A Great Game (12 page)

The story has been widely referenced—and widely believed—ever since. It fits to a tee the modern-day image of the arbitrary, controlling nature of the amateur fanatics who ran the OHA of the early 1900s.
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It must be pointed out, however, that prominent hockey author Eric Zweig has recently questioned the veracity of the tale.

According to Zweig, the then ninety-three-year-old Taylor—a two-time winner of the Stanley Cup and early member of the Hockey Hall of Fame—had a notoriously unreliable memory. The last living player of his era, the legend often confused the facts of his career with the myths that had grown up around it. Zweig points to a number of instances where Taylor's stories cannot be squared with contemporary newspaper reports. Even as a young man, Taylor had given conflicting accounts of his actual date of birth.
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Zweig goes on to raise some specific questions about the story. First, Hewitt had no formal connection to the Marlboro club, so why would he be recruiting for the Dukes? Second, is it not odd that, of some half-dozen clubs reported to be after Taylor in 1904, the Marlboros were not one of them?

These are good questions, but it is far from obvious that they exonerate the OHA secretary. For one thing, Hewitt's lack of official connection to the Marlies does not mean he had no interest in their welfare. He was one of Toronto's most important hockey organizers. As a league executive, he was also bitterly disappointed in the OHA's failure to win the Stanley Cup the previous spring. The more pertinent question is: How emotionally vested was Hewitt in the Marlboros' goal of becoming the association's first Cup champion?

As Zweig admits, Hewitt would have known that the defending Ontario champs had some gaps in the lineup that needed addressing if they were to challenge again for the national trophy. True, it would have been highly unethical for the league secretary to do some recruiting on his own, all the while keeping the matter out of the newspapers (including his own
Toronto Star
). Of course, that doesn't mean it did not happen. Hewitt was widely rumoured at the time to be willing to bend the rules to help the Marlboros. Furthermore, collusion between the OHA and key Toronto newspapers not only transpired, it was, in fact, notorious.

What is not disputed is that the OHA forbade Taylor to move from his Listowel juniors to the intermediate squad in Thessalon. It is clear
that other clubs were much closer to the boy's home. It is even clearer that the OHA had an interest in stopping players from shopping themselves around—a habit that smacked of professionalism. Whatever the real reason, the OHA apparently could not accommodate Taylor, and the twenty-year-old star sat out the entire 1904–05 season.

Hewitt passed away many years before Taylor and apparently never said anything on the matter. In his biography, published nearly twenty years before Taylor's, Hewitt glossed over the prodigy's departure from the OHA. He remembered only that Fred had played in the junior final of 1904 and that “soon after, the young ‘Cyclone' was pursued by professional clubs.”
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There are, of course, issues around memory and myth in Hewitt's book as well, his story about Ottawa salting the ice in the Marlboros' Stanley Cup challenge being the perfect illustration.

Regardless of what might have happened between Hewitt and Taylor, the result was far-reaching. Effectively banned by the OHA, the youthful prospect headed for Portage la Prairie of the quasi-pro Manitoba league the following season. There, he made the contacts that quickly led him down to the burgeoning pro hockey scene in the United States.

South of the border, Taylor would join the world rapidly building up around another OHA exile, Doc Gibson. Indeed, the season that Taylor left the OHA, 1904–1905, would be the one in which Gibson and a growing cast of hockey managers and players brought the International Hockey League into being. It united under one umbrella the clubs in Pittsburgh, Michigan's “copper country” and Sault Ste. Marie on both sides of the border. It was hockey's first unabashedly professional intercity league.

The Western Pennsylvania Hockey League had paid salaries before,
but usually at a modest, fixed rate of $10 to $20 per week, supplemented by an outside “position.” In contrast, the IHL recruited and negotiated with players individually—that is, with true professional athletes. Some salaries were said to be over four figures for the short season, comparing well to sports like baseball and lacrosse. Beginning with the Portage Lakers, who had beaten the Federal league champion Montreal Wanderers in a “World Series” in March 1904, the IHL was assembling some of the best teams in hockey.

It was here that Taylor and others like him would hone the skills and images that define the career pro athlete. At this, no one was better than young Fred. As adept at promotion off the ice as he was at performance on it, he was rapidly evolving into the man that Governor General Earl Grey would famously dub the “Cyclone,” a name that stuck so firmly that few people remember his Christian one.

And so, an OHA ban gave birth to “Cyclone Taylor,” the professional game's first colourful superstar, and he would prove to be a key to the building of the widespread fan base the sport required.

Back in the Canadian hockey world—at least outside Ontario—the pace of change was accelerating. The eastern hockey war was getting more intense and more complex. The Federal Amateur Hockey League grew stronger. The champion Wanderers had fought a tough but inconclusive Stanley Cup series against Ottawa in the spring of 1904. Now the Silver Seven were joining the wandering “Redbands” in the new circuit.

The Canadian Amateur Hockey League answered by enticing the Nationals to switch associations and by adding a new club from Westmount. The Federal League retaliated by substituting a rival Francophone club, the Montagnards, and placing a team in Brockville, Ontario. Eastern hockey had gone from five elite teams to eleven in just two years.

Competition to the CAHL was also coming from more distant corners. The Manitoba league was the base of a growing powerhouse, the Rat Portage Thistles, who had startled the hockey establishment in the 1905 playoffs by dispensing entirely with “lifting” in favour of greater
“combination.” In effect, instead of clearing the puck from their end by backhanding it high and pursuing it, the Thistles rushed from the defence and transitioned to offence through passing and puck control. They came within a hair of taking the Stanley Cup.

Cup competition was becoming truly national. As early as 1900, for instance, the first Maritime team, the Halifax Crescents, had played for the trophy. However, 1904–05 would feature the most memorable—and most disastrous—attempt ever at Lord Stanley's mug. Entrepreneur and adventurer Joe Boyle spent $10,000 and took three weeks to move the Dawson City Nuggets 4,000 miles from Yukon, only to lose to Ottawa by scores of 9–2 and 23–2. Frank McGee's fourteen-goal performance in the second Cup match will never be equalled.

The expanding range of Stanley Cup contenders, the cost of challenges and the increasing movement of players confirmed a growing certainty that financial inducements were involved. This was doubtlessly true in both Quebec and Manitoba. Yet the Montreal-based Canadian Amateur Athletic Union, tightly tied to the eastern leagues and their financial interests, had none of the OHA's zeal for investigation. Besides,
those leagues weren't just in the midst of their own player war, they were now also fighting the commercial pull of the new International circuit.

Whereas the Toronto-centric hockey realm was ideologically opposed to this professionalism, the Montreal-dominated region was pragmatically adapting. Robertson's OHA dismissed every departure of a young star to the United States with “good riddance.” Indeed, it had proactively exiled any athlete who also played lacrosse—and in the summer that was a fair number. Conversely, the eastern and other “amateur” leagues wanted those players to come back from the States. They bid accordingly. Thus, there was a growing transit of players between the International and the Canadian senior leagues—except for the hidebound OHA.

The Ontario Hockey Association was becoming increasingly vocal about the CAAU's growing tendency to “whitewash” such obvious violations of amateur standing. In the case of lacrosse, the national governing body was in essence allowing the sport to professionalize. As Robertson had told the annual meeting:

The Canadian Amateur Athletic Union,
whose headquarters are at Montreal
 . . . has so far retrograded from its natural and essential position that it has offered to declare as amateurs all the professionals in the country if they will only join some organization that will affiliate with the C.A.A.U.
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(emphasis added)

Nevertheless, the OHA was still prepared to permit games between its clubs and those of the supposedly amateur, but less pristine, Canadian leagues.

The OHA had to, if it wanted to win the Stanley Cup.

And there is no doubt that the Ontario Hockey Association, which rated itself the nation's best hockey organization, still wanted to win the Cup that had become so emblematic of the championship of the Dominion. As the 1904–05 season got under way, the OHA's greatest hope again rested with the Toronto Marlboros. As the year progressed, there were more questions about how far the association—Secretary Hewitt, in particular—was prepared to go to help them get it.

The Marlboros began the season with some big holes to fill. Tom Phillips had returned to Rat Portage and taken goaltender Eddie Giroux with him. Stalwart defender Doc Wright had retired. And veteran Frank McLaren was lost in the OHA's lacrosse decision.

There were, however, some new bright lights in the Dukes' lineup. Chuck Tyner was an all-round athlete and quality goalkeeper. McMaster University student Rolly Young was known as a talented stickhandler and tough defenceman (or sometimes rover). And at right wing was a new offensive star, Bruce Ridpath.