A Great Game (10 page)

The presence or absence of various executive members had an ongoing effect on this and other OHA disputes—most notably a simmering issue concerning Aeneas “Reddy” McMillan. McMillan was the star of the Belleville Red & Whites, a team steamrolling towards the intermediate championship. When Reddy was accused of a fast run around the association's residency rule, the case soon came before the executive, in which Belleville's member of Parliament, Gus Porter, was a member.

Porter and Nelson's on-again, off-again resignations, along with new and conflicting information, led to farcical consequences. The executive suspended McMillan, let him play again, suspended him a second time and then threw out the whole club for refusing to go along. The fact that the suspension resolution was moved by the executive member from Peterborough, whose team then became the district champion, did not help matters.

It was the second bitter blow to Belleville's championship aspirations. The year before, the OHA executive had intervened to overturn the club's apparent victory over the Toronto Marlboros in the playoffs. It had suddenly ruled forward Jack Marks ineligible because he had once played pro baseball—a fact the OHA had known but had never had problems with before.

It is interesting to note that, in both cases, new secretary Hewitt had strongly supported the resolutions, which strengthened the title hopes of the Marlboros. This would tie into growing rumours of Hewitt's favouritism towards that club, which his sports department often lauded. In the meantime, with Belleville now doubly enraged, Porter decided to take his case to court. In a lawsuit that dragged on for months, he eventually persuaded a local judge to block Peterborough from playing for the OHA championship.

Perhaps the most serious case, from a long-term perspective, originated with the earlier defection of Sault Ste. Marie. The complication of a pro team in Ontario became immensely worse when Toronto's Varsity
squad was invited to play in the Soo. The players accepted the invitation, took the trip north and faced off against both its Canadian and American professional teams.

Although the university itself was furious about the northern hockey excursion, it did not see things in quite the same light as the OHA. The fact was that the colleges recognized professionalism as playing for real money, not merely playing in an exhibition, as the Varsity team had against the two Soos. The CAAU likewise refused to apply full sanctions. Thus the OHA was left to expel the University of Toronto—effectively ending the OHA's governance of intercollegiate hockey in Ontario.

With amateurism reversals outside Ontario and professionalism crises inside the province, 1903–04 was a difficult season for Toronto's hockey establishment. It had begun with the death of the beloved Wellingtons. Yet there were to be some highlights that suggested all was far from lost. Chief among these new was the emergence of a new troop of amateur heroes: the Toronto Marlboros.

Like its Wellington counterpart, the Marlborough Athletic Club had long been active in Toronto team sports. It set up its hockey branch in 1899, initially joining the Toronto Lacrosse Hockey League. The club took the league's junior honours in 1900–01 and added the senior title the following year. The shorter spelling of the official team name took hold in those early seasons and the “Marlboros” were soon a household name in Toronto.

Recognized early as a skilled if light septet, the Marlboros formally applied for admission to the OHA intermediate and junior divisions in the fall of 1902. The manager of the team was Fred Waghorne, later to gain renown as the first referee credited with dropping the puck for faceoffs. That first year, the “Little Dukes”
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were finalists in the intermediate series while winning the junior circuit outright. They were ready to aim higher.

The new Marlboro seniors would join an OHA loop that included ten other teams, one being the Toronto St. Georges, a well-established rival that had been quick to pick up most of the available Wellingtons. On
paper, it seemed the St. Georges would reign supreme, but the Marlboros would prove far stronger than had been anticipated for a rookie senior outfit.

The new Queen City aggregation began the year in impressive fashion, hosting the powerful Montreal Wanderers for two games. The Marlboros tied one match against this squad of former Stanley Cup champs and lost the other by a single goal. They then went undefeated in the OHA season—a feat the Wellingtons had never accomplished. In the home-and-home total-goals final against the Perth Crescents, the Dukes won by an incredible margin of 28–9.

A big reason for the season's success was the addition of a tall, dark-haired young man from Rat Portage, Tom Phillips. The sheer speed and skill of the Marlboro rover caught everyone's eye immediately. The
News
summarized local opinion nicely: “Phillips is without doubt the best hockey player that has ever been seen on Toronto ice, and is a whole team in himself.”
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This should not really have been a surprise. Phillips had long been a top prospect in the Manitoba Association. He had also spent the previous season in Montreal, where, with the Wheelers, he had starred in their defence of the Stanley Cup against the Winnipeg Victorias. As well, he had been rumoured as a candidate for Bellingham's abandoned Toronto pro club. Interestingly, none of this rapid shifting around seems to have bothered the Toronto-centric OHA brass.

The official reason for Phillips's appearance with the Marlboros was the same one that had taken him to Montreal—a change in his college studies. That was good enough for the normally suspicious amateur barons of the Queen City. Toronto now believed it had a real shot at the Stanley Cup, something that few wished to see more than the
Star
's own Billy Hewitt. The gentlemen sportsmen of the OHA badly wanted a crack at the Ottawas, the team that had angrily defected from their ranks a decade before. It was widely believed the Silver Seven had taken the Cup more by brute force than through lightning skill. Secretary Hewitt personally filed the challenge before the playoffs had even concluded. Toronto was not going to wait till the next winter and repeat the problems with early-season conditioning that it believed had sunk the Wellingtons.

The Stanley Cup trustees accepted the challenge and the series was scheduled to be a best-of-three in the Dominion capital. The visitors arrived in Ottawa a day early, with about a hundred supporters from Toronto in tow, and skated through a light practice. Local Ottawa hockey scouts were generally impressed, especially after another peek at Phillips. He looked big, fast and dangerous. Nevertheless, informed odds still had the champion Silver Seven as two-to-one favourites.

The Marlboros arrived with a couple of spares from their own system. They hadn't acted on rumours they would pick up a couple of heavier players from other elite OHA clubs. The Ontario Association felt that such a move, while strictly permitted, would not be appropriate for a club of sporting gentlemen. According to Phillips, the confidence was warranted: “Don't you believe all you hear. There are just as good hockey players in Toronto as in the east, and I think that the Stanley Cup is about due to come here.”
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It looked that way for the first half of game one at the Aberdeen Pavilion on February 23, 1904, with the Marlboros outscoring the Ottawas 3–1. Then the roof fell in. The Silver Seven came back with five unanswered goals in the second segment to win 6–3. Future Hall of Famer “One-Eyed” Frank McGee
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had netted three of them before the 2,000 Ottawa fans. What caused the turnaround would become a source of furious accusations between the two cities.

Everyone seems to agree that the Marlboros outplayed the Silver Seven in the first frame. After that, the complexion of the game—and the coverage of the series—changed dramatically. According to the Toronto papers, Ottawa had turned it all around by resorting to nothing short of thuggery. Francis Nelson's
Globe
, for example, claimed the capital septet “endeavor [
sic
] to incapacitate their opponents, rather than to excel them in skill and speed.” The paper sniffed that “so long as the game was hockey the Marlboros were the leaders” and that the famed Silver Seven were not up to the skill level of “an O.H.A. intermediate team.”
¹⁸

Hewitt's
Star
offered the ready excuse that the Marlboros “were unaccustomed to the style of game that permits downright brutality, cross checking in the face and neck, tripping, hacking, slashing over the head and boarding an opponent with intent to do bodily harm.”
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Both Toronto journals were defensive and protective, listing a litany of injuries to the various Dukes while proudly noting their club's general disinclination to retaliate.

Ottawa observers told a far different story. The
Citizen
felt the Silver Seven had simply played poorly in the first half, but had got back on track in the second. It found the game rough on both sides and singled out Marlboro star Phillips for dirty play. The local newspaper also tried to claim there were no ill feelings at the end of the first match.
²⁰

There is more agreement on what occurred in game two on February 25. It was a thoroughly gentlemanly affair—and the Marlboros got creamed. McGee had five tallies in the 11–2 thrashing. The Ottawa papers emphasized the superior skill of the Silver Seven in every department. However, Toronto's take was again at odds. Queen City reporters suggested instead that their team was banged up, dispirited, even intimidated. Most agreed that only goalkeeper Eddie Giroux and Phillips seemed to have their hearts in it. Ottawa opinion was blunter, though,
calling Phillips “much too fast a man for the company in which he is traveling.” As for the rest of the Marlboro skaters, they “looked like a bunch of old women chasing a hen.”
²¹

The
Citizen
poured on the disdain: “The squealers from Squealville-on-the-Don raised an awful howl against the alleged brutality of the holders of Lord Stanley's silverware.” The paper even ripped the Toronto newspapers for claiming the outcome would have been different had the teams stuck to hockey: “But they got their answer good and hard last night.”
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There is strong reason to believe that neither side was telling the whole truth. For instance, a careful reading of the
Citizen
's game-one report makes clear that Marlboro players were hurt by hits on several different occasions. And dirty play by Ottawa in Cup games had been witnessed on more than one occasion.

However, if the Ottawas were really so vicious, would at least elite opinion in the capital not have expressed some dismay? There seems to be no evidence it did. Indeed, it is hard to believe that His Excellency Governor General Lord Minto would have agreed to drop the ceremonial puck for the series if the champions were the butchers the Toronto press made them out to be.

In reality, in spite of all the documented bangs and bruises of the Marlboro players, all but one played in the second game two nights later. Lal Earls replaced Edgar Winchester at left wing, but he did so to give the team more weight, not because of injury. It was also conceded that the most serious mishap by far—right winger Frank McLaren breaking his ribs in game two—was accidental.

There are other holes in the tale told by the client papers of the OHA's Toronto headquarters. Why, if Ottawa's play was so flagrantly illicit, did no one blame the referee for not calling it? The independent
Toronto News
hinted at a rather different version of events. Its initial postgame report conceded rough play, especially by Ottawa, but also acknowledged the champs' superior skill.
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