upper body injury

harvey pulford: captain of a silver seven, keeping the peace on the nhl’s opening night

/ puckstruck / 1 Comment

A Man For All Seasons: Harvey Pulford cleans up for the camera in October of 1907.

Born in Toronto on a Thursday of today’s date in 1875, Harvey Pulford’s Hall-of-Fame playing career began in the far-off days of 1893, the year that a brand-new chalice that we know as the Stanley Cup mad its debut. Pulford was a big defenceman with the Ottawa Hockey Club, and one of the best in the game at that. He was especially adept at the “lift:” clearing the puck from his team’s end by hoisting it high in the air to his opponent’s end. He captained the team during Ottawa’s high-flying Silver Seven years, when the team held the Stanley Cup against all challengers from March of 1903 through March of 1906, when they ceded the championship to the Montreal Wanderers.

Pulford was a man of many sports: he won four national championships playing for the Ottawa Football Club, and excelled as well at lacrosse, boxing, and rowing. In 1905, he teamed up with hockey teammate Frank McGee to scull in the Royal Canadian Henley Regatta and win the junior fours.

After retiring as a hockey player in 1909, Pulford took up as a referee in the NHA. He was in the running to be president of that league in 1916 before losing to Frank Robinson. He returned, after that, to officiating and ran the risks, which in February of 1917 included running into Quebec Bulldogs defenceman Dave Ritchie in the second period of a game at the Montreal Arena versus the Canadiens.

The Montreal Star reported the damage that Pulford incurred:

As Pulford’s head has to fall about six feet before it strikes the ice, it did so with a very hard bump, and in addition to that Ritchie’s knee was pressed so hard in his ribs that the Referee thought at least one of them was broken.

He continued his work, however, and upon examination by a doctor during the rest between the second and third periods it was found that there was nothing the matter with his ribs, except that one of them was bent a little, which though, according to the doctor, was very painful, would gradually right itself.

As he has met with similar accidents in his Rugby career, it is not likely that this will prevent him from refereeing any more.

True enough, in the longer term; in the short, a further post-game examination determined that Pulford had, in fact, at least one cracked rib, for which he was wrapped in plaster and forbidden to return to the ice until he was healed.

He was fit enough that same fall to join up a referee when a whole new loop called the National Hockey League appeared on the horizon. Actually, it was in a suite in Montreal’s Windsor Hotel that the NHL was born. That was in November of 1917, when most of the NHA’s owners agreed, deviously, to abandon their old league and start a new one expressly to rid themselves of one of their fellows, the irksome Eddie Livingstone. A month later, Pulford was on the ice to adjudicate one of the NHL’s two opening night games with which the league made its fresh start. His assignment on the night of Wednesday, December 19, 1917, was at Ottawa’s Laurier Avenue Arena, where the Canadiens beat the hometown Senators 7-4 on the strength of Joe Malone’s five goals. Pulford was kept busy calling infractions, most of them committed by Montreal’s ruthless defenceman Joe Hall, who incurred two minors along with a major for an overzealous bodycheck on Ottawa’s Georges Boucher.

The other game that night was in Montreal, where Tom Melville refereed the Wanderers’ 10-9 win over Toronto. The man who scored the first goal in that game for Montreal and thereby the very first in NHL history? Dave Ritchie.

Stars Of Stripes: Ottawa’s mighty 1905 Silver Seven team, who successfully held on to the Stanley Cup by fending off challenges from Dawson City and the Rat Portage Thistles. Back row, from left, they are Rat Westwick, trainer (coach) Mac McGilton, Billy Gilmour, and Frank McGee. Seated up in front are: Dave Finnie, Harvey Pulford, captain Alf Smith, and Art Moore.

 

goldie’s rush

/ puckstruck

From The Front: News of Goldie Prodger’s shrapnel wound reached Canada in October of 1918.

The goal came late, with four minutes left in the game.

With the visiting Rosebuds tied 1-1 with the hometown Montreal Canadiens, Portland winger Smokey Harris shot the puck, which Montreal goaltender Georges Vézina saved: that’s where things got started. Vézina cleared it to the corner, where Newsy Lalonde picked it up, the Canadiens centreman. He left it for a defenceman who then, well — Goldie Prodger skated through just about the entire Portland team, is what Goldie Prodger did.

It was a “rough journey,” the Montreal Gazette noted, but Prodger kept going. He beat Harris at centre ice, then barged into defenceman Del Irvine: “his weight toppled the Portland player over.” He evaded the second Portland defender, Moose Johnson, with some ease, and by then he only had the goaltender, Tom Murray, to hoodwink. He paused, to test Murray’s patience. “As the Portland goaltender came out to meet him,” the Gazette narrated, “Prodgers [sic] skated around him and lobbed the puck into the nets.”

And that was it: with Montreal leading 2-1, they fell back into defence to see out the decisive game of the Stanley Cup Finals, which they duly did on the penultimate day of March in 1916, to outlast the PCHL Rosebuds and take the series 3-2 at Montreal’s Westmount Arena.

It was, of course, Canadiens’ very first Stanley Cup championship, and 25-year-old Goldie Prodger, who was born on a Wednesday of today’s date in 1891, was the man who clinched it.

He was from London, Ontario, where he was christened George. Though his surname was often pluralized throughout his career (and continues to be, in many of the standard references, including at NHL.com), his birth registration and other vital documents confirm that it was, properly, Prodger.

Goldie? He owed that sobriquet, a press profile from 1912 helpfully explained, to “his sunny complexion.”

That was the same year Prodger won his first Cup, playing for the NHA Quebec Bulldogs, whose formidable line-up also featured Joe Malone, Joe Hall, and goaltender Paddy Moran.

In May of wartime 1916, Prodger flocked to his country’s colours, enlisting with the Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force. He was soon following Howard McNamara, his captain with the Canadiens, into the highly hockey-focussed 228th Battalion. Just how puck-minded was the 228th? Later that year, having recruited to the unit’s ranks some of hockey’s best talents, the 228th iced a team in the NHA alongside the Canadiens et al. (I’ve written about that whole fantastical finagle before, over here, if you’re interested.)

Prodger’s military career began with trip to the hospital: that August, probably while the battalion was in training at Camp Borden, north of Toronto, he broke an ankle playing baseball. That didn’t end up interfering with his skating: once hockey season got going in late December, he would play in all 12 of the 228th’s NHA games.

Along with many of his teammates, Prodger did eventually make it overseas, in 1917. The battalion was converted from an infantry to a railway construction unit; Prodger, for this part, was soon promoted corporal and then company sergeant-major. He took time to write home to remind friends just how vital hockey was, as the Ottawa Journal reported in a morale-boosting column:

Even if we are at war [Corporal Prodger rationalized] with an enemy that threatens our very existence, it is no reason why the great winter sport should be allowed to die. In fact, just such diversions are required at this time to keep the minds of those at home away from the horrors of war.

In 1918, as noted in the clipping from that October presented above, Prodger was added to the casualty list again, suffering a shrapnel wound in the back in (I think) France while attached to an Australian field artillery battery.

Battle Bulletin: Casualty report from Montreal’s Gazette in October of 1918.

He recovered, again. Following his CEF discharge in 1919, Prodger headed back to the ice, though not before some dramas played out, both medical and contractual. Another baseball injury befell him that fall, and this one got complicated when he came down with blood poisoning and had to have a finger amputated.

Meanwhile, in the fledgling NHL, Prodger’s rights were owned by the Quebec Hockey Club. He wanted to play in Toronto, and for a while it seemed as though he would sit out the season rather than report to Quebec. In December, Quebec traded him to his old team, the Canadiens, in exchange for Eddie Carpenter. But Prodger didn’t want to play there, either, so he waited until mid-January when Montreal’s George Kennedy worked a deal to send him the Toronto St, Patricks for Harry Cameron.

After finishing the season with the St. Pats, a trade took him to Hamilton the following season, and it was there with the Tigers that he played the rest of his NHL career, five seasons, through to 1925.

Goldie Prodger died in October of 1935 at the age of 44.

Habs Have It: Goldie Prodger and the rest of the 1915-16 Stanley Cup champions.

 

the human side of hockey!

/ puckstruck / 1 Comment

Teddy Graham was a busy man in the winter of 1933. At his day-job, as a frontline defenceman for the Chicago Black Hawks, he and Taffy Abel were expected to do their best preventative work in front of goaltender Charlie Gardiner, keeping opposing forwards at bay, with minimal relief — Chicago was usually dressing just four defenceman at this time.

Then, that January, Graham got a promotion if perhaps not a raise: when the Black Hawks offloaded their captain, the veteran 39-year-old defender Helge Bostrom, Graham, 28, was appointed in his stead.

Still, with things so busy at work, Graham still managed to make a detour in early February of ’33 after the Black Hawks played in Detroit, heading north for a quick visit to Owen Sound, Ontario, his hometown, where he spent his summers playing baseball with the Brooke Millionaires.

Oh, and Graham was writing a syndicated newspaper column, too — well, lending his name and insight, if maybe not actually typing out actual sentences. In a series that would start appearing on newspaper pages across the continent in early March, Graham shared wild and woolly tales from his career. “Written On Ice,” the Tribune in Great Falls, Montana, headed the column, while the Buffalo Evening News touted it as revealing “The Human Side of Hockey!”

As it turned out, being human, Graham would fall to injury later around the same time. Along with several key teammates, he would miss the end of the schedule. Contemporary accounts aren’t clear on what was ailing him, exactly, but let’s assume that it had something to do with the wrapping we’re seeing in the scene here, dated to February, with Graham under the care of Black Hawks trainer Eddie Froelich and the supervision of coach Tommy Gorman.

Chicago finished at the bottom of the NHL’s American Division that month, out of the playoffs. With several games remaining in the regular season, Chicago owner Major Frederic McLaughlin announced that Gorman was the only employee on his payroll whose job was safe. “From today on,” he told the papers, “I will sell or trade any member of the squad, or all of them if necessary, to make certain of a berth in the Stanley Cup series next year.”

“It is apparent that not a few of our players have outworn their welcomes here,” he continued. “New faces are needed, and we’ll get them.”

That was good-bye for Teddy Graham: in October, he was traded to the Montreal Maroons in exchange for Lionel Conacher. (Charlie Gardiner succeeded him as captain.)

McLaughlin, it should be noted, got his wish: by the end of the 1933-34 season, Tommy Gorman had not only steered Chicago into the playoffs, he contrived to win the Cup, Chicago’s first.

 

(Image: © Chicago Sun-Times Media. SDN-074245, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection, Chicago History Museum)

saving face

/ puckstruck

Crashed In The Crease: In the 1957 Stanley Cup final, Montreal goaltender Jacques Plante was felled in Boston by the Bruins’ Vic Stasiuk.

Jacques Plante played 398 games in the NHL over seven long bare-faced years before he donned his famous mask after a wicked shot from Andy Bathgate cut him on the Sunday night of November 1, 1959. Born in Notre-Dame-du-Mont-Carmel, Quebec, on a Thursday of today’s date in 1929, Montreal’s goaltending great had suffered head traumas before that, along with nearly every other goaltender who braved the ice in the NHL’s agonizing early decades. Masks would have made sense throughout that time, of course, but the prevailing wisdom among the hockey cognoscenti (including Plante’s coach, Toe Blake) was that masks interfered with a goaltender’s view of things, showed weakness, not worth the trouble.

A maskless Plante was felled, above, for instance, in Boston in a Stanley Cup final game in April of 1957, when Vic Stasiuk crashed into him, or clipped him with his stick, or shot the puck in his face (contemporary accounts vary). He recovered that night, and finished the game.

In November of 1954, Plante didn’t start the game he was supposed to, which was at the Forum, against the Chicago Black Hawks. The image below shows the aftermath of a nasty friendly-fire incident in the pre-game warm-up when teammate Bert Olmstead caught him with a high shot. “Plante went down like a log,” Baz O’Meara reported in the Montreal Star, “with a scream strangling in his throat. His outcries could be heard as high as the standing room section, before they were stilled by a surge of unconsciousness.”

Called in as Plante’s emergency replacement was Andre Binette, 20 years old, a practice goaltender for the Canadiens and the QHL Montreal Royals. In his one-and-only NHL game, Binette helped Montreal down the Black Hawks by a score of 7-4.

At Montreal’s Western Hospital, Plante was found to have a fractured right cheekbone. In his absence, Binette would cede the net to Claude Evans and Charlie Hodge. He was back in the Montreal net in a matter of weeks, unmasked, stopping 29 shots in his mid-December return to help his team beat Gump Worsley and the New York Rangers 5-1.

“Plante came back brilliantly, had to make some nomadic rushes out of the net to save goal,” O’Meara reported, “did so with the fancy flourishes which have been his hallmark all through his career. … Plante showed no ill effects from his recent accident, gave a distinguished display.”

Man Down: Canadiens trainer Hector Dubois checks in on Jacques Plante at Montreal’s Western Hospital in November of 1954. (Image: Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)

 

but the russians are trying

/ puckstruck

A birthday for Russian hockey today: happy 75th. It was on this date in 1946 that the USSR’s inaugural championship in what was then distinguished as Canadian hockey got underway.

Twelve teams took the ice that year: CDKA Moscow, Spartak Moscow, Dinamo Riga, VVS MVO Moscow, Sverdlovsk House of Officers, Leningrad House of Officers, Kaunas, Spartak Uzhgorod, Dynamo Tallinn, Dynamo Leningrad, Vodnik Arkhangelsk, along with the eventual champions, Dynamo Moscow. The IIHF has some handsome archival footage of the team’s triumph in its observance of the anniversary today.

Canadian notice of the upstart league/hockey revolution that winter was limited to a few brief, paternalistic, not-quite-accurate wire reports. One that Vancouver’s Province (among other papers) carried noted that Russia had spent previous winters playing at bandy. “Hitherto,” went that dispatch, “the Russians have played a form of ice hockey peculiar to themselves, using a ball instead of a puck and playing two periods instead of three as in the western game.” (Swedes and other Europeans had been bandying for some years, too, of course.)

The season went on without Canadian coverage, all the way to the end, in March of 1947. Ross Munro of the Canadian Press arrived in Moscow too late to catch any of the on-ice action in person. But that didn’t keep him from filing an end-of-season feature to report on what others had seen and scoffed at.

“The players, according to my informants,” Munro wrote, “wear curious uniforms featured [sic] by long woollen drawers which seem to be a combination of grandpa’s flannel underwear and track sweat pants. They complete the uniform by adding to this creation a type of quilted short-coat which is the usual dress of the poorer classes in Russia.”

“Instead of padded gloves,” he noted, “the players wear ordinary heavy workman’s mitts. At present the goalie is only lightly padded but padding and other refinements will be added as the Russians work out the details of the game.”

From what Munro had heard, “the game as played in Moscow is gentlemanly compared with its Canadian counterpart and there is little bodychecking. Sticks are carried high only by accident and the tripping seems entirely unplanned. Penalties are few.”

Munro reported that the championship final was “a fairly anaemic game.” For all his diligence, he managed in his second-hand reporting to get the result wrong: in his telling, CDKA (as the Red Army team that would become CSKA was then known) beat Dynamo, when in fact it was the other way around.

Globe and Mail columnist Jim Coleman had slightly better information — on the winner, at least:

The Moscow Dynamos — well-known in the soccer world since they whipped Arsenal — won the first Russian ice hockey championships, staged this winter. … One of their stars, Vsevolod Bobrov, was unable to play because he had undergone an operation on his quote “meniscus” unquote — undoubtedly it’s a Russian word for clavicle.

Winding up his dispatch, Ross Munro did take a glance at the horizon. Pondering on the future, he was generous — and prescient — enough:

Canadian and United States residents of Moscow who followed hockey in North America say that the Soviet teams gave a mighty long way to go before they get anywhere near Canadian standards. But the Russians are trying and they probably will be playing the game efficiently before they are through.

Beyond The Iron Curtain: Ottawa’s Journal reports on Soviet hockey developments in December of 1946.

hall monitor

/ puckstruck

Born in Humboldt, Saskatchewan, on a Saturday of this date in 1931, the great Glenn Hall celebrates his 88thbirthday today. For the first eight seasons of his NHL career, playing first in Detroit before a trade took him to Chicago, Hall never missed a start in goal, suiting up for 552 consecutive games (regular seasons and playoffs), or (if you’d prefer) 33,126 minutes and 55 seconds. He reached his limit in early November of 1962, at the age of 31, when he tweaked his back in a Tuesday practice, or twinged it, twisted or … anyway, it hurt.

Two days later he geared up all the same, took to his net as usual when the Black Hawks hosted the Boston Bruins. Ten minutes in, after a goal by Bruins’ centre Murray Oliver, Hall left his crease to consult with coach Rudy Pilous. He didn’t return. Standing by to replace him was 24-year-old Denis DeJordy, called up for just such a contingency from the AHL Buffalo Bisons. Deemed by many to be the best goaltender outside the NHL, DeJordy held the fort. After the Bruins and Hawks finished up tied 3-3, press reports variously described Hall’s injury as “a pinched nerve” and “strained ligaments.” Whichever it was, we do know, thanks to Chicago GM Tommy Ivan, pointedly pictured here, post-game, the exact location of Hall’s soreness. He missed three games in all, two of which Chicago won. Returning to action in New York on Saturday, November 17, 1962, Hall and his teammates beat Gump Worsley’s Rangers by a score of 4-3.

playing hurt: I’m getting back into that game if it kills me

/ puckstruck

Special Ed: Eddie Gerard in 1914, when he first joined the Ottawa Senators. (Image: Topley Studio / Library and Archives Canada / e003525294)

So the Boston Bruins’ 42-year-old captain Zdeno Chara is in tonight, leading his team into the fifth game of the Stanley Cup finals against the St. Louis Blues despite that jaw of his that a puck broke two nights ago and (as Ron MacLean reported just before puck-drop) “we believe to be wired shut.”

Chara got medical clearance to play this afternoon, we’re told, whereupon he himself made the decision to play. Much of the coverage through the day focussed on Chara, watching him at the Bruins’ optional skate, imaging his discomfort. Much of the punditry heading into the game toggled between expressions of amazement at Chara’s pain-threshold/courage and reminders that he is, after all, a hockey player.

Along with frontline dispatches from Boston came historical reviews of other ghastly injuries suffered by other stout NHLers who gamely played on. None of those reached back to the 1923 Stanley Cup, so maybe that’s our duty here. A comparable case? Maybe not exactly, but here it is nonetheless.

Eddie Gerard is the man in question, captain of the (original) Ottawa Senators as they won their third Stanley Cup in four years. Coached throughout those years by Pete Green, this is a team (it’s worth mentioning) that has been called one of the finest in NHL history. Just because that’s impossible to verify doesn’t make it untrue. In its 1923 edition, the team’s 10-man line-up included eight future Hall-of-Famers, including Frank Nighbor, King Clancy, Clint Benedict, and Cy Denneny. A ninth player, defenceman Lionel Hitchman probably should be in the Hall, which leaves another blueliner, poor Harry Helman, as the odd man out.

Gerard, for his part, was one of the original nine players to be chosen for the Hall’s inaugural class in 1945, joining the likes of Howie Morenz, Hobey Baker, and Georges Vézina in that auspicious cohort.

In 1923, aged 33, he was still a dominant defenceman in the league, which the Senators duly topped. By beating the Montreal Canadiens 3-2 on aggregate in a two-game playoff, Ottawa earned the right to represent the NHL in a three-team Stanley Cup tournament played in Vancouver. The Senators had to dispense with the Vancouver Maroons to make it to the finals, which they did, setting up a two-game sweep of the Edmonton Eskimos that won them the Cup.

It was in the final game against Vancouver, a 5-1 Ottawa win at the Denman Street Arena, that Gerard was hurt, Monday, March 26. He was rushing for goal, as Ottawa’s Journal had it, when he collided with Eskimos’ centre Corb Denneny, Cy’s brother. Gerrard ended up on the ice with his left shoulder dislocated and an injured knee. Helped off, he spent the third period on the bench with his arm in a sling, “shouting and coaching his players,” according to the eyewitness account of Ottawa manager Tommy Gorman, who was beside him, and would later write the game up for the front page of the Ottawa Evening Citizen.

“Twice he begged me to let him get back on the ice,” Gorman reported. “‘I can hold my arm up,’ he kept saying. ‘Let me on and they’ll never get in.’”

Gorman demurred; Gerard stayed put. The following day, the latter wrote, “the gallant Ottawa captain” lay in hotel room “smiling in the face of his pain and assuring his teammates that they’ll beat Edmonton without him.”

“There is,” Gorman concluded, “only one Eddie Gerard.”

A visit to a Vancouver hospital revealed that his injury wasn’t so singular: “Eddie suffered a double fracture,” the Journal noted, “and his shoulder ligaments are torn.” Gerard’s optimism was page-one news back home in the Citizen: he now said he expected to join his teammates when they took the ice Thursday night.

Gorman wasn’t so sure. By Wednesday, a compromise seems to have been reached. The shoulder was responding to treatment and Gerard would dress, though he would most likely stay on the bench. “If he should get into the game it will be for a few minutes at a time,” the Citizen’s correspondent wrote, “just to relieve George Boucher or Frank Clancy.” With defenceman Harry Helman ruled out entirely due to a cut on a foot and Lionel Hitchman (broken nose) uncertain, the Senators were looking at going into the game with (Gerard aside) a grand total of five skaters out in front of goaltender Clint Benedict.

Hitchman did play, in the end, scoring Ottawa’s first goal; Gerard remained for the entire game on the bench, even after yet another defenceman, George Boucher, hurt a foot. Despite a line-up that featuring the legendary likes of Duke Keats and Bullet Joe Simpson, the Eskimos (to the slightly impartial eye of the Citizen) “looked like an ordinary hockey team.” Cy Denneny decided it in Ottawa’s favour when he scored in overtime.

Ahead of the second game, played on Saturday, March 31, the word again that Gerard would be dressed, though it wasn’t clear how much he would play. George Boucher’s ankle was swollen to twice its usual size, but he too would be in the line-up. In event, it was Boucher who kept to the bench the whole game while Gerard made his return.

Ottawa’s victory was a narrow one: Punch Broadbent scored in the first period and they held on from there to claim the tenth Stanley Cup in franchise history.

Gerard’s part in the piece was duly recognized. As Citizen sports editor Ed Baker saw it, the captain’s mere presence on the ice was an “exhibition of courage rarely witnessed in any form of sport.”

“He was unable to raise his lift arm as high as his chin at any time since he was injured,” Baker wrote, “but knew the serious position the Senators were in and went into the game more for the moral effect it would have on his teammates than with any expectation of playing up to his usual form.”

He mainly kept to coaching his teammates, Baker noted, though there were a couple of occasions on which he couldn’t resist a rush into Edmonton territory. In the second period, he fell badly, had to be helped from the ice — “but pluckily returned to the fray.”

Tommy Gorman filed his view from the Ottawa bench:

Eddie Gerard actually played for the greater part of the game, notwithstanding his injuries. Twice he went down with a crash and three times with the  shoulder, and after each occasion he skated over to the bench groaning under the pain, but refusing to retire. “Pull that shoulder back,” he would shout to Trainer [Cozy] Dolan. “I’m getting back into that game if it kills me.”

With Hitchman fading in the third, Gerard insisted on relieving him. “It was a physical torture to skate and could not shoot or handle the stick,” Gorman attested, “yet he blocked with all his old-time effectiveness, and steadied his team at critical moments. The Ottawa captain gave the greatest exhibition of pluck and endurance ever seen in Vancouver.”

For Gerard and Gorman alike, 21-year-old King Clancy was the pick of Ottawa’s litter. Gorman:

In the last period Clancy outskated every other man on the ice. With Gerard unable to carry the puck, and Hitchman hardly able to move, Clancy bore the brunt. “Heavens!” Eddie Gerard once ejaculated through his pain-racked [sic] body, “look at Clancy playing the whole Edmonton team. He’s the greatest kid in the world.”

Clancy stood out in this game for another reason: in the second period, when Clint Benedict was called for slashing Joe Simpson, the Ottawa goaltender (as one did in those years) headed to the penalty bench to serve his sentence. “King Clancy then went into net,” Ed Baker wrote, “and that gave the youngster unprecedented distinction of having played every position on the line-up during the present tour. He had previously subbed in both defence positions, center, and on right and left wing.”

The Senators enjoyed their victory — and nursed their wounds. “Eddie Gerard and George Boucher lie in their rooms smarting under injuries,” Gorman wrote, “but smiling and happy.”

The team enjoyed their triumphant cross-country train trip home. Ed Baker was aboard. From Moose Jaw he sent word that Gerard and Boucher were “both doing nicely and picking up more as every mile is reeled off.” Gerard (a.k.a. The Duke of Rockcliffe) was “getting the injured shoulder back to a working basis again” while Boucher hobbled his way around with increasing dexterity.

When the team’s train arrived in Ottawa on the morning of Friday, April 6, it was met by a crowd of thousands. There was a parade, and there were speeches, a lunch at the Chateau Laurier. “Men,” declaimed Mayor Frank Plant, “we are glad and proud to welcome you back home after your splendid victory. Ottawa is proud of you.”

The Citizen took one more survey of the cost of victory:

Many of the players bore evidence of their honorable scars. Eddie Gerard shoulder was bothering him and George Boucher walked lame from the effect of the bad smash he got in the West. Others had pieces of skin missing, but all were cheerful and smiling.

The Senators spent the summer months recovering their health. For Eddie Gerard, though, there would be no return to NHL ice. Though shoulder was recovered in time for the start of the new campaign, he fell ill in October with throat and respiratory problems that would keep him out of the line-up for the entire 1923-24 season. He spent the year helping coach the team before finally retiring in 1924 to sign on to coach the expansion Montreal Maroons.

Stanley Cup Sens: Ottawa’s 1923 line-up, showing (back row, left to right) Owner Ted Dey, Clint Benedict, Frank Nighbor, Jack Darragh, King Clancy, manager Tommy Gorman, coach Pete Green. Front: Punch Broadbent, George Boucher, Eddie Gerard, Cy Denneny, and Harry Helman.

 

spinster

/ puckstruck

Winged Wheeler: Detroit Red Wings defenceman Bill Quackenbush was 24 in 1946 when he fractured his wrist in a game against the Montreal Canadiens. It was the same one he’d injured in 1942, causing him to miss most of his rookie season. This time he returned, bike-fit, in five weeks. Born on this date in Toronto in 1922 (a Thursday), Quackenbush played 14 NHL seasons in all, the last half of those with the Bruins in Boston, where he was often paired with Bob Armstrong. In 1948-49, when he took not a single penalty, Quackenbush became the first defenceman to win the Lady Byng Memorial Trophy for his troubles — which is to say, I guess, his lack of them.

leo bourgault: it irked him to just defend

/ puckstruck

Newspaper accounts of Leo Bourgault from his days as an NHL defenceman sometimes — often, even — spelled his name Bourgeault, and called the town he came from Spurgeon Falls. Bourgault, who was born on this day in 1903 in Sturgeon Falls, Ontario, near North Bay, died in 1978 at the age of 75.

He started his professional career with Newsy Lalonde’s Saskatoon Crescents in the old WHL in 1924-25 before leaping to the NHL, where he spent most of his eight-year career as a New York Ranger, he helping them win a Stanley Cup in 1928. He had stints, too, in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. As a Canadien, he was a close friend of Howie Morenz’s, and may well have been one of the Habs who wore a sweater numbered 99 during the 1934-35 season.

They said he had the heart of a forward. Harold Burr did, hockey correspondent for the old Brooklyn Daily Eagle. “He’s forever breaking loose from a tangle of players and streaking away on running runners,” he wrote in 1929. “It irks him to just defend.”

“The wide-spreading stocky little youth” is a string of epithets referring to Bourgault you might come cross, if you go searching: another is “stocky little blue-shirted meteor.” The damage he suffered as a hockey player included a 1929 lump on the face (courtesy of the Montreal Maroons) that Burr described as “the size of an Easter egg as vari-colored.” In 1927, a collision with Reg Noble of the Detroit Cougars broke his nose doubly, which is say two nose-bones fractured, and needed surgery.

In New York, he shared an apartment with goaltender John Ross Roach. Sometimes when he talked to a local reporter he said, “In the fall at home I go after moose — just another fellow and myself. We head in for a lumber camp in the heart of the wilderness, where they cut pulp wood, with just a blanket, paddle, and tent.”

“It’s a great way to keep in physical trim,” he told Burr — hunting, that is. The newspaperman lapped it up, filling a column with Bourgault’s off-season exploits “around his home in the far Canadian country,” where he enjoyed his “mother’s home cooking of juicy steaks, wild ducks, and big fat trout.”

Some other summers Bourgault spent at Jasper Park Lodge, in Alberta, where he had a job as manager of the transportation desk. I don’t know whether he did any hunting out west, but he was working out, certainly, and golfing. That’s him on the course here, negotiating a porcupine hazard in 1927. A year later, he met a black bear. Good to see that Bourgault was wearing his Rangers’ sweater.

 

mother’s say

/ puckstruck

Montreal captain Brian Gionta sideswiped Leafs’ goalie James Reimer, shook his head, sent his mask skittering. That was October 22, and Reimer hasn’t played since. A concussion? The Leafs haven’t said. Whiplash is a word they’ve volunteered for his non-lower body injury; concussion-like symptoms is something else they’ve disclosed. So a week ago, Toronto Star reporter Dave Feschuk phoned up James’ mum in Morweena, Manitoba, to see whether she had anything to add to the team’s diagnosis. “He looks clear,” Marlene Reimer said. “His eyes look fine.” But — well, she didn’t know. There were headaches. He seemed better and then he didn’t. As a mother, she worried. That’s all, pretty much — oh, James and his wife have a new puppy, a Havanese, called Optimus.

 The Leafs didn’t like it. Coach Ron Wilson was ready to — not the dog, the interview. The dog was fine. The interview was …. Well. Where to start? What you don’t do, according to Wilson, is a call up a man’s mother. That’s a line you just do not cross, because to do so is sneaky and underhanded and also (this from TV pundits like Nick Kypreos and Mike Keenan) not-journalism. Don Cherry said it was weaselly — unless that was Mike Milbury. Why so, exactly? Well, obviously as mentioned, because of the line: you don’t cross it.

A quick review of other notable motherly interventions from hockey’s archives:

• Boston centre Milt Schmidt’s mother wouldn’t let him play football when he was a boy because it was too rough;

• Andy Bathgate was going to quit hockey in 1953 when the New York Rangers sent him down to play in minor-league Vancouver, but his mother talked him out of it;

• when referee Red Storey did walk away in 1959 after NHL president Clarence Campbell criticized his handling of a playoff game, Mrs. B.L. Storey weighed in from her home in Barrie, Ontario: “He’s a mighty fine boy and I don’t care what Campbell or anyone says;”

• in 1957, Mrs. Alice Richard came clean on her eldest, little Maurice: as a boy he was a fierce competitor. “He even played hockey in the streets,” she said, “and always came back with torn pants.”