Sprague Cleghorn

what’s the sense of changing horses in midstream?

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All of NHL History? Sportsnet was quick to tweet out the news last night. Others added the detail that the league has only been recording shift-times since 2009.

Jack Hughes was in it to … well, his team had to tie up the game last night in Newark before they could win it. In the end, Hughes’ New Jersey Devils ended up falling short: the visiting New York Islanders won the game 6-4. The Devils’ 21-year-old star centreman did give it his all, staying out on the ice as he hunted for goals — he also blocked a couple of Islander attempts on his team’s vacant net — for the final 6:02 of the game.

This looked exhausting.

It was also, as was quickly noted across social media, the longest shift in NHL history.

Well, not all 105 years of NHL history. As was also mentioned (mostly), in some of the breathless reporting, in brackets, and some small type, the NHL has only officially been logging shift-times for 13 years. The league’s PR office weighed in with the facts of the matter, for those who were interested: “Hughes recorded a 6:02 shift to conclude the game, marking the longest verified shift on record (since 2009-10), besting the previous benchmark of 5:52 by John Klingberg on Jan. 18, 2022 (Dallas Stars).”

Yeoman’s work, by any measure: a big bravo to Hughes, his stamina, and coach Lindy Ruff’s confidence in him. Also, inevitably, because it’s what happens here, we’re now going to have to harken back to the league’s first decades to recall that in those years players habitually stayed on the ice for entire games without relief.

These feats are, yes, unverified: nobody in the 1920s was recording the duration of shifts and filing them numbers with the NHL. It’s true, too, that rosters were smaller in those years, and certainly the tempo and overall tenor of the game was much different than it is today. We’ll add that to the mix. Still, the endurance of these earlier NHLers is remarkable, nonetheless. Be warned: just reading about them you risk ending up on the IR, or at the very least in need of a nap.

Newspapers from those years tell of many players who toiled without respite for their teams. Clem Loughlin was coaching the Chicago Black Hawks in 1936 when he reached back to remember his playing days a decade earlier. “It was customary,” he wrote then, “for a defense man in those days to play the entire game. There was no such system of changing men to allow them rest as there is now.”

“60-minute men,” they used to call them. While they were common enough before the NHL came along, that’s the league we’ll concentrate on here. The term is one you’ll come across often in the hockey archives once the league got going in 1917, associated with defencemen like Sprague Cleghorn and Herb Gardiner. In 1929, anchoring the blueline for the New York Rangers in a 5-5 tie with the Detroit Cougars that was extended by a ten-minute overtime, Ching Johnson was reported to have played 68 of the game’s 70 minutes alongside Leo Bourgeault, who played 64. The only time they missed was when they were serving penalties.

Lionel Conacher was in his early 30s when he was logging full games for the Montreal Maroons in the early 1930s.

The latest evidence of a 60-minute game that I’ve come across — that is, the most recent — isn’t from the NHL, though it involves a future Hall-of-Famer: in 1961, playing for the Junior A Canadiens, Jacques Laperriere played an entire game on defence against the St. Catharines Teepees.

Dogged non-defencemen of the day include Frank Frederickson, a hero of Canada’s 1920 Olympic team, who in 1928 was traded by the Boston Bruins to the Pittsburgh Pirates. “His stamina is remarkable,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette advised its readers, “and he has played 50 of the 60 minutes comprising a championship game, a remarkable record for a forward.”

Frankly Speaking: In 1924, Nighbor won the very first Hart Trophy as the NHL’s MVP. A year later, he was awarded the inaugural Lady Byng Trophy.

It’s another superlative centreman I’d prefer to illuminate, Frank Nighbor, a favourite of ours here at Puckstruck, and a player whose name, we continue to believe, deserves to be better known.

It’s the early 1920s we’re focussing on here, when Nighbor was in his late 20s, and his prime as a graceful and supremely skilled defensive forward coincided with the heyday of the (original) Ottawa Senators. Starting in 1920, they won three Stanley Cup championships in four years — and returned in 1927 to collect another.

Through it all, Nighbor played a lot.

Take for a sampler a game in March of 1920 when Ottawa, dressing just seven skaters, beat the Canadiens 4-3 in Montreal. “Nighbor played the entire game,” the Citizen reported, “taking desperate chances.” He scored a hattrick, including the game-winner in overtime.  

Sometimes, Nighbor’s teammates joined him in just keeping going. When Ottawa beat Montreal 2-0 at home in January of 1921, Georges Boucher, Eddie Gerard, Nighbor, Jack Darragh, and Cy Denneny lined up in front of goaltender Clint Benedict to start the game. As the Citizen noted, only Denneny took a break, giving way in the third period to Jack MacKell. “All the others played from start to finish without relief.”  

By the following year, the man they called the Pembroke Peach had upped the ante. “Nighbor played another remarkable game for Ottawa,” the Montreal Daily Star testified after the Senators downed the Toronto St. Patricks 2-1 at home, “as he went the entire 60 minutes without relief.”

But then, at that point, seven games into the season, Nighbor had played every minute but two that the Senators had played — he’d been penalized for tripping in the previous game. He was, the Citizen proclaimed, “making history.” I haven’t got solid intel on whether he carried on with this consistency for the rest of Ottawa’s 32 regular-season and playoff games that season, but I’m not sure I’d bet against him.

Nighbor was back at it the following year, too. Good to know, I guess, that local observers weren’t taking it entirely for granted. We’ll end with this concerned nod from the Ottawa Journal from January of 1924:

 

 

 

double take: what the camera shows, and doesn’t, of the barnstorming 1929 new york americans

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On The Oregon Trail: The New York Americans line up outside the Portland ice Arena in April of 1929. From left, that’s Roy Worters, Harry Connor, Tex White, Billy Burch, Tommy Gorman, Lionel Conacher, Leo Reise, Johnny Sheppard, Rabbit McVeigh, ? Beckett.

They’re some of the biggest names in hockey, standing there in their skates on the pavement, as though surprised by a photographer in their attempt to escape the bounds of the rink in Portland, Oregon, or maybe of hockey itself. That’s the dominant Canadian athlete of the first half of the 20th century in the middle, Lionel Conacher. Beside him is T.P. Gorman, a.k.a. Tommy, who as an NHL coach and manager was involved in winning four Stanley Cup championships with three different teams. The other future Hall-of-Famers here are Billy Burch, to Gorman’s right, and the tiny mighty goaltender Roy Worters, out on the end at far left.

There’s a mystery man lined up here, too, over on the right. Inquiring hockey minds have wondered about him, in recent years, who was he, what was his role with the team, how did he end up crossing sticks with Rabbit McVeigh outside the Portland Ice Arena in the spring of 1929? In another version, he’s in between Burch and an even happier Conacher:

Take Two: From left, Harry Connor, Tex White, Bill Burch, ? Beckett, Lionel Conacher, Leo Reise, Johnny Sheppard, Rabbit McVeigh, Roy Worters, Tommy Gorman.

Thanks to photographer Theo Mentzer’s annotations we know his name is Beckett. Beyond that — I haven’t been able to find out too much more about him. Not that the first photograph doesn’t have surprises to spring. I came across those recently, as I looked for traces of him. As surprises go, these ones aren’t particularly momentous, but that doesn’t mean they’re not worth waiting for. They seem to have been concealed for decades in … well, no, not exactly plain sight, I guess.

Some background, first. For that, we tunnel back to April of 1929 and the end of the NHL’s twelfth season. The Stanley Cup finals had wrapped up at the end of March, with the Boston Bruins collecting their first championship by overcoming the New York Rangers in a two-game series.

There were ten teams in the league at this point, and the New York Americans were one of the good ones. For all the team’s star-power, coach Gorman had failed to urge them past the first round: two weeks earlier, they’d been ousted from the playoffs by the Rangers, in a close-fought two-game, total-goals series.

The Montreal Canadiens, meanwhile, had ridden a bye into the second round of the playoffs, but they faltered there against the Bruins. To ease the pain of defeat — and supplement the club’s coffers — both disappointed teams, Canadiens and Americans, went west, departing on a post-season exhibition tour, a common practice for NHL teams in those years.

As April got going, as the Americans arrived in Oregon, for the first of six games they’d play on the Pacific coast, the NHL was concluding its last bit of business for the season, announcing the year’s individual trophy winners. Among them was Roy Worters, who had the high distinction of being winner of the David A. Hart Trophy as the NHL’s MVP. It was the first time in the trophy’s six-year history that it had gone to a goaltender. Worters wasn’t deemed to be the best at his own position, it might be worth pointing out: in 1929 it was the Canadiens’ goaltender, George, Hainsworth, who was named winner of a third consecutive Vézina Trophy.

Hainsworth didn’t join his teammates in the west that spring: along with defenceman Sylvio Mantha and star winger Aurèle Joliat, the goaltender stayed home. I don’t know about the other two, but Hainsworth had a job to do, heading home to Kitchener, Ontario, where he worked as an electrician during the summer months. To tend to their goaling in his absence, the Canadiens borrowed Clint Benedict from the Montreal Maroons. He had just one more year left in his NHL career: the following one, 1929-30, was his finale, featuring a pair of fearful facial injuries suffered at the sticks of Boston’s Dit Clapper and Howie Morenz of the Canadiens, a prolonged absence, and a revolutionary (if ultimately unhappy) experiment with a mask.

Benedict and the Canadiens would play four games in Vancouver that April in ’29. In the first three, they took on the Vancouver Lions, Frank Patrick’s team, who’d just wrapped up the championship of the new four-team Pacific Coast Hockey League (PCHL), Frank Patrick’s newly launched loop. Notable names in the Vancouver line-up included Red Beattie, Art Somers, and the Jerwa brothers, Joe and Frank. Percy Jackson was the goaltender: according to Frank Patrick, he was the best backstop there was, anywhere in hockey.

Ahead of the first game between Montreal and Vancouver, on the basis that the former were the best of the NHL’s Canadian-based teams, Patrick boldly declared that at stake in the three-game series between Canadiens and Lions would be nothing less than the “professional championship of Canada.”

This was news to NHL President Frank Calder, already wary of the PCHL, a more or less outlaw operation, in the NHL’s view, not to mention a possible threat to its hockey hegemony. One of the rumours making the rounds that spring was that Patrick was preparing to expand his operation eastward, setting up a league to rival the NHL there. That would never be, of course: this incarnation of the PCHL would fizzle out after a second season of play, with Frank Patrick heading east, eventually, to become managing director of the NHL, under Calder, in 1933.

Back in 1929, Calder was quick to kibosh the championship talk, noting to Montreal reporters that the PCHL was merely a “minor league” operation, “and it is therefore absurd to say that a minor and a major league team can be engaging for the championship.”

“Then there is the fact,” Calder continued, “that Canadiens went west with only half a team. They left Hainsworth, Mantha, and Joliat behind, and that surely is half their regular club.

“When the team left for the west understrength, I anticipated there would not be any big success for the Canadiens, and when I read advance notices that the games were being booked for the Canadian championship, I took steps to stop this, as it was not correct. But the enthusiasm of some of the western writers has overcome their discretion apparently, for the championship booking is repeated, and I have notified President Frank Calder to discontinue such references. These are merely exhibition with no championship involved.”

True to Calder’s lack of confidence, Montreal lost two of its three games against Vancouver, going down 2-0 on April 6 before rebounding two days later with a 4-1 win. On April 10, the Lions prevailed by a score of 3-2. A shot from Howie Morenz knocked Percy Jackson cold that night, if not out: the aforementioned Vancouver goaltender was revived and, as happened as often as not in those years, he carried on.

Cleaned Up Good: The Americans, again, suited up in Portland in April of 1929. Back row from left, they are Tex White, Harry Connor, Lionel Coancher, Billy Burch, Leo Reise, and Tommy Gorman. Coruched, from the left: Bullet Joe Simpson, Johnny Sheppard, Rabbit McVeigh, and Roy Worters.

Gorman’s Americans, meantime, had alighted in Oregon. That’s them there, above, in their civvies in what seems to be yet another Theo Mentzer photograph. It has to be said: they’re looking great. No Beckett here, but another player makes an appearance, one who doesn’t show up in the top two photographs, Bullet Joe Simpson. Take a note of that, if you would: we’ll come back to him and why, though he was on the ice for New York throughout their tour, he happened to be absent from these pictures.

The Americans played two games at the Portland Ice Arena, beating the PCHL Buckaroos on April 1 by a score of 2-1 (in overtime) and again on April 4 by a score of 4-3. Portland had a couple of future NHLers in its line-up in centreman Paul Runge (a Bruin-, Maroon-, and Canadien-to-be) and left winger Red Conn (who’d join the Americans in the early ’30s).

The second game was a costly one in that Lionel Conacher was injured, sent to hospital when his head accidentally met up with a skate belonging to Buckaroos defenceman Ted Jacques. The cut he suffered behind one ear took 16 stitches to close, and while he tried his best to get back on the ice the team’s final game on April 15, medical prudence prevailed and he sat out.

Lacking Conacher, the Americans did borrow a defenceman for the rest of the tour from the Buckaroos, Earl Armstrong, who seems to have acquitted himself well, though this was as close as he’d come to skating in the NHL.

The Americans went to Seattle next, where they split a pair of games (6-4; 1-4) against the PCHL Eskimos, who had Jack Walker leading the way on the ice.

Finally, New York followed the Canadiens to Vancouver. Montreal had completed its series with the local Lions, who New York now met, and beat, 1-0. Bullet Joe Simpson notching the decisive goal. Notable names in the Vancouver line-up included Red Beattie, Art Somers, and the Jerwa brothers, Joe and Frank.

The Americans played one last game, returning to Vancouver’s Denman Arena on April to outlast their NHL rivals from Montreal by a score of 5-3. Worters was outstanding in the New York net, came the report from the coast, while Benedict was only ordinary. Billy Burch scored a pair of goals for the Americans, with Johnny Sheppard, Harry Connor, and Earl Armstrong contributing the others. Battleship Leduc (with 2) and Armand Mondou scored the Montreal goals. Referee Mickey Ion called not a single penalty.

And that was all for the (non-championship) tour. The Canadiens had been planning to carry on to Portland and Seattle, but those games were cancelled. West-coast interest in hockey was waning as the spring sprang, apparently; Portland, it was reported, had lost money on its two games with New York.

As for the Americans, they headed home to nurse their wounds. Joining Lionel Conacher on the clinical ledger were Harry Connor, cut for seven stitches on the head after a Seattle collision with Smokey Harris, and Joe Simpson who (the Montreal Gazette reported) “had his right wrist twisted.”

Which brings us back to the photograph we started with.

As mentioned, historians and others who pore over the hockey past have puzzled over the second man in civilian clothes (after Gorman), including several of us who frequent the virtual byways of the Society of International Hockey Research, where no detail of hockeyana has yet proven too abstract or obscure for study. The fact that his name — his surname — has been preserved hasn’t (so far) been a factor in the investigation into his role with the Americans (if any) or how he happened to be lining up with the players that April day in Portland.  

Was Beckett maybe a bootlegger? Prohibition had been the law in the United States since the Volstead Act went into effect in 1920, and it would be 1933 before it was repealed. SIHR speculation has hovered over the possibility, the bottles prominent at Beckett’s feet having wetted speculation, at SIHR and elsewhere, around that possibility. That notion might be plausibly fortified by the fact that the Americans were owned by the prominent New York rum-runner Bill Dwyer who, starting in 1925, had spent more than a year in jail for his efforts attempting to bribe members of the U.S. Coast Guard.

Or maybe was Beckett a boxer? That’s been hypothesized, too, if not proven out. An Oregon newspaper did note that fight promoter Herb Owen would be coinciding in Portland with the Americans that first week of April, and that his “party” planned to attend the hockey game, so maybe Beckett was with him, and could have been invited to pose with the visiting hockey players?

But there’s no further corroborating evidence to substantiate either one of the bootlegging or boxing theories — none that I’ve come across, anyway.

The likeliest answer is that Mr. Beckett was a railway porter. Jim Coleman identifies him as such in a 1942 Globe and Mail column, and he has the authority of Roy Worters himself behind him on this: Coleman describes studying one of the same rinkfront photographs we’ve been looking at in Worters’ own office at the Toronto hotel he ran (with Charlie Conacher) at the corner of Lawrence and Dufferin.

Along with everybody else in the first decades of the 20th century, hockey players took the train. In the NHL, that was the case in the 1920s whether it was the Ottawa Senators going to Montreal for a regular-season encounter with the Canadiens, or bands of barnstormers crossing the continent.

The history of Black railway porters in Canada is a long, fascinating, and oftentimes fraught one in its own right. The points where that history intersects with professional hockey are worth investigating, too. I’m waiting for someone to file a feature on Hamilton, Ontario’s own Norman “Pinky” Lewis, for example. He was a beloved figure in his time, and would serve as trainer for the football Tiger Cats in his hometown, where one of the city’s downtown recreation centres is named in his honour.

Columnist Jim Coleman thought he ought to be in the Hockey Hall of Fame for his services to the game. In the 1920s, when he worked as a sleeping-car porter for the CPR while also working as trainer for Newsy Lalonde’s WCHL Saskatoon Sheiks (for whom George Hainsworth was the goaltender, in those years). By 1929, Lewis was trainer for the C-AHL Newark Bulldogs, where Sprague Cleghorn was the coach. Lewis himself went on to coach, notably for the OHA’s Owen Sound Greys.

Someone else could look into the bow-tied and behatted man who appears in a photo from another coastal barnstorming tour, this one from the fall 1922, when the Toronto St. Patricks, the reigning Stanley Cup champions, played a series of pre-season games in the west. Above, the team poses aboard the ship they took from Vancouver to Seattle. The man standing between Harry Cameron and Babe Dye is identified as F. Williams, though there’s no consensus on that initial: another contemporaneous version of this image calls him H. Williams, identifying him as a CPR porter while also adding the more than slightly disturbing designation we see here: “mascot.” I’ve never found any other trace of him and his time with Toronto.

The erasure of Messrs. Williams and Beckett, their names and contributions and experiences, isn’t unprecedented, unfortunately, or surprising. Maybe the blanks can be filled in: I hope so. It’s not impossible to imagine that they’re gone forever.

The past does have a way of continuing to churn, and of pressing its artifacts to the surface. These aren’t always of high importance or lasting significance, but that doesn’t mean they don’t hold their value. Sometimes you might even have been staring at them over a period of years without noticing what you were seeing.

Look again at the photograph we started with. Later commentaries on what we’re seeing here (one from 1942, another from 1960) reveal that Bullet Joe Simpson would have been in it, alongside his teammates — if only he hadn’t climbed into the car you can see behind Tex White and Billy Burch for a nap. By one account, the photographer, Mentzer, was taking too long in setting up his gear. In the other, Simpson was just plain tired.

Then again, if you study the second team photo, there does seem to another player in the line-up, next to Tommy Gorman on the far right, who’s been … excised? Is that Simpson, possibly? Why leave him out?

I don’t know the answer to that, but I can report that shenanigans were at play that day. The car in the first photo, you may also have noticed, is … not all there? Take a look: it seems to be missing its front half, including one wheel. This suggests a long exposure, and movement, of car, camera — maybe both. Which leads to the second surprise. It’s one that Montreal Gazette columnist Vern DeGeer revealed when he wrote about the full, uncropped version of this photograph, a copy of which Tommy Gorman used to have hanging in his office at the old Ottawa Auditorium.

Here’s DeGeer on what that, in its glory, looked like:

When the picture was developed there was much guffawing in the ranks. It showed the impish Roy “Little Squirt” Worters at both ends of the group.

The photog had used a panoramic camera. He started at one end with Worters and slowly swung the magic lantern down the line. As he was doing this Worters sprinted behind his mates, and was at the end other end of the group when the camera completed its arc.

They say that whenever Tay Pay Gorman feels depressed or tired, or just plain nostalgic, he parks the picture on his desk and laughs, and laughs and laughs.

So while Joe Simpson napped, Roy Worters scampered from one end of the line to the other. Knowing that, is it possible to surmise that something the same was going on in the other photo from that day, and that the shoulder next to Tommy Gorman belongs to a second Harry Connor? Maybe so.

I wonder where Gorman’s office copy is parked now. It may well be hanging on someone’s wall, somewhere, generating guffaws as it has since 1929. All that’s left to us in our vandalized version of the photograph is the edge of Roy Worters’ oven-mitt blocker and a bit of the butt-end of his stick, not far from the bottles, next to Mr. Beckett, on the far right:

And just to be clear: Worters would, of course, have had to have sprinted behind the photographer, rather than his teammates, on his way to replicating himself.

Double Take: A cartoon illustrating Vern DeGeer’s 1960 telling of the tale came complete with a car-napping Joe Simpson and double Roy Worterses — but no Beckett.

il est malade

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Old Goaler: Georges Vézina outside Montreal’s Mount Royal Arena in November of 1925.

Heading into the NHL new season in November of 1925, Montreal Canadiens managing director (and co-owner) Léo Dandurand wasn’t sure whether Georges Vézina was going to play or not. The goaltender was 38 that fall, and he had a cabinetry business to run in Chicoutimi, his hometown. He’d served his time with Montreal down through the years, maybe earned his rest, nobody could argue otherwise: since 1911, Vézina had, astonishingly, been the one and only goaltender to defend the Canadiens’ net. He’d seen the NHA come and go in that time, and the rise of the NHL in 1917, and had suited up for every competitive game for the Canadiens in the eight years since then. The only break Vézina had taken in 14 years came in 1922, when he’d ceded his net to serve a slashing penalty against Ottawa, with teammate Sprague Cleghorn filling in on an emergency backstop.

In 1925, Vézina left it late to agree to play another season. Dandurand finally got him to agree to it on November 10, after (as the Montreal Star reported) “some busy long-distance telephoning.” This was to be his swansong. “There is little doubt that this is to be Georges’ last season in hockey,” the newspaper noted. “His business in Chicoutimi needs his attention more and more, and it was only in view of the fact that he had given the Canadiens the impression earlier that he would be with them again that he has made special arrangements for this season.”

Showrunner: Léo Dandurand

Dandurand was making contingency arrangements of his own, signing an understudy in 28-year-old Alphonse (a.k.a. Frenchy) Lacroix, the Newton, Massachusetts-born goaltender who’d backed the U.S. Olympic team to a silver medal at the 1924 Chamonix Olympics. “Even though Canada scored six goals against him in the Olympic hockey final,” the Star advised, “he was given credit for staving off a worse defeat than that.”

Vézina arrived in Montreal the following Monday, November 16. He saw his first action two days later, in an exhibition match-up with Lester Patrick’s Victoria Cougars, the same WCHL team that had beaten the Canadiens in four games the previous March to claim the Stanley Cup. The Cougars prevailed again this time out, outlasting Montreal by a score of 5-3. Despite the loss, the hometown Gazette reported that Vézina’s “eagle eye” was intact, rating some of his first-period stops “heart-breaking to the Victoria attacking division.” A defenceman, Gord Fraser, scored Victoria’s last goal in the third period — the final goal ever to be scored on Vézina.

The following week, with their goaltender reported to be suffering from “a severe cold,” Montreal cancelled a series of further exhibition games against Tommy Gorman’s New York Americans in Hamilton, Ontario.

Still, Vézina was in his net at the Mount Royal Arena on the night of Saturday, November 28, when the Canadiens took on Pittsburgh’s mighty Pirates. Steered by a former Canadien, Odie Cleghorn, who served both as right wing and coach, with Roy Worters in goal, the Pirates ended up winning the game, 1-0, on a goal by Tex White. The Pittsburgh Press carried a lively narrative next day, in which Montreal’s Howie Morenz featured both for storming offense and pugnacity. In the first period, he took a penalty for “bumping;” in the second he had “a fist fight in the corner” with Jesse Spring.

Only briefly did the Press note a line-up change at the start of the second period:

 Lacroix was in the nets for [sic] Canadians at start of second period. Vézina was reported ill.

 Montreal’s Gazette carried a more detailed report under the sub-head “Vézina Was Shadow:”

But the high spot of the evening for the Canadien supporters came at the beginning of the second period when Lacroix, former United States Olympic goalkeeper went into the Canadien goal in place of Georges Vézina. The veteran goalkeeper started the game with a high temperature. He was pale and haggard looking as he turned shots aside in the first period. At the rest interval it was decided to replace him and for the first time since he took up hockey eighteen years ago, the veteran goalkeeper was forced to drop out of play. He remained in the dressing room with only his pads off hoping to pick up a little and get back into the game. But he was not in condition and with Lacroix well settled in the play, the former amateur was left in to the last.

The Star detailed an even more desperate scene:

His temples throbbed with fever, his face, while on the ice, was flushed, pale and drawn, and though he should have been home and in bed, he insisted on remaining till the end, impatiently sending out [Canadiens assistant trainer] Pat Kennedy and ither messengers, to find out how the battle progressing.

When the Canadiens went to Boston for their next game, Vézina stayed home. “Dandurand left instructions with a doctor here,” the Star reported on December 1, “to give Georges a thorough examination today to see if anything really serious is the matter with him.”

By the end of the week, the verdict was out: Montreal’s iconic goaltender had been diagnosed with tuberculosis. The Star ran a long story under the headline

Greatest Hockey Goal Keeper of Past
Decade Will Never Play Again

that featured Leo Dandurand’s (more or less?) embroidered account of Vézina’s turbulent final weeks in Montreal.

Sick List: A Montreal newspaper with the Vézina news in November of 1925.

It was Dandurand, remember, who’d played a large party in fashioning his famous goaltender’s image over the years, certainly in the English press, in Montreal and beyond. Vézina wasn’t interested in publicity, kept mostly to himself and to the French language, allowing (or suffering) Dandurand to fill the void. It was the Canadiens’ owner, for instance, who’d launched the myth, a persistent one that still, today, comes back to life from time to time, that Vézina was the father of 22 (or maybe was it 17?) children.

Dandurand’s account from this week in 1925 may be the straight goods; it does have, it has to be said, an air of having been over-crafted.

Tuberculosis isn’t mentioned, oddly: instead, Dandurand is quoted as saying that “poor Georges has the battle of Christy Mathewson to fight.” That would have held no mystery for sports fans: news of the great New York Giants pitcher’s death from the disease at the age of 45 had rippled across North America that same October.

Announcing the goaltender’s retirement, Dandurand added the news that Vézina had left for Chicoutimi without bidding farewell to his teammates, who had returned to Montreal to meet the Maroons on Thursday, December 3. Dandurand framed this as “Vézina’s last act of devotion to the club he loved so well,” quoting the goaltender himself. “Perhaps they will play better if they think I am coming on,” he’s supposed to have said. “When I’m not on they will soon forget about me in the excitement of the play.”

Dandurand had more to disclose. “I had known from the first that Vézina was not the Vézina of old. He did not look well when he reported, but assured me he would improve. That too was typical of him. But he lost weight in an alarming fashion, and it was not by accident that we signed Lacroix. I saw Vézina was nearly done, and though he insisted on going through his last game with a temperature of 102 degrees, and even then gave a good account of himself, he never recovered. Perhaps his insistence on playing the game spelled his doom. He was taken to bed that night, stayed there for a week, and when doctors examined him, it was found he had lost 35 pounds since coming to the city. Further examination revealed that his lungs were in bad shape ….”

Dandurand described the goaltender’s final visit that Thursday to Montreal’s Mount Royal Arena dressing room. Vézina found his usual corner. “I glanced at him as he sat there, and saw tears rolling down his cheeks. He was looking at his old pads and skates that [trainer] Eddie Dufour had arranged in George’s corner thinking that probably Vézina would don them that night. Then he asked one little favour — the sweater he wore in the last world series. Then he went. I doubt if hockey will ever know his like again.”

Vézina was soon home in Chicoutimi. Within four months, before the end of March of 1926, just 39, he was dead.

gaoledtenders: a short history of time served

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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 20th.

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.

aide-mémoire: a short history of nhl assistant coaches

/ puckstruck

Mike Nykoluk was an up-and-coming 21-year-old forward when he played for the Winnipeg Warriors of the old WHL in 1955-56, a team loaded with former NHLers, including goaltender Ed Chadwick, defenceman Bill Juzda, and forwards Bill Mosienko and Paul Masnick. Also manning the Warrior blueline that year was a former New York Ranger, 30-year-old Fred Shero, who was just about to launch a coaching career that would take him to Philadelphia in the early 1970s.

It was there, of course, that Shero would contriveto guide the Flyers to successive Stanley Cup championships, in 1974 and ’75. Nykoluk was there for those, too, you might remember: following his brief NHL career (32 games with the ’56-57 Toronto Maple Leafs) and a longer cruise (16 seasons) in the AHL, Shero had hired him as an assistant coach in June of 1972.

Mike Nykoluk, I’m sorry to say, died last week at the age of 87. In 1978, he followed Shero when he went to New York to coach the Rangers. Mostly he was referred to (again) as an assistant, though Shero preferred to call him a co-coach. Eventually, between 1981 and 1984, Nykoluk got his chance to be the boss, seeing service through parts of four seasons as head coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Something he was not: the NHL’s first assistant coach.

That’s a claim that has been often repeated over the years, with confidence. Eric Duhatschek, for instance, in a 2017 Globe and Mail feature about the evolution of the role of coaches in the NHL declared that Shero had “hired the first official full-time assistant coach, Mike Nykoluk, in 1972.” History doesn’t agree.

Reminders of Nykoluk’s (supposed) trailblazering resurfaced last week, too, so maybe time for some clarifying. For all his achievements through the years, Nykoluk wasn’t even close to being the NHL’s original assistant coach.

Jeff Marek, Sportsnet’s esteemed hockey broadcaster, keeps a careful eye on hockey’s history, and he was attentive in seeing the record corrected …

… up to a point.

Because while Al McNeil and Doug Harvey did indeed precede Nykoluk as NHL assistants, others went before. Many others. Onward into the obscurity.

The first? That distinction would seem to belong to Dick Carroll, in Toronto, all the way back in the league’s inaugural season, 1917-18. There’s some cloudiness to this, so bear with me, if you will.

To start with, some straightening out of terminology is in order: in those early decades of pro hockey, teams tended to have one man who both coached and took care of player personnel, and he was usually called (in the baseball way) the manager. This was true, for example, in the mid-1920s, with icons like Art Ross in Boston, Lester Patrick of the New York Rangers, and Jack Adams in Detroit.

Toronto’s manager for the 1917-18 season was Charlie Querrie, who happened to be the man who ran Toronto’s Arena Gardens on Mutual Street, home to the new team. Querrie was appointed in early December of ’17, two weeks before the NHL’s opening night. Dick Carroll’s appointment as Querrie’s aide was announced at the same time.

So there it is: Dick Carroll was the NHL’s first assistant coach.

Ottawa’s Journal reporting the news (and misspelling the name) in December of 1917.

If that’s clear enough, here’s some cloud to obscure things: as the modern-day Maple Leafs recount it, Carroll was head coach in 1917, steering the team through its first 40 games and onward through to 1919. Querrie’s 1917 service is recognized in the team’s list of GMs; as a coach, he’s recognized for two later tours he served in the ’20s, by which time the team had turned into the St. Patricks.

Got that?

Wrong, I’d say, in my nitpicking way, with a kicker to the effect that, by failing to acknowledge the way things used to be, the Leafs have (not for the first time) muddled their own history.

Further fogging things is the fact through the course of the 1917-18 season, Toronto’s bench was anything but settled.

Charlie Querrie had taken the job in Toronto on the understanding that he’d be free to operate without the interference of Eddy Livingstone, the NHA owner, Toronto hockey eminence, persona non grata — it was to ostracize and spite Livingstone that the NHL was formed in the first place in November of 1917. Livingstone’s ongoing meddling seems to have prompted Querrie’s resignation at the end of December, after Toronto had played just three NHL games, leaving Dick Carroll in charge: the assistant coach was now the coach.

Unless Querrie didn’t quit.

Newspapers that had reported that Querrie was finished were soon correcting the record to say that he was still on the job, or would be again as soon as the team’s owners at the Montreal Arena Company guaranteed him that Livingstone would really, truly, be kept away from the team. Querrie also seems to have sought to download some of the coaching he was doing to Carroll.

This all seems to have taken some negotiating, leaving Carroll in charge. Querrie did return to the fold, but as of January of 1918, Carroll does seem to have assumed day-to-day — and game-to-game — control of the team, with Querrie moving more into the realm of — well, yes, what we would today recognize as GMing.

That April, when Toronto won the first Stanley Cup of the NHL era, accounts of the final series only confirm this division of labours: Carroll was coach, Querrie was manager. Glory to them both, along with a footnote or two: Querrie’s NHL’s coaching record should include those first three games that he coached, the very ones that constitute Carroll’s entire tenure as the league’s original assistant coach.

Hawk’s Nest: Helge Bostrum (left) and Clem Loughlin in May of 1934. The caption on this photo, as it appeared in the Chicago Tribune: ‘Loughlin’s appointment as the new manager of the Chicago Blackhawks was confirmed yesterday morning. Helge Bostrum, former Hawk defense star, will be his assistant.”

Next in the NHL’s long line of assistant coaches? A non-definitive listing might look to Boston.

Sprague Cleghorn was 37 in 1927, playing out the last year of his long, distinguished, and very brutal career with the Boston Bruins. He was team captain again that year, as he had been previously, and he had a new role, too, as manager Art Ross’s (playing) assistant. Cleghorn was running practices and stood in as interim coach for several games in early 1928 when Ross was home with a stomach ailment. So he seems to have been second among assistant coaches.

Born in Copenhagen, Emil Iverson went from head coach of the University of Minnesota hockey team in the 1920s to being hired as the NHL’s first full-time physical director when Major Frederic McLaughlin brought him on with the Chicago Black Hawks in 1930. Iverson was appointed head coach after that (the league’s first European-born pilot), only to be replaced in 1933 by Tommy Gorman … whom Iverson continued to serve as assistant.

Gorman departed in 1934, having won the Stanley Cup. When Clem Loughlin was named his successor, the newly retired Chicago defenceman Helge Bostrum signed on as his assistant.

More and more teams in the ’30s were hiring deputies, a review of newspaper archives shows, some of them who were still playing, some others fresh off hanging up their active careers. To wit:

Bill Cook aided Lester Patrick with the New York Rangers in 1936-37, with Frank Boucher stepping in to take up the same role the following season, ’37-38.

Frank Boucher’s Ranger role was reported in September of 1937.

Larry Aurie served as a playing assistant to Jack Adams with the Detroit Red Wings in 1938-39.

Paul Thompson was Chicago coach Bill Stewart’s playing assistant that same season.

When the Montreal Canadiens shifted coaches in the latter stages of that season, swapping in club secretary Jules Dugal to replace Cecil Hart, Babe Siebert was named captain and playing assistant.

In Chicago in 1938, Carl Voss was hired to assist Paul Thompson, now the coach of the Black Hawks. And in 1941, Helge Bostrum resurfaced as an assistant to Thompson.

The Bruins had a run of distinguished assistants through the ’40s and ‘50s, with Dit Clapper, Jack Crawford, and Milt Schmidt all appointed to the role at one point or another.

In 1958-59, Bert Olmstead served as a playing assistant to Toronto Maple Leafs’ coach Punch Imlach. King Clancy, too, served Imlach and the Leafs the same role in Toronto in the ’60s, as well as working as assistant GM.

This is, again, no official register, but it does make clear that at least 17 men served as assistant coaches in the NHL before Mike Nykoluk started in Philadelphia in 1972.

I don’t know exactly how the Nykoluk glitch get into regular rotation, but it seems it started at the source. Discussing the hiring that June, 50 years ago, Flyers GM Keith Allen is quoted in several newspaper reports as confirming Nykoluk as a pioneer, with Fred Shero weighing in on the breakthrough, too. Why not add an assistant? “Football and baseball have assistant coaches,” Shero opined, “and those sports are not as physical or mentally demanding as hockey.”

The error was enshrined early on in the local literature. The Flyers’ 1975-76 yearbook, for instance, casually mentions it.

In Full Spectrum, a comprehensive history of the team from 1996, Jay Greenberg scales it back a bit: Nykoluk is identified there “one of the NHL’s first assistant coaches.”

Keith Allen is quoted as crediting Flyer owner Ed Snider for the hire. “Eddie came from football, where they had assistant coaches, and thought Freddie could use some help,” Allen recalled. “Mike had never been fast enough to play in the NHL,  but he was a smart player and I had a lot of respect for him.”

Helpmeet: A team-issued photo of Al McNeil, who appointed an assistant to Montreal Canadiens coach Claude Ruel in 1970 and, a few months later, succeeded him.

 

making waves on the montreal blueline

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Born in 1902 in Salaberry-de-Valleyfield in Quebec on a Saturday of this date, Albert Leduc was a pillar of the Montreal defence for nine years, starting in the mid-1920s, winning two Cups with Canadiens along the way. (He also played short stints with the Ottawa Senators and New York Rangers.) Accounts of his antics on the ice sometimes included the phrases “his legs working like pistons, Albert dashes down and swerves at no defence” (1931) and “crashed Paul Thompson into the fence so hard in the first period that said fence was broken” (1933). As a 23-year-old rookie, he scored ten goals in 1925-26, second among all NHL defencemen that year, outscoring Lionel Conacher, King Clancy, and Sprague Cleghorn.

The first money he was ever paid for playing hockey? Leduc had a story he told about that in 1935, by which time he was coaching in the Can-Am league. Back in his teenaged years, while he was still a schoolboy during the First World War, Leduc was a bright enough hockey prospect to be invited to play in an exhibition game against the NHA’s barnstorming Montreal Wanderers. The venue was Ormstown, Quebec, about 20 kilometres from home. It was a big opportunity that young Leduc didn’t mean to miss, and so to get to the game, he hired a horse on credit, counting on being paid for his hockey efforts. But: when he arrived, he was told his talents weren’t needed.

“I am stricken,” Leduc recounted in the ’30s, as told in a contemporary newspaper reporter’s rendering of Leduc’s diction, “I protest. I cry out. I cry out so loud that the great Arthur Ross come along and say, ‘Hey, what is all this?’”

A powerhouse defenceman in his own right long before he started with the Boston Bruins, Ross, the Wanderer captain for many of those wartime years, listened to Leduc’s tale of woe and unpaid horse-rental.

“The great Mr. Ross, he tell me: ‘O.K. for the ’orse. Cry no more but shut up. You play for us. We need a guy with a ’orse and maybe you better bring the ’orse on the ice with you.’ But I think he joke, though Mr. Ross always look very stern.”

So Leduc played for the Wanderers in Ormstown, scored a goal, even. “After the game, the great Mr. Ross comes to me and he says: ‘How much for the ’orse?’”

“I say: ‘Five dollar fix everything,’ and what do you think now? The great Mr. Ross say: ‘Here, kid, give those ’orse a few oats,’ and he hand me fifteen dollar. I am broke down at such kindness. I pay for my ’orse, I have a profit.”

a husky healthy lot: a vaccination mandate for the nhl — in 1920 

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Benny And The Vax: An arm swollen to twice its regular size didn’t keep Ottawa goaltender Clint Benedict from the ice in 1920.

Winter was on the way, but cases were on the rise, too, and as concerns over the spread of disease mounted, players in the National Hockey League did what they had to do and took a needle to make sure that the hockey season could proceed.

If the scenario sounds as familiar and up-to-the-moment as today’s (online) edition of your daily newspaper, the case at hand comes to us as 100-year-old history. Twenty months into our 21st-century pandemic, in a week in which the NHL’s modern-day Ottawa Senators have seen their schedule suspended under a weight of Covid-19 protocols, we’re casting back here to the fall of 1919 here.

Back then, in the wake of a world war, another devastating pandemic still wasn’t finished its dreadful work, but this isn’t a Spanish flu story. Seven months after that virulent virus shut down the Stanley Cup finals in Seattle, sickening most of the Montreal Canadiens’ line-up and killing defenceman Joe Hall, it was smallpox that was on the loose across Ontario.

 News of a “mild” epidemic in Toronto made news in Ottawa at the beginning of November. “Fifteen cases are in the smallpox hospital,” the Journal advised, “but no deaths have been reported. All teaching institutions, included colleges, are ordered vaccinated. The City Council is to be asked to issue a proclamation ordering everybody to be vaccinated.”

By mid-month, the case count in the provincial capital was at 361, with 1,000 people in the city under quarantine. (Across the rest of Ontario, 541 cases were reported.) But Dr. Charles Hastings, the city’s medical officer of health, estimated that the actual number of infected Torontonians to be between 2,000 and 3,000. The smallpox vaccine was the first to have been developed against a contagious disease, going back to the end of the 18th century, and in Toronto that fall, the effort to vaccinate city’s population was working well, Dr. Hastings felt: in a city of some 520,000, as many as 100,000 had been inoculated by mid-November, “including a large proportion of schoolchildren.” Still, urgency was required: he sought compulsory vaccinations for all Torontonians.

Plus ça change: Anti-(smallpox)-vaxxers demonstrate in front of Toronto’s City Hall in 1920. (Image: City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 2517)

The fact that Mayor Tommy Church and a majority of city councillors didn’t agree meant this was anything but a straightforward matter. Mayor Church declared his belief in vaccines; he just didn’t think the people of his city should be compelled to get them. Ontario’s Board of Health sent a letter requesting that the city issue a mandate; Council declined to issue one. Dr. John McCullough was the province’s top doctor: he reminded the Mayor and his stubborn councillors that any of them (as the Globe noted) “to whom responsibility for failure to issue this proclamation may attach will be liable to a penalty under the Vaccination Act.” There was talk of fines, of indictments under a grand jury, of jail sentences.

As Christmas approached — and cases increased — the struggle between the politicians and the doctors intensified. While the politicians refused to give ground, the local Board of Health saw to it that unvaccinated children were barred from city schools: on December 4, more than 1,000 were sent home. But it was politicians who manned the Toronto Board and by early January dissenting councillors had the upper hand, such that the city’s BOH not only refused to cooperate with the Ontario Board in its effort to enforce general vaccination, but suspended its earlier exclusion of unvaccinated schoolchildren.

The Ontario Board kept up its pressure on Toronto’s council, warning of lawsuits that would surely follow as a result of the city’s neglect and noting that smallpox outbreaks in the rest of the province were all traceable to Toronto. By early January, the Globe was reporting the epidemic’s first two Toronto deaths, a baby girl of 17 months and a man of 66.

Ontario’s neighbours were watching, and worrying. In November, the United States Public Health Service announced that all travellers crossing from the province into Michigan at Detroit would need to show proof of vaccination to enter; similar rules applied at Buffalo and other New York ports of entry. On December 20, Manitoba imposed a similar restriction. By January, Quebec was ready to follow suit, imposing “one of the most severe and sweeping health protection measures in years,” and extending an order already in place in Montreal requiring all visitors from Ontario be vaccinated was extended to include the entire province. “Quebec,” declared Dr. Hector Palardy, district health officer for Montreal, “has no smallpox whatever, and does not want any.”

It’s here that we circle back to the ice. Papers across the country carried the news as the old year shifted into a new one:

Needle News: Word of NHL vaccinations went on the wires across Canada in early 1920.

By then, the NHL’s third season had been underway for a week. It was a four-team loop that year, with Quebec having joined in with Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. The Senators would end up winning the league championship and the Stanley Cup by the time it was all over. With a line-up that included Clint Benedict, Eddie Gerard, Punch Broadbent, and Frank Nighbor, they were already working with a formula that would bring home two more Cups over the course of the next three seasons.

“None of the boys reported sore arms,” the Ottawa Citizen reported in the wake of Dr. Graham’s needling, “but they are liable to develop in a day or two and may handicap the club considerably in the championship race.”

Still: “As a husky healthy lot, Dr. Graham does not believe that any of the men will be disabled.”

Frank Nighbor wasn’t so sure. Along with teammates Broadbent, Jack MacKell, and Morley Bruce, he’d been previously vaccinated against smallpox while on military service during the war. Lacking certificates to prove it, all four had submitted to repeats from Dr. Graham. Nighbor hadn’t forgotten the first time: “he says he was a very sick boy when the Flying Corps surgeon jabbed him at Toronto.”

Frank Nighbor

Several of Nighbor’s teammates did suffer in the days that followed. On January 3, before they hit the road for Quebec, the Senators traveled to Toronto to take on the St. Patricks. It was a rough game, with the home team prevailing, 4-3. Ottawa defenceman Sprague Cleghorn did score his team’s second goal, but the Citizen asked for some sympathy on his behalf: “Cleghorn went into the game so sick that he could hardly stand.” A week after Dr. Graham’s visit to the dressing room, he was still suffering. “His left arm was swollen,” the Citizen explained, “and he complained of pains and dizziness in his head. Yet Cleghorn insisted on playing.”

Ahead of Ottawa’s next game, at home to Montreal, the Citizen later revealed, a couple of Senators were ailing: while Punch Broadbent had a case of pleurisy, goaltender Clint Benedict’s “vaccinated arm was swollen was swollen twice its normal size.” Both insisted on playing in what turned out as a 4-3 Senators win; Broadbent scored a hattrick and added an assist.

It’s not clear whether or not Ottawa’s players were still feeling any side effects by the time they finally got to Quebec in mid-January. We do know that the road trip east yielded a split: after beating Quebec 2-1, they lost to Montreal by a score of 3-2.

NHL notes from January of 1920.

When Toronto’s players got their vaccinations in early January, the news was that “several of the players were laid up with sore arms.” As for players from Montreal and Quebec — I’ve seen no mention in contemporary accounts of them getting their needles, though I assume that if they were travelling to Toronto and back home again, Quebec’s mandate must have caused them to be vaccinated, too.

Ontario’s Board of Health gave up its fight for a city-wide Toronto mandate in early January of 1920 after the Supreme Court of Ontario ruled that the board didn’t have the power to tell the city what to do. “The Provincial Board of Health has done its utmost to protect Ontario and others from the peril of smallpox,” Dr. McCullough said. “Owing to the opposition of the Toronto City Council, we have not been completely successful.”

Case numbers did begin to drop, even if Dr. McCullough didn’t soften his tone as the weeks went on. Addressing Windsor’s Chamber of Commerce at the end of January, 1920, he charged that “the city of Toronto has been guilty of spreading smallpox all over the province of Ontario and would have spread it all over the continent had not the Americans taken steps to prevent it.”

He was referring, of course, to U.S. border restrictions, but let’s not diminish Quebec’s efforts. After that province lifted its restrictions on Ontario travellers in early March, health officials went to the trouble of releasing a bevy of impressive analytics. In the two months of monitoring railway traffic from Ontario, Quebec inspectors had boarded 1,501 trains carrying 89,275 passengers. Of these, 69,933 were found to have vaccination certificates (“which were examined and stamped,” the Montreal Gazette divulged) while a further 12,549 rolled up sleeves to show vaccination marks (“which were verified”). Another 6,639 passengers who had neither certificates nor vaccination marks submitted to vaccinations on the spot.

And those who refused a frontier shot? There were 154 of them. “The inspectors were adamant,” the Gazette noted; “that number was turned back and prevented from crossing into this province.”

Playing Hurt: Punch Broadbent scored a January hattrick for his Ottawa Senators in 1920, pleurisy notwithstanding.

 

 

in harmony: in 1923, eddie gerard led ottawa’s original senators in song, all the way to a stanley cup

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Ottawa’s Musical Ride, 1923: Posing in front of their CPR carriage “Neptune,” Ottawa’s Senators arrive in Vancouver in March of 1923, on their way to claiming the Stanley Cup. They ( and their friends) are, from left: Baz O’Meara (Montreal Star), Ed Baker (Ottawa Citizen), owner Ted Dey, manager (and stand-in coach) Tommy Gorman, Cy Denneny, Clint Benedict, Punch Broadbent, Harry Helman, Lionel Hitchman, King Clancy, captain Eddie Gerard, Billy Boucher, Buck Boucher, Frank Nighbor, trainer Cozy Dolan.

There was no better team in hockey through the 1920s than the Ottawa Senators, who won four Stanley Cups in eight years with a line-up stacked with future Hall-of-Famers. Coached by the brilliant (and sadly undersung) Pete Green through the first years of the NHL’s first decade, the Senators counted on a core of supremely skilled players in those years that included Clint Benedict in goal, King Clancy and Lionel Hitchman on defence, and Cy Denneny, Frank Nighbor, and Jack Darragh on the forward line.

Captaining the team through those first three championships was the anchorman of the defence, Eddie Gerard. Born in Ottawa on a Saturday of this date in 1890, Gerard deserves a bigger fame, better broadcast, than he has nowadays. The modern-day Senators could get things going — and should — by retiring his number 2 and raising it to the rafters of the Canadian Tire Centre. Then again, according to me, they ought to be hoisting a whole wardrobe’s worth of sweaters to honour that golden age, including Nighbor’s number 6, Cy Denneny’s 5, and Darragh’s 7, just for a start.

Gerard played his last NHL season in 1923, when, aged 33, he steered the Senators their third Cup in four years. (He actually got his name on four straight Cups, but that’s a tale for another day.) It was early March when the Senators beat the Montreal Canadiens in two games to take the NHL title, whereupon the team boarded a CPR train for Vancouver.

On arrival to the coast, Ottawa surpassed the PCHL Vancouver Maroons in four games to earn the right to meet the Edmonton Eskimos in for the Stanley Cup, which they collected by way of a two-game sweep of the WCHL Edmonton Eskimos.

On the rails heading west, the Senators were accommodated in a special carriage, the “Neptune.” It’s worth noting that they left two prominent members of their team behind in the capital: winger Jack Darragh and coach Pete Green were both unable to make the trip west. Canadiens winger Billy Boucher did join the Senators for their Stanley Cup swing — he was from Ottawa, after all, a brother to Senators’ defenceman Buck Boucher — but didn’t, in the end, play a single game on the coast. So Ottawa had just nine players available for the six games they played on their way to winning the Cup.

It wasn’t easy. During the finals, Harry Helman cut his foot and was unable to play. Buck Boucher and Lionel Hitchman played through injuries, while Eddie Gerard suited up for the last two games despite torn ligaments in a shoulder that was also doubly fractured. In the deciding game, after Clint Benedict was penalized for chopping at Joe Simpson’s skates, 20-year-old Ottawa defenceman King Clancy took a turn in goal, proving himself to be uniquely versatile — earlier in Ottawa’s undermanned visit to the coast, he’d also taken turns at centre and on both wings as well as doing his regular duty as a defender.

Back in Ottawa that April, Eddie Gerard was invited to address the regular Wednesday-night meeting of the youngsters of the Canuck Club at the YMCA. His young audience sat on the gym floor to listen to the Senator captain tell them (as the Ottawa Citizen reported it) “that the first man signed on by the Ottawa players before starting out West was ‘Mr. Harmony,’ and he said that without harmony nothing could succeed.”

His message was, of course, about playing as a team, with a shared purpose — but it was also about, well, harmonies.

Turns out that the Senators packed a small piano for their train journey west, with Gerard and trainer Cozy Dolan as principal performers, ably accompanied by Lionel Hitchman on violin, Clancy on harmonica, and Helman on drums. “This might appear on paper as a joke orchestra,” Citizen sports editor Ed Baker wrote, “but it is not. It’s a real honest to goodness band.”

Gerard recalled this a decade later, when he was coaching the New York Americans. “Harmony on a hockey club,” he told Harold Burr of the Brooklyn Eagle in 1931, “is half the battle. And one kind of harmony brings another. I like to sign singing players. If they knock around together off the ice, they’re liable to fight for another on it. Conversely, the player who curses his teammate in the hotel and on the trains isn’t going to pass him in front of the goal when he should.”

That’s when he remembered the musical rides of the ’20s. The Senators had shunted west in 1921, too, also (I guess) with a piano aboard? “All the fellows could sing,” Gerard testified in 1931, “but I think Sprague Cleghorn had the best voice. Our trainer, Cozy Dolan, could play anything from the big drum to the little piccolo.”

One more (non-musical note), on a matter of historical housekeeping: shouldn’t Tommy Gorman get the credit for coaching the Senators to that 1923 Cup? With Pete Green staying home in Ottawa, manager Gorman does seem to have taken charge on the Ottawa bench for those western playoff games that year. And yet in most of the standard records, Gorman’s coaching career is listed as beginning in 1925, when he took over the New York Americans. Seems like deserves the credit for the work he did in that regard for the Senators, too, in claiming that Stanley Cup.

 

 

 

 

meet me in chicoutimi

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Meet Me in Chicoutimi: Canadiens pose at the Aréna with (in white) local players on the afternoon of March 7, 1915. Dark-sweatered Montrealers are (front row, from left) Louis Berlinguette, Didier Pitre, and Harry Scott and (back row, from left) Jack Laviolette with Ernie Dubeau (I think) next to him, Nick Bawlf fourth from left,  and Georges Vézina sixth from left, in the tuque. It’s likely that Vézina’s older brother Pierre would have played in this game, and judging from other photographs, I’m guessing that  he’s the tall one at the back, third from the left. Or maybe front row, farthest to the right? A defenceman, he played briefly for Montreal in the NHA, suiting up for a single game in 1911-12.

A birthday today for Georges Vézina, who was born in Chicoutimi on a Friday of this date in 1887. That means he would have been 28 in March of 1915 when this photograph was taken on the ice at the Aréna one Sunday afternoon in his Saguenay hometown, when his Canadiens came to town for an exhibition game against the local Banque National team.  While I haven’t found a record of the score that day in ’15, what I can report is that Montreal’s season had finished with a thud a few days earlier, when they’d finished dead last in the standings of the six-team NHA.

It’s not that the team lacked talent: alongside Vézina, playing in his fifth professional season, the 1914-15 Canadiens iced a few other future Hall-of-Famers that year in Jack Laviolette, Didier Pitre, and Newsy Lalonde, as well as the solid talents of Bert Corbeau and Louis Berlinguette. A year later, with much the same line-up, Canadiens did win their first Stanley Cup, but in 1915 they just couldn’t get it together.

Finishing top of the NHA that year were the Ottawa Senators and Montreal’s other team, the Wanderers, and those two teams duly played for the league championship.

Ottawa won the two-game series, earning the right to play the PCHA-champion Vancouver Millionaires for the Stanley Cup. That was at the end of March; Vancouver prevailed, winning three successive games.

Progrès du Saguenay ad ahead of Montreal’s exhibition in Chicoutimi in March of 1915.

Montreal’s teams, meanwhile, went to New York, where they played in a friendly tournament at the St. Nicholas Rink at 69 West 66th Street. Wanderers lined up the Cleghorn brothers that year, Odie and Sprague, along with Harry Hyland and Goldie Prodger. They took the first game 7-6 over Vézina and his teammates, and won again the following night, 8-3.

Maybe “friendly” isn’t quite the right word, given the reports from New York.

“It was a hard game from start to finish in the way of body checking,” The New York Times wrote of the first encounter. “The players of each team crashed into each other with utter disregard of consequences and several times players were sent sprawling on the ice and time was taken so they might recover.”

Jack Laviolette impressed: a dispatch from the sidelines of the second game described him skimming “over the ice with such speed that in his jersey of flaming scarlet he resembled a fire brand.”

Vézina, too, earned praise, despite the eight goals that went by him that night. He was deemed to have done “some excellent work at stopping the rush of the Wanderers” even though “at times they came at him so fast and furious it was impossible for him to see the puck at all.”

The victorious Wanderers went on to meet their NHA rivals from Quebec in the next stage of the tournament. The Bulldogs featured Joe Malone in their forward line and Paddy Moran in goal, but the Wanderers overwhelmed them all the same, winning by scores of 12-6 and 15-12 to claim their reward: a purse of $2,500.

lapses in the legacy: tallying up boston’s neglected captains

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“Patrice Bergeron was meant to be a Bruins captain,” a former Boston teammate of his was saying last week, Martin Lapointe, emphasis on the meant and on the destiny. Is there anyone who pays attention to the NHL who’s going to dispute it?

Bergeron’s inevitable ascension to the captaincy came last Thursday, seven days after Zdeno Chara’s 14-year tenure sporting the Boston C ended when the lofty defenceman signed with the Washington Capitals.

Was a week enough to dissipate the regret associated with Chara’s departure? Maybe not quite, but the announcement of Bergeron’s succession still made for a proud picture to add to the gallery commemorating the Bruins’ 97-year history.

It was also very much of the fraught moment: players, coaches, and managers at TD Garden that day were all masked for the dressing-room ceremony that formalized Bergeron’s new role. Elsewhere, online, the team marked the occasion with a profusion of nouns and glossy graphics, the former (“Integrity. Humility. Resiliency.”) featuring in the latter.Bruins GM Don Sweeney threw in a few more in his statement.

“Patrice Bergeron exudes leadership, character, talent, will, and empathy,” Sweeney said. “We all know Bergy embraces the legacy of the Boston Bruins, as he will with the captaincy.”

Patrice Bergeron: Boston’s new  (but not 20th) captain.

Bergeron, who’s 35, is skating into his 17th season as a Bruin. He had his say, too.

“It’s very humbling. It’s a huge honour,” he offered. “There’s been some tremendous captains and leaders along the way, and some legends of the game, and as I said it’s an absolute honour and I’m going to try to keep bettering myself and learning and leading by example, but also trying to be me.”

All in all, then, a bright note on which to get the new season going in such a fraught time.

Yes, true — unless you’re talking hockey history, which Bergy and the Bruins were. From a hockey history perspective, last Thursday’s announcement was (at best) confused. It wasn’t Bergeron’s fault, and it doesn’t make him any less deserving of the Boston C, but it was — and continues to be — a bad look for the Bruins, who’ve been careless with their own history, inattentive to the detail of their rich past, and even willfully neglectful.

If they’re willing to revel in their history (and they should), they ought to take pains to get it right.

There have been, as Bergeron noted, tremendous captains and leaders along the way since Charles Adams took his grocery money and put the Bruins on ice in 1924. They should all be remembered, and recognized.

Bergeron isn’t the 20th man to captain the Boston Bruins, as the team is content to claim. Somehow, somewhere the Bruins have forgotten — and duly erased from their records — the captaincies of at least six Bruins — and maybe as many as eight.

Included in those numbers are five (or six) Hall-of-Famers, some of the greatest names in the annals of the team.

How did this happen? It’s not entirely clear.

Are these mistakes that can be corrected? Easily.

Will they be? Hockey is full of surprises.

These are not contentious cases. The evidence backing up the claims I’m making on behalf of six (or eight) famous Bruins takes some finding, which is to say it involves a certain amount of steering search-engines through newspaper archives, which is to say, no, actually, not that much finding is required at all, just some persistence.

Other than that, it’s not controversial, or particularly difficult to decode. It’s pretty plain. I have it organized here at my desk, because, well, that’s the kind of thing I enjoy doing. I like to share, too, which is why I’ve offered this information I shuffled together to the Bruins in case they wanted to look at it and, you know, acknowledge their own, update the record.

There are errors and inconsistencies in the records of other NHL teams and their accountings of who captained them. Mostly, these are irregularities of the calendar, having to with when a certain player was appointed captain, for how long he served. With no other team (I’ve looked) is the forgetting on a scale that matches Boston’s.

There’s nothing sinister behind this. Part of it seems to be that the record has been faulty for so long that the gaps have worn down, grown over. It’s easy to accept antiquity as accuracy; it’s not just in matters of hockey history that errors get repeated over and over again to the point that they sound almost truthful. (It does happen in hockey history a lot, though.)

What’s baffling in this Bruins case is that the team seems to be so very much … not really interested. Give them that: there does seem to be a consistent commitment to indifference over the years.

•••

“I’m not really in the know on this stuff,” Bob Bauer said when we talked a few months ago. “I mean, I know my dad’s career, but I didn’t know about the being overlooked as captain thing.”

He’s a lawyer in Toronto, Bob; his dad was Bobby Bauer, legendary Bruins, right winger on the Kraut Line, three-time winner of the Lady Byng Trophy, Hall of Fame class of 1996. He died in 1964 at the age of 49, when his son was 17.

Maybe the younger Bauer could have followed his father into the NHL — Bob played at Harvard, for the Crimson, and later in Austria. “I didn’t think really — I thought I’d be more likely to be riding the buses in the IHL,” he laughed, “and that wasn’t really a pleasant thought for me, so that was kind of it.”

Bob Bauer knew his dad’s linemates well, Milt Schmidt and Woody Dumart. Knowing what Bobby achieved in the hockey, Bob worked, too, on compiling the nomination package that helped see his namesake inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in ’96.

But the fact that his father captained the Bruins in his last year in the NHL? That was news to Bob when I first got in touch by e-mail. “I went back and looked at what I had submitted [to the Hall],” he said on the phone. “It didn’t mention one way or another about him being captain that year.”

It’s true, though. Even though the Bruins fail to acknowledge it, Bobby Bauer was indeed captain of the team for the 1946-47 season, his last in the NHL.

There’s no doubt about this. The evidence isn’t cloudy, doesn’t leave room for other interpretations.

Bauer was 31 in ’46, heading into his eighth year as Bruin. Like many hockey players — like lots of his Bruin teammates — he’d interrupted his NHL career to go to war. Serving with the RCAF, he missed three full seasons before making a return to the ice in 1945. Back on skates, he helped the Bruins reach the Stanley Cup final the following spring, though the Montreal Canadiens beat them in five games.

After the final game at the Forum Bauer tried to pack up his sweater, number 17, to take home as a souvenir. Manager Art Ross wouldn’t surrender it. “You’ll be using it next year,” he said.

Globe and Mail, October 17, 1946

He was right. In October, Bauer joined the rest of his Boston teammates in Hershey, Pennsylvania, where the Bruins convened to train for the upcoming season. It was on a Wednesday, the 16th, that Ross announced that number 17 would be the Bruins’ new captain.

“Bauer, often referred to as the ‘Brain,’ will make an excellent leader,” Boston’s Globe reported. “The Bruins will also have two alternate captains in the event Bobby is not on the ice during a dispute. These cocaptains [sic] are defensemen, Johnny Crawford, team leader the past few seasons, and Murray Henderson.”

It was a year of change in the NHL. Clarence Campbell succeeded Red Dutton as president of the league that fall. Rosters, reduced in wartime, expanded. Tweaks to the NHL’s rulebook saw changes to regulations governing penalty shots, broken sticks, and unnecessary roughness. New face-off dots were mandated and, as a safety measure, it was decreed that across the league, all gates leading to the ice now had to swing inwards.

Also, for the first time in NHL history, captains of teams got a letter for their sweaters. Never before had players actually worn a letter to indicate their role as captain or alternate. The effort to limit players crowding referees to complain and dispute calls had been ongoing over the years, and this new act of embroidery was another piece of that.

“One Captain shall be appointed by each team,” Rule 14 of the NHL Rulebook now stipulated, “and he alone shall have the privilege of discussing with the Referee any questions relating to interpretation of rules which may arise during the progress of a game. He shall wear the letter ‘C’, approximately three inches in height and in contrasting color, in a conspicuous position on the front of his sweater.”

If this new lettering aided referees at the time, now privileged with easy identification of players permitted to get in their grill, it also continues to abet historians and curious record-keepers alike. The first to wear an actual C in Boston, Bauer wore his front and centre, stitched in between the 1 and the 7 of the sweater he’d almost given up earlier in 1946. There’s no mistaking it in the Bruins’ team photograph:

It’s apparent, too, in images from games the Bruins played that year, like this one below, from Maple Leaf Gardens in March of 1947. That’s Bauer and his C lurking in front of Leaf goaltender Turk Broda. Leaf captain Syl Apps (his own C obscured) is down on a knee in the slot. Bruin winger Joe Carveth is the man with the puck.

If that’s not proof enough, then maybe could I interest you in the notation official NHL documentation for that same game, with Bauer and Apps annotated with Cs and Nick Metz and Gaye Stewart listed as alternate captains along with Crawford and Henderson?

As mentioned, I’m not the first to flag this, or to have tried to engage with the Bruins to point it out.

Others have written to the team to make the case over the years, or even phoned, cold-calling the TD Garden with the quixotic notion that somebody there might be curious.

Boston author and lifelong Bruins fan Kevin Vautour is one such optimist. For years he’s been trying to get the team’s attention and recognize Bauer’s captaincy. Vautour has collected (and shared) newspaper articles, program notes, photos of Bauer wearing the C. He’s not so much frustrated by the Bruins’ attitude towards their own history as he is flummoxed.

Okay, he is, possibly, a little frustrated. “Maybe they don’t care,” he hazarded in “Recognizing An Omission,” a 2008 article for the Society for International Hockey Research’s annual Journal. In that same piece he chronicled a call he put in to the team’s PR department, which someone named John gamely took, and from whom Vautour … never heard back.

Taking up the challenge last year, I made a little more … what? Not progress, exactly. After arrowing several e-mails into the Boston ether, I did eventually hear from Heidi Holland, the team’s director of publications and information, whose job it is to corral and compile all the stats and esoteric detail that goes into the team’s voluminous annual Guide & Record Book, the de facto official record of all things Bruin.

Team guides used to be published the old-fangled way, on paper, but now they’re only online. The latest edition, for 2020-21, went up before last week’s news, so if you scroll over to page 241, where the honour roll of Bruin captains is listed alongside the men who’ve managed, coached, and presidented the team since its start in 1924, you won’t find Patrice Bergeron’s name.

Nineteen others are there, from Sprague Cleghorn all the way through to Chara:

Boston Wrong: Boston’s register of captains, as listed in the team’s 2020-21 Guide & Record Book.

What about Bobby Bauer? How was the list sourced? Were the Bruins aware of Guide’s several absences and anomalies? Could I send along some corroborating evidence in the spirit of friendly good-faith remedial philanthropy?

I e-mailed my questions, then chased that e-mail with a few (exponentially irritating?) follows-up. In Holland’s perfectly gracious reply, I gleaned, if nothing else,that the reason the Bruins’ complacency when it comes to bygone captains seems as solid as it does may be largely Schmidt-based. Holland wrote:

This question has come up a couple of times over the past several years but unfortunately, I have no way of confirming it. The list of captains from earlier media guides lists John Crawford as captain in that season. The earliest media guide that I have is 1947-48 and Crawford’s bio in that book only says that he has “been captain or assistant captain of the Bruins in recent seasons.” Bauer does not have a bio in that guide.

When the subject first came up, I asked Milt Schmidt (as the only person who was active at that time) if he remembered Bobby being named Boston’s captain and he did not have any recollection that he did.

Makes sense, I guess — other than the abundance of proofs that don’t rely on the memory of the altogether eminent and venerable Schmidt, an institution unto himself, who captained, coached, and GM’d the Bruins in his day, and, right up until his death at age 98 in 2017, remained a beloved icon in and around the team.

Especially since, as it turns out, Bauer isn’t the only Bruin great to have somehow vanished off the historical ledger.

Waiting to hear back from Holland, I kept on shaking the archives, as I tend to do, to see what might fall from the branches. One of the more instructive items I came across was from Montreal Gazettecolumnist Vern DeGeer writing in 1961.

He’d been talking to Ken McKenzie, the co-founder of The Hockey News who also served as the NHL’s long-time publicist. It was thanks to McKenzie’s research that DeGeer was able to report that Chicago’s Black Hawks was the club with the most captains in its history to date, with 18. (Almost but not quite right: Chicago is another club who’ve forgotten a leader or two. But maybe that’s another day’s post.)

The captaincy-confusion seems to have been general. While Montreal’s Canadiens have subsequently righted the record, the Gazette was at in ’61 confident that new Habs skipper Jean Béliveau counted as the team’s ninth captain since the founding in 1909, when in fact he was the 16th.

Remarking on the Bruins, DeGeer alluded specifically to the scattered state of Boston records. According to McKenzie, team records of the captaincy were so lacking that they only included six names and reached back no further than 1939 and Dit Clapper.

“The Boston publicity department,” DeGeer lamented, “hasn’t been able to track down names of any earlier leaders.”

I don’t know — maybe the modern-day Bruins can find some comfort in knowing that 60 years ago, the record was already wanting.

Back in the present, I was a little affronted, I suppose, when Heidi Holland didn’t invite me to send along my Bobby Bauer findings. So along with DeGeer’s article, I didn’t send them.

I guess I was feeling a little sheepish, too, as though it were my fault that the more I juddered the archives, the more the captains missing from the record seemed to multiple.

By then, gazing back beyond Bauer through the 13 seasons before he got the C stitched onto his solar plexus, I found that five other famous Bruins had somehow been effaced from the record.

When I’d first e-mailed the Bruins, I’d been ready to pronounce that Bauer was the Bruins’ seventh captain, which meant that Zdeno Chara came 20th in the succession. Actually? Bauer is (confirmably) the 12thman to have led the team. Given that, Patrice Bergeron is at the very least the 26th captain in Boston Bruins’ history. Depending on your interpretation of a later situation from the 1960s, he could be the 28th.

Either way, that’s a big helping of oblivion. As a team proud of its history you’d want to get that looked at, you’d think.

•••

It was at some point during the 1931-32 NHL that Art Ross made a decision that’s key to the story of the Boston captaincy and its missing protagonists. Just how Ross reasoned this isn’t clear — I haven’t seen it explained, at least — but the Bruins’ coach and manager decided that, in the future, the team would pick a new captain each season.

Hired to launch the expansion Bruins into the NHL in 1924, Art Ross steered his team that first year without naming a captain. (Vern DeGeer speculated in 1961 that if he hadchosen one, the likeliest candidate would have been left winger Herb Mitchell, sometimes said to have been the first player ever signed by the Bruins as well as — maybe not coincidentally — Ross’ brother-in-law.)

Ross did name a leader in 1925, making Sprague Cleghorn the team’s first captain. At 35, Cleghorn was an old Montreal friend of Ross’, as well as a wily, much-scarred — and all-too-willing-to-scar — veteran who, in the five years before joining Boston, had played in four Stanley Cup finals, three times on the winning side.

Cleghorn captained the team for three seasons. To start the last of these, 1927-28, Ross, ever the innovator, named a 25-year-old Lionel Hitchman as his deputy — vice-captain, he called him. This was an NHL first, as far as I know.

“Sprague Cleghorn,” Ross explained to the Boston Globe, “continues, of course, as the Bruins’ captain, but Hitchman a year ago was the regular starting defenceman with [Eddie] Shore, and he will be the playing captain of the team when he is on the ice. Cleghorn will continue to have the entire supervision of players’ conduct as team captain, and when on the ice he will make all decisions.”

Like Cleghorn’s, Hitchman’s stint as captain lasted three years. In his first year at the helm, 1929, he led the Bruins to their first Stanley Cup. In 1930, slowed by injuries, Hitchman tried to relinquish his role. Ross wouldn’t hear of it, convincing him to stick with it for one more season.

As the manager told it in 1931, the team picked his successor in their dressing room at the Montreal Forum the day before they opened the season against the Maroons. Hitchman nominated 30-year-old defenceman George Owen, with Eddie Shore seconding the motion. The resulting vote was unanimous. Owen himself missed the election: he’d stayed back in Boston to tend tending to his business, joining his teammates for the game next day.

Dit Clapper was next. He was 25. “The likable right winger yesterday was elected to lead the Bruins,” the Globeheralded in October of 1932, “continuing the policy of selecting a new captain each playing season.”

By his biographer’s account, Clapper’s inauguration involved a ceremonial shower of snow and ice-shavings in the Boston Garden dressing room.

As far as the Bruins are concerned, Ross’ one-off policy ended the following year, with Clapper re-upping and continuing on as captain for five further seasons, through 1937-38.

As with Bobby Bauer, that’s where their history is wonky.

Boston Globe, November 7, 1933.

The policy didn’t expire: in early November of 1933, in Quebec City, where the Bruins convened their training camp, 27-year-old Marty Barry was anointed captain.

He was expected, I suppose, to lead by example — nobody could have been expecting him to rule by oratory. The Globe sketched the scene as his captaincy was announced. “Barry, who never utters a word in the dressing room, as usual had nothing to say, but his playmates insisted, so Marty stood up and made the longest speech of his career. ‘Thanks fellows,’ then he sat down.”

Barry was the first of four captains from the 1930s who are now forgotten by the Bruins. Nels Stewart, 31, came next, a 32-year-old Eddie Shore after him, Hall-of-Famers both. Next was Red Beattie, who was 30.

The announcements of these appointments are all there in 90-year-old print, not just in the Boston papers, but across North America as, year by year, the merits of Boston’s new captains were duly discussed.

In 1934, the Globe noted that Bruins’ goaltender Tiny Thompson had been in the running alongside Stewart, but that coach Frank Patrick “felt a goalie-captain tends to slow up the game in case of disputes on the ice. In 1935, extolling Shore, the Globe reminded readers that Boston captains were appointed (by Ross) rather than elected, and that their term lasted just a year.

Boston Globe, October 25, 1934.

That policy was in fact finally coming to its end. Cooney Weiland, 34, was the new captain in 1937 and kept the job for a second year, during which he also served as Art Ross’ assistant coach, and so might deserve a double measure of credit for the fact that Boston claimed the Stanley Cup in the spring of 1939. (Not to rain on that parade, but I have to report that the Bruins have their dates wrong on Weiland, crediting him with just a single year as captain instead of his two.)

Weiland’s 1939 retirement opened the door for a return to the captaincy by Dit Clapper, now 32, starting into his 13th season as a Bruin. He lasted five seasons this time around, raising a Stanley Cup in 1941.

And the Bruins … well, the Bruins have him staying on through to 1946-47, after which (they assert) John — a.k.a. Jack — Crawford stepped up.

No.

It was the fall of 1944 that Clapper handed over the captaincy to concentrate on his duties as Boston’s playing coach. Yet another long-unacknowledged name took his place: 32-year-old Bill Cowley.

It was after Cowley that Crawford got his turn as captain, and while the Bruins give him credit for four years’ service in the role, he actually only lasted one. Bobby Bauer was next, as mentioned, followed by his (forgetful) friend and linemate Milt Schmidt.

There are other kinks in the Bruins’ list as you go on, mostly to do with dates, nothing on the scale of the gaps that mar the ’30s and ’40s. A corrected list of the entire span of those first decades and the captains who (actually) reigned is here for your consideration, in case you’re interested. Eventually I’ll add in the later decades and highlight some of the confusions and anomalies therein.

For now, let’s just preview a single, significant one of those.

If you study the Bruins’ master list, you’ll see that they declare “No Captain” for the years 1967-68 through 1972-73. Johnny Bucyk’s name appears on either side of this chasm in the captaincy, before (1966-67) and after (1973-74 to 1976-77).

Why so?

It’s complicated and (in this later case) open to some interpreting. I’ll spare you most of that here, focussing (for now) on the first of those No-Captain years, 1967-68, if only because I have a fairly explicit explanation at hand of what went on that year.

Again we go to the Boston Globe, for whom reporter Kevin Walsh was on the Bruins beat as a new NHL season, the first of the expansion era, approached in October of 1967. Here’s Walsh’s lede from a piece headlined “Three Captains Leading Bruins:”

The big ‘C’ Johnny Bucyk wore on his uniform a year ago that designated him as team captain of the Bruins has been retired. He now wears an ‘A’.

Coach Harry Sinden was happy to explain the spelling correction. He and his GM had were opting in this new hockey age for co-captains — that’s the word that he and (none other than) Milt Schmidt were using.

“We decided,” Sinden said, “the important duties of the captain would be shared among Bucyk. Ted Green, and Phil Esposito. All share equally the responsibility of captain.”

Bucyk, he reported, was all aboard. “He thinks it’s a good idea.”

Divided C: The 1967-68 Bruins, featuring co-captains (and GM Milt Schmidt).

“If the league rules allowed it,” Sinden went on, “we would have three men on the ice wearing a C. We may eventually have a captain but right now we will have three players share the duty.”

“We are the first team in the league to have co-captains,” he added, perhaps as a nod of trailblazing respect to Art Ross, “and I feel it’s a good idea.”

So, then: do Ted Green and Phil Esposito deserve to be tallied in the catalogue of Boston captains? Is the proper total 28 rather than 26?

As well as it might have worked at the time, the decision to divide the captaincy in three clearly posed a problem for the team’s records-keepers who, maybe, decided that “No Captain” was simpler that Co-captains. I suppose it’s an easier solution than having to annotate and explain, even if annotating and explaining might better reflect and even honour the team’s history.

I’m satisfied to offer Green and Esposito up for debate. It’s true that they never wore the C for Boston, so it makes a sort of sense that they’re not counted in the overall tally of Bruins captains. Does it, though? By Harry Sinden’s description here, they were captains of the team just as much as Johnny Bucyk was before and after he shared his title.

As for the earlier others, I don’t see how Boston can continue to ignore them. With all due respect to Milt Schmidt’s memory, proof of the Bruin captaincies of Marty Barry, Nels Stewart, Eddie Shore, Red Beattie, Bill Cowley, and Bobby Bauer is available and confirmable.

It’s time to elevate their distinguished names to the register up alongside Patrice Bergeron’s.

Captains Three: Three B defenceman, all of whom led the team in their early decades. From left, Eddie Shore, George Owen, and Lionel Hitchman.

hart beat

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They Were The Champions: Montreal’s 1930-31 championship lines up outside for the Forum. Back row, from left: Trainer Ed Dufour, Gord Fraser, Sylvio Mantha, Marty Burke, coach Cecil Hart, Battleship Leduc, Nick Wasnie, Armand Mondou, Jimmy McKenna. Front, from left: Pit Lepine, Georges Mantha, George Hainsworth, Aurèle Joliat, Howie Morenz, Wildor Larochelle.

They used to say that Cecil Hart had never played, that all his hockey savvy and successes came without the benefit of actually having plied with pucks, on skates. That’s not quite true: Hart, who was born in Bedford, Quebec, on a Wednesday of this date in 1883, did indeed play, inlcluding some senior hockey in Montreal. It is the case that Hart’s truly singular suite of achievements in hockey did occur when he wasn’t wearing skates, near benches, or in offices of business.

He was the NHL’s first — and still only? — Jewish coach, and a direct descendent of Aaron Blake, one of the first Jewish settlers in Canada, who made his home in Trois-Rivières in 1761. Cecil’s father was David A. Hart, Aaron’s great-grandson, a distinguished physician and surgeon and the man who, in 1923, donated the NHL’s first trophy recognizing individual excellence.

Back to Cecil. Away from the sporting world, he was an insurance broker — though he seems never to have been too far away from the sporting life. Baseball was, apparently, his first love. He was a pitcher and a shortstop as well as an ace organizer: in 1897, at the age of 14, he started a team, the Stars, that would soon come to dominate Montreal’s amateur leagues, while featuring rosters that included Art Ross and the Cleghorn brothers, Sprague and Odie.

Hart was coach and manager, scorekeeper, publicist, travel agent for the team, which eventually added a hockey program. Frank Calder, the NHL’s first president, was still a newspaperman in Montreal when he first met Hart in 1906. “Cecil thought more of his Stars than of his right hand,” he recalled later.

It was Hart who, in 1921, brokered the agreement whereby Leo Dandurand and partners Joe Cattarinich and Leo Letourneau bought the Montreal Canadiens after the team went on the market following George Kennedy’s death. Dandurand and Cattarinich were in Cleveland at the time, watching horses race: Hart was the one who offered $11,000 on their behalf — about $156,000 in 2020 coinage — to get the deal done.

Cecil Hart, ca. the early 1930s.

Hart was a director of the Canadiens in 1923 when he sealed another historic Montreal bargain, travelling to Stratford, Ontario, to sign a hurtling 20-year-old named Howie Morenz to a Canadiens contract.

Hart would, in 1926, succeed Dandurand as coach of the Canadiens, but not before he spent a year building Montreal’s other NHL team, the one that would eventually be named the Maroons, when they first got their franchise in 1924. Hart only stayed a year, and so he wasn’t in the room where it happened when, after just their second season, the Maroons won the Stanley Cup, but the foundation of that championship team was very much of his making: he was the man who’d brought on Clint Benedict and Punch Broadbent, Dunc Munro, Reg Noble, and coach Eddie Gerard.

Hart’s first stint as coach of the Canadiens lasted six seasons, during which his teams won two Stanley Cups, in 1930 and ’31. He left the team in 1932 after a disagreement with Leo Dandurand. In 1936, he returned to the Montreal bench on the condition that the team bring back Howie Morenz. They did that, of course; that was also the year that Morenz died at the age of 37.

Hart coached in parts of another two seasons before Canadiens president Ernest Savard deposed him in early 1939. Savard insisted that he hadn’t fired his coach; Hart was merely being granted “a leave of absence” while team secretary Jules Dugal took over as coach. Hart’s record of 196 regular-season wins remains fifth-best on the list of Canadiens coaches; he’s eighth in points percentage. His teams won another 16 games in the playoffs, wherein his winning percentage stands at .486, 13th in team history.

Cecil Hart died in July of 1940. He was 56.

Trophy Case: The original David A. Hart Trophy, first presented in 1924. At that time it was suggested that if a player won the Hart three times it would be his to keep, a scenario by which Howie Morenz would have acquired it for his mantelpiece in 1932. While that proviso seems to have been forgotten along the way, the original trophy was retired in 1960 to the Hockey Hall of Fame and replaced by a new one, re-named the Hart Memorial Trophy.

 

 

dental appointment: doc stewart takes to the boston net, 1924

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B List: The 1925-26 Boston Bruins line up, from left, Sprague Cleghorn, Sailor Herbert, Gerry Geran, Carson Cooper, Red Stuart, Norm Shay, Stan Jackson (I think), Hago Harrington, Dr. Charles Stewart.

Born in Carleton Place, Ontario, on a Wednesday of this same date in 1895, Dr. Charles Stewart was the second goaltender to take the net in the history of the Boston Bruins, making his debut on Christmas Day of 1924, after things didn’t quite work out with the team’s original goaler, Hec Fowler.

Stewart was a dentist, which explains his nickname, Doc, as well as the fact that he played in the Senior OHA for the Toronto Dentals, and (also) that he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Canadian Army Dental Corps towards the end of the First World War. In and around and after his hockey career, Stewart had a dental practice in Hamilton, Ontario.

The good Doc lines up with Boston for a 1926 game against Ottawa.

It was to Kingston that Bruins coach and manager Art Ross tracked Stewart in December of 1924. Hec Fowler’s demise is a whole other story: let’s just say that seven games into the Bruins’ debut season, he had worn out his welcome. As well as drilling and capping teeth in Hamilton, Stewart was playing for the local OHA Tigers that winter, and Montreal’s Gazette reported that while Ross was offering him $2,500 to make the jump from amateur to pro ranks, as well paying living expenses in Boston, and the rent on his Hamilton practice, Stewart was holding out for $1,000 more.

I can’t say for certain what they settled on, just that Stewart was in Montreal on the 25th to defend the Bruins’ net against the Montreal Canadiens. Boston lost, 0-5, though Stewart’s effort was roundly praised. He and his Bruins had to wait another five games, until January 10, to celebrate his first win — still only the second in Bruins’ history — when Boston returned to Montreal to eke out a 3-2 overtime decision.

The Bruins finished dead last in the NHL that year, but things did improve the following season, 1925-26, when Doc Stewart went 16-14-4 to help the team to a fourth-place finish in the seven-team NHL. (They still didn’t make the playoffs.)

Stewart played half of the Bruins’ regular-season games the following year, 1926-27, his last in the NHL. That was a season that saw Boston go all the way to the Stanley Cup final, though they lost in four games to the Ottawa Senators. Stewart’s time in Boston was over by then: he played no part in those playoffs. By that point, he’d been supplanted by Hal Winkler.