A Great Game (39 page)

The amateur zealots of the OHA and its Toronto papers had also fundamentally misjudged the recent developments in professional hockey. As commercial clubs and leagues came and vanished with increasing and
shocking rapidity, they saw what, in an amateur environment, would be only disorder and disunity. Yet, in the world of enterprise, what was occurring was the conquest of weaker participants and networks by competitors that were growing ever stronger. A solid group of essentially volunteer organizations surrounded the Allan Cup. However, out of the apparent chaos of Stanley Cup competition, far more powerful structures were emerging. As amateur leaders celebrated their segregated existence, pro hockey was quietly laying the groundwork for its longer-term supremacy in the sport.

The purchase of the old Caledonian properties by the 1911 consortium was one step in this progression. The group, headed by Toronto's Sir Henry Pellatt—the man who brought hydroelectricity to the city and was using his enormous wealth to build Casa Loma—also included Montreal interests. These Quebec owners were closely connected to the National Hockey Association.

The NHA intended to rip the old Mutual Street building down, construct a big new rink and place a franchise in Toronto. A modern artificial-ice arena would ensure a viable commercial season for the full length of Toronto's unreliable winters. The new rink would also serve a range of other public functions, including selling ice to the populace in the summer.

Important as it was, the planned arrival of big-time eastern pro hockey in Toronto in 1911–12 was just one in a series of historic developments in the sport that season. The fall of 1911 is the moment when, in retrospect, the era of the professional domination of hockey began to first take shape. And its most significant events that year took place on the West Coast.

That's where the Patricks—later to be christened “Hockey's Royal Family”—had just relocated.

Joe Patrick had been in the lumber business in Quebec and Ontario before moving his family to Nelson, British Columbia, in 1907. Joe's eldest son, Lester, had been born in Drummondville, Quebec, in 1883; younger brother Frank came along two years later in Ottawa. They would learn
the game in the East, but they would
own
the game in the West, both figuratively and literally. The Patricks' effect on the sport would be nothing short of profound.

The Patrick boys were already well known as superb hockey players. A third brother, Ted, was expected to do just as well, but had any such dreams cut short when he lost his right leg in a sledding accident.
²
Ted played anyway, anchoring his peg—at the age of nineteen, he switched to an artificial wooden leg—to the ice while pivoting. He was said by family members to have been good enough to play professional hockey but for his handicap.
³

Lester and Frank, who both played at McGill University, went on to become professionals. Lester famously performed for the Montreal Wanderers in their Stanley Cup days, including the March 1907 exhibition encounter at Mutual against Alex Miln's Professionals. More recently, both had suited up with Renfrew's Millionaires in 1909–10. Convinced that pro hockey had a bright future, they persuaded their father to invest the proceeds from the sale of the lucrative family enterprise in their idea for a new league.

The Patrick family's Pacific Coast Hockey Association would be a league unlike any other. What made the PCHA unique was that the professional sport had, to date, evolved largely through the conversion of the amateur game's top level. Conversely, the Pacific Coast league was a completely novel and wholly commercial organization. Its rise was an unmistakable sign that the pro game was creating its own structures and, in the process, fundamentally altering the nature of the sport.

The first big difference was the character of the PCHA entries. The association's Vancouver, Victoria and New Westminster squads would not be built around any pre-existing entities and would all be owned by the Patricks. In fact, Frank would play for, coach and manage the team in Vancouver, while Lester would do the same for the one in Victoria. The purists thus derided the PCHA as mere “syndicate hockey,” by which they meant that its component organizations had no membership, no history, no tradition, no real existence in the conventional sense. They were
teams
, not clubs—mere franchises of the syndicate that ran the league.

While the critics were entirely correct about hockey's heritage, it was
the Patricks who had grasped its future. Unlike its amateur forerunner, pro hockey was a commercial business, not a network of gentlemen's clubs. As a business, the profitability of the venture would ultimately depend upon the soundness of the enterprise as a whole. The league, not the club, had to be the ultimate focus if the undertaking were to succeed.

The National Hockey Association had stumbled upon the “syndicate hockey” concept when it established the Montreal Canadiens in 1909. The Canadiens were, in effect, the first purely “manufactured” big-league franchise in hockey history. They had been similarly denounced, only to quickly earn the highest loyalty of the French Canadian hockey fan. The PCHA's uniqueness, however, went beyond its complete syndicate nature.

The PCHA franchises would be located in what was a spectator, rather than a player, environment. B.C.'s Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island were the only parts of Canada where hockey had been essentially a foreign sport. It could be sustained in the West Coast climate only through artificial ice. The Patricks were therefore building the country's first such rinks: the 10,500-seat Denman Street Arena in Vancouver, then the largest in the country, and the 3,500-seat Willow Arena in Victoria. Pro hockey, it was being discovered, did not depend on player pools or indigenous institutions, but on modern facilities and the urban markets that could sustain them.

The new league was distinct in yet another way: the Patrick brothers' view that they could rewrite the rules of the sport to sell it as a commercial product. For years, they had brainstormed on how to open up the game and make it more exciting. Their proprietary league would be employed to test-market these theories.

The NHL official rule book contains some twenty-two entries that can be linked to Frank's innovations—the creation of the blue line, which divided the rink into three zones, being the most notable. The Patricks are credited with inventing the forward pass, the penalty shot, delayed calls, line changes, a playoff format and, finally, a rule allowing goaltenders to leave their feet to make a save.
⁴

Such innovations are as legendary as the Patrick name itself.

While most of the Patrick rule changes were still some years off, it was the NHA that introduced the seminal changes of 1911–12. Foremost was the announcement that the league was shifting to six-man hockey. The rover would be eliminated from the game.

The reason for the disappearance of the rover—until then the key man in the lineup—is still somewhat of a mystery. No explanation was ever made public, although it was alleged the NHA needed to cut rosters to deal with ongoing salary pressures. However, once the position was eliminated, the game flowed more quickly and the innovation gradually became more popular. Along with the rover, the positions of point and cover point withered away, with defencemen tending increasingly to “left” and “right” positions. The “T” formation inexorably gave way to the more familiar triangle configuration.

The NHA also introduced on-ice substitutions and, consequently, player numbers. Combined with the switch from two halves to three periods and two intermissions—unveiled the previous season—the pace of the action was stepped up, as performers rested in the dressing room or on the bench instead of on the ice. All this also had the effect of prolonging the careers of star veterans entering their thirties. They could now conceivably go the distance against twenty-somethings at the peak of their physical prowess.

All these changes were interrelated. No rover meant more room on the ice and a faster game. A faster game led to a need for rest and substitution, which produced bigger lineups and therefore numbers to identify the players. Of course, all this would seem to disprove the allegation that the rover was eliminated to reduce payroll.

Yet the NHA's most anticipated change for the fall of 1911 was its expected expansion to Toronto. Almost immediately after its consortium got control of the Mutual Street properties, the association sold a franchise to interests connected with the Toronto Lacrosse Club, including Percy Quinn and Frank Robinson. Percy, the brother of league president Emmett Quinn, was most noted in hockey circles as a referee. He had initially been named ref of the Wanderers–Torontos Stanley Cup match of 1908, although he was ultimately unavailable. He had also emerged as an executive member of the Interprovincial Amateur Hockey Union through his connection to the Toronto Athletics.

It is interesting to note that the franchise sold to Quinn and company—for the modest sum of $2,000—was the O'Briens' original
les Canadiens
. This meant, in effect, that two NHA teams now traced their roots to that franchise. One was the new Toronto club, its legal heir, while the other was evidently the team using the name Montreal Canadiens.

The Toronto Lacrosse Club's crosstown rival, the Tecumseh Lacrosse Club, was rather unhappy about the NHA's favouritism towards Quinn and his organization. It demanded a team of its own. The league hummed and hawed for a while, but ultimately had no choice in the matter. Lol Solman, the managing director of the new arena company, was also the proprietor of the Tecumsehs. He reminded the association he had been granted a franchise back in 1909. With Solman to be in control of Toronto's new arena, the NHA was obliged to live up to that promise.

The Tecumsehs were then managed by Charlie Querrie. Querrie had long been the lacrosse club's boss and star performer. Once a decent hockey player, he had desired to play professionally. He was, however, past his prime when the original Torontos came to town in late 1906.

What finally allowed the Tecumsehs to enter the NHA was the preseason decision by the O'Briens to sell their hometown Renfrew club, the last of their hockey holdings. They got $2,500 the second time round. Still, it was not enough to compensate for the Millionaires' two seasons of red ink with no Stanley Cup to show for them.

The death of Renfrew's Cup pursuit was yet another example of the failure to build a championship team out of exclusively star performers. It was also the historic end of small-town competition for the national professional championship. As the amateur advocates of the OHA had long claimed, small-market clubs were gradually being squeezed out by
the economics of the pro game. Those few, smaller pro leagues that continued to exist increasingly had the feel of a “farm system” to them.