A Great Game (29 page)

For now, it was but a small example of the growing turmoil within the professional sporting bodies that had risen up in rebellion against the rigid order of amateur athletics. And none was facing greater challenges than the organization that advocated the coexistence of amateur and professional athletes: the Amateur Athletic Federation of Canada. It was gradually but inexorably losing its civil war with the ideologues of the Canadian Amateur Athletic Union. Events between the hockey seasons of 1908 would seal its fate.

Colonel John Hanbury-Williams, secretary to Governor General Grey, had finally, after several false starts, secured his Olympic compromise. The Montreal-based Federation and the Toronto-based Union had been arm-twisted into an uneasy agreement on the structure of a Canadian Olympic Committee. In essence, the two feuding amateur bodies agreed to waive their various rules and injunctions against each other's athletes for the purposes of the London Summer Games only.

A temporary truce had thus been reached in the Athletic War. There would be a Canadian team at the Olympics after all. There was no sense, when the Canadians set sail for Britain, that the pact was soon to blow up in spectacular fashion.

The source of the confrontation lay in the alliance between the AAFC and the American Amateur Athletic Union. The U.S. body had severed its links to the CAAU over a number of issues, including that of Tom
Longboat. American sports authorities were convinced that the stellar Onondaga runner was a professional. In their eyes, he was therefore ineligible for the Olympic marathon, which he was also the clear favourite to win following his remarkable performance the year before in Boston. The split between the American and Canadian unions had given the Federation the advantage in any cross-border athletic endeavour.

Yet the Federation badly overplayed its hand. Egged on by its Yankee ally, the Montreal-based organization decided to support a U.S. protest against Longboat's entry in the Olympic marathon just ten days before the event was to take place. The CAAU and the COC publicly joined in support of Longboat. The challenge was ultimately rejected, but Canadian unity had been shattered before an international audience.

Longboat ran, and indeed, he held the early lead as the runners set out from Windsor Castle. However, he began to struggle in the middle third of the race and, near the twenty-mile mark, collapsed and was unable to finish. The race was marred by controversy. In extremely hot conditions, Italy's Dorando Pietri came first into the Great Stadium but
fell several times and, seemingly disoriented, began moving in the wrong direction. He was set right by the intervention of British officials and was all but carried across the finish line. The Americans protested, and U.S. runner Johnny Hayes was ultimately awarded the gold. As for Longboat, the theories were rampant: heat exhaustion, drugs—even that he had been drunk.
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Back in Canada, however, the public was outraged. The actions of the AAFC in joining with the Americans to try to block Longboat were widely seen as dishonourable and disloyal. In truth, it was hard to view them any other way.

Ironically, within a few short months, Longboat announced his intention to go openly professional after all. But it did not matter—the Federation's support, even in its home centre of Montreal, had been shattered.

The reality was that the Toronto-centred Union had won more than just the war of public opinion. It had aggressively and massively outorganized the Federation over the previous two years. By its 1908 annual fall meeting, the CAAU had grown from just thirty-six clubs to more than 900, with 60,000 members and provincial branches in every part of the country. It had also adopted a more flexible approach, sometimes offering readmission to those bodies that had dabbled in professionalism.

Conversely, the Federation seemed convinced of its superiority simply by virtue of being based in Montreal. With only token efforts at national recruitment, it remained limited to that city's environs in Quebec and eastern Ontario. Equally important, the AAFC had also failed to advance its core agenda. While professional sport was more and more in the open, professionals and amateurs were mixing less and less. In an era when many athletes played more than one sport competitively, the Union was able to effectively threaten cross-sport bans on pro participants and organizations. Thus, players, clubs and leagues going professional tended to do so without qualification—and outside the Federation—further lessening the Montreal organization's sway.

Nowhere was the division between professionals and amateurs as increasingly stark as in hockey. In the lead-up to the 1908–09 season, the country's leading league finally went fully and officially professional. Following the example of the National Lacrosse Union three years before, the organization dispensed with the word “Amateur” to become simply the Eastern Canada Hockey Association.

Coincident with the rechristening of the ECHA was the departure of two of its historic clubs, Montreal's Victorias and Wheelers. The defection of the latter was a sure sign that the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association—the backbone of the Federation—was preparing to capitulate in the Athletic War. Almost immediately, the two teams would help
form a new, major league of amateur hockey, the Interprovincial Amateur Hockey Union. It was clearly intended to parallel the CAAU's “Big Four” rugby football league. The two Montreal clubs would be joined by two from Ontario: the Ottawa Cliffsides and the Toronto Athletics. The four teams would be a high-calibre, purely amateur grouping. Professional hockey had no equivalent cross-regional circuit.

Indeed, amateur hockey, with a much more extensive infrastructure in place than the pro game, was regrouping across the country. In Manitoba, the Winnipeg Victorias were leading the re-establishment of a provincial amateur league. The CAAU's provincial wings were likewise linking to amateur hockey associations in their respective jurisdictions. Of course, John Ross Robertson's Ontario Hockey Association, despite the growth of pro hockey in the province, remained the country's largest and most deeply organized hockey body.

In other words, the advocates of amateurism were living by the apparent sports (and life) dictum of Robertson: “If you can't beat 'em, don't join 'em.” Unable to stop professional hockey, they were undertaking a second-best alternative—forming their own, parallel structures. But the most important long-term move for the amateur game that year was made by Sir Hugh Montagu Allan, not by the OHA boss.

Soon after the 1908–09 season began, the honorary president of the MAAA announced the presentation of a new national challenge trophy for Canada's winter sport. It had been at first rumoured that the mug would be donated by the governor general. In the end, however, it was to be the Allan Cup, not the Grey Cup, that would serve amateur hockey. It would quickly galvanize coast-to-coast competition just as the Stanley Cup had done for the pros.

Meanwhile, the problems of professional hockey showed no sign of
abating. In reality, the pro scene had been built up far too quickly for its foundations to have been well laid. Its rapid growth in the past couple of seasons had clearly been an overexpansion.

Players' salaries were rising faster than revenue streams—far faster. Managers pleaded for the need to control salaries at the same time as they agreed to bigger contracts. And even as they raised ticket prices, they were literally bleeding money. In short, it was the same woeful owners' tale, in microcosm, that hockey fans would be hearing a century later.

Not only was the Eastern Canada Hockey Association shrinking, but so were the circuits around it. The Renfrew Creamery Kings joined the struggling Federal league after its Upper Ottawa Valley group returned to the amateur ranks. The Temiskaming league had lost Latchford the previous year and was now just an isolated three-town association.

In Manitoba, the professional organization—one of the country's most important—completely imploded. The league had lost two of its five teams to financial problems the previous season, including the once-mighty Kenora Thistles. Shortly after 1908–09 began, its three teams became two. By midseason, only the Winnipeg Shamrocks remained.

The Alberta-Saskatchewan association had also become a one-team league. In December, its Edmonton club finally got its first shot at the Stanley Cup. A team loaded with stars—Tom Phillips, Lester Patrick, Didier Pitre, Fred Whitcroft—went down to the defending champion Montreal Wanderers. This would not be the last time an all-star aggregation would fail to defeat a balanced, quality team. In the process, however, the outcry against the hiring of ringers and against players jumping contracts would reach new heights.

Yet the salary wars and shrinking ranks of the commercial game seemed to be of little concern to the Ontario Professional Hockey League. At the November 13 annual meeting, held at Toronto's King Edward Hotel, the league adopted a salary cap of $25 per player per week. Of course, this was a limit that no one intended to honour. More importantly, the organization decided to expand to six teams, the two newcomers being Galt and St. Catharines.

The OPHL had been eyeing Galt since its inception. Alex Miln and Buck Irving had visited the industrial town the previous fall, trying to place a franchise, against a backdrop of continuing local fallout over the charges Irving had levelled against the OHA in January 1907.

During the 1907–08, season the relationship between Galt and the OHA, which had long been tenuous, had soured completely. The local paper charged that “the frothings” of John Ross Robertson and his underlings had led to “a successful professional league that is tearing the vitals out of the O.H.A.”
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Such a ripe audience for the OPHL explains why Toronto and Berlin had held their postseason exhibition in the town known as Little Manchester.

Interestingly, the Galt franchise was eventually granted to none other than Buck Irving himself. This gave Irving a role in two of the league's six clubs. While the Guelph team was officially taken over by local former pro baseball player Jimmy Cockman, Buck's father, Thomas Irving, kept the franchise in the family orbit through his ownership of the Royal City Rink. Nonetheless, the focus of the younger Irving's escapades shifted to his new team.