A Great Game (37 page)

Professional hockey increasingly looked like a wreckage yard. All that remained of pro hockey in western Canada was a fledgling new league in Saskatchewan and a declining club in Edmonton. In Ontario, there were just two associations—one in the southwest, the other in the northwest—and both were small groups of modest-sized towns. The commercial game was still in its infancy in the Maritimes, and Doc Gibson's pro ranks had vanished entirely from the United States. Even worse, the war with the CHA had left the new big league, the NHA, weighed down by unsustainable costs.

While the pro hockey war of 1909–10 was an eastern phenomenon, its effects were felt elsewhere. Indeed, the elevated level of instability had ramifications throughout Canada. In Ontario, for example, the money-losing OPHL was further squeezed by the high salaries offered during the CHA–NHA showdown. Also, amateur Toronto, the war's “western front,” was, ironically, the site of some minor skirmishes during the professional hostilities.

The truth was that, while the Toronto Professionals had died fairly quietly, they had not done so in complete silence. Some voices had decried—and resisted—the club's demise. As well, eastern pro hockey barons had begun looking at the prosperous, heavily populated Ontario capital as a potential marketplace.

Even within the Toronto Hockey Club itself, Miln's decision to embrace Simon-pure amateurism had not been uncontested. Foremost among the dissenters was Teddy Marriott, the second-in-command at both the Mutual Street Rink and its pro club. Marriott proposed to run the OPHL squad himself and was putting out feelers to the local veterans. Miln remained adamant that he would not allow a professional team in his building.

A more determined attempt to keep the club alive was made by former player Herb Birmingham and his brother Hilliard. The Birminghams were a powerful political family of well-connected provincial Conservative organizers. Herb and Hilliard were leading a players' consortium that aspired to move the team into the ECHA. The trouble was that they also lacked a rink to play in.

To this obstacle, the Birminghams had a rather unique solution. They proposed to put a large canvas tent over the open-air National Rink on Brock Avenue. This rink was located on a large baseball field that would provide plenty of space to build a permanent facility later. The short-term cost was reckoned at just $2,000.

The idea attracted howls of laughter from the local press. “Any
circus stunts to be done in the Eastern Pro. Hockey League will be done in Montreal and Ottawa, not in Toronto,”
⁹
wrote Billy Hewitt's
Star
. Nevertheless, the Eastern Association seemed ready to at least give them a listen.

To most observers' genuine surprise, the Birminghams got their franchise. It was not for the tent scheme, however, which was judged too shaky. Instead, on the condition they build a new indoor rink, the ECHA granted Toronto a franchise for 1910–11. When the ECHA evolved into the CHA, it extended the same terms. Of course, that possibility died with the league.

Seeing the CHA attempting to corner the prospective Toronto market, the NHA moved quickly to do the same thing. Its leaders arranged a meeting with Miln, but were also unable to dissuade him from his opposition to any new pro venture. The league then acted swiftly to find other partners.

These turned out to be pro baseball men E. J. “Eddie” McCafferty of Montreal and Lawrence “Lol” Solman of Toronto. McCafferty, who had connections to the Wanderers, was also the NHA's secretary-treasurer. Solman's Toronto Baseball and Amusement Company had myriad other sports and entertainment interests, including the Toronto Island ferry franchise and the Tecumseh Lacrosse Club.

The NHA offered this group the same terms as the CHA had to the Birminghams: a Toronto franchise in 1910–11, conditional on a new rink.

With the conclusion of the CHA–NHA war, talk of pro hockey in Toronto all but died for the rest of the season. In its place, shinny attention in the city focused on St. Michael's. Under the direction of Jimmy Murphy, St. Mike's would repeat as OHA champions and, this time, capture the Allan Cup.

With the amateurs having finally brought the Queen City a national
hockey crown, the Ontario capital now appeared utterly in their grip. It is hard to overstate the hold that John Ross Robertson's Ontario Hockey Association had taken over the city's hockey culture. Professional hockey was covered in the local papers, but usually with reminders from OHA leaders that the chaotic competition for the ringer-infested Stanley Cup had become a “joke.”
¹⁰

Even the once-independent
Toronto
News
had now become a disciple of Robertson's amateur puritanism—for example, castigating Bruce Ridpath when the former Toronto Pro idol made remarks suggesting that clandestine pay had long existed in the OHA.
¹¹

That same Ridpath had sold his Yonge Street sporting goods store in December 1909. He was moving to Ottawa permanently. For Toronto professional hockey, all hope seemed lost.

John Ross Robertson was almost too busy to savour his seemingly total victory. If the suffragette movement had been a distraction and an annoyance, there were now far larger issues to concern the publisher and his powerful newspaper. He was, after all, a man of principle dedicated to the propagation of a firmly developed worldview. Robertson might have united Toronto editorial opinion on the question of amateurism in sports, but there were greater battles to fight. And if they divided his sports allies, then divide them he would.

The most volatile split was between Joe Atkinson's (and Billy Hewitt's)
Star
and Robertson's
Telegram
over the question of Canada's war readiness. The
Star
could see no threat of war coming. Atkinson attacked the “jingoism” of the British press and declared that “this whole German scare is simply a nightmare.” Germany, the
Star
believed, was “a nation now wholely [
sic
] friendly.”

Robertson's
Telegram
, on the other hand, viewed the German naval buildup as a “danger to humanity, to liberty, to everything.” Both the
Star
and Frank Nelson's
Globe
argued that if Canada must build up its naval power, it must be the Dominion's own, as Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier preferred. Robertson aligned his paper with Opposition leader Robert Borden, saying Canada should build battleships for the Empire and its Royal Navy.
¹²

Yet, while they debated such weighty affairs, all the Toronto papers continued to pontificate on the evils of professional hockey. They would sometimes take the argument even further. It was not just that pro hockey should not exist; rather, as the Queen City had demonstrated, it was that it really
could not
exist.

Robertson's
Tely
was, predictably, the most vociferous, postulating that the commercial sport had a fatal logic that could never be overcome. The clubs engaged in professional hockey, it argued, were inexorably faced with a no-win choice: “to decide between paying big salaries, in which event the players would take all the gates, and then some, or paying small salaries and having no gates worth mentioning to pay them with.”
¹³

As the 1910–11 season approached, even some in the NHA must have wondered if this was indeed true. It had won the war with the CHA, but at a price it could not continue to afford to pay. Indeed, the preseason began with the loss of three of its seven previous clubs. The Montreal Shamrocks, in over their financial heads, took advantage of the AAUC's transition rules and returned to the amateur ranks. And the O'Briens, bathing in red ink as the backers of four of the league's teams, decided to unload some of their franchises.

First, the Renfrew group managed to transfer their Cobalt Silver Kings to Quebec City. This allowed the Bulldogs to re-enter top-level hockey. Then they had to deal with George Kennedy (né Kendall), the owner of Montreal's Club Athlétique Canadien. Kennedy was threatening to sue them for stealing his trademark when the NHA's Canadiens had been created.

From the outset, it had been the O'Briens' intention to secure local French-Canadian ownership for their Montreal club. In a sense, the arrival of Kennedy on the scene was a blessing. However, for reasons unknown, the franchise the O'Briens sold to Kennedy before the 1910–11
season was Haileybury's, not the Canadiens'. True, Kennedy got control of the name and signed most of the Montreal club's players, but the O'Briens retained legal ownership of the original Canadiens entity.
¹⁴
This was to have some implications later. For now, the Renfrew owners opted to keep the original Canadiens franchise dormant, putting all their money into another attempt at getting the Stanley Cup for their Millionaires.

When the dust had settled, the NHA was left with five operating teams. They were, however, saddled with the salary expectations created by the prior year's bidding war. In truth, this sort of thing had been a recurring problem since the days of the International league. Ideally, it had long been claimed, hockey would set up a national commission to enforce contracts, limit salaries, schedule playoffs and regulate player movements between leagues and clubs, as baseball had done in the United States. The rival pro hockey organizations had periodically discussed such an arrangement, but had never been able to nail anything down.