A Great Game (14 page)

Unfortunately, the public spectacles at the OHA's Toronto headquarters in 1905–06 were not compensated for by performances on local ice. An extended early-season thaw delayed the start of the campaign. It also kept the city's players dangerously out of condition. Very quickly, it became evident that area clubs were not going to have great seasons—especially the fan-favourite Marlboros.

The Marlboros had again lost some key men in the off-season. This time, however, no new crop of regulars stood ready to bridge the gaps. Despite the allegations in Barrie and elsewhere of a capital-city bias, no OHA rulings came to the club's rescue, either. The subcommittee's pre-emptive crackdown gave the Marlboros no breaks on amateur declarations or residency certificates. Jack Earls, son of club founder John Earls and brother of former captain Lal Earls, was denied permission to
play after returning from a work stint in Buffalo. Conversely, mainstay defenceman Pete Charlton was permitted to defect to Berlin.

There were other player losses as well. Cover point Harold Armstrong joined Smiths Falls in the Federal league. Studies took Chuck Tyner and Rolly Young out for much of the season. Bruce Ridpath, along with veterans Herb Birmingham and Edgar Winchester, anchored a decent forward unit, but the rest of the lineup was a shifting mess. After two almost perfect years, the Marlboros started losing games consistently—and sometimes badly.

It was becoming inevitable that Toronto would hear calls for an alternative to the OHA. While the
Telegram
and its allies bragged that even OHA intermediates could win the Stanley Cup, no one was buying it. Toronto was out of the running for the national championship because of the provincial association's edict. To top it all off, the amateur season concluded sourly, with the Argonauts losing the city's provincial title to Berlin—the first non-Toronto champion in seven years.

Then, on March 7, a bombshell hit the newsstands. It was a story out of the boomtown Temiskaming League—a circuit known for wild betting backed by frantic player recruiting. Bobby Rowe had headed up there, to Haileybury, when it was clear his OHA career was over. Now it seemed irrefutable that Marlboros idol Bruce Ridpath and teammates Rolly Young and Harry Burgoyne had appeared as Rowe's opponents in a game at New Liskeard.

The Haileybury–New Liskeard game had occurred back on February 23. The Marlboro trio had initially escaped detection by playing under assumed names. When the gate receipts proved insufficient to pay these ringers, local proprietors passed the hat and came up with $265. It was sham amateurism at its worst. It was also very clear that the Marlboro stars were going professional.

Nevertheless, while the Marlboro case appeared to be open and shut, the OHA suddenly chose to proceed with unusual caution. The executive met and decided it would hear more from the men themselves before acting. In the meantime, Ridpath and company kept dressing for the Dukes. Was this because the club's president and secretary, both fine Toronto gentlemen, had assured the subcommittee the boys could be cleared? Was the OHA a bit gun-shy because of the ongoing Rowe litigation? Was it simply in denial of the possibility that its chosen successor to the
thoroughbred Wellingtons could actually be a Trojan horse of professionalism?

The truth was that OHA leaders were considering the full implications of expelling the Marlboro stars. The
Telegram
warned that such a move would remove the final hurdle to the assembling of an “out-and-out professional organization”
²⁰
in Toronto. Worse, the
Globe
opined, it might suggest “the Marlboros are not now, and never were, on the level as an amateur organization.”
²¹

The panic among the executive ranks of the OHA literally spills off the pages. And their concerns were fully justified. For one, out-and-out professionalism was inching ever closer to reality in the Queen City. Bellingham's abortive efforts to form a “Toronto Hockey Club” back in 1903–04 were being repeated by others. In 1904–05, the risk had been the number of lacrosse outcasts around the city, although, in the end, the most talented went to the International League. This season, though, there was now more than just a player pool on which to build in Toronto. The OHA had provided the raison d'être for professionalism: to compete for the Stanley Cup.

In fact, by February 1906, a Toronto professional hockey club was taking shape in the city. Eight senior players were known to be practising
full-time. They included veteran hockey travellers Roy Brown (cover point), Bert Morrison (centre), Charlie Liffiton and Jack Marshall (wings), who were joined by locals Clarence Gorrie (goal), Hugh Lambe (point), Jack Carmichael (rover) and Frank McLaren (spare), the only man to play on both the Wellington and Marlboro teams that challenged for the Stanley Cup. It was a creditable lot.

Three different names were associated with these efforts to get a paid Queen City team together. One was local promoter W. A. Patterson, who was known to be trying to arrange games with International League teams. Another was Chaucer Elliott. A highly rated OHA referee who had gone to the IHL for the season, he had become a big advocate of the professional game in the Toronto press. In March, he managed to sign Walter Forrest of the Portage Lakers to the fledgling pros in the hopes they might get into the IHL the following season.

The most important of the trio was Alexander Miln, now manager of the Mutual Street Rink. Mutual was the home base of the pro club. Since none of its men played anywhere else in 1905–06, one can surmise that Miln was paying their retainer. He was also talking to the management of Pittsburgh's Duquesne Gardens about plans for artificial-ice rinks—and a corresponding league—for Toronto and the other large cities of northeastern North America.

Throughout February it was reported that games between the Toronto pros and IHL clubs were imminent. There were also notices of a coming match against a similar group of southwest Ontario pros being organized by Brown in Brantford. Nevertheless, the winter wound down without anything happening on the ice.

The OHA leaders may have thus felt that they could simply dodge the pro hockey bullet in Toronto. It seemed to make sense. If they delayed dealing with the Marlboro situation, the outfit at Mutual would scatter harmlessly to other regions of the hockey world. Soon, however, any thoughts that the OHA could easily work around the growth of professionalism were to be shattered.

On April 28, 1906, the country's largest sports club, the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association, voted to allow professionals to play with amateurs on its sports teams. The pressures on the MAAA had been most acute in lacrosse, where other major clubs were openly going
professional. Indeed, the country's leading summer league, the National Amateur Lacrosse Union, would soon vote to remove the word “Amateur” from its name. It was evident that Canada's hockey capital, Montreal, would be a base for unapologetic professionalism the following winter.

The overwhelming attitude of the Montreal men was that they were simply accepting reality. One vocal opponent had warned that the city would be visited by floods, earthquakes and other signs of God's wrath as punishment.
²²
But for the vast majority, the time had come to end the hypocrisy.

The prevailing view was very different in the Queen City. John Ross Robertson had been presented with the possibility of mixing professionals and amateurs in the same club, but he could abide it no more now than he could those $10 gold coins in Berlin years earlier. Indeed, at the 1904 annual meeting of the OHA, he had addressed this very subject. Quoting Lincoln on freedom and slavery, he declared that the organization “cannot honorably [
sic
] be half amateur and half professional.”
²³

Honest Abe and his men had chosen to take their nation to war to defend their principles. Faced with insurrection in Montreal, Robertson and the amateur sport leaders of Toronto were prepared to do no less.

The Toronto Hockey Club Is Born

Professional hockey in Toronto promises to flourish till the frost comes. Then like other flowers it will fade away and die.
¹

—
Toronto Telegram

As 1906 unfolded, John Ross Robertson's world must have felt increasingly under siege. Professionalism in hockey was everywhere. Even in Toronto, the capital of the Ontario Hockey Association, some pro hockey players had been openly practising with the intention of forming a team. Worse still, the Toronto Marlboros were maintaining on their roster men who, there could be no reasonable doubt, had played for pay. In three short years, this club, which was meant to succeed the Wellingtons as the epitome of the OHA's amateur principles, had instead become a symbol of the changing times.