A Great Game (50 page)

One other major character to fade only slowly from public memory was the bane of the existence of every Toronto Professional: John Ross Robertson. In 1921, a school was built in his name in the north part of the city. Thereafter, each year in late spring, a delegation of
Telegram
editors and school children would visit the family plot and remember the great man. In 1947, the mythical “father of the OHA” became an early member of the Hockey Hall of Fame.

Yet the pilgrimages to the grave site stopped after 1942.
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Three decades later, in 1971, the
Tely
itself vanished, having been on the wrong side of too many business decisions, labour disputes and editorial choices. Today, only a few Toronto library archivists and Hospital for Sick Children administrators can recount something of Robertson's life and achievements.

As for his role in hockey, did Robertson actually change the course of the game? Might things today have been different without him? What if the pragmatists had won the Athletic War? Could, as they preferred, an element of the noncommercial ethic have been preserved at the highest
level of the national winter sport? Would top-level hockey have evolved on a more community-oriented, less purely commercial basis, perhaps even preserving the National Hockey League and the Stanley Cup as Canada's own?

Those who hold this view sometimes have the Canadian Football League and its Grey Cup in mind.
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The parallels seem to make sense. The inspiration for the Interprovincial Amateur Hockey Union was the Interprovincial Rugby Football Union—which eventually became the CFL's Eastern Division. Indeed, Earl Grey's mug had originally been conceived, not as a football award, but as the amateur hockey alternative to Lord Stanley's.

These simple similarities ignore some important differences. Unlike hockey, Canadian football is a unique national game, not an international sport. The last time American football seriously tried to enter the country—the Toronto Northmen of the World Football League—it was saved by good old-fashioned government protection, not by the structure of the Canadian sport. And it was ultimately the Americans themselves who, in 1995, thwarted the CFL's own continentalist ambitions.

In other words, while the Athletic War doubtlessly delayed the future, a skeptic must doubt whether it really altered its eventual outcome. After all, at the time, the forces behind amateurism were international in nature. The revived Olympic Games of Pierre de Coubertin gave the amateur purists a worldwide reach. Likewise, commercial forces, rooted in our natural American export market—and deeply imbedded in Western society generally—were already aggressively shaping the business side of hockey. Perhaps, truth be told, the pragmatic “mixers” never had a chance.

On the other side of the argument, it is easy in hindsight to see the Athletic War's victors as nothing more than excessively powerful, old white men fighting for the values of a dying culture that gave old white men excessive power. Yet we still do hear the echoes of these amateur advocates' cry against professional hockey. They told us that one played for either the love of the game or the money. The pros protested that one could do both. Living in the shadow of four NHL labour shutdowns in twenty years—including one lost season and a recent one nearly so—it is no wonder the old doubts remain.

Wage cycles have been a big part of the business story of hockey ever since the professional game was first established over a hundred years ago. On the one hand, there have been periods of intense competition between leagues and players. These have been marked by rapid salary escalation, pools of red ink for management and increasing franchise instability. On the other hand, there have been times of remarkable constancy—most notably the quarter century of the NHL's Original Six. In such eras, the dominance of the market by a tight cartel meant healthy profits for owners and ironclad contracts that reduced players to little more than serfs. The inability of successive collective bargaining agreements to establish equilibrium is only the latest episode in this long story of volatility. Interestingly, the amateur advocates of Robertson's time predicted all of this.

The most recent labour turmoil, some would say, has exposed millionaire players as motivated more by personal greed than by any devotion to the national game. The same critics point at the even wealthier owners, making profits off a ridiculously long season and a largely needless playoff system. Watching it all, they see the fans, living vicariously through the stars rather than playing the sport themselves. Those in the small communities breeding many of the players have long been squeezed out of the game's top echelon. For the rest, team loyalties have been sold as commodities, constant player movements rendering them little more than “cheering for laundry,” as Jerry Seinfeld once observed.

That is not the way everyone sees it, but I have no doubt that it is the perspective John Ross Robertson would take. We can even visualize him barging into a sports television studio today to comment on the state of the game and to address the critics of his actions. Yes, he would concede, he now sees he lost the war. All those furious battles were indeed futile assaults against the inevitable.

So, would John Ross Robertson do it all differently if he could? I think he would pause and answer, “A poor man is he who journeys through the mazes of a busy world with no purpose in view, no ambition to serve.”
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In other words, and without hesitation, he would do exactly the same.