A Great Game (22 page)

There was, however, an even bigger complication on the horizon: the Olympics. The Summer Games of 1908 had originally been awarded to Rome, but would now be held in London. Relocation had been deemed necessary due to increased concern over volcanic eruptions.

Italy, it turned out, was not the only country where the Games were being threatened by explosion. Back in Canada, it was dawning on people that a team had to be named—but by whom, and including whom? All the country's top athletes had been banned by either the CAAU or the AAFC—or both. Technically, the responsibility for it all fell on the British Olympic Committee, which still had formal jurisdiction for the Dominion. Wanting nothing to do with this “colonial” problem, the British assigned the task to the governor general, Earl Grey, who in turn passed off the unholy mess to his secretary, Colonel John Hanbury-Williams, who then turned for help to prominent Ottawa publisher P. D. Ross. And Ross, of course, just happened to be a Stanley Cup trustee. As such, he had long been annoyed with the rigid CAAU and insisted that it had to work with the more flexible AAFC.

Throughout the winter, Hanbury-Williams struggled to put together an arrangement. Every time a deal seemed close, one side or the other would balk or face internal dissension. Petty and pompous public denunciations rang back and forth between the two groups of Edwardian gentlemen. The Union accused the AAFC's leaders of being “professionals.” The Federation replied that the CAAU men were “shamateurs.” During it all, Hanbury-Williams publicly articulated useful, if somewhat condescending, pearls of wisdom in an effort to encourage an agreement. In exasperation, he observed simply that “this is a big country, and we have to have big minds and big views to settle difficult points.”
⁴

However, while the great debate over amateurism dragged on, the hockey world had already moved on. As the 1907–08 season approached, professional hockey was no longer a curiosity—anywhere. It had become a reality in every part of the country. Nor were there any serious attempts
to hide this professionalism from view. It was a proud and open world of competition.

The country's elite hockey organization, the Eastern Canada Amateur Hockey Association, still paid lip service to the formalities of amateurism. The league, home to the Stanley Cup champion Montreal Wanderers, would meticulously publish lists of its amateur and admitted pro players. But except for the also-ran Montreal Victorias, the league was essentially professional.

All around the ECAHA were competitor leagues that practised professionalism pure and simple. Also based in eastern Ontario and Quebec, the Federal league was still crawling along. Farther west and north, there was the ascendant Upper Ottawa Valley circuit. Even farther west and north, the Temiskaming league paid out money—in wages and wagers—by the wheelbarrow.

Pro leagues had also set up shop in the farther-flung sections of the Dominion. Manitoba, long a hockey power in its own right, had a credible association that stretched from Brandon to Kenora. The New Ontario Hockey League pulled together the other towns in the northwestern portion of the province. In the former territories of Alberta and Saskatchewan, the Interprovincial league had been established. Efforts were being made to do the same in the Maritimes.

All of this made the job of the Stanley Cup trustees increasingly complicated. Any pro league in the country could file a challenge for the trophy. Even the Canadian Soo team of the U.S.-headquartered International league was eligible if it could take the title. In December, the trustees mandated a semifinal for the first time, requiring the champions of the Federal league, the Ottawa Victorias, to take on the Upper Ottawa Valley's Renfrew Creamery Kings before they got a shot at the Wanderers.

The new world of professional hockey was a chaotic, booming business. Matches between the country's two leading clubs, the Wanderers and the Ottawa Silver Seven, were drawing as many as 7,000 spectators. Tickets in Montreal were reportedly scalped for as much as $15. Even a country town like Pembroke could pull in two and a half thousand for a big game.

As profitable as hockey could be, however, this new industry lacked
any real structure. The only unifying element was the quest for the Stanley Cup, whose guardians had long maintained a hands-off policy on league governance. Periodic suggestions of a “national commission” between the various circuits did not lead to any serious discussions.

With no body to enforce agreements, “contract jumping” by players was widespread. Salaries escalated as teams openly raided each other for players, sometimes even within the same league. It was not uncommon for a quality performer to suit up with multiple teams in the same year, or to be employed in two different leagues at the same time. The phenomenon was reaching its logical extreme in Edmonton, where local management began buying star players from across the country as part of its plan to assemble a Cup contender.

Another downside of unregulated competition was the inability of pro leagues to enforce on-ice discipline. It should be noted that, contrary to what the amateur organizers claimed, violence in hockey was by no means a professional phenomenon. The papers of the day are full of on-ice assaults, all-out brawls and spectator bedlam in the unpaid ranks. However, when amateur leagues dealt with these, they could enforce their rulings throughout the amateur world.

When it came to violence in sports, Canadian hockey stood in intriguing contrast to American football in these early years. In the 1890s, the United States had moved to ban such dangerous plays as the flying wedge, a strategy taken from Napoleon that involved a “V” formation of players zeroing in on a single opponent. By 1905, the American press was so concerned with the rising death and injury tolls on the gridiron that universities across the country began banning the sport. It ultimately took the intervention of President Theodore Roosevelt to bring about the changes—such as the forward pass—that would deal with the issue.
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Hockey took no such actions at any level.
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Professional hockey in particular lacked the system-wide rules necessary to control violence. For example, when “Bad” Joe Hall and Harry Smith of the Winnipeg Maple Leafs were suspended by the Manitoba league for particularly brutal play, they promptly received offers of employment in other parts of the country. The league then backed off. Smith was the same one who, along with his brother Alf and Baldy Spittal, had been involved in a vicious stick-swinging attack during an Ottawa–Wanderer contest the previous season.

The Ottawa–Wanderer incident had underscored the impotence of even the ECAHA. With the league unable to act, Montreal Arena management had to call in the police, who decided to arrest the three capital city players. Indeed, intervention by the authorities that season culminated in a murder charge against Charles Masson of the Ottawa Vics. He was apprehended after the Federal league's leading scorer, Owen “Bud” McCourt, died as a result of a multiplayer altercation at Cornwall.

Nonetheless, the year's tragedy with the most lasting consequence actually occurred during the offseason. Before the 1907–08 campaign began, it was reported that Hod Stuart, widely acknowledged as the game's greatest player, had perished in a diving accident. To raise funds for his widow and children, the ECAHA assembled a team of its best players to take on the remaining Wanderers in an exhibition contest played on January 2, 1908, before 3,800 paying spectators in Montreal.

The professional all-star game had been born.

If John Ross Robertson seems less of a force in these times, there was more to it than the growth of professionalism in hockey. Now in his late sixties, he was beginning to consciously pattern himself after that other aging ruler, Edward VII. Like the king, Robertson increasingly spoke in favour of leisure and attempted to seek it himself.

“His concept of it was unique,” biographer Ron Poulton wrote. “He was really a compulsive worker, but Edwardian enough to pose with
ease as an absentee owner. The lid of an ever-ready steamer trunk was constantly being slammed; and word would filter through the lower echelons of the
Telegram
that he was prowling again through the hospitals, libraries and museums of Europe, or lolling the lobby of some favoured Southern hotel, adding to his collection of ‘darkie' jokes.”
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Robertson had so many other interests, it is a wonder he had any time at all for the game. He had other “causes” at which to aim his newspaper's slings and arrows, chief among them the suffragette movement. As a dedicated Edwardian, he believed absolutely in “the age of men,” not the vote of women.

Robertson also became fascinated with the automobile and loved to show off his latest acquisition while being driven about Toronto by his chauffeur, Frank Yewman. He was involved in horse racing and in charity fundraising (mostly for the Children's Hospital) and he travelled extensively to add to his growing collection of artefacts. His eccentricities were both charming—like the five dollars' worth of change he carried in his pocket each day for the panhandlers he would encounter on his way to the office—and curious. He had an insatiable appetite for funerals, going to as many as five in one week. Yewman liked to claim his boss held “the all-Canadian record” for attending such memorials “and he always cried quicker than anyone else.”
⁸

The old man was increasingly leaving the job of daily editing the
Telegram
to his trusted second, John “Black Jack” Robinson. Likewise, he had formally passed the mundane matters of the OHA to its future presidents. He did, however, continue to be the power behind the throne. With his position of past president set to expire at the upcoming OHA annual meeting, it was arranged for Robertson to be declared a “life member” of the executive. Along with his perennial colleagues, Secretary Hewitt and CAAU representative Nelson, and their Three White Czars subcommittee, John Ross could wield his power whenever it suited him, just like at the
Tely
.

It is not clear whether Robertson felt the need. Professionalism might be rampant, but it was also now effectively outside his Ontario Hockey Association. In fact, he and his followers were taking considerable satisfaction
from the on- and off-ice challenges facing the pro game. Similarly, where senior amateur hockey elsewhere might be in disarray, the OHA was still the leading league in Canada's largest province. In Toronto, Alex Miln's new artificial-ice arena at Mutual had not yet materialized, putting the International Hockey League franchise for his fledgling local pro club in doubt.

In truth, Toronto was the least of the IHL's concerns. Not only had its ambitious expansion plans failed to pan out, but early in November the outfit folded altogether. While the softening economy was blamed, the truth was that growing pro competition had been slowly undermining the league. In just three years, bidding for players from back home had driven up salaries by two-thirds. The growth of professionalism in Canada, initially fuelled by the IHL, would ultimately finish the IHL.