winter’s first olympics, 1924: why did the canadians run up such big scores?

January 28, 2024January 29, 2024 / puckstruck

Running Up That Score: Canada keeps up the pressure on the Czech goal on this day 100 years ago. Is that Canadian goaltender Jack Cameron heading in on goal, second from left? I think so. Visible in the background is the second rink at the Stade Olympique.

What’s one paltry goal among 30?

A century-old mystery is what it is. On Monday, January 28, 1924, when Canada played its first game of the Olympic tournament at Chamonix, France, the defending champions ran up a mighty score of 30-0 against the toiling team from Czechoslovakia. It was, at the time, the biggest tally of goals in the tournament’s brief history, with the Canadians exactly doubling the bounty Canada’s 1920 team had bagged against Czechoslovakia.

How much of a rout was it, out there on the open-air rink beneath Mont Blanc? Enough that the last goal Canada scored in the first period — the eighth — happened so quickly after the seventh goal that the official scorer didn’t see who scored it, leaving a hole in the summary, a blank that lasts to this day.

Could the scorer not have asked the Canadians whodunit? You’d think so, but apparently that didn’t happen. Paging back through historical newspapers doesn’t clarify anything. Dispatches that reached Canadian papers tend to mention Harry Watson scoring the seventh, followed by “another Canadian.”

W.A. Hewitt, who was on hand as both manager of the Canadian team and sporting editor of the Toronto Daily Star, credits Hooley Smith with three goals in the first period and Watson with five. But then most other accounts give right winger Bert McCaffrey a goal in the first while limiting Watson to just three.

Papers in the U.S. reported the score, but they were more interested in the outcome of the American game that same day against the Belgians. European papers that were covering the Olympics didn’t bother reporting names of goalscorers at all.

So: the mystery persists.

Chamonix Set-Up: Map of the Olympic venue in 1924. Speedskaters and skiers raced around the perimeter of the hockey and figure-skating rinks while curlers kept to their own ice, at bottom right.

Until it’s solved definitively, the consensus is that Harry Watson scored 11 goals that afternoon 100 years ago, Hooley Smith 4, Bert McCaffery 3, Dunc Munro 3, Beattie Ramsay 3, Harold McMunn 3, Sig Slater 2, unknown 1.

None of the contemporary reports of the trouncing mention any of the Czech players, so let’s at least name Vladimir Stransky, the goaltender. This was his first Canadian onslaught, though several of his teammates had played in the 1920 undoing by the Winnipeg Falcons, including Josef Sroubek, Otakar Vindys, and Vilem Loos.

There were some good skaters among the Czechs, Hewitt allowed, and they checked “very strenuously at times.” The Canadians weren’t much scathed — “except Hooley Smith, who had his tongue cut slightly in a tumble.”

The game got going around 3.30 in the afternoon, in daylight, but it didn’t end there: it finished under lights — distant lights, mostly, according to Hewitt. “Darkness falls very quickly in the valley, and it was pitch dark when the game finished.”

The French enjoyed our Canadian vim and vigor. Here’s Paris-Soir:

The matches played yesterday Monday allowed us to see the teams of the United States and Canada play, which we will certainly see again, because it is not going too far to predict that we will find them battling in the final. It is also certain that in this next part, the advantage will remain with the Canadians who yesterday proved a truly overwhelming superiority. It is true that they only played against Czech-Slovakia; but they still inflicted 30 goals to 0! This Canadian team combines remarkable power with skill and virtuosity which are truly a feast for the eyes.

Why did Canadian players run up such big scores? Billy Hewitt addressed this very question in a Toronto Daily Star column headlined

WHY CANADIAN PLAYERS RAN UP SUCH BIG SCORES

in which he explained that, under tournament rules, goal average would count in the final in case of a tie: there would be no overtime. “It was most important, therefore, to get as many goals as possible in the 60 minutes.”

Man About Olympics: Billy Hewitt (Foster’s dad) was a busy man in Chamonix, managing Canada’s team, filing reports home to the Toronto Daily Star, and refereeing a couple of games.

The week before the games got going, the Olympic hockey committee had re-iterated that the tournament would be played mostly by “Canadian rules,” which is to say OHA regulations, as had been the case in 1920. This time, though, the U.S. introduced an amendment that would forbid goaltenders from falling to their knees or lying down, and won the day on this: as had been the rule (briefly) in the NHL until a week into the inaugural 1917-18 season, goaltenders in France had to stay on their feet or risk penalty. Canada voted against this amendment, as did Great Britain and Sweden: they lost.

U.S. coach and manager William Haddock had also lobbied to play three 15-minute periods, which was the custom in the U.S., but the committee voted him down on that, so the games played with 20-minute stanzas.

What else? The Olympic rink was, as mentioned, outdoors. And big: 230 feet long by 98 feet wide, bigger than the North American indoor norm (NHL rinks would eventually settle on dimensions of 200 x 85). In Chamonix, there were two of these side by side on the vast expanse of ice that made up the Olympic stadium. The nets were Canadian-pattern, but rickety — “very unstable,” Hewitt said.

Rather than regular boards familiar to the North Americans, the rinks were surrounded by six-inch bumpers. This surprised the Canadians, but didn’t faze them. Hewitt:

The players found they could play the sides by keeping the puck low, and it was extraordinary how few times the puck left the ice at the sides. No time was lost when it did, as the Canadians had a good supply of the best Canadian-made pucks along, and kept the referee supplied with sufficient to keep the game going all the time. Netting was put up at the ends of the rink and saved many a long chase after a puck when the shot was wide. The committee had men on skates stationed on all sides of the rink to retrieve the puck, and only one was lost the first day, when three games were played.

First up, in the morning, Sweden opened the tournament with a 9-0 win over Switzerland. “The Swiss seemed to know little more than the rudiments of the game,” was the gist of one report; an unattributed Toronto Daily Star dispatch classed it a “a tame affair.” That might have been Billy Hewitt saying that: he refereed the game, so maybe preferred not to put his name to an opinion.

The U.S. took the ice next, at 1.30, with Canada’s captain, Dunc Munro, as referee. The Americans carried the day easily, winning by a score of 19-0. Coach Haddock complained that while he was pleased by the win, he thought his players had relied too much on individual efforts and needed to play more as a team. “A passing game will be required when stiffer opposition is encountered, he pointed out,” according to the Associated Press.

Leading the way for the Americans was centreman Herb Drury, who scored six goals. (He stayed on the ice to referee Canada’s game.) Wingers Willard Rice, Frank Synott, and Jerry McCarthy scored five, three, and two goals, respectively, with defenceman Taffy Abel chipping in two past the Belgian goaltender, whose name no North American report mentioned.

Alphonse Lacroix was the American goaltender, or Frenchy, as they called him back home. Like Drury and Abel, he’d make it to the NHL. The circumstances weren’t optimal for Lacroix: he was the man Leo Dandurand drafted to fill the Montreal Canadiens’ net when legend Georges Vézina fell ill in the fall of 1925.

Backing up Lacroix in France was a goaltender named John Langley. With three minutes left in the U.S. lambasting of the Belgians, he petitioned coach Haddock to let him take the ice as a forward. When the coach agreed, Langley doffed his pads and skated into the action. Before he could touch the puck, though, Belgian captain Andre Popliment raised his objection. According to Olympic rules, goaltenders were only eligible to play goal. Langley, it was reported, “retired gracefully.”

Winterland, 1924: The Stade Olympique at Chamonix, in the valley below Mont Blanc.

gaoledtenders: a short history of time served

October 25, 2022January 14, 2023 / puckstruck

Box Seats: Chicago’s Mike Karakas was the last NHL goaltender to serve out a penalty, in New York in 1936. That’s Rangers’ trainer Harry Westerby standing by and, in the hat, Ranger coach and GM Lester Patrick.

Clint Benedict’s violations were out in the open, many of them, whether he was upsetting Corb Denneny behind the net or (another time) dropping Toronto captain Frank Heffernan “with a clout on the dome.”

In the decisive game of the 1923 Stanley Cup finals, with Benedict’s Ottawa Senators on the way to beating the WCHL-champion Edmonton Eskimos to claim hockey’s ultimate trophy, referee Mickey Ion sanctioned the goaltender for a first-period slash on Edmonton defenceman Joe Simpson. “Benedict tried to separate Joe from his legs behind the goal,” Andy Lyle wrote in the Edmonton Journal. This particular game was being played under eastern (NHL) rules, so Benedict headed for the penalty bench.

Foul but no harm: with Ottawa nursing a 1-0, Benedict’s teammates were able to defend the lead without their goaltender’s help. This was at the end of the famous series during which Senators defenceman King Clancy ended playing defence, forward, and goal. In a 1997 memoir written with Brian McFarlane, Clancy describes the moment that he headed for the latter: Benedict chucked over his goalstick and said, “You take care of this place ’til I get back.”

After that, Clancy’s time was mostly an exercise in standing around, though not entirely. In the memoir, Clancy recalls that when, at one point, he smothered the puck near the net, Ion threatened him with a penalty.

But while Clancy says that he didn’t face a single Edmonton shot, contemporary accounts tell a different tale. By Ottawa manager Tommy Gorman’s account, Clancy faced down two Edmonton shots. “Once Joe Simpson whipped in a long one,” he wrote, “whereupon ‘King’ dropped his stick, caught the puck with the skill of a baseball catcher, and tossed it aside while the crowd roared its approval.”

Count it, I guess, as the first shared shutout in Stanley Cup history.

Nowadays, when it comes to penalties for goalies, the NHL rule book gets right to the point with Rule 27:

Minor Penalty to Goalkeeper — A goalkeeper shall not be sent to the penalty bench for an offense which incurs a minor penalty, but instead, the minor penalty shall be served by another member of his team who was on the ice when the offense was committed. This player is to be designated by the Coach of the offending team through the playing Captain and such substitute shall not be changed.

But for the first three decades of NHL history — in the regular season as well as in Stanley Cup play— goaltenders themselves served the penalties they were assessed, departing the ice while a teammate did his best to fill in.

This happened more than a dozen times in those early years, and was cause for considerable chaos and excitement. In the 1920s, Clint Benedict was (as mentioned) often in the mix, while in the ’30s, Lorne Chabot featured prominently. Among the temporary goaltenders, King Clancy continued to stand out, along with Sprague Cleghorn. Goals would have been easy to score in these circumstances — you’d think. In fact, none was scored on the first eight occasions — it wasn’t until 1931, when Chicago’s Tommy Cook punished the Canadiens, that anyone was able to take advantage of an absent goaltender to score.

Despite what you may have read in a recent feature on NHL.com, the last time a goaltender went to the box wasn’t in March of 1932, after a particular fractious game in Boston, though the NHL did adjust some language in the rule book that year.

No, the final goaltender to do his own time would seem to have been Mike Karakas of the Chicago Black Hawks at the end of December in 1936. After that — but we’ll come back to the shifting of the rules that went on for more than a decade before goaltenders were fully and finally excused from going to the box.

Ahead of that, herewith, a helpful review of the NHL’s history of goaltenders who were binned for their sins, listed chronologically from earliest to last, starting in the league’s second season on ice and wandering along to its 20^th.

None of the six goalies who tended nets during the NHL’s inaugural season, 1917-18, was penalized. That’s worth a note, if only because, until the rule was changed a couple of weeks into the schedule, goalies were forbidden, on pain of penalty, from falling to their knees to stop the puck. Benedict, again, was front and centre in the discussion that led to the change. In the old National Hockey Association, his collapses were as renowned as his penalties. Indeed, in announcing in January of 1918 that goaltenders would now be allowed to “adopt any attitude” to stop the puck, NHL President Frank Calder made specific mention of Benedict before going on to explain the rationale for the change. “Very few of the teams carry a spare netminder,” Calder explained, “and if the goaler is ruled off it means a long delay in equipping another player, and in a close contest would undoubtedly cost the penalized team the game. The old rule made it hard for the referees, so everybody will be helped.”

Free to flop, Benedict was left to find other means of catching the attention of referees. Which he duly did:

Tuesday, February 18, 1919
Ottawa Senators 4 Toronto Arenas 3 (OT)
Mutual Street Arena, Toronto
Referees: Lou Marsh, Steve Vair

The NHL was a three-team affair in its second season, and not exactly robust, at that: the anemic Toronto Arenas ended up dropping out before the season was over, suspending operations with two games left to play in the schedule. Their sparsely-attended penultimate game — no more than 1,000 fans showed up — saw Ottawa’s goaltender penalized with ten minutes left in the third period. Yes, this was unruly Benedict once again: with Toronto leading 2-1, he was sanctioned for upsetting Corb Denneny behind the Ottawa net, incurring a three-minute penalty (that was a thing, then).

Ottawa defenceman Sprague Cleghorn took over Benedict’s net. The Ottawa Journal: “Torontos tried hard but their sharp shooters were kept at long range by the defensive work of the Senators. Finally goalkeeper Cleghorn himself secured the puck and made an end to end rush, almost scoring.” An added detail from the Citizen: with Cleghorn absent on his rush, Senators’ winger Cy Denneny took to the net where he stopped at least one shot. After Benedict’s return, Toronto stretched their lead to 3-1 before Ottawa got goals from Frank Nighbor and (not one to be denied) Sprague Cleghorn before Punch Broadbent sealed the win for the Senators in overtime.

Hors De Combat: Seen here in the first uniform of Montreal’s Maroons, Clint Benedict was an early protagonist when it came to goaltenders serving time in penalty boxes.

Saturday, January 24, 1920
Ottawa Senators 3 Toronto St. Patricks 5
Mutual Street Arena, Toronto
Referee: Cooper Smeaton

The call on Clint Benedict this time, apparently, was for slashing Toronto captain Frank Heffernan. Referee Smeaton had already warned him for swinging his stick at Corb Denneny before sending Benedict to the penalty bench. The Ottawa Citizen described the goaltender as having swung his stick “heavily,” catching Heffernan across the forehead, while the Journal saw Heffernan go down “with a clout on the dome.” The Toronto faithful, the Globe reported, weren’t pleased: “the crowd hissed and hooted him.” Sprague Cleghorn was still manning the Ottawa defence, but this time it was winger Jack Darragh subbed in while Benedict served his three minutes. The Journal noted several “sensational stops,” and no goals against.

Wednesday, February 1, 1922
Montreal Canadiens 2 Ottawa Senators 4
Laurier Avenue Arena, Ottawa
Referee: Lou Marsh

“At times,” the Ottawa Journal reported, “Sprague Cleghorn played like a master and at other times like a gunman.” It was Cleghorn’s violence that made headlines this night, drawing the attention of Ottawa police, who showed up in Montreal’s dressing room after the game. Cleghorn was a Canadien now, turning out against his old teammates (including Clint Benedict in Ottawa’s goal), and proving a one-man wrecking crew. He accumulated 29 minutes in penalties for transgressions that included cutting Ottawa captain Eddie Gerard over the eye with a butt-end; breaking Frank Nighbor’s arm; and putting Cy Denneny out of the game in its final minutes. For the latter, Cleghorn was assessed a match penalty and fined for using indecent language. Canadiens managing director Leo Dandurand turned back the police who tried to apprehend Cleghorn, telling them to come back when they had a warrant.

Amid all this, Cleghorn also stepped into the Montreal net after Georges Vézina was sent off for slashing King Clancy. Notwithstanding the Ottawa Citizen’s verdict, calling Cleghorn “the present day disgrace of the National winter game,” Montreal’s Gazette reported that as an emergency goaltender he “made several fine stops.”

Saturday, March 31, 1923
Ottawa Senators 1 Edmonton Eskimos 0
Denman Arena, Vancouver
Referee: Mickey Ion

Clint Benedict’s Stanley Cup penalty was for a second-period slash across the knees of Edmonton’s Bullet Joe Simpson. (The Citizen: “the Ottawa goalie used his stick roughly.”) After multi-purpose King Clancy, stepped in, as mentioned, to replace him, his Senator teammates made sure that Edmonton didn’t get a single shot on net.

Saturday, December 20, 1924
Montreal Maroons 1 Hamilton Tigers 3
Barton Street Arena, Hamilton
Referee: Mike Rodden

Montreal Daily Star, 1924.

Clint Benedict, again. He was a Montreal Maroon by now, and still swinging; this time, in Hamilton, he was sent off for (the Gazette alleged) “trying to get Bouchard.” Eddie Bouchard that was, a Hamilton winger. Maroons captain Dunc Munro stepped into the breach while Benedict cooled his heels, and temper. The Gazette: “nothing happened while he was off.”

Saturday, December 27, 1924
Ottawa Senators 4 Toronto St. Patricks 3
Mutual Street Arena, Toronto
Referee: Lou Marsh

For the first time in NHL history, Clint Benedict wasn’t in the building when a penalty was called on a goaltender. He was in Montreal, for the record, taking no penalties as he tended the Maroons’ net in a 1-1 tie with the Canadiens that overtime couldn’t settle.

Offending this time was Senators’ stopper Alec Connell, who was in Toronto and (the Gazette said) “earned a penalty when he took a wallop at big Bert Corbeau. The latter was engaged in a fencing exhibition with Frank Nighbor late in the second period when Connell rushed out and aimed a blow at the local defence man. Connell missed by many metres, but nevertheless, he was given two minutes and Corbeau drew five. ‘King’ Clancy then took charge of the big stick and he made several fine saves, St. Patricks failing to score.”

During the fracas in which Connell was penalized, I can report, Ottawa’s Buck Boucher was fined $10 for (the Toronto Daily Star said) “being too lurid in his comments to the referee.” The Star also noted that when, playing goal, Clancy was elbowed by Jack Adams, the temporary Ottawa goaltender retaliated with a butt-end “just to show the rotund Irish centre player that he wasn’t at all afraid of him and wouldn’t take any nonsense.”

Saturday, February 14, 1925
Hamilton Tigers 1 Toronto St. Patricks 3
Mutual Street Arena, Toronto
Referee: Eddie O’Leary

In the second period, Hamilton goaltender Jake Forbes was penalized for (as the Gazette saw it) “turning [Bert] Corbeau over as the big defenceman was passing by the Hamilton goal.” Hamilton winger Charlie Langlois was already serving a penalty as the defenceman Jesse Spring took the net, but the Tigers survived the scare: “Both Langlois and Forbes got back on the ice without any damage being done while they were absent, the other players checking St. Pats so well that they could not get near the Hamilton net.”

Wednesday, December 2, 1931
Montreal Canadiens 1 Chicago Black Hawks 2
Chicago Stadium
Referee: Mike Rodden, Bill Shaver

Montreal Gazette, 1931.

A first for Chicago and indeed for the USA at large: never before had an NHL goaltender served his own penalty beyond a Canadian border. Notable, too: after seven tries and more than a decade, a team facing a substitute goaltender finally scored a goal. On this occasion, it was a decisive one, too.

The game was tied 1-1 in the third period when Montreal’s George Hainsworth tripped Chicago winger Vic Ripley. With just three minutes left in regular time, Ripley, who’d scored Chicago’s opening goal, hit the boards hard. He was carried off.

Hainsworth headed for the penalty bench. He had a teammate already there, Aurèle Joliat, so when defenceman Battleship Leduc took the net, the situation was grim for Montreal. The Gazette:

Albert Leduc armed himself with Hainsworth’s stick and stood between the posts with only three men to protect him. His position was almost helpless and when [Johnny] Gottselig and [Tommy] Cook came tearing in, the former passed to the centre player and Cook burned one past Leduc for the winning counter. Then Joliat returned and Leduc made one stop. When Hainsworth came back into the nets, Canadiens staged a rousing rally and the final gong found the champions peppering [Chicago goaltender Charlie] Gardiner unsuccessfully.

Tuesday, March 15, 1932
Toronto Maple Leafs 2 Boston Bruins 6
Boston Garden
Referee: Bill Stewart, Odie Cleghorn

Boston saw its first goaltender-in-box when, three minutes in, Toronto’s Lorne Chabot was called for tripping Boston centreman Cooney Weiland. “The latter,” wrote Victor Jones in the Boston Globe, “entirely out of a play, was free-skating a la Sonja Henie in the vicinity of the Leaf cage.” Toronto’s Globe: “The Leafs protested loudly, but Stewart remained firm.”

It was a costly decision for the Leafs. At the time, a penalty didn’t come to its end, as it does today, with a goal by the team with the advantage: come what might, Chabot would serve out his full time for his trip.

Victor Jones spun up a whole comical bit in his dispatch around Leaf coach Dick Irvin’s decision to hand Chabot’s duties (along with his stick) to defenceman Red Horner. The upshot was that Bruins’ centre Marty Barry scored on him after ten seconds. Irvin replaced Horner with defenceman Alex Levinsky, without discernible effect: Barry scored on him, too, ten seconds later. When King Clancy tried his luck, Boston captain George Owen scored another goal, giving the Bruins a 3-0 lead by the time Chabot returned to service.

There was a subsequent kerfuffle involving Toronto GM Conn Smythe, a practiced kerfuffler, particularly in Boston. He’d arrived late to the game, to find his team down by a pair of goals and Clancy tending the net. Smythe ended up reaching out from the Toronto bench to lay hands on referee Bill Stewart, who (he said) was blocking his view. Backed by a pair of Boston policemen, the Garden superintendent tried to evict Smythe, whereupon the Toronto players intervened.

“For some minutes,” Victor Jones recounted, “there was a better than fair chance that there would be a riot.” Bruins’ owner Charles F. Adams arrived on the scene to keep the peace and arrange a stay for Smythe who was allowed to keep his seat on the Leaf bench (in Jones’ telling) “on condition he would not further pinch, grab, or otherwise molest” the referee.

Boston didn’t squander its early boon, powering on to a 6-2 victory.

A couple of other notes from Jones’ notebook: “Stewart may have ruined the game, but he called the penalty as it’s written in the book and that’s all that concerns him.”

Also: “The best crack of the evening was made by Horner, after the game in the Toronto dressing room: ‘You fellows made a big mistake when you didn’t let me finish out my goal tending. I was just getting my eye on ’em, and after four or five more I’d have stopped everything.”

Leaf On The Loose: Lorne Chabot was a habitual visitor to NHL penalty boxes in the 1930s.

Sunday, November 20, 1932
Toronto Maple Leafs 0 New York Rangers 7
Madison Square Garden III, New York
Referees: Eusebe Daigneault, Jerry Goodman

The Leafs were the defending Stanley Cup champions in the fall of 1932, but that didn’t help them on this night in New York as they took on the team they’d defeated in the championship finals the previous April. This time out, Lorne Chabot’s troubles started in the second period, when he wandered too far from his net, whereupon a Rangers’ winger saw fit to bodycheck him. Cause and effect: “Chabot was banished,” Toronto’s Daily Star reported, “for flailing Murray Murdoch with his stick.” (Murdoch was penalized, too.)

Leafs’ winger Charlie Conacher took to the net, and in style. “He made six dazzling stops during this [two-minute] time,” Joseph C. Nichols reported in the New York Times, “playing without the pads and shin-guards always worn by regular goalies.” When Chabot returned, Conacher received a thundering ovation from the New York crowd. Chabot worked hard on the night, too, stopping a total of 41 Ranger shots. Unfortunately, there were also seven that got past him before the game was over.

Thursday, March 16, 1933
Toronto Maple Leafs 0 Detroit Red Wings 1
Detroit Olympia
Referee: Cooper Smeaton, Clarence Bush

Lorne Chabot’s next visit to the penalty box came during what the Montreal Gazette graded one of the wildest games ever to be played at the Detroit Olympia. In the third period, when Detroit centreman Ebbie Goodfellow passed the Leaf goalmouth, Chabot (wrote Jack Carveth of the Detroit Free Press) “clipped him over the head with his over-sized stick.”

“That was the signal for Ebbie to lead with his left and cross with his right,” Carveth narrated. “Chabot went down with Goodfellow on top of him.”

Both players got minor penalties for their troubles, which continued once they were seated side-by-side the penalty box. “After they had been separated,” wrote Carveth, “a policeman was stationed between them to prevent another outbreak.”

Just as things seemed to be settling down, Detroit coach Jack Adams threw a punch that connected with the chin of Toronto’s Bob Gracie, who stood accused of loosing “a vile remark” in Adams’ direction. “Players from both benches were over the fence in a jiffy but nothing more serious than a lot of pushing developed.”

Toronto winger Charlie Conacher took up Chabot’s stick in his absence. “But he didn’t have to do any work,” according to the Canadian Press. “King Clancy ragged the puck cleverly,” and the Wings failed to get even a shot at Conacher. They were already ahead 1-0 at the time, and that’s the way the game ended, with the shutout going to Detroit’s John Ross Roach.

Tuesday, November 28, 1933
Montreal Maroons 4 Montreal Canadiens 1
Montreal Forum
Referees: Bill Stewart, A.G. Smith

Lorne Chabot may have moved from Toronto to Montreal by 1933, but he was still battling. On this night, he contrived to get into what the Montreal Daily Star called a “high voltage scrap” with Maroons centreman Dave Trottier. The latter’s stick hit Chabot on the head as he dove to retrieve a puck in the third period, it seems. “Thinking it intentional,” the Gazette reported, “Chabot grabbed one of Trottier’s legs and pulled him to the ice with a football tackle. They rose and came to grips.” Later that same brouhaha, Chabot interceded in a fight between teammate Wildor Larochelle and the Maroons’ Hooley Smith, whereupon (somehow) Trottier and Larochelle were sentenced to major penalties while Smith and Chabot earned only minors.

With two minutes left in the game and Maroons up by three goals, Canadiens’ coach Newsy Lalonde elected not to fill Chabot’s net. Maroons couldn’t hit the empty net, though winger Wally Kilrea came close with a long-distance shot that drifted wide.

Sunday, December 27, 1936
Chicago Black Hawks 0 New York Rangers 1
Madison Square Garden III
Referee: Bill Stewart, Babe Dye

“One of hockey’s rarest spectacles,” New York Times’ correspondent Joseph C. Nichols called the second-period tripping penalty that was called when Chicago’s Mike Karakas tripped New York’s Phil Watson. Filling in for Karakas was none other than Tommy Cook who, you might recall, scored a goal against Battleship Leduc in 1931 when he’d replaced Montreal’s George Hainsworth. This time, Nichols reported, the net might as well have been empty for all the chances the rangers had to score. With Chicago’s Johnny Gottselig, Paul Thompson, and Art Wiebe doing yeoman’s work on the defensive, Cook faced no shots during his stint as a stand-in — the last one, as it turned out, in NHL history.

Both Sides Now: Chicago centreman Tommy Cook was the first NHLer to score a goal with a goaltender in the box, in 1931. In 1936, he was also the last player to take a penalized goaltender’s place.

Tracing the evolution of the NHL’s rule book generally involves a certain amount of sleuthing. James Duplacey’s The Rules of Hockey (1996) is helpful up to a point, but it’s not it’s not without bugs and oversights.

This is specifically the case, too, when it comes to goaltenders and their penalties. When in 1918 goaltenders were freed to fall to their knees without risk of punishment, this freedom never enshrined in writing. For most if not all of the league’s first decade, the only language in the rule book governing goaltenders had to do with holding the puck — not allowed — and the face-off arrangement that applied if they dared to commit this misdemeanor.

This changed in 1932, after that Leaf game in Boston in March when Toronto’s three emergency goaltenders yielded three goals and Conn Smythe got into (another) melee. Did he draft or drive the addition of the paragraph that was added to the rule book that year? It’s possible. It was procedural only, and didn’t change the way things had been done since the beginning. The language added to Rule 12 read:

If a goal-keeper is removed from the ice to serve a penalty the manager of the club shall appoint a substitute and the referee shall be advised of the name of the substitute appointed. The substitute goal-keeper shall be subject to the rules governing goal-keepers and have the same privileges.

The last part does suggest that stand-ins would be within their rights to strap on goaltending pads, and maybe that happened, though I’ve never seen any archival or anecdotal evidence that it did in any of the instances cited above.

Goaltenders were boxed on four more occasions (as we’ve seen) after this change in rule-book wording. It was six years later that the sentencing of rule-breaking goaltenders changed materially, in September of 1938. No goaltender had, to date, ever been assessed a major penalty, but if that were to happen, the new rule stipulated that he would go to the box, with his substitute accorded all the privileges of a regular netminder, “including the use of the goal-keeper’s stick and gloves.”

And for lesser infractions? Now The Official Rule Book declared that:

No goal-keeper shall be sent to the penalty bench for an offence which incurs a minor penalty but instead of the minor penalty, a penalty shot shall be given against him.

It didn’t take long for the statute to get its first test, once the 1938-39 season got underway. There was, it’s true, some confusion on the ice when the Detroit Red Wings hosted the Chicago Black Hawks, the reigning NHL champions, on Thursday, November 24.

It was a busy night for referee Clarence Campbell. The future NHL president wasn’t a favourite in Detroit, as Doc Holst of the local Free Press outlined:

Anytime Mr. Campbell is referee on Mr. [Jack] Adams’ ice, you can wager your grandma that there will be plenty of difficult problems and that he will never solve them to the satisfaction of the Red Wings. He’s their ogre, no matter how the other club praises his abilities.

Campbell infuriated both teams on this night. In the first period, he disallowed a goal that the Wings’ Marty Barry thought he’d score. Next, Campbell awarded the Wings a penalty shot after Hawks’ defenceman Alex Levinsky held back the Wings’ Ebbie Goodfellow on his way in on Chicago’s Mike Karakas. Levinsky objected so vociferously that Campbell gave him a ten-misconduct. Mud Bruneteau took Detroit’s penalty shot: Karakas saved.

Things got even more interesting in the third. It started with Detroit’s Pete Kelly skating in on the Chicago net and colliding with Karakas. Doc Holst: “The two of them came out of the net and started to roll, Pete holding on to Mike for dear life. The only thing Mike could think of was to tap Pete on the head with his big goalie stick.”

Campbell penalized both, sending Kelly to the box for holding and awarding Detroit a penalty shot for Karakas’ slash. The Wings weren’t having it — they wanted the Chicago goaltender sent off. “Campbell pulled the rule book on the Wings,” a wire service account of the proceedings reported, “and showed them goalies do not go to penalty boxes” Once again Mud Bruneteau stepped up to shoot on Karakas and, once again, failed to score. The Red Wings did eventually prevail in the game, winning 4-2, despite all the goals denied them.

Goaltenders did keep on taking penalties, some of them for contravening a new rule added to the books in 1938 barring them from throwing pucks into the crowd to stop play. In Detroit, if not elsewhere, this rule was said to be aimed at curbing the Red Wings’ Normie Smith, who’d been known in his time for disposing of (said the Free Press) “as many as a dozen pucks a night over the screen.” Chicago’s Karakas was, apparently, another enthusiastic puck-tosser.

And so, in February of 1939, Clarence Campbell called Wilf Cude of the Montreal Canadiens for flinging a puck over the screen against the New York Americans. Cude took his medicine and kicked out Johnny Sorrell’s penalty shot. In January, 1941, when Toronto’s Turk Broda tripped Canadiens’ Murph Chamberlain, he was pleased to redeem himself by foiling a penalty shot from Tony Demers.

The NHL continued to tweak the rule through the 1940s. In September of ’41, the league split the penalty shot: now there were major and minor versions. The major was what we know now, applied when a skater was impeded on a clear chance at goal. The player taking the shot was free to skate in on the goaltender to shoot from wherever he pleased. A minor penalty shot applied when a goaltender committed a foul: he would be sentenced to face an opposing player who could wheel in from centre-ice but had to shoot the puck before he crossed a line drawn 28 feet in front of the goal.

By 1945, the rules had changed again, with a penalty shot only applying when a goaltender incurred a major penalty. That meant that when, in a February game in New York, referee Bill Chadwick whistled down Rangers’ goaltender Chuck Rayner for tossing the puck up the ice (just as prohibited as hurling it into the stands), Rayner stayed in his net while teammate Ab DeMarco went to the penalty box. From there, he watched Chicago’s Pete Horeck score the opening goal in what ended as a 2-2 tie.

This continued over the next few years. Boston’s Frank Brimsek slung a puck into the Montreal crowd and teammate Bep Guidolin did his time for him. Detroit’s Gerry Couture went to the box when his goaltender, Harry Lumley, high-sticked Boston’s Bill Cowley. In the October of 1947, in a game at Chicago Stadium between the Black Hawks and Red Wings, Chadwick saw fit to call (in separate incidents) penalties on both team’s goaltenders, Lumley for tripping (Red Kelly went to the box) and Chicago’s Emile Francis for high-sticking (Dick Butler did the time).

A few days later Francis was penalized again, this time against Montreal, after a “mix-up” with Canadiens’ winger Jimmy Peters. By some accounts, this was an out-and-out fight, though Peters and Francis were assessed minors for roughing. Is it possible that referee Georges Gravel downgraded the charge to avoid the spectacle of Francis having to face a penalty shot for his temper?

The rule does seem generally to have fallen into disrepute in these final years before it was rewritten. Witness the game at Maple Leaf Gardens in January of 1946 when the Leafs beat the Red Wings 9-3 in a game refereed by King Clancy. Late in the third period, Detroit’s Joe Carveth took a shot on the Leaf goal only to see it saved by goaltender Frank McCool. The Globe and Mail’s Vern DeGeer described what happened next:

The puck rebounded back to Carveth’s stick as a whistle sounded. Carveth fired the puck again. It hit McCool on the shoulder. The Toronto goalie dropped his stick and darted from his cage. He headed straight for Carveth and enveloped the Detroiter in a bear hug that would have done credit to one of Frank Tunney’s mightiest wrestling warriors, and bore him to the ice.

DeGeer’s description of the aftermath came with a derisive subhed: Who Wrote This Rule?

The sheer stupidity of major hockey rules developed out of the McCool-Carveth affair. Carveth was given a two-minute penalty for firing the puck after the whistle and an additional two minutes for fighting. A major penalty shot play was given against McCool. Carl Liscombe made the play and hit the goalpost at McCool’s right side. There’s neither rhyme nor reason for such a severe penalty against a goaltender, but it’s in the rule book.

Carveth was in the penalty box when the game ended. First thing the former Regina boy did was skate to the Toronto fence and apologize to Frank for taking the extra shot after the whistle.

The NHL made another change ahead of the 1949-50 season: from then on, major penalties, too, that were incurred by goaltenders would see a teammate designated to serve time in the box rather than resulting in a penalty shot.

this friday

October 14, 2022 / puckstruck

Icy Crisis: The Philadelphia Blazers were set to make their debut this week in 1972 as the WHA kicked off its inaugural season, and they were oh so close to hosting the New England Whalers at the local Civic Center. But the Zamboni arrived late, and when it ventured out to do its work, the ice buckled. After officials conferred with referee Bill Friday (that’s him, above, on the cover a 1977 Houston Aeros program), the game was postposed, to the chagrin of 6,000 expectant fans, who tossed back the red WHA pucks they’d been given as they arrived. Blazers’ captain Derek Sanderson took to the PA to explain. “It would be very dangerous for the players,” he said. “Please come back, we need your support after they get this bloody ice fixed.” Not an auspicious start for the Blazers, who continued to falter. Sanderson departed after eight games, returning to the NHL Bruins. The Blazers themselves lasted just a single season in Philadelphia before upping stakes and relocating to Vancouver.

department of throwing stuff: turning back the clock

May 19, 2022 / puckstruck

Tool Time: In February of 1939, 13 years after he was not-quite brained in Boston, Charlie Querrie (right) handed over a repurposed wrench to Boston coach and manager Art Ross. (Image: City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1266, Item 56558)

I’ve reported before on the bedlam that ensued on the night of Tuesday, December 21, 1926, when Toronto’s bygone St. Patricks went to Boston to beat the Bruins and Toronto’s coach was lucky to escape with his life, after frantic local fans threw a hardboiled egg and a monkey wrench at his head — only the egg hit its target.

That’s a chaotic story I told in some detail in a 2016 post — you can find it here. Our business tonight is with the aftermath, which is to say the monkey wrench, insofar as the 1939 photograph shown here of that very implement is one I recently unearthed at the Toronto Archives.

Charlie Querrie was the Toronto coach: that’s him on the right. He was 61 in 1939, and had been out of hockey management for more than a decade. On the left is 54-year-old Art Ross, who was very much in it, still coaching and managing the Bruins as he’d done since their advent in 1924.

The two were old rivals. In the NHL’s very first season, 1917-18, when Querrie was manager of the Toronto team that went on to win the Stanley Cup, Ross was the referee for the penultimate game of the finals. While Toronto did upend the PCHA’s Vancouver Millionaires to take the Cup, that game didn’t go their way, with Vancouver winning by a score of 8-1.

An Ottawa Journal report from February 3, 1939.

Ross did not, shall we say, failed to endear himself to Querrie on that occasion. Talking to reporters after it was over, the referee decried Toronto’s tactics. “The Blues gave a most brutal exhibition,” he said of Querrie’s team, “and unless the western club gets absolute protection from the referees, they will all be killed.”

“If the Vancouver club gets protection,” he added, “it has a good chance to win the world’s championship series with Toronto.”

Querrie was furious. The two had words after the game, which the Toronto manager was only too glad to pass on to the newspapers. “Ross started in by telling me that I was a poor loser,” he said, “and went on to say that I [was] mixed up in a crooked league, and was a crook in sport. I promptly called him a liar, and then he threatened to lick me.”

“If Ross is such a fighter,” Querrie said, “there is plenty of room for him over in France.”

Eight years later, with Ross running the Bruins and Querrie back in charge of a Toronto team now clad in green and called the St. Patricks, the 1926 havoc we’re interested in got going late in the game. With about five minutes remaining, with Toronto leading by a score of 5-2, Boston winger Percy Galbraith put a puck past St. Pats goaltender John Ross Roach. Too bad for Boston, referees W.H. O’Hara and Dr. Eddie O’Leary called it back, for offside. Definitively so, as Charlie Querrie saw it from the Toronto bench. “The offside goal,” he told a Toronto newspaper, “was easily 60 feet offside.”

Boston disagreed. Here’s Querrie’s version of what happened next:

Just as soon as the goal was called back, the Boston players, led by [captain Sprague] Cleghorn, rushed at the officials, and Art Ross, manager of the Bruins, and Charles Adams, the owner, clambered over the fence and took a hand in the argument. Ross had a rulebook and he tried to make monkeys out of the officials by producing it and reding the rules to them in front of the crowd. Naturally the actions of Ross and Adams worked the crowd up and in a moment three or four excited spectators were over the fence and the pennies and the bottles and other things commenced to fly. I got over the fence, too, to protest against the presence of Ross and Adams on the ice and someone hurled a monkey wrench at my head. It wasn’t any toy, either, but a full-sized three-pound wrench, and I brought it away as a souvenir. It only missed my head by a foot.

Querrie didn’t preserve the egg that hit him after that — it was, he quipped, “not an overly fresh one at that” — but he did hang on to the wrench.

Thirteen years later, he dug it out and decided the time was right to send it back to Boston. Globe and Mail columnist Vern DeGeer took note in February of ’39, reporting that Querrie had “had the wrench polished and coated with a glistening touch of varnish. It was converted into a unique desk set, with an eight-day clock attached.”

When the Bruins came to town to meet the Leafs for a Thursday game that February 2, Querrie arranged to hand over the wrench to Ross in the press room at Maple Leaf Gardens. As I’ve written previously, it now bore an engraving:

To
‪ARTHUR ROSS

From
CHARLIE QUERRIE

‪Returning a Gift
Thrown at Him
‪Many Years Ago

Back in those dangerous days of 1926, Charlie Querrie was not only coaching the St. Patricks, he was the owner of the team, too, though not for much longer: in mid-February of 1927, he would divest himself of the St. Pats (and his coaching duties), selling out to a syndicate headed by a Toronto sand and gravel contractor by the name of Conn Smythe, who (spoiler alert) turned them into Maple Leafs.

As I’ve written elsewhere, profiling Querrie’s distinguished sporting career, his post-hockey days revolved around the movie-house he ran on Toronto’s west-end Danforth Avenue. He didn’t stray too far from the city’s ice and its proud hockey record: in 1944, he noted that in the 32 years since professional hockey debuted in Toronto in 1912, he had (incredibly) been on hand to witness all but three games.

Charlie Querrie died at 72 in 1950, four years before Art Ross finally retired from the Boston Bruins. He was 79 when he died in 1964.

And the time-telling monkey wrench? It’s back in Canada, again, having been presented (regifted?) by the Ross family to hockey historian Eric Zweig, author of Art Ross: The Hockey Legend Who Built The Bruins (2015).

Clocked Work: The monkey wrench that almost clouted/could have killed Toronto’s NHL coach in 1926 is now in the collection of hockey historian Eric Zweig.

king toot

February 25, 2022 / puckstruck

Whistleblower: Today marks the 120th anniversary of the birth of King Clancy, superstar NHL defenceman, long-serving referee, sometime coach. Born in Ottawa on a Tuesday of this date in 1902, Clancy played a decade with his hometown Senators in the 1920s, winning two Stanley Cup championships, before joining the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1930. With the Leafs, he skated a further seven seasons and got in on another Cup. The photo here dates to April of 1947, when Clancy was 45 and reffing in the finals that saw Toronto dismiss the Montreal Canadiens four games to two. (Image courtesy of Toronto Public Library)

canada v usa, 1932: a little shaken by the unexpected turn of events

February 12, 2022February 12, 2022 / puckstruck / 2 Comments

Placid Puck: On outdoor ice on February 4, 1932, Canada and the U.S. opened the 1932 Olympic tournament, with the visitors winning 2-1 in overtime. Broadly banded around the chest to show they’re U.S. defenceman are Ty Anderson (#5) and John Garrison. Canada’s #2 is defenceman Roy Henkel.

“The Canadian team had shown such terrible form … that their officers were commencing to cultivate brows like old-fashioned washboards.”

“To tell the honest truth, the team Canada has to depend upon looked worse than awful.”

Oh, it all worked out in the end in February of 1932, at the Winter Olympics, for Canada, in hockey. It just wasn’t as easy as it might have been for the Winnipeg Hockey Club, the team charged with upholding Canada’s golden honour at hockey’s fourth Olympics. That the gloomy words above were written and published for a national audience to ponder by the man who refereed every one of the Canada’s games during the tournament might seem a little strange, but, well, that’s how it went in those years. Lou Marsh, the sports editor for the Toronto Daily Star whose record of racism has recently come under renewed scrutiny, was in Lake Placid in ’32 as a working reporter, albeit one with a unique perch: along with an American colleague, Donald Sands, Marsh was one of the officials who oversaw every game at of the tournament. (He was, it’s true, a seasoned veteran, having moonlit as an NHL referee for more than a decade.)

By February 7, when Marsh was furrowing his own brow, Canada had played three games. After opening the tournament against the hosts from the United States with a 2-1 overtime win on February 4, they’d (reluctantly) skated in an exhibition game, losing 2-0 to McGill.

Next, back to the fight for gold, came Germany, who insisted on succumbing by a mere 4-1. This was just getting silly. Four years earlier, Canadians had been lapping Swedes and Czechs by scores of 33-0 and 30-0.

Lake Placid had a brand-new indoor hockey rink that year, but as Marsh explained it, the organizers preferred a second, outdoor, venue at the local Stadium, where they could accommodate more spectators and sell more tickets. The Stadium rink was narrow and, for the first meeting between Canada and the U.S., its ice was soft and spongy. That worried Marsh, on Canada’s behalf. “If these games continue on these outdoor rinks, Canada is not out of the woods yet, Anything can happen.”

The Americans, the referee warned, were a real threat.

“True enough,” he wrote following the overtime win, “it was nothing like a good hockey match to look at, but those Yanks know what it is all about and they made the going tough for the Canucks.”

Wearing his newspaperman’s hat, Marsh had done his best to toughen the going for the Americans before the tournament got underway. In January, Ralph Winsor’s U.S. aggregation of college players had played an Olympic warm-up game at Boston’s Garden against the NHL Bruins. The pros prevailed by a score of 5-1, with Art Chapman netting four goals.

But (the Boston Globe judged) “the amateurs left an impression that the shield of these United States is to be worn by a group of right smart hockey players.” The U.S. team further profited from the experience by receiving gate receipts from the game to help finance their foray to Lake Placid. If no-one south of the Canadian border saw anything untoward in this, there were those to the north who did. Lou Marsh took it upon himself to cable Paul Loicq, president of the Ligue Internationale de Hockey sur Glace (forerunner of the IIHF), to wonder whether the U.S. hadn’t broken rules governing amateurism and the Olympics.

After years as a sports columnist at Toronto’s Daily Star, Marsh had in the fall of 1931 succeeded to the role of editor when his long-time boss, W.A. Hewitt, accepted a job from Conn Smythe as attractions manager of his brand-new Maple Leaf Gardens. Hewitt, Foster’s father, had strong Olympic hockey ties himself, having accompanied the 1920 Canadian team to the very first tournament in Antwerp as a reporter and representative of the Canadian Olympic Association.

In 1932, Hewitt was serving as the COC’s manager of winter sports while still writing for the Star. Pointing out the U.S. transgression, Marsh quoted Hewitt in his COC role as saying he didn’t think Canada should lodge an official protest. Which they didn’t, in the end. While Paul Loicq confirmed that the U.S. had broken the rules, without Canada’s objection, no further action was taken.

Back on the ice in the Adirondacks, Canada recorded a restorative 9-0 drubbing of the Poles on February 8, and that must have calmed some nerves. The Germans got the message, sort of, losing 5-0 when the teams met for a second time. Next day, when it was Poland’s turn again, the Winnipegs patiently re-drubbed them 10-0.

Which was better. More Canadian, certainly. In the final (indoors at the Arena), the Winnipegs faced the United States again, on February 13. Lou Marsh noted a quirk of the American wardrobe in his Star column before the game: as seen in the image at the top, Ralph Winsor’s defencemen wore sweaters featuring a broad white band around the chest, to distinguish them and remind their teammates on the forward line of their defensive responsibilities.

“Any time a forward sees a player with this broad white band pass him going down the ice,” Marsh wrote, “he knows that the defence is temporarily weakened and that he must cover up for a return rush.”

In the game, the Americans twice had the audacity to take the lead and twice — “a little shaken by the unexpected turn of events,” as the Toronto Globe reported — Canada was forced to tie it up. That’s how the game ended, 2-2, which was just enough to give Canada the gold, on points, even as the country considered the disturbing shift in Olympic hockey that we’ve been struggling with ever since: other teams, from other countries, seemed like they wanted to win gold just as much as we did.

Reftop: When he wasn’t writing and editing sports at the Toronto Daily Star, Lou Marsh worked as an NHL referee. Not certain why he was up on the roof in his skates and his reffing gear, but it’s fair to surmise that he’s up atop the old Star building in Toronto at 80 King Street West. (Image: City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 3610)

such a violent contact game: clarence campbell holds court at the statler hotel, 1951

January 31, 2022 / puckstruck

Hearing Room: Ted Lindsay, NHL President Clarence Campbell, and Bill Ezinicki in Campbell’s suite at Boston’s Statler Hotel on the afternoon of Saturday, January 27, 1951. (Image: Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection)

Reasons hockey players ended up in hotel rooms in the 1950s: they were on road trips, with hours to kill before the game, or recuperating after it was all over, maybe it was the old Bismarck Hotel in Chicago, or the Croydon, could be that they were living there, in the Kimberly in New York, where some Canadian Rangers used to shack up during up the season, or in the Belvedere on 48^th, or the Roosevelt on 45^th, in the Theatre District. The Montreal Canadiens often put up at the Piccadilly, also on 45^th, that’s where, in 1951, Maurice Richard grabbed a referee by the name of Hugh McLean “by the throat or tie,” to quote one account of the fracas — though I think that was in the lobby.

In Toronto, Richard and his teammates used to stay at the Royal York. The Mount Royal Hotel on Peel Street was a haven for NHL teams visiting Montreal in those years. The Sheraton-Cadillac in Detroit was where the Red Wings threw a big testimonial bash for Jack Adams in 1952 on the occasion of his having devoted a quarter-century to the cause of the wingéd wheel.

And in Boston? For years, hotelwise, hockey central was the Manger (rhymes with clangour), neighbouring the old Garden, which was built atop the city’s busy North Station. “Who could forget Boston and the old Manger Hotel where we stayed?” Canadiens’ captain Butch Bouchard wondered, years later. The coming and going of trains below would tremor the hockey players all night in their beds, he recalled. The Bruins used to convene there, too, in 1956, for example, when coach Milt Schmidt ran his training camp at the Garden. Herbert Warren Wind wrote about it in Sports Illustrated:

To make sure that his players were thinking of hockey, hockey, hockey, Schmidt made it mandatory for every member of his squad to live in the Hotel Manger, which adjoins the Garden. He moved in himself, the better to enforce a strict curfew of 11 p.m. Furthermore, every man had to be up by 7 — there would be none of that lolling in bed and skipping breakfast and then trying to slide through morning practice without a good meal to fuel you.

In his 2020 memoir, Willie O’Ree remembered arriving at the Manger in the fall of 1957 for his first NHL camp. “I’d never seen so much marble in my life. It was first-class, and just staying there made me feel as if I were already a full-fledged member of the Bruins.”

The Manger is where Bruins legend Eddie Shore is supposed to have chased another player through the lobby waving a stick— I’m not clear on whether it was a teammate or rival. It’s where, in his refereeing years, King Clancy got into a fight with Black Hawks’ coach Charlie Conacher. And the Manger was the scene of another momentous moment in Bruins history in 1947, when another Boston hero, Bill Cowley, summarily quit the team and his hockey career in a dispute with Bruins’ supremo Art Ross at a post-season team banquet.

Could it be that it was due to this long record of ruckus that NHL President Clarence Campbell chose to stay away from the Manger’s fray? I don’t have good information on that.

What I can say is that, in January of 1951 — 71 years ago last week — Campbell checked himself into the calmer — more commodious? — confines of the Statler Hotel, which is where he and a couple of his (concussed) players posed for the photo above. The Statler is about a mile-and-a-half south of the Manger and the Garden, down by Boston Common. The latter was razed in 1983; the Statler is Boston’s Park Plaza today.

And how did Campbell come to be entertaining Ted Lindsay and Bill Ezinicki (while showing off the bathroom of his suite) on that long-ago Saturday afternoon?

It all started two days earlier, in Detroit, where Lindsay’s Red Wings had been hosting Ezinicki’s Bruins.

The Red Wings were leading the NHL, eight points ahead of second-place Toronto; the Bruins were 23 points back, fourth-placed in the six-team loop. Three of the league’s top six scorers wore Red-Wing red that season, names of Howe and Lindsay and Abel; Milt Schmidt was Boston’s leader, eighth in the league. The game ended as a 3-3 tie, with Howe and Abel adding assists to their collections.

Scoring wasn’t what this game would be remembered for. “At Detroit, there was more brawling than hockey playing.” That was the Canadian Press’ reporting next day. Enlivened was a word in the version The New York Times ran: an NHL game “enlivened by a bruising battle between Ted Lindsay and Bill Ezinicki.”

“Fist fighting has no honest place in hockey,” Marshall Dann of Detroit’s Free Press wrote while also allowing that, for those in the 10,618-strong crowd who enjoyed hockey’s violence, what ensued was “probably … the best battle at Olympia this season.”

Ezinicki was 26, Lindsay a year younger. They’d been teammates once, winning a Memorial Cup championship together with the (Charlie Conacher-coached) 1944 Oshawa Generals. In 1949, playing with the Toronto Maple Leafs, Ezinicki had led the NHL in penalty minutes, with Lindsay not far behind, in seventh place on the league list.

A year earlier, 1949-50, only Gus Kyle of the New York Rangers had compiled more penalty minutes than Ezinicki; Lindsay had finished third, a minute back of Ezinicki. Wild Bill the papers called him; the Associated Press identified Lindsay (a.k.a. Terrible Ted) as Detroit’s sparkplug. They’d clashed before in the NHL: in a 1948 game, in what the Boston Globe qualified as a “joust,” Lindsay freed four of Ezinicki’s teeth from his lower jaw.

In the January game in 1951, it was in the third period that things boiled over between the two malefactors. To start, they had exchanged (in Dann’s telling) “taps” with their sticks. “The whacks grew harder and finally they dropped sticks and gloves and went at it with fists.” Three times Lindsay seems to have knocked Ezinicki down: the third time the Boston winger’s head hit the ice, knocking him out.

Referee George Gravel assessed match penalties to both players for their deliberate efforts to injure each other. Both players were assessed automatic $100 fines.

In the aftermath, Red Wings physician Dr. C.L. Tomsu closed a cut from Lindsay’s stick on Ezinicki’s forehead with 11 stitches. He threaded another four into the side of Ezinicki’s head, where it had hit the ice, and four more inside his mouth. He also reported that Ezinicki had a tooth broken off in the violence.

Before departing Detroit, Ezinicki had his skull x-rayed; no serious injury was revealed, said his coach, Lynn Patrick. It took several days — and another x-ray — for Boston’s Dr. Tom Kelley to discover that Ezinicki’s nose was broken.

Lindsay took a stitch over one eye, and got treatment “for a scarred and bruised right hand.”

The Montreal Gazette’s Dink Carroll reported that Lindsay stopped by the Olympia clinic as Ezinicki was getting his stitching.

“Are you all right?” Lindsay asked. … The angry Ezinicki growled, “I’m all right,” and Lindsay left.

The Boston Daily Globe reported that the two had dropped their gloves and “slugged it out for more than a minute.” A Canadian Press dispatch timed the fighting at three minutes: “the length of a single round of a boxing match.”

None of the immediate (i.e. next-day) reports included the term stick-swingfest. That was a subsequent description, a few weeks after the fact, in February. Much of the reporting was couched in standard-issue hockey jovialese, as though the two men’s attempts to behead one another were purely pantomime.

The two teams were due to meet again in Boston two nights later, on the Saturday night, but before the two teams hit the ice, NHL President Clarence Campbell called for a hearing at the Statler to decide, hours before the puck dropped, on what today would be called supplemental discipline. The match penalties that referee Gravel had assessed came with automatic suspensions, but it was up to Campbell to decide how long the offenders would be out.

Campbell had been planning to be visiting Boston, as it turned out, on his way down from NHL HQ in Montreal to a meeting of club owners scheduled for Miami Beach. So that was convenient. NHL Referee-in-Chief Carl Voss would conduct the hearing into what had happened in Detroit, then Campbell would come to his decision.

We Three: Lindsay, Campbell, and Ezinicki. (Image: Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection)

And so the scales of what passed for NHL justice weighed the evidence. Ezinicki and Boston coach Lynn Patrick were scheduled to appear in Campbell’s suite at 11 a.m. Saturday morning, with Lindsay and Detroit coach Tommy Ivan following at 1 p.m. George Gravel was also on deck to report what he’d witnessed.

In the event, the teams were late arriving in Boston — their train from Detroit was delayed for five hours after hitting a car at an Ontario rail crossing — and proceedings had to be hurried along.

It would have been mid-afternoon when the scene above ensued. No-one else spoke to the reporters who assembled to hear the verdict: this was Clarence Campbell’s show.

“Everything has been said,” Ezinicki offered. Lindsay: “Nothing to say.”

“Neither of them had a whisper to offer in defence of their actions,” Campbell said.

The Boston Globe reminded readers that Campbell, himself a former NHL referee, had a lawyerly past, and that in 1945, just before assuming the NHL presidency, he’d been a Canadian Army prosecutor at the German war crime trials.

“There are three factors to be considered in settling a case of this kind,” he began. “First, the amount of incapacitation; second, provocation, and third, the past records of the players.”

“I don’t feel there was any real incapacitation in this instance,” Campbell continued. “I’m sure that Ezinicki would be able to play all right against the Wings if he were allowed.” (Ezinicki later concurred, for the record: he said he felt “all right.”)

“I don’t consider either of these men had provocation. They went at each other willfully.”

“These two fellows’ previous records are hard to exceed, not for one but for all seasons.”

His sentences? Campbell noted that the punishments he was handing down were the most severe of his five-year tenure as NHL president. Lindsay and Ezinicki were each fined $300 (including the original $100 match-penalty sanctions) and both were suspended (without pay) for the next three Boston-Detroit games. The fines were, in fact, more akin to peace bonds: so long as they behaved themselves, Lindsay and Ezinicki could each apply to have $200 of their fines returned to them.

“It depends upon their records the remainder of the season,” Campbell said, “if they’re not too proud to ask for it.”

Campbell did have some sharp words for the linesmen who’d been working the game in Detroit, Mush March and Bill Knott, who’d failed to quell the disturbance. “An order has been sent out reminding linesmen rules call for them to heed instructions in their rule books which say they ‘shall intervene immediately in fights,’” he said.

Campbell did, finally, have an important policy distinction to make before he concluded his sentencing session at the Statler Hotel. “I want to emphasize,” he told the writers gathered, “that I’m handing out these penalties entirely for the stick-swinging business and not for their fist-fighting.”

“In 1949, when there was a mild epidemic of match penalties, the board of governors instructed me to stiffen up on sticking incidents. I’m following that policy.”

“We want to stamp out the use of sticks. We’re not so concerned with fists . Fighting is not encouraged,” Campbell explained, “but it is tolerated as an outlet for the high spirits in such a violent contact game.”

It was the end of February by the time Ezinicki and Lindsay had served out their suspensions and were back on the ice to face one another in a game in Boston. They restrained themselves, I guess: neither of the antagonists featured in the penalty record or write-ups generated by the 1-1 tie that the Red Wings and Bruins shared in.

Campbell had a busy schedule all the same as February turned to March in ’51.

He took a suite at Toronto’s Royal York as the month got going and it was there that he decreed, after hearing from the parties involved (including referee Gravel, again), that Maple Leaf defenceman Gus Mortson would be suspended for two games and fined $200 for swinging his stick at Adam Brown of the Chicago Black Hawks.

“It appears to me as if he had a mental lapse,” Campbell said of Mortson.

Next up, a few days later, Campbell was back in his office in Montreal to adjudicate Maurice Richard’s New York hotel run-in with referee Hugh McLean.

During a game with the Rangers at Madison Square Garden that week, the Rocket had objected to a penalty he’d been assessed. For his protestations, he’d found himself with a misconduct and a $50 fine.

Later, when Richard happened to run into McLean in the lobby of the Piccadilly Hotel on 45^th, just west of Broadway, he’d accosted him.

Campbell fined Richard $500 on a charge of “conduct detrimental to the welfare of hockey.”

Yes, he decided, Richard had appl wrote in rendering his decision, “that Richard did get McLean by the throat or tie …. Richard’s action in grabbing McLean was accompanied by a lot of foul and abusive language at the official which was continued through the entire incident lasting several minutes, and during which several women were present.”

Campbell did chide press coverage of the incident, which had been, he found, “exaggerated” the situation, since no blows had actually been landed in the fracas.

Campbell did say a word in defence of his referee, saying that Richard’s conduct was “completely unjustifiable.” His fine, Campbell insisted, would serve both as punishment for his bad behaviour and as a warning to other hockey players not to attack referees on the ice, or in hotels — or anywhere, really, at any time.

Justice League: Back row, from left, that’s Detroit coach Tommy Ivan, NHL Referee-in-Chief Carl Voss, referee George Gravel, Boston coach Lynn Patrick. Up front: Ted Lindsay, Clarence Campbell, Bill Ezinicki. Lindsay, Campbell, and Ezinicki. (Image: Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection)

collateral damage: a faceful of rocket richard’s stick, and gloves, and other adventures with an nhl whistle

January 17, 2022January 14, 2023 / puckstruck

Purpled Hayes: That’s rookie referee George Hayes on the ice in January of 1947 at Maple Leaf Gardens, struck down by Maurice Richard’s flying stick. Attending the patient is linesman Eddie Mepham. Richard looks on with interest and, I think, concern; that’s the Rocket’s stick still airborne behind Hayes. Leafs’ #7 is Bud Poile.

The Toronto Maple Leafs won the game, but it was this photograph of stickstruck referee George Hayes that ended up making the front page of the Globe and Mail on the morning after, 75 years ago this week.

Welcome to life as an NHL official in the late 1940s. Well, the turbulent times of Hayes, anyway, whose start in the league was auspicious for all the wrong reasons, and whose temperament, — and/or lifestyle — and/or suspicion of doctors — didn’t seem to promise much in the way of a long career.

And yet, and yet: in the course of a 19-year career, Hayes would become the first NHL linesman to work 1,000 games. All told, he skated in 1,549 NHL games, regular-season, playoff, and all-star.

The scene above? On Wednesday, January 15, 1947, just months into that tenure, Hayes was working the whistle in Toronto as the Leafs entertained the Montreal Canadiens. Syl Apps and Gaye Stewart got the goals Toronto needed, but (said the Globe’s Jim Vipond) goaltender Turk Broda was “the main factor” in Toronto’s 2-1 win. It cemented the Leafs’ hold on first overall in the NHL, with Montreal standing second.

Here’s Vipond on the mishap depicted here, which Hayes suffered in third period:

Five stitches were necessary to close the gash which split open his left eyebrow. He returned to finish his job after being patched up in the Gardens hospital. Hayes was struck by Maurice (The Rocket) Richard’s stick which accidentally flew out of the Montreal player’s hands. A fraction of an inch lower and the referee might have lost an eye.

Fans at Maple Leaf Gardens booed the very notion of the 32-year-old referee as it was announced that he’d been hurt. For Vipond, that was a “new low for sportsmanship” in Toronto sporting annals. “And the mild clapping when he returned stitched up only partly atoned for the misdemeanor.”

Born in 1914 in Montreal, Hayes grew up in Ingersoll, Ontario. “I could skate before I could walk,” he told a newspaper reporter in 1975. He learned his officiating chops in the OHA and AHL. In 1946, he was considered one of the top amateur referees in Canada. He was, no question, of the busiest: through the 1945-46 season, he officiated 105 games, including the Memorial Cup final, travelling some 32,000 kilometres that year as he attended to his duties.

It was interim NHL President Red Dutton who signed him to a big-league contract in April of ’46. The salary was $2,000 a year, with a bonus of $25 paid for each game he refereed.

By the time Hayes started his new job that fall, former NHL referee Clarence Campbell had taken the helm of the NHL. The six-team league, which played a 60-game schedule, employed just four referees that year: Hayes joined King Clancy, Bill Chadwick, and Georges Gravel on the whistle-blowing staff, who were supported by a dozen or so linesmen.

It was as a linesman that Campbell first eased Hayes into his new job, through October and November of ’46. He got his first assignment as a referee in Boston, where on a Wednesday night, November 27, he adjudicated a 5-2 Bruins’ win over the New York Rangers. He seems to have done just fine, which is to say he managed to stay out of the papers. Let the record show that the very first infraction he whistled was committed by Bruins’ centre Milt Schmidt, a cross-check.

It was one of only two penalties Hayes called on the night, which presumably pleased Campbell who, to start the season and his regime, had declared that he’d told his referees to err on the side of silence. “There’ll be a full 60 minutes of action,” he promised. “I’ve instructed all officials to keep the game moving and to lay off the whistle unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

The first blood Hayes spilled in his NHL career would seem to have been on New Year’s day of 1947, when he was reffing Leafs and Red Wings in Toronto. “Gorgeous George essayed to wrestle [Leaf] Bud Poile and [Wing] Pete Horeck — both at the same time — and finished up counting his teeth carefully,” Jim Coleman wrote in the Globe and Mail. Actually, he got a stick in the nose in the melee and the game was delayed while he went in search of patchwork.

The encounter with Richard’s stick came next, which had Coleman calling him “a scarred hireling.” Following in quickish succession was another game featuring Montreal, this one in Detroit, in which Canadiens’ Ken Mosdell was so irked by a penalty that Hayes had assessed him that the centreman (as the Gazette described it) skated hard against Hayes’ leg and had him stumbling” Hayes stayed up; Mosdell got a 10-minute misconduct for his efforts.

Around this same time, it was reported that Campbell had taken the league’s newest referee aside for a chat in the wake of criticism (notably from the Detroit Red Wings) that Hayes was letting too much go in the games he was overseeing.

If so, Hayes seems to have got the message: at the end of the next game he reffed, a torrid one between Toronto and Chicago, he announced that he was augmenting the penalties he’d assessed with $25 fines to four players who’d been brawling. (His accounting, as it turned out, was slightly off: one of those punished was Leaf left winger Nick Metz, though it was his teammate and younger brother, right winger Don Metz, who’d been in the melee.)

George Hayes’ rookie season didn’t end quietly. That February, in another fractious game between Toronto and Montreal, he gave the notoriously peaceable Leaf captain Syl Apps a 10-minute misconduct. Here’s the Globe and Mail’s Al Nickleson describing what happened:

Apps, who had only one minor penalty up to Sunday, received his misconduct after a shoving and high-sticking bee in the Canadien end. Not on the ice at the time the fracas began, Apps said that as team captain, he skated out to talk to the referee after the whistle had blown. Hayes, he said, told him the penalty was for having too many men on the ice. No penalties were given participants in the fracas.

According to Jim Coleman, as Apps skated to the penalty box, Montreal’s designated rankler Murph Chamberlain followed along to apply his needle: “There goes the Byng trophy, Syl, old boy.”

Maybe so, maybe not: what’s true is that when the post-season votes were tallied that year, Apps was second to Boston winger Bobby Bauer. Hayes’ iffy misconduct was, by then, missing from Apps’ charge-sheet: upon review, Clarence Campbell deemed that Hayes had erred and so erased the penalty from the league’s records. That was an NHL first at the time and, as far as I know, it hasn’t happened again.

March of 1947 had its own trials for Hayes. After a playoff game between Montreal and Boston, Canadiens’ GM Frank Selke declared his officiating “the worst I’ve seen in my life.”

Rocket Richard again figured in the narrative, though this time he was the one who was cut, in a clash at the boards with Boston’s Ken Smith. The former felt the latter deserved a major, but Hayes called a minor, and when Richard slapped his stick on the ice in disgust, Hayes drew one his 10-minute misconducts from his quiver. Asked about Hayes after the game, Selke said, “Clarence Campbell shouldn’t have sent out a child to do a man’s job.”

Campbell came out in defence of Hayes on that occasion: he had “handled the game quite competently.” But the following season, Hayes was back working as an NHL linesman, mostly, his reffing assignments much reduced. Not that he was, on the lines, protected from further harm: in the first weeks of the 1947-48 season, he was either pushed or punched by Montreal defenceman Butch Bouchard, who was duly fined $50.

In 1954, Hayes got to rekindle his relationship with Rocket Richard. This was late December, just three months before Richard punched another linesman, Cliff Thompson, in the face on the way to a match penalty and the suspension that exploded in an eponymous riot. It was Leafs and Canadiens again, in Toronto, and Richard was sparring with Leaf centre Bob Bailey who, as the Rocket later told it, gouged at his eyes. Here’s Richard’s account of what happened next, from his 1971 Stan-Fischler-assisted memoir:

When I got up I was madder’n hell. But I couldn’t see very well. George Hayes, the linesman, was trying told hold me off, and that got me even angrier, because all I wanted to do was get back at Bailey. Hayes didn’t mean any harm to me but I was furious over anybody trying to hold me so I went after Hayes. I didn’t hit him with my fist; just my gloves with a sort of “get away, man, you’re bothering me” kind of push. I just didn’t want to see anybody around me. But Hayes was big and strong and he managed to keep me away. I got fined good for that one and, even worse, I didn’t catch up with Bailey.

“Molesting an official” was the charge entered by Clarence Campbell in fining Richard a total of $250 for that incident.

Hayes was an imposing figure on the ice in his day, 6’3’’, 200+ pounds. “Ox-like” was a description invoked at the time of his death, in 1987. “He used to smell trouble,” NHL referee Art Skov said then. “He’d step between players. He knew how to talk to guys like the Rocket and calm them down. He saved me and a lot of other referees a lot of trouble.”

Break It Up: Linesmen Mush March (left) and George Hayes attend a scuffle during the Bruins’ 3-1 win over the Black Hawks at Chicago Stadium in December of 1950. “There were several fights in the final period resulting from the Hawks’ general frustration at not being able to score,” UPI noted in a write-up of the game, “but no one was hurt.” Embrangled here, that’s the Bruins’ Milt Schmidt, who’d end up winning the Hart Trophy that year as NHL MVP, atop Chicago’s Pete Babando. Referee Bill Knott punished the combatants with two-minute penalties, for roughing. Embrangled here, that’s the Bruins’ Milt Schmidt atop Chicago’s Pete Babando. Referee Bill Knott punished the combatants with two-minute penalties, for roughing.

Skov, who started as a linesman in the later 1950s, remembered Hayes telling him and his fledgling colleagues never to touch Richard, no matter what. “Talk to him, talk about anything,” Skov recalled Hayes saying, “the weather, the news, anything, but never handle him. When the Rocket was mad, he was mad. He might do anything.”

Obituaries would, eventually, cite Hayes’ individualism, hot temper, his stubbornness, love of argument, his drinking.

There was the story of his days as a talented amateur baseball player playing for the Tillsonburg Pandrieds in southern Ontario. Those came to an abrupt halt in 1940 when he took exception to the effrontery of an Aylmer second baseman. “I hauled off and broke his nose,” Hayes later recalled. In the ruckus that ensued, Hayes picked up an umpire and (as he told it) threw him over a fence.

Lionel Conacher was chairman of the Ontario Athletic Commission at the time, and it was the former NHLer who banned Hayes from playing any sports. By the time he was re-instated, he’d taken up as a hockey official.

The episode, Hayes said, taught him “tolerance for the player’s point of view.”

“I wanted to treat them the same as I’d like to be treated.”

Whisky (Canadian Club) and beer (Molson’s) were his drinks. There was the story that when Hayes started working the lines in the NHL, Campbell and referee-in-chief Carl Voss thought that putting him under King Clancy’s wing might regulate his intake. “Campbell knew King didn’t drink,” Hayes had once recalled,” and I did. But he didn’t know that King would sit up with me until five in the morning and drink ginger ale.”

“Hayes makes no secret of his drinking,” a 1965 profile reported, adding Hayes’ own disclaimer. “Sure, I took drinks after a game,” he said. “Who doesn’t? The players do, the officials do. This is a tough racket. But I’ve never taken a drink before a game. I’ve never been in a bar before a game.”

Hayes was fined, apparently, for having a friendly post-game drink with a couple Chicago Black Hawks, Pierre Pilote and Frank Sullivan: $50.

He got into trouble in 1961 for his travel habits: Campbell suspended him for two weeks for going coach on trains to games instead of riding first class while still charging the NHL for the more expensive ticket. At the time, Hayes insisted it wasn’t about the money. “I just can’t sleep in a sleeper, but I can sleep in a day coach.”

That may have been so; he also later said that all the officials were doing it. “the league only allowed us $10 a day and that was supposed to pay for the hotel, meals, taxis, and our laundry. We went in the hole every day. That’s why I rode day coaches — to make up the losses.”

“It would make you $20 or $30 per trip.”

Campbell said that NHL officials had no choice in the matter: they needed a good night’s sleep before a game. “We want officials who are fit and in proper condition to work,” he said.

In 1963, Carl Voss docked Hayes $50 for taking the ice unshaven for an afternoon game.

If it doesn’t sound like a sustainable relationship that Hayes and his employers had, well, no, it wasn’t. It came to its professional end in 1965 when Campbell required all NHL officials to undergo an eye test and Hayes refused.

“Hell,” he protested, “I’ve tested my eyes for years in bars reading the labels on whisky bottles. I can still do it, so who needs an eye test? A guy is an inch or two offside and I can call it from 85 feet away. There’s nothing wrong with my eyesight and there never has been.”

“We all took the test, except George,” Art Skov said in 1987, “and nobody could talk him into it. The part of it is, the guy doing the test was a war buddy of referee Eddie Powers and, even if you were blind as a bat, he was going to give you a good report.”

Campbell wasn’t backing down, either. Again, Hayes was suspended, though this time there was no going back. He never worked another NHL game.

“My name was mud,” he said. “They were going to get me one way or another.”

Nineteen years he’d worked the NHL ice. Towards the end, the job that had started at a base salary of $2,000 was paying him $4,000 a year for working 80 games. Linesmen were by then getting $50 for any additional games they toiled at, $100 for a playoff game. For 1963-64, Hayes made about $6,300 all in.

In his exile, Hayes returned to the family farm in Beachville, in the Ingersoll area. He refereed benefit and oldtimers’ games. He became a sports columnist for the Sentinel-Review in nearby Woodstock, Ontario, weighing in regularly to barrack Voss and Campbell. A 1967 profile said that he walked ten miles a day while noting that it was five miles from his gate to the Ingersoll Inn, his favourite pub, and that he didn’t drive.

He was bitter but not surprised at being overlooked year after year by the Hockey Hall of Fame. “I’ve been blackballed,” he told a reporter in the spring of 1987 when Matt Pavelich became the first NHL linesman to be inducted. “You don’t get any money for it,” Hayes said, “so I don’t really care if I ever get elected. But I’m not bragging when I say I should be in it.”

Georges Hayes died that year, in November. He was 73, though he insisted until the end that he was 67. He had circulation problems in his legs, and had developed gangrene, but he refused to see a doctor, let alone visit a hospital. “George was just as stubborn as always,” his widow, Judy, told a reporter in the wake of his death.

“George just didn’t believe in doctors,” Art Skov said. “We had a tough time getting him sewed up when he’d get cut during games.”

“Nobody could ever tell George what to do,” Matt Pavelich said. “He had no faith in doctors or hospitals. He wanted things in his own hands and that was that, his way or no way.”

No-one from the NHL showed up for Hayes’ funeral, or sent a condoling word, though a phalanx of veteran officials was on hand: Skov and Pavelich, Bruce Hood, John D’Amico, Scotty Morrison, Ron Wicks.

A year later, George Hayes did find his way into the Hall of Fame, a member of the class of 1988 that also included Guy Lafleur, Tony Esposito, Brad Park, Buddy O’Connor, and Philadelphia Flyers’ owner Ed Snider.

Today, if you look him up in the Hall’s register of honoured members, you’ll find Hayes remembered as a “controversial, colourful, proud, and competitive” character who “loved hockey with his every breath.” He’s credited there, too, as a trailblazer in collegial politesse: he was, apparently, the first official to hand-deliver pucks to his colleagues for face-offs, rather than toss or slide them over.

olympicsbound, 2022: here’s to muscle cars and america’s industrial past

November 28, 2021 / puckstruck

Star-Spangled Nine: The U.S. team that lined up on Chamonix ice for the 1924 Olympics included (in back, from left) captain Irving Small, Willard Rice, John Lyons, Alphonse Lacroix, Taffy Abel, Frank Synott, and Justin McCarthy. Sitting, up front, are Art Langley and Herb Drury. (Image: Agence Rol, Bibliothèque nationale de France)

Canada’s botanically flawed 2022 Olympic sweaters weren’t the only ones to debut this week; USA Hockey divulged the wardrobe its players will be wearing in Beijing in February, too:

As in the north, so too in the republic to the south: USA Hockey is insisting on explaining the many meanings of its design. Like Canada’s own exegesis, it’s a brave bit of nonsense. Inspired by “American pride and ingenuity,” the look “pays homage to America’s industrial past, while representing the future of innovation.”

There’s more:

In a nod to America’s symbols, a subtle band of stars is set between red, white, and blue stripes that surround the chest and arms on the home and away [sic] jerseys. Drawing inspiration from American ‘muscle cars’ and traditionally bold hockey designs, Team USA’s alternate jersey bears a deep blue double stripe running around the chest and arms.

And then there’s “the internal back neck message.” No, it’s not XL … or it’s not just XL. “‘Driven by Pride’ serves as a reminder to athletes and fans,” USA Hockey alleges, “that they are, in part, driven by the pride of competing for their country.”

While we’re nodding at American symbols, I’m going to revert to a time before internal back neck messages and conclude here with the 1924 U.S. team. That’s them at the top here, on the ice at Chamonix in France, showing off a truly superlative suite of sweaters that, as far as I’m concerned, require no further explanation.

Pride was, I will add, a souvenir of the American experience in France that year. William Haddock was president of the U.S. Amateur Hockey Association at this time, and he coached the Olympic team in that second tournament. As the U.S. had done in 1920 in Antwerp, Haddock’s charges came home with silvery second.

“While I regret that I will not be able to report a championship victory,” he said in early March of ’24, “I nevertheless can say that I felt very proud of the team, which won all of its matches until it met our neighbors, the Canadians, and they only lost after a magnificent battle which was more closely contested than the score would indicate. I believe that our boys, as individuals, proved themselves every bit the equal of the Canadian players, but the Canadians had the advantage in having played together longer and therefore were superior in team play.”

The score indicated was 6-1 and while I’m not able to adjudicate on the closeness of the contest, I can report that Beattie Ramsay, who played on Canada’s defence in that game, did report at the time that the U.S. didn’t worry the Canadians so much.

Back home in late February, he unpacked an immaculate ingot of Canadian pride to tell a Saskatchewan newspaper that the Americans had tried to impede Canada “by rough work.” There had a row before the final over who should referee: both Haddock and his Canadian counterpart, W.A. Hewitt fretted that a European wouldn’t be up to the task. In the end, they’d settled on Paul Loicq, the Belgian lawyer and Continental hockey pioneer who’d played for his country at the 1920 games and had recently been elected president of the International Hockey Union, forerunner of the IIHF.

Beattie Ramsay, for one, wasn’t impressed by Loicq’s umpiring. “With an efficient referee, he declares, Canada could have won the final game by 20 goals. As it was, it was poor hockey.”

Ramsay did pick out a pair of Americans for praise, defencemen Herb Drury and Taffy Abel. Both went on to play in the NHL, Drury for the Pittsburgh Pirates, Abel as both a Ranger in New York and Black Hawk in Chicago.

In goal for the U.S. in 1924 was Alphonse “Frenchy” Lacroix, who would, a year hence, step into the breach in Montreal when the illustrious Canadiens’ career of goaltender Georges Vézina came to an abrupt end with the onset of his final illness.

c’mon, ref

June 22, 2021August 25, 2023 / puckstruck

With NHL referees back on the job tonight in Las Vegas, here’s a handy guide to the calls they won’t be making throughout game five of the Golden Knights’ Stanley Cup semi-final against the Montreal Canadiens. Kelly Sutherland and Eric Furlatt will be wearing the stripes tonight, taking over from Chris Lee and Dan O’Rourke, the much-maligned pairing whose handling of games three and four in the series stirred up so much Twitter ire and pundit pother. The illustration is from Zzzzzzzzzap Hockey, an ebulliently whimsical 1976 hockey miscellany for young readers.

Below, that’s Scotty Morrison, the NHL’s referee-in-chief, in September of 1969, which is when 13 referees and 7 linesmen under his command went out on strike 24 hours before the league’s pre-season schedule was set to get underway. At issue: the officials, including refs Bruce Hood, Vern Buffey, and Bill Friday, had organized themselves into the NHL Referees’ and Linesmen’s Association only to have the league to recognize it.

“I’ll referee myself,” Morrison declared in the face of the job action, though it didn’t quite come to that. Not all of the league’s officials had walked out on him: five senior officiants stayed on the job, working weekend exhibition games as planned. One game that was handled by a replacement referee was a notorious meeting in Ottawa between the Boston and St. Louis that featured a grisly stick-fight that ended up with the Blues’ Wayne Maki fracturing Ted Green’s skull.

By the following Monday, the NHL and the officials had come to a seven-point agreement, covering pay and expenses and insurances, that put the men in stripes back on the ice.

with a curve in his stick, and his puck

February 6, 2021March 27, 2023 / puckstruck

Pembroke’s Other Peach: Harry Cameron won three Stanley Cups with Toronto teams, the last with the St. Patricks in 1922.

Born in Pembroke, Ontario, on a Thursday of this date in 1890, Harry Cameron was a stand-out and high-scoring defenceman in the NHL’s earliest days, mostly with Toronto teams, though he also was briefly a Senator and a Canadien, too.

He scored a pair of goals on the NHL’s very first night on ice, December 19, 1917, when Cameron’s Torontos lost by a score of 10-9 to the ill-fated Montreal Wanderers. He was 27, then. A week later, in a Boxing Day meeting with the Canadiens, Cameron scored four goals and added an assist in his team’s 7-5 win. “Cameron was the busiest man on the ice,” the Star noted, “and his rushes electrified the crowd.” Belligerence enthusiasts like to claim that Cameron’s performance on this festive night qualifies as the NHL’s first Gordie Howe Hattrick, and it is true that referee Lou Marsh levied major penalties after Cameron engaged with Billy Coutu in front of the Montreal net. “Both rolled to the ice before they were separated by the officials,” the Gazette reported.

Cameron scored 17 goals in 21 games that season. In both 1921 and ’22, he scored 18 goals in 24 regular-season games. Overall, in the six seasons he played in the NHL, Cameron scored an amazing 88 goals in 128 games, adding another eight in 20 playoff games. He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1962.

A miscellany of other Harry Cameron notes and annotations to get you though today:

Out of Pembroke

His father, Hugh Cameron, was a lumberman. Working on a log boom when Harry was just a boy, Hugh was struck by lightning and killed.

In 1910-11, Harry played with another legend of Pembroke’s own, Frank Nighbor, for their hometown team in the Upper Ottawa Valley Hockey League.They played another couple of seasons together in Port Arthur and were together again with the NHA Toronto Blueshirts in 1912-13. It was in Toronto that playing-coach Jack Marshall converted Cameron from a forward to a defenceman.

Never Again

Also in Toronto: Cameron won his first Stanley Cup. That was in 1914, when the Blueshirts beat the PCHA Victoria Cougars in three straight games. Cameron won another Stanley Cup with Toronto in 1918 and a third in 1922, by which time Toronto’s team was called the St. Patricks. So there’s a record I don’t think has been matched in hockey, or ever will be: Cameron won three Cups with three different teams based in the same city.

Shell Game

That first NHL season, Cameron reported for duty in “pretty fair shape,” as one paper’s seasonal preview noted. His off-season job that wartime summer was at a munitions plant in Dundas, Ontario. “He has been handling 90-pound shells for six months,” the Ottawa Journal advised.

Skates, Sticks, And Curved Pucks

He never allowed anyone to sharpen his skates, always did it himself, preferring them “on the dull side,” it was said.

And long before Stan Mikita or Bobby Hull were curving the blades of their sticks, Cameron used to steam and manipulate his. Hence his ability to bend his shot. Another Hall-of-Famer, Gordon Roberts, who played in the NHA with the Montreal Wanderers, was the acknowledged master of this (and is sometimes credited with the invention), but Cameron was an artisan in his own right. Frank Boucher testified to this, telling Dink Carroll of the Gazette that Cameron’s stick was curved “like a sabre,” by which he secured (in Carroll’s words) “the spin necessary to make the puck curve in flight by rolling it off this curved blade.”

“He was the only hockey player I have ever seen who could actually curve a puck,” recalled Clint Smith, a Hall-of-Fame centreman who coincided with Cameron in the early 1930s with the WCHL’s Saskatoon Crescents. “He used to have the old Martin Hooper sticks and he could make that puck do some strange things, including a roundhouse curve.”

Briefly A Referee

Harry Cameron played into his 40s with the AHA with the Minneapolis Millers and St. Louis Flyers. He retired after that stint in Saskatoon, where he was the playing coach. After that, NHL managing director Frank Patrick recruited him to be a referee. His career with a whistle was short, lasting just a single NHL game. He worked alongside Mike Rodden on the Saturday night of November 11, 1933, when the Boston Bruins were in Montreal to play the Maroons, but never again. “Not fast enough for this league,” was Patrick’s verdict upon letting him go.

Harry Cameron died in Vancouver in 1953. He was 63.

the artful ross

August 5, 2020 / puckstruck

Shoulder Season: Art Ross leans into Bruin defenceman Jack Portland at practice in the late 1930s. (Image: Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection)

There’s no need to exaggerate the influence that Art Ross exerted on the game of hockey and the way it’s played — what more could the man have done? He was an outstanding defender in the early years of the 20^thcentury; designed the puck that the NHL adopted when it started up; devised the net that’s still in use today; was the first coach in the league to pull his goalie for an extra attacker. He did that, of course, as coach of the Boston Bruins, the team he was hired to run when they debuted in 1924, and the one he more or less shaped in his own never-back-down image, imprinting the franchise with his penchant for winning and contentious attitude right from the start.

A son of northern Ontario, Art Ross died on a Wednesday of this date in 1964 in the Boston suburb of Medford. He was 79.

His demise was, famously, reported long before that, in error: in the summer of 1918, newspapers across North America announced the sad news that he’d been killed in a motorcycle accident in New Hampshire.

Ross was 33 that year, and had just become a father for the first time. He’d spent part of the previous winter playing the only NHL games he ever got into, three of them. He was captain and playing coach of the ill-starred Montreal Wanderers, scoring his only NHL goal in the team’s very first game, against Toronto. The Wanderers didn’t last, folding after playing four games and defaulting another two. That was all for Ross as a player, though he did get back on the ice as a referee that season, and worked the Stanley Cup final that Toronto won that March.

In the summer, at the time of his purported death, Ross was mourned as one of the “best known hockey players, motor cyclists, footballers, trap shooters, and al-around sportsmen in Canada” — that, from the Vancouver Sun.

As it turned out, Ross had survived an accident that had killed his nephew, Hugh Ross. While some newspapers would still be mourning the elder Ross for weeks to come, he had escaped uninjured.

Ross was back on NHL ice the following winter as a referee. He got his next coaching gig in 1922, when he took the helm of another team that didn’t last, the Hamilton Tigers, before signing on in ’24 with Boston’s expansion team.

Reports of His Death: An ode to Ross from early July of 1918, after he was mistakenly reported killed in a motorcycle accident.

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Out of Pembroke

Never Again

Shell Game

Skates, Sticks, And Curved Pucks

Briefly A Referee

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