for instance, was Morris — like Hall, a Brandon man.

For all the bonds between players, the two teams played very different brands of hockey. The western game had been shaped and streamlined by the Patrick brothers, Lester and Frank, sons of a British Columbia lumber baron. Retired now from distinguished playing careers, they ran the PCHL.

As hockey innovators, the Patricks introduced many of the rules and procedures hockey fans take for granted today, from blue-lines and penalty-shots to forward-passing and the awarding of assists. East and west were working towards harmonizing their rules — in 1918-19, the NHL had gone so far as to adopt the west’s forward-passing rule — but because they still hadn’t fully agreed on how best the game should be played, the Stanley Cup final saw the teams alternate rulebooks.

One night, the teams would ice seven men aside, as per PCHL practice. Next game: fans would see six-man NHL hockey, which also allowed teams to substitute a player who’d been penalized without worrying about going shorthanded.

Opening the championship series under western rules, Seattle duly won in a 7-0 romp. They managed this despite the unexpected absence of Bernie Morris, accused on the very eve of the final of deserting the U.S. Army, and confined to Seattle’s Camp Lewis to await a court martial that would eventually imprison him on Alcatraz for a year.

Playing to the eastern code, Montreal won the second game 4-2. Seattle took the third, 7-2, which meant that they had a chance to wrap up the championship on March 26.

Hints of what was ahead crept into the reports of that fourth game, played March 26. Scoreless through 60 minutes, the teams battled for a further 20 minutes of overtime without a goal to decide the outcome. Players from both teams collapsed as the game ended unresolved; some had to be carried off the ice.

“The hardest-played game in hockey history,” Frank Patrick called it. NHL President Frank Calder said that there was none more remarkable in all the hockey annals, even though it never should have been halted — in his book, the teams ought have continued until somebody scored a goal. Seattle coach and manager Pete Muldoon didn’t see why the game shouldn’t count as a tie, which would mean that the next game would be played under western rules. A brief stand-off ensued before Muldoon allowed that the fourth game would, in effect, be replayed under eastern rules. Epic as it was, the contest would be ignored, with the series continuing as though it had never been played at all.

It seems clear now that many of the players were already, by this point, fevering under the effects of the H1N1 virus. The Spanish flu pandemic that had swept the globe in the wake of the First World War would kill between 20 and 100 million people worldwide. Preying largely on young, vigorous adults, the highly infectious respiratory virus had reached its deadly peak in October of 1918. Both Stanley Cup cities had been hit hard then: by the end of the year some 1,400 had succumbed in Seattle, while the toll in Montreal was close to 3,000.

In nearby Ottawa that fall, the hockey fraternity had mourned the death of Hamby Shore, 32, a three-time Stanley-Cup champion who’d just retired as an NHLer. And two weeks before the games in Seattle, Montreal centre Jack McDonald learned that flu had killed a brother of his who was serving with the Canadian Army in Siberia.

McDonald, as it happened, scored the decisive goal when the two teams met for the last time that week when the final resumed. Poised once again to clinch the Cup, Seattle got goals from  Foyston and Walker, who notched a pair, to surge to a 3-0 lead after two periods. It didn’t hold.

Joe Hall wasn’t a factor — after having played only sparingly, he seems to have left the game at the end of the first period, retiring (as the Vancouver Daily World described it) “owing to sickness.” An early shoulder injury knocked Hall’s partner Bert Corbeau out the game, which meant that Lalonde and Pitre had to drop back to play defence for the balance of the game. Still, Montreal got a goal to start the third period from Odie Cleghorn before Lalonde tied it up with a pair of his own.

In overtime, McDonald skated half the rink to score on Mets’ goaltender Hap Holmes.

But there would be no more hockey. In the days leading up to what would have been the decisive game, the focus moved east from Seattle’s Ice Arena to the city’s Providence Hospital, to which several suffering Mets were transferred, and the Columbus Sanitarium, where five Canadiens, including Hall and McDonald, along with Canadiens manager George Kennedy were soon under care.

It was pneumonia that killed Joe Hall at the age of 37 on April 5, a week after he’d played in his final hockey game. His mother and his brother were with him at the end; his wife learned of his death as she hurried west on the train from Brandon. Joe Hall was buried April 8 in Vancouver.

Vancouver historian Craig Bowlsby has argued persuasively that if the rules revolution underway in hockey a century ago didn’t actually kill Joe Hall, it did set the stage for his demise.

The advent of forward-passing had made the game faster than ever before. As exciting as this new and still-evolving brand of hockey was for fans, it was taxing the players to their physical limits — and in Joe Hall’s case, beyond.

Under the old ice order, players often played an entire game, 60 minutes, without leaving the ice. But while hockey in its new, speedy, evolved form made that physically difficult even for players who weren’t battling a deadly virus, hockey had failed to adapt to allow for regular substitutions. Montreal iced nine players for the 1919 series, Seattle just eight. In any other year, the game that had failed to adapt quickly enough might just have left them exhausted. With H1N1 still in the air in Seattle, they faced a much more dangerous prospect. Even after Hall’s death, it would be years, Bowlsby points out, before teams adjusted their rosters.

“The games were the most strenuous I have ever been in,” Newsy Lalonde said when he and his teammates got back to Montreal after burying Joe Hall. “I would not like to go through another such experience for any amount of money.”

mclaughlin’s all-americans: making the chicago black hawks great again

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Newlyweds: Irene Castle and Major Frederic McLaughlin, circa 1923, the year of their marriage.

(A version of this post appeared on page D3 of The New York Times on June 12, 2017.)

Long before President Donald J. Trump turned a protectionist eye to the iniquities of Canadians, another opinionated American tycoon decided that he had had enough. Eighty years ago, the cross-border irritant wasn’t Nafta or softwood lumber. As Major Frederic McLaughlin saw it, Canada was flooding American markets with too many hockey players.

In 1937, his short-lived America-first campaign was all about making the Chicago Black Hawks great again.

Canadians have long and fiercely claimed hockey as their own, a proprietary technology that also happens to be a primary natural resource. But the game’s south-of-the-border veins run deep, too. The first organized American game is said to have been played in the 1880s at St. Paul’s, a prep school in Concord, N.H.. The first fully professional league was based in Michigan, in 1904, though most of the players were Canadian.

When the N.H.L. made its debut in 1917 with four Canadian teams, it counted a lonely three Americans among 51 players.

“The climate is not suitable for hockey in the United States,” Lester Patrick (b. Drummondville, Quebec), the longtime Rangers coach and manager, explained in 1928. Unfair as it might be, Canadian boys donned skates at age 3.

“They start skating from the ankles, then with the lower leg up to the knee and at maturity they skate from the hip,” Patrick said. “It is an evolutionary process of time.”

“The Americans,” he held, “start too late to develop a full-leg stride.”

None of that mattered, of course, when it came to the potential profitability of American markets. The N.H.L.’s sometimes rancorous rush south saw Boston’s Bruins as the first United States-based team to join, in 1924. Pittsburgh’s Pirates and New York’s Americans followed in 1925 before the Rangers debuted in 1926, along with teams in Detroit and Chicago.

In Chicago, McLaughlin emerged as the majority shareholder. The McLaughlins had made their fortune on the Lake Michigan shore as coffee importers. In the 1850s, most American coffee drinkers bought raw beans and roasted them at home. W.F. McLaughlin was one of the first to sell pre-roasted coffee. When he died in 1905, his elder son took the helm of McLaughlin’s Manor House Coffee with Frederic, the younger son, aboard as secretary and treasurer.

Harvard-educated, Frederic found fame in those prewar years as one of the country’s best polo players. In 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson sent troops to the restive Mexican frontier, McLaughlin served in the Illinois National Guard.

A year later, the United States went to war with Germany, and McLaughlin joined the Army’s new 86th “Blackhawk” Division, taking command of the 333rd Machine Gun Battalion. Trained in Chicago and England, the division reached France just in time for peace to break out in 1918.

Postwar, McLaughlin returned to Chicago society as a prized catch among bachelor millionaires. But he gained national attention after secretly marrying Irene Castle, a ballroom dancer and movie star revered as America’s best-dressed woman.

As president of Chicago’s N.H.L. team, he reserved naming rights, borrowing from his old Army unit’s tribute to an 18th-century Sauk warrior. From his polo club, the Onwentsia in Lake Forest, Ill., he plucked the distinctive chief’s-head emblem that still adorns Black Hawks sweaters.

“Oh, boy, I am glad I haven’t got a weak heart,” McLaughlin is reported to have said at the first hockey game he ever attended, in November of 1926, just a month before Chicago’s NHL debut. His newly minted Black Hawks were in Minneapolis, playing an exhibition that featured Canadian men named Moose and Rusty and Tiny.

McLaughlin and his fellow investors bought a ready-made roster to get their franchise going: 14 players who had spent the previous winter as the Western Hockey League’s Portland Rosebuds, men named Dick and Duke and Rabbit from Canadian towns called Kenora and Snow Lake and Mattawa.

While owners in New York and Boston hired old Canadian hockey hands to run their teams, McLaughlin decided he would do the job himself. Asked whether his team was ready to compete for a championship, he said, “If it’s not, we’ll keep on buying players until it is.”

The Blackhawks started respectably enough, making the playoffs in their inaugural season. Coaches came and went in those early years, while McLaughlin cultivated a reputation for ire and eccentricity. Still, after only five N.H.L. seasons, Chicago played its way to the finals. Three years later, in 1934, the Black Hawks won the Stanley Cup.

Key to Chicago’s winning formula was McLaughlin’s decision to replace himself with a veteran (Canadian) coach and manager, Tommy Gorman.

“I’m sending myself to the cheering section,” McLaughlin grinned, announcing his midseason surrender in 1933. “I’m convinced that I’m just an amateur in hockey. It’s been a case of the blind leading the blind as far as my influence on the team goes.”

The joy of victory did not linger. Gorman resigned, and Charlie Gardiner, the team’s beloved goaltender, died at 29.

Charged with the reconstruction was a former Black Hawk defenseman, Clem Loughlin, a son of Carroll, Manitoba. Hired in the fall of 1934, he was Chicago’s 11th coach in nine years. The team remained largely Canadian-staffed during his regime, with several talented American exceptions, including Doc Romnes and the goaltender who arrived in 1935, Mike Karakas.

A photograph promoting Loughlin’s 1936-37 squad bore the slogan “Lightning On Skates.” When the season opened, Chicago’s still mostly Canadian roster struck for a pair of listless ties. Then they started losing in earnest. By Christmas, they had won only two of 16 games.

The new year brought no relief. Coach Loughlin threatened a shake-up and then shook, releasing center Tommy Cook, an eight-year veteran accused of “failure to keep in playing condition” and “lax behavior.”

The remaining Hawks won a couple of games before reverting to type. Mulched in Montreal, trimmed in Toronto, they returned to Chicago to lose again and solidify their hold on last place in the league’s American division.

That’s when McLaughlin announced that he had an answer, or at least a vision. Having already lobbied the N.H.L. to replace Canadian referees with Americans, he divulged his plan to shed the yoke of northern tyranny: within two years he would have only American boys skating for the Black Hawks. And he would be changing the team’s nickname to Yankees.

“I think an all-American team would be a tremendous drawing card all over the league,” McLaughlin said.

He was also said to be annoyed that his Canadian veterans rejected the daily calisthenics he insisted they needed.

“We’ve found out you can’t make athletes out of hockey players,” he declared, “so we’ll try to make hockey players out of athletes. Give me a football player who can skate and we can show this league a lot of hockey.”

He already had a so-called “hockey factory” up and running, with five prototype Minnesotans and Michiganders in training on the ice and at Chicago’s Y.M.C.A. These were men in their 20s named Bun and Butch and Ike. Plucked from quiet amateur careers, none of them had yet shown particular signs of stardom. In command was Emil Iverson, a former Danish Army officer who’d coached college hockey in Minnesota and — briefly — the pre-Gorman Hawks.

Meanwhile, the Hawks went to New York, where they hammered the Americans, 9-0. The Americans, as it happened, were almost entirely not — Roger Jenkins of Appleton, Wis., was the only exception. Chicago’s goals were all scored by importees.

Ridicule was brewing in Canada. John Kieran, a columnist for The New York Times, reported that the north-of-the-border consensus was that an all-American team would dominate at “the same time that the Swiss navy equals the combined fleets of the United States, Great Britain and Japan in total tonnage and heavy armament.”

Coach Loughlin stood by his boss. “It isn’t as silly as it sounds by any means,” he said. “I contend that most hockey players are made, not born.”

By March, the future had arrived. With the Hawks out of the playoffs, McLaughlin decreed that his five factory-fresh Americans would debut against Boston.

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It went well — for the Bruins, who prevailed by 6-2. The Rangers and the Detroit Red Wings wired Frank Calder, the president of the league, to protest Chicago’s use of “amateurs” while other teams were still vying for playoff positions.

Boston Coach Art Ross called McLaughlin a “headstrong plutocrat.”

“I have been in hockey 30 years,” he railed, “and never in its entire history has such a farce been perpetrated on a National Hockey League crowd.”

He demanded Chicago refund the price of every ticket —“that’s how rotten the game was.”

“I don’t know whether our constitution will allow the cancellation of an owner’s franchise,” Ross continued, “but if it does, I’ll do everything I can to see that the board of governors do it.”

Unsanctioned by the league, the Hawks went to Toronto, where loudspeakers blared “Yankee Doodle” as “the cash customers prepared for a comedy,” one correspondent reported. Ike Klingbeil of Hancock, Mich., scored a Chicago goal in a losing effort, though a Canadian critic deemed his skating “stiff-legged.”

The new-look Hawks got their first win at home, outlasting the Rangers, 4-3. That night at least, the Times allowed that McLaughlin’s experiment might not have been so far-fetched after all.

The Hawks themselves weren’t entirely contented. A New York reporter listened to a Canadian veteran on the team grumble about the new Americans. “We score the goals and make the plays and they do nothing but a lot of spectacular heavy back-checking,” he said, “but they get all the headlines and all the praise.”

Chicago lost its final two games, finishing a proud point ahead of New York’s even-worse Americans. When the playoffs wrapped up, the Stanley Cup belonged to a Detroit team featuring one American among 21 Canadians with names like Hec and Mud and Bucko.

Come the off-season, the Major gave Clem Loughlin a vote of confidence, right before the coach decided he preferred a return to wheat-farming and hotelkeeping back home in Canada.

Chicago’s five experimental Americans were released. None of them played another N.H.L. game.

The team’s new coach was appropriately unorthodox, for McLaughlin: Bill Stewart, born in Fitchburg, Mass., was best known to that point as a Major League Baseball umpire who carried a wintertime whistle as an N.H.L. referee.

McLaughlin’s wife sued him for divorce that summer, which may have distracted the Major from his all-American plan. In any case, Stewart announced that it was on hold, and the team would continue as the Black Hawks.

When the new hockey season opened, the team started slowly. By March of 1938, they surprised most pundits when they beat the Maple Leafs to win the Stanley Cup.

The trophy itself was absent from the final game, so the champions had to wait to hold it high. Eight of Chicago’s 18 players that season were Americans, men named Doc and Virgil and Cully, who had learned their hockey in Minnesota towns called Aurora, Minneapolis and White Bear Lake.

No N.H.L. champion would count more Americans until last year, when the Pittsburgh Penguins had 10.

(Note: Chicago’s NHL team was Black Hawks for the first 60 years of its history; Blackhawks became one word in 1986.)

 

mars fatal

/ puckstruck

mars fatalHowie Morenz died late on the night of Monday, March 8, 1937, in his hospital room at Montreal’s Hôpital Saint-Luc. Many Montrealers would have first known the shocking news next morning through the pages of Tuesday’s morning paper, The Gazette, Le Canada, La Patrie. None of them had much light to cast on just what had happened, how the leg Morenz had fractured in late January on the ice at the Forum could now have killed him. His doctor reported that his heart and his pulse had been normal on Monday, according to La Patrie, and yet he’d died in his sleep.

Amid the many tributes and reviews of Morenz’s career, La Patrie also saw fit to remind readers that there’s no more mournful month in Montreal Canadiens’ history than March. It was just 11 years, after all, since legendary goaltender Georges Vézina had died of tuberculosis at the age of 38, four months after opening the 1925-26 season in the Montreal net. Seven years before that, Canadiens’ notorious 37-year-old defenceman Joe Hall had succumbed to pneumonia he’d contracted while suffering from Spanish influenza.

A terrible thing that was, of course, if not entirely fair to March. La Patrie had a key detail wrong: Hall actually died on April 5, 1919.

Back on March 19, he was still resting in his room in Seattle’s Georgian Hotel, one of several Canadiens to have sickened while the team was battling the Seattle Metropolitans for the Stanley Cup. Transferred to the Providence Hospital in early April, Hall was saidto be improving, his temperature a steady 103. With five games of the six-game Stanley Cup series in the books, the ravaging flu had by then forced Montreal to forfeit the deciding game on April 1. When Seattle manager Pete Muldoon refused to accept the forfeit, the championship was abandoned.

On April 3, Montreal manager George Kennedy announced that his players were not all, as rumour had it in Eastern Canada, on the verge of death. Hall’s condition had, however, worsened. “He still has a chance for his life,” The Vancouver Daily World wrote the day before he died, “and he is fighting hard.”

In 1937, Canadiens were scheduled to play the Maroons the night after Howie Morenz died. The team planned to cancel, but Mary Morenz insisted that her husband would have wanted the game to go on. Two days later, on Thursday, his body would lie in state at centre ice in the Forum, but on Tuesday it was hockey night.

The referees and players on both teams wore mourning arm-bands; ushers and program-sellers had black ribbons pinned to their jackets.

Canadiens president Ernest Savard spoke to the crowd of 10,000. “It is with sincere regret and deep emotion that we announce the death last night of the one and only Howie Morenz,” he said. “He was a gentleman and the finest hockey player ever known.”

Two minutes of silence followed his words. “The monotonous whirling of the ventilating fans alone broke the stillness,” The Canadian Press reported, “until the drums of the Victoria Rifles began to roll. Then, the bugles sounded Last Post.”

Canadiens’ goaltender Wilf Cude cried, The Gazette noted, “unashamedly,” and defencemen Walter Buswell and Babe Siebert “had to skate to his side and talk to him.”

In the dressing room, coach Cecil Hart said, “You know, boys, there is little I can say on an occasion like this.” He told them to “forget all your troubles, to go out there and play — play as Howie would have played if he were here.”

“The game that followed helped make those in the Forum a bit forgetful of the tragedy of the night before,” was the way The Gazette described it. “A fighting Canadien team saddened by the loss and minus two regulars, Aurel Joliat and Toe Blake, hurled itself at Maroons.” They couldn’t overcome: the final score was Maroons 4, Canadiens 1.