A Great Game (6 page)

After his school experience with the
College Times
—and also with a satirical magazine he called
The Grumbler
—Robertson became a journalist, first working for the
Globe
, then trying to found his own newspaper, the
Daily Telegraph
, which failed. He was twenty-eight years old when he found himself sent to the Northwest Territories to cover the Riel uprising. His reports were more graphic than the staid, impersonal accounts that were traditional in the
Globe
. It was this style he later brought to the
Telegram
, which he founded in 1876 and which soon became a pre-eminent journal in the city and the country. The
Telegram
was staunchly Orange—this zealous devotion to all causes Protestant perhaps having something to do with Riel's treatment of the young reporter. At his death he was said to have marched in fifty-three Twelfth of July Orange parades.
⁸

A man of prodigious energy, he was politician, publisher, philanthropist and hockey head all at the same time—and still it did not use up all his available time. His restlessness could be seen in his fingernails, which his second wife, Jessie, insisted he stop biting. Robertson's “crusty benevolence”
⁹
was by no means limited to hockey, where he was exceedingly generous with both his time and his money. He was Toronto's most renowned early historian and archivist, leaving his collection to the city's library system. Most significantly, his dedication to helping the young almost single-handedly created the Hospital for Sick Children, an organization to which he bequeathed a considerable endowment.

In 1890 he became grand master of the Grand Masonic Lodge of
Canada West and, in a single year, travelled 10,000 miles in order to pay visits to some 130 lodges. “Wincing most of the way,” biographer Ron Poulton wrote. “His lumbago was particularly bad the day he hired a boy on skates to haul him in a sleigh across Rice Lake to visit some lodge brothers in Keene.”
¹⁰

Although Robertson had his detractors at the time, admirers were much more numerous. In 1896, with Toronto in an uproar over a series of unpopular concessions to the Catholic Church and the French language, he succumbed to public pressure to run for Parliament in East Toronto. Robertson aligned himself loosely with the small but radical McCarthyite League, made up of followers of D'Alton McCarthy, a one-time Conservative cabinet minister who had broken with the party over French-language issues and reform of protective tariffs. Presenting himself as an “Independent Conservative,” the Orangeman was swept to office—very rare for a third-party candidate in that era. He would later become one of very few Canadians to turn down both a knighthood and a senatorship.

His leadership skills were also much admired by the Toronto hockey community. Robertson had already been involved in the sport for some time when he attended the OHA's annual meeting in 1898. Robertson's son, J. S. Robertson, better known as “Cully,” was a great sports fan and already on the OHA executive. Apparently impressed by its controversial defence of amateur principles the previous season, J.R. presented the association with a stunning new championship trophy, the John Ross Robertson Cup, and delivered “delightfully smart”
¹¹
remarks that brought the house down. History then records that at the next meeting, in 1899, he was by acclamation “persuaded to accept the position of President.”
¹²

Robertson's well-known opinions were happily embraced by his fellow members of the executive. As he succinctly put it at one annual meeting: “Hockey as a recreation is all right, but hockey as a business is all wrong.”
¹³

The new president, however, did bring a new dimension to amateur advocacy: Canadian nationalism. Put simply, according to Robertson's
followers, to advance professionalism was to undermine the country itself. To be clear, this perspective was based on a national identity then firmly defined within a much different context from today. To his contemporary OHA audiences, their president's message would have been clear: Canada, as an outpost of the traditions of the British Empire, had to stand on guard against the encroachment of the values of the American Republic.

The idea that there was a patriotic cause here was not as far-fetched as it may seem now. The bourgeois establishments of Canada and the United States saw the world quite differently. Much of this country's contemporary elite—particularly old-line Tories like Robertson—were the conscious heirs to a long evolution of British practices and traditions that, they believed, had created the greatest and most enlightened power in history: the British Empire. They saw U.S. society as inherently chaotic and their American counterparts as the offspring of rootless—and potentially dangerous—revolutionaries.

Robertson and his colleagues felt more imminently threatened by the United States than do the anti-Americans of today. Indeed, our concerns at their worst would be minor compared to the sovereignty worries of those years. Although Canadian–American relations had improved considerably over the decades, the two countries were not then bound in alliance. Robertson's cohorts had witnessed frequent periods of grave tension between the two countries. They might have known men who had lived and fought during the War of 1812; they certainly knew those who had lived through the American Civil War. “Muscular Christianity” was to them no mere theoretical concept. Developing young Canadian boys into tough men who could defend British North America against the possibility of U.S. invasion was a national imperative. In fact, Lord Stanley's patronage of hockey was motivated, in significant part, by precisely this line of thought.
¹⁴

The OHA leaders could also look across the Great Lakes—at states like Pennsylvania and later Michigan—and see the corruption of their country's beloved national winter sport by professionalism. There, hockey players had been more or less openly paid for some time—with hardly the slightest sense of outrage or offended public mores. This was not the under-the-table pay, or “shamateurism,” that was creeping
into Canada's senior leagues. It was the unbridled commercial excess of American culture, complete with all the violence and plebeian evils they believed it inflicted on athletics.

It mattered not that precisely the same amateur-versus-professional debates were being played out both in the United States and the United Kingdom. Indeed, in much of the United States—where the clean-playing amateur star Hobey Baker was the game's role model—the professional corruption of hockey was viewed as a Canadian phenomenon.
¹⁵
Nevertheless, according to Canada's amateur purists, this was a fight for Canada's national game and national soul.

Powerful institutions, especially those rooted in Anglo-Canadian culture, promoted strands of this thinking. One example could be found in the British schools, of which Robertson's alma mater, Upper Canada College, was the quintessential Canadian example. There were also the military and paramilitary organizations, such as police and fire departments, as well as the homegrown North-West Mounted Police.

Not surprisingly, the ultimate fortress of this philosophy became the Ontario Hockey Association under Robertson's leadership. In effect, Robertson took the moral and social theories of amateurism and wedded them to a political ideology. At the 1903 annual meeting, he provided perhaps as clear and concise a contemporary articulation of this ideology as one will find:

The Ontario Hockey Association is a patriotic organization, not in name exactly, but in nature most assuredly. A force we stand for is fair play in sport, and sport is one of the elements in the work of building up the character of a young nation . . . We have tried to live up to the ideals which are part of our birthright as Canadian sons of the greatest of countries, and as British citizens of the grandest of empires.
¹⁶

The fanaticism of Robertson's convictions has obscured his contribution to the sport. He had, in fact, been enthralled by hockey since he cobbled together a shinny team, the Simcoes, from among his boyhood friends.
As OHA president, he virtually doubled the size of an already large organization, making it the richest and by far the biggest sports body in the country. Under his guidance, the association pioneered and promoted numerous rule changes that grasped the subtlety of the game: the delayed penalty, the goal net, the intermediary role of the captain, flexible interpretations of the offside pass, dropping the puck for a faceoff instead of laying it between the two centres' stick blades. Other sporting entities envied and emulated the OHA's publications and its organizational methods.

However, Robertson's contributions came with a price: his breathtaking proclivity to control. This power was built not only through long hours of dedicated service, but also by constitutional manipulation and self-promotion bordering on self-mythologizing. He was hailed as the “father of pure amateur hockey in Ontario”
¹⁷
and, quite erroneously, as the “father of the association.”
¹⁸
Any person who had helped build up the OHA over the nine years before his presidency either became a follower or was simply swept away. Even his donation of the eponymous championship trophy had the side benefit of brushing aside the Cosby Cup, which had been named after the organization's real first president, Toronto investment manager Major A. Morgan Cosby.

The new president sought total, unconditional victory over his opponents, wherever they might be. For example, by 1902 professionalism was widely known to be practised in the Western Pennsylvania Hockey League. Thus, Robertson told the annual meeting that “every guilty player should be given to understand that the axe of the O.H.A. will fall upon his neck just as surely for an offence committed in Pittsburg [
sic
] as for an offence committed in Toronto.”
¹⁹
He gloated openly about his
power to ruin such athletes in lacrosse and football just as easily as he could in hockey.

In the name of amateur principles, Robertson would almost immediately begin tightening his personal hold over the OHA. At the annual meeting of 1900, a constitutional amendment allowed him to directly name two of the executive's ten other members, ostensibly to ensure better regional representation. The next year, all but the immediate past president were dropped from the governing body.

However, Robertson did have a vision. His speeches on amateur hockey were eloquent, powerful mixtures of morality, inclusiveness and unbridled nationalism. Take this passage from his address to the annual meeting of 1902: “You are with few exceptions, young Canadians. I am not exactly in the junior class, but, thank God, I also am a Canadian, and I am as young as any of you in my love for this country and this country's winter game.”
²⁰