A Great Game (8 page)

Needless to say, the Wellingtons could expect no less attention from their hometown. A crowd, smaller than expected due to “Arctic
weather” and a seven-hour train delay, greeted the Wellingtons at Union Station. With Mayor Oliver Howland in tow, President Robertson, who had transmitted laudatory telegrams to the boys throughout, led the delegation in “three cheers and a tiger for the plucky Wellingtons!”
²⁸
He and his executive then promptly took the crew for dinner.

A grand public reception awaited the team as the players arrived at Shea's Theatre later that evening. They were escorted to boxes decorated in the team's red and white for the purpose of viewing the show. However, time and again cheers broke out for the hometown heroes, all interest in the performance being utterly forgotten. It mattered not in the least that the Wellingtons had lost. The club, as one local paper observed, “by
their gallant and sportsmanlike conduct, both on and off the ice, attained to a degree of popularity far greater than was ever before.”
²⁹

The Wellingtons returned the accolades. They prominently published thanks to their supporters along with a detailed list of the patrons who had underwritten the eleven-day trip to Winnipeg. It was noted that the whole affair, after a $1,000 share of the gate, had almost broken even.

However, none of the generous hospitality or kind words directed towards the Torontonians by the Winnipeggers should suggest that this had been a tame affair. The national championship was on the line in what was regarded as a tough, manly sport. By the end of the two matches the Iron Dukes, to use the phraseology of the day, were “badly used up.”

The Victorias had sensed the relatively poor conditioning of the Wellingtons early in the Toronto season
³⁰
and had taken the body to them with a vengeance. One Toronto player had a dislocated shoulder. Another sported damage around the eye. Yet another hobbled on a crippled leg. One was so sick with injuries he had to leave Shea's early (and was later diagnosed with a mild case of scarlet fever). The Vics were not pristine either, one member having a badly damaged rib cage.

It should be noted that the beginnings of a less genteel era were also on display in Winnipeg. At halftime of game two, a large black Newfoundland dog suddenly appeared on the ice surface, pursued by a frantic owner. More serious was the crush when the auditorium gates had opened for the series, a stampede and critical injuries being only narrowly averted. And pure hooliganism occurred when youths who had been shut out climbed high in the building and smashed some upper windows to gain free admission. The times, indeed, were changing, although few then realized how quickly those changes would come.

Following the Stanley Cup challenge, the Wellingtons went on to win the Ontario senior series again in 1901–02 and an unprecedented fourth consecutive title the following year. They were known to be actively planning another run at the Cup when, at their annual banquet on November 30, 1903, the club abruptly announced it was disbanding. Too many veterans, it seems, would be unavailable—and irreplaceable—for the coming season.

Chummy Hill, with the Wellingtons since their inception, was just one player reported to have broken down upon the news of their demise.
In fact, Toronto's OHA establishment—including team patron John Ross Robertson—was stunned by the unexpected end of the venerable club. The OHA had laboured mightily to create the perfect order in hockey in the province and the Iron Dukes represented the epitome of its ideals.

In truth, the series between the Toronto Wellingtons and Winnipeg Victorias was the last gasp of the gentleman amateur in Stanley Cup play. Before the end of 1901–02, the Vics would lose the championship to the Montreal AAA. That team would, at the end of the next season, defect en masse to the newly formed Montreal Wanderers—a decidedly entrepreneurial act that certainly hinted at professionalism. The Cup itself would be taken by the Ottawa Silver Seven. They were a gang not merely suspected of accepting pay, but employing dirty play as part of a deliberate strategy of winning at all cost.

In other words, the demise of the Wellingtons would prove to be a relatively minor blow to hockey's old order. Much bigger challenges were about to confront the amateur world that John Ross Robertson had sought to entrench.

The Ascent of the Marlboros

We have met the enemy and he is us.

—P
OGO
(
COMIC-STRIP CHARACTER CREATED BY
W
ALT
K
ELLY
)
¹

The great irony of the efforts John Ross Robertson and his cohort undertook to preserve the amateur order is the degree to which those efforts would serve to undermine it. More than once, in their search for an enemy, the Ontario Hockey Association brain trust would create one. Their first such target was Jack Gibson. It all began with that $10 coin Gibson received from the mayor of Berlin (later Kitchener), Ontario, in 1898—a coin he never asked for and in fact had offered to return.

Gibson was a local boy and an accomplished athlete who excelled in virtually every sport he took up: lacrosse, baseball, rowing, swimming, cycling, soccer, curling, cricket, tennis and skating. He played his first organized hockey when he was sent to Pickering College, a private school in what was then a rural setting just east of Toronto. At fifteen, he was captain of the school team. At seventeen, he was a member of the Berlin intermediate team that was soon to be disgraced by the OHA's heavy-handed actions. Even though the players' suspensions were to be lifted at
the end of the season, the experience had a profound effect on the handsome young hockey star.
²

Gibson moved from his Ontario hometown to Detroit, where he played some non-OHA hockey and studied dentistry. He then settled in the copper-mining town of Houghton, on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where he set up a dental practice. There, in 1900, “Doc” Gibson would establish the Portage Lake Hockey Club, giving it Berlin's green and white colours. With the 200-pound Gibson as its star, and bolstered by other Canadians from Gibson's Detroit college team, Portage Lake soon emerged as a force. At one point, Houghton ran off fourteen straight victories, defeating all comers in the States and some reputable Canadian challengers as well.

Then, in the fall of 1903, Gibson made a momentous decision. He resolved to make his Houghton Portage Lakers hockey's first avowedly professional club. Setting out to build the strongest possible team in an area with few homegrown recruits, he determined that he would openly remunerate the players by dividing any gate receipts among them.

For the OHA zealots, the enemy had finally come into the open. However, this adversary was no longer some callow youngster suspected—rightly or wrongly—of breaking the finer interpretations of ancient dogma. Gibson's action was to rapidly transform paid hockey from a hidden and isolated exception to a systemic development across clubs and leagues. The kid with the $10 coin who had been driven into OHA exile was about to become the “father of professional hockey.”

The first effects of Gibson's move were felt in other parts of Michigan and neighbouring northern Ontario, specifically in Sault Ste. Marie. The
birth of a pro team in the Canadian “Soo” was perhaps inevitable. The city had built a large arena, incurring much debt in the process. There being no serious OHA competition in the area, the city's newly formed Algonquin Hockey Club turned to the only nearby rival: a competitor of Gibson's in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, that the OHA clearly considered professional. The Canadian-side Algonquins said they would rather remain amateur, but according to the rules of the day, they were branded as professional as soon as they skated out against the team from across the St. Marys River.

Semi-professionalism had already taken hold in another U.S. state, hundreds of miles south of Gibson's Michigan realm. In 1896, the Western Pennsylvania Hockey League had been founded in Pittsburgh.
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After a false start (the local arena burned down that December), the WPHL was relaunched in 1899, making its home in an enormous, modern arena called the Duquesne Gardens. In addition to its status as a former streetcar barn, what set the Gardens apart from other rinks was its still-novel artificial-ice plant. The league needed paying fans to cover its costs. However, just as had happened in Michigan, hockey in the Pittsburgh area saw its status as a spectator sport quickly outgrow its local talent pool, creating a market for paid players. As early as 1901–02, the Pittsburgh league had been drawing quality Canadian players with promises of modest dollars and side jobs. And in 1903, the WPHL champion Pittsburgh Bankers met, and were narrowly defeated by, the Portage Lakers for the first-ever “United States Hockey Championship.” John Ross Robertson's
Telegram
had run an exposé on the organization's professionalism, leading—not surprisingly—to an OHA ban against any Ontario boy who might play there.

These commercial pressures south of the border were already having repercussions in Canada. For example, the new Stanley Cup champions, the Ottawa Hockey Club, had seen their clandestine payroll creep from a nominal $100 to about $250 in the preceding years. Battles over anything with financial implications—league membership, scheduling dates, Cup challenges—were thus growing ever more serious in eastern hockey. The combination of the overt demands of hockey's popularity with the covert ones of its sham amateurism could not be contained by the sport's existing structures for much longer.