A Great Game (44 page)

Though in fact Minnie rarely fought, he was regularly penalized. At his worst, he took dumb, dirty and retaliatory penalties—or undeserved ones imposed by old-fashioned refs who just wanted him off the ice. At his best, he checked ferociously and energetically, driving opposing players to distraction, lifting his teammates and notching the odd marker himself.

Behind it all—indeed, often barking instructions to the boys—was old Jack Marshall. At thirty-six, he tended to play back, but he still occasionally led the charge. As Cameron spent much of the season fighting a separated shoulder, Marshall recruited a couple of old hands to help him. One of these was Con Corbeau, the former Toronto Professional who was secured from the Ontarios just before the campaign started. The
other was George McNamara, sold for cash by the irrelevant Ontarios in midseason. The truth was that Toronto now had only one team that mattered—and they had the big white “T” on their blue sweaters.

These Toronto Blue Shirts had a great season—and a lucrative one—but it was no cakewalk. The Montreal Canadiens (with ex–Toronto Pros Newsy Lalonde and Donald Smith) and Ottawa Senators (with ex–Toronto Pro Skene Ronan) also had very good teams and were contenders most of the way. The defending champion Quebec Bulldogs (with ex–Toronto Pro Jack Marks) likewise seemed always close behind and threatening. The Blue Shirts were usually at the top, but rarely alone in that position.

That began to change on February 21. On that Saturday night, the Blue Shirts edged the Canadiens 3–2 at the Arena Gardens to assume sole possession of first place. The next Wednesday, they blew past the Ontarios by a count of 6–1. The small crowd was actually paying more attention to the out-of-town scoreboard, which showed the Senators, who had been fading in recent games, surprising the Canadiens 6–5 in overtime at the national capital.

The victory seemed to put the Blue Shirts over the top, adding to the city's growing excitement. Even Billy Hewitt's
Star
seemed to be shunting aside its amateur adherence. The appearance of the legendary amateur Princeton star Hobey Baker in Canada that month
⁷
could not compete with its focus on the Toronto pros. Almost from the beginning of the campaign, its coverage of the team it dubbed the “Blue Streaks” had been expanding. Now it was unreservedly jumping on the bandwagon, proclaiming, “Torontos Sure of Championship.”
⁸

After all, with a two-game lead in the NHA race, just two games left to play and a favourable remaining schedule, what could go wrong?

So confident was Toronto of the NHA championship and the resulting Stanley Cup title that talk inside and outside the dressing room turned to the coming Cup defence against the Victoria Aristocrats. Before the season, the National, Pacific and Maritime associations had agreed to set up the long-contemplated “hockey commission” to regulate player
rights, enforce contracts and schedule Stanley Cup games. Lester Patrick's Victoria team had recently wrapped up the PCHA championship. They were already planning the trip east, bringing their wives and their Vancouver rivals with them.

Nobody seemed much troubled when the Blue Shirts lost their next game in Quebec. They had played reasonably well on poor ice, and after all, the Bulldogs were the reigning champs. However, the Canadiens edged out the Wanderers in an overtime struggle at Montreal to move within a game of the leaders.

So, for the Torontos, it all came down to their home match against the Wanderers. In fact, the fifth-place Redbands were coming to Mutual Street with excessively low expectations. Long a Cup contender, their season had been ruined by multiple injuries to key players. All of these had returned, though, and the Montreal club was again playing in top form.

On March 4, the Wanderers did not just beat the Blue Shirts—by a score of 7–5—they completely outplayed their hosts. Truth be told, the Torontos stunk out the joint. With Holmes holding them in it, their play became increasingly feeble as the game progressed. Meanwhile the Canadiens, seeing the scores flash from the Queen City, made an extra push and overcame the Ontarios, 5–3. The race for the NHA regular-season crown had finished in a tie, with each of the leaders posting thirteen wins and seven losses.

The Torontos' supporters were furious about this turn of events. Particular anger was directed at Davidson, whose performance had progressively declined in the last half of the season. The
Star
was the bluntest: “Davidson was, to use the fans' own picturesque phraseology, ‘absolutely putrid.' ”
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The newspapers repeated widely circulated rumours about breaks from training and sobriety by Scotty and his young Blue Shirt teammates.

But there was an even more serious charge: that the Torontos had thrown the game.

The hypothesis was that the club wanted an extra gate from a home-and-home final with the Canadiens. The accusation was said to be pouring off the lips of the 4,000 streaming out of the Arena after the match.

Many in the media did question the conspiracy theory. Would the team really have thrown the game that would have clinched the NHA championship and the Stanley Cup just so that they could earn an extra gate? And why would anyone potentially squander an entire Stanley Cup series—the pending PCHA challenge—by deliberately putting the NHA title at risk? Nevertheless, the papers repeated the charge ad nauseam. As they did, the Blue Shirts' Queen City survival suddenly seemed endangered by the same ghosts that had driven the old Toronto Professionals out of Mutual Street in 1909.

The Blue Shirts organization had to be conscious of how dangerous this situation was. It would not take much to turn the fans back to pure amateur loyalty—particularly because the amateur Torontos were about to wrap up another senior provincial championship. For the second year running, Eddie Livingstone's TR&AA had taken the John Ross Robertson trophy and was musing about a challenge for the Allan Cup.

In reality, by backing themselves into the tiebreakers with the Canadiens, the Blue Shirts were taking a huge gamble. The “Flying Frenchmen” were definitely coming on. Montreal also promised to have Newsy Lalonde—who had missed a considerable chunk of the season with shoulder problems—back in their lineup for the series.

Four years since his departure from the Ontario provincial capital, Newsy remained the player the fans loved to hate. His every appearance at the Arena Gardens was followed by accounts of his poor play. The following editorial comment in the midst of a midseason game report was typical: “Lalonde was the slowest man on the ice . . . Any hustling young player has ‘Newsy' beaten nowadays before he starts; so much for a reputation.”
¹⁰

On the ice, Lalonde's performance was consistently described as sluggish. His frequent scoring was attributed to “loafing” ahead of the play. His competitive spirit was dismissed as nothing more than crudeness. Periodic episodes of violent confrontation—most notably with Quebec's “Bad Joe” Hall—were greeted with wagging fingers and shaking heads.

Lalonde's apparently inexplicable success in hockey was usually chalked up to his manoeuvrings off the ice. In an era of unrestrained commercial competition, he had proven to be the ultimate master at playing leagues and owners off each other for his services. Even the new hockey commission had not stopped him. By cross-negotiating his contract as a star lacrosse player, Newsy still managed to attract competing bids. In 1913–14, as in many seasons before and after, he was the highest-paid athlete in Canada.

Nonetheless, the opinion of Toronto fans was clear. Except for being the highest-paid, often highest-scoring performer in the business, Newsy Lalonde was not much of a hockey player. Other than being one of the fiercest, most effective leaders on the ice, he added little to his team.

The two-game, total-goals series to decide the NHA championship and the Stanley Cup did not begin well for the Blue Shirts. In Montreal for game one, the Torontos lost 2–0 on mushy, water-covered ice. They simply could not keep pace with the bigger Frenchmen under such conditions. Lalonde, playing with what was reported after the series as a partially separated shoulder, had not been much of a factor, but he did bring confidence to his club.

Returning to Toronto, the Blue Shirts thus became definite underdogs. Despite a healthy demand for tickets, betting was strongly against the home side on that fateful night of March 11, 1914. Almost a hundred fans had come up from Montreal. Indeed, it was widely suggested that it would take only one goal to bring the Queen City crowd behind the Canadiens.

Whether that was true or not, the hypothesis never got tested. On the cold, hard artificial ice, the Torontos came out flying. And the Canadiens made an age-old mistake: playing defensively and sitting on the 2–0 lead they had brought with them from Montreal. With no more than two French forwards ever moving up, the Blue Shirts' defence joined the rush. After two periods of relentless attack, they had the series tied at 2–2.

Finally, early in the third, Marshall confidently carried the puck up the ice and deep into the Montreal end. As the Canadiens' attention shifted to him, he faked a pass to Walker and then sailed it over to Davidson. The big forward blasted the rubber into the net, the 6,000 present exploding into bedlam with the series lead.

The Canadiens tried to turn up the heat on offence. However, trying to reverse the flow at this point only caused their game to collapse into chaos. By the time it was over, the Blue Shirts had whipped them 6–0 (for an aggregate score of 6–2), giving Toronto its first national professional hockey championship.

The
News
, reflecting the city's sense of triumph, proclaimed that “Torontos settled all argument last night as to their superiority.”
¹¹

The Stanley Cup, twenty-two years after it had first been presented, had finally come to the Queen City.

The Blue Shirts had been rehabilitated. Although it was Toronto's first Stanley Cup, the mug was not presented that night. It was still in
Quebec City, awaiting transportation. For now, the players had to be content to hoist the O'Brien Trophy, emblematic of the NHA championship. Besides, unless the Torontos dealt successfully with the upcoming challenge from Victoria, they would not be champions for very long.