A Great Game (28 page)

Referee Patrick then proceeded to blow the whistle at centre ice to resume play. For reasons that are unclear, the Redbands showed no sign of heeding the call to action. In frustration, the ref finally dropped the puck in front of Lalonde, the lonely and momentarily startled Toronto centre.

Hern and the other Wanderers had been chatting to admirers at the boards. Suddenly seized with their predicament, they fled towards their positions. But Newsy, now realizing what was happening, stepped back and drilled the puck high from centre ice, towards the empty net. With the outstretched arms of the goalie still yards away, the disc dropped in and the umpire's hand went up to signal a goal.

The sudden-death match to decide the Stanley Cup was now tied at four with less than a quarter of the game left to be played. The action became increasingly rough. Smaill was hurt and Marks went off to even up. Without Ridpath, however, the Torontos' attack was fading and the Wanderers were forcing the play to their end. Then, yet again, defencemen Corbeau and Young were penalized.

The Wanderers now outnumbered the Torontos five men to three—counting the goaltenders. Lalonde and Morrison valiantly ragged the puck for a couple of minutes. Finally, Johnson got control and shovelled it in for a 5–4 Redbands lead.

Only about twelve and a half minutes were left in the match. In due course, the penalized players returned, as did Smaill and Marks.
Morrison had a fight with Ross, but this time it was the Wanderers who began to fall into penalty trouble.

With this opportunity, the Torontos launched something of a counteroffensive. Morrison pressed towards the Montreal goal. Lalonde had a clear shot at a partly open net—but it went over the crossbar.

At last, with less than two minutes to go in the contest, the Wanderers broke out and carried the puck down to the Torontos' end. Smaill took a good, hard shot from the side. The rebound off Tyner landed in the pool in front of the challengers' net. The defence attempted to clear, but Stuart managed to poke it in.

It was all over, the champs winning 6–4. In the process, they had confirmed their reputation as great finishers. This had been the club's trademark ever since their first Stanley Cup win over the Ottawas two years earlier.

Finishing their third straight season in possession of the Cup, the Montreal Wanderers would be immortalized as one of early hockey's great dynasties. The Toronto Professionals, their incredible brush with eternity terminated by the final bell, would be a mere footnote in the mug's history.

But on that Saturday night, it could have gone either way.

The Garnet and Grey Hit Cracks in the Ice

Five or six hundred
[
Guelph
]
rooters were out
 . . .
vigorously and vehemently declaring that the Torontos were “dogs,” “fat lobsters,” “cattle,” “horses,” “wooden men,” and other things equally complimentary.
¹

—
Toronto News

Having come within a whisker of taking the Stanley Cup, the Toronto Professionals had emerged as the toast of the hockey world. They had managed to impress virtually all observers of the big game. Rabid Montreal followers admitted their Wanderers had just scraped through. And even John Ross Robertson's
Tely
heaped praise on the play of Alexander Miln's men, conceding, “it is a big thing for the Mutual street pros to have got within hailing distance of the cup.”
²

To a man, the players also received rave reviews. The defence, normally the weak point, had performed admirably after Miln brought in Jimmy Murphy to do some rearguard coaching. Bruce Ridpath, who had never been seen before on eastern ice, had stunned the men with his speed and skill and charmed the women with his clean-cut good looks. General opinion was that the Torontos had a bright future. “If they can be kept together [they] will be a strong factor in the fight for the Stanley
Cup next season,” predicted the
Montreal Star
.
³
The result had some side benefits for Toronto management, too. Miln and sidekick Teddy Marriott had taken many bets against the Wanderers doubling the score. They were coming home with their pockets full—reportedly to the tune of two and a half thousand dollars.

Yet the close, coarse and controversial sudden-death Stanley Cup match had concluded with none of the good cheer of the old amateur days. Neither club had much good to say about the other. Both claimed they would have won decisively on good ice. The Wanderers' president, William Jennings, dismissed the scare the champs had received. He offered instead a quip about the watery ice surface: “Our fellows are bad swimmers.”
⁴

Notwithstanding the plaudits and the profits, the Torontos were very bitter in defeat. They complained about every aspect of the refereeing. The eastern officials, they alleged, had failed to understand the Ontario offside rule and had called their plays back frequently. The challengers had also been on the long end of the penalties. The failure to impose one when Ridpath was injured and the allowing of a Wanderer player substitution—the big turning points of the match—had them particularly angry.

Some—though clearly not all—commentators thought the Torontos had a point. It did not help when judge of play Russell Bowie, a Montrealer, opined that “the better team won.”
⁵
Miln's brief postgame statement was as pointed and undiplomatic as his 1902 speech in Winnipeg had been expansive and generous:

We lost on account of the ice. If there had been less water on it, and the officials had been more impartial, there was no reason why we should not have beaten Wanderers. We had them going all the game. I think that they were lucky to win.
⁶

Maybe it was the foul mood, but the Toronto Professionals began a downward trend almost as soon as they left Montreal. As was the practice of the day, both teams headed out to finish the season with some exhibition matches. The Wanderers were off to New York, taking Bert Morrison and the Shamrocks with them. The Torontos had their own three-game excursion planned for Ontario, in the hopes of promoting their league—as well as earning some extra cash.

The Torontos' exhibition schedule was to start with the Dutchmen at the Berlin Auditorium on the following Friday night, March 20. The Berlin club likely needed the extra home revenue because Guelph had failed to show there for the final league game.

Right from the outset of the trip, pulling together a lineup was proving to be a challenge. Besides Morrison, the Torontos would also be missing Rolly Young, who was off doing his studies. Guelph's Harvey Corbeau was brought in at cover. Brantford's Jack Marks was retained to play right wing. Walter Mercer was moved to Morrison's position at rover.

With the teams playing for a $500 bet, the game was bound to be
intense. Before a crowd of 1,200 Berliners, the home side went up 5–0 before Toronto managed to score. With the half ending 6–1, the play got increasingly rough. No fewer than six players were down at various times. Only the ever-reliable Ridpath was a bright light for the Stanley Cup challengers in the decisive 8–4 loss, while Ezra Dumart and Nelson Gross starred for Berlin.

Matters quickly turned worse. The following night, the Toronto team was even more patched up as they prepared to meet Guelph. Inexplicably, somewhere on the train ride from Berlin, Chuck Tyner and Ridpath had apparently jumped off. This now left only Con Corbeau, Newsy Lalonde and Mercer from the regulars. Berlin goaltender Charlie Ellis and utility man Jim McGinnis were added to Marks to beef up the squad. Guelph also borrowed from Berlin—in the person of Goldie Cochrane—and also put just six men on the ice.

The incomplete, makeshift cast was only the tip of the iceberg. The game was characterized in terms ranging from “burlesque” and “farcical”
⁷
to just plain “weird.”
⁸
The
Globe
summarized it as “a game of shinny and fighting, with the spectators piling in occasionally.”
⁹
The local paper gave more expansive descriptions of the spectacle:

It was an exhibition of hockey tag, where one player got the puck and held it as long as he could, despite the interference of friend or foe . . . a free for all scrap . . . however, no one was hurt and, like the game, the whole matter ended in a laugh . . . Bert Booth [Guelph's goalie] helped to sustain the interest of the spectators by occasionally rushing.
¹⁰

If this was the Royals' attempt to relaunch themselves after the dismal season in Guelph, it certainly failed. Only a couple of hundred turned out. Toronto won 12–6—according to the few who were counting.

The last exhibition game—and the second against Berlin—was set for Monday night in the neighbouring town of Galt (now part of the city of Cambridge). There had been unhappiness with the OHA and talk of pro hockey in that burg for some time. By bringing in its two best clubs, there can be no doubt the OPHL was scouting the site for the next season.

Alas, this final chapter to the 1907–08 season was another step in the postseason descent. The contestants again presented the public with improvised
rosters falling a man short. This time, the Torontos borrowed Booth and Corbeau from Guelph to supplement their remaining core and Jack Marks. They won convincingly, 9–4. However, with the ice quickly disappearing, the game was nothing to write home about, let alone to waste much space in the sports pages over.

There was no denying that the road trip from Montreal to Galt had been a very odd anticlimax to a great season. The Toronto Professionals had assembled a top-notch, disciplined aggregation and stuck with it all the way through to a near miss at the Stanley Cup. Observers had universally christened them a future contender. Then the club had finished off with cobbled-together lineups and halfhearted efforts.

It would be a sign of things to come.