A Great Game (3 page)

Toronto's status as the second city of hockey is embedded in this period of history—the period during which the modern sport first developed. Kingston, Halifax (or, more precisely, Windsor, Nova Scotia) and many other Canadian sites have staked claims as the birthplace of hockey. In fact, stick-and-ball games on ice can be traced back centuries to different parts of northern Europe. Field hockey's ancestors are even older. Aboriginal Canadians probably had similar rudimentary pastimes. There is little doubt, however, that ice hockey as an organized endeavour traces its evolution from Montreal, then the only centre truly capable of defining a new national sport.

Montreal was the location of ice hockey's first formal game (1875), its first published rules (1877), its first official club (1877), its first major tournament (1883), its first intercity league (1886) and its first national champion (1893).
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That occurred when the reigning governor general, Lord Frederick Stanley of Preston, presented his famous Cup, and a five-team league—three of which were from Montreal—settled on its winner.
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For much of this time, hockey as an organized sport had been marginal and largely unknown in Toronto.

Hockey's slower emergence in the Ontario capital was not an accident
of history. While there are early accounts of boys playing shinny on Toronto's frozen harbour and ponds, the city had natural disadvantages. Its winters are significantly milder than Montreal's and given to much more frequent thaws. This was a serious impediment to the development of the sport before the arrival of artificial ice.

Yet Toronto, as an important city in its own right, had a vibrant sporting life. The local papers of the era are replete with articles on winter activities of all kinds. There was skating, snowshoeing, tobogganing, ice yachting, boxing, fencing, pedestrianism (walking races), indoor baseball, billiards, shooting, checkers, card games, dog shows and, most important of all, curling. Yet, until well into the 1880s, little mention is made of hockey in the local newspapers of the day. One then finds only the odd brief report of some contest before a large gathering in Montreal.

As the decade of the 1880s progressed, however, hockey was beginning to firmly entrench itself beyond Montreal. It first settled into Montreal's hinterland in Quebec and eastern Ontario. Each place hockey arrived, interest would quickly escalate. Canada needed a sport that would speak to its winter soul the way lacrosse had captured its summer heart. It was only a matter of time before hockey would find its way to Toronto.

The introduction of the modern game to the Queen City is credited to Tom Paton, goalkeeper of the Montreal Wheelers. The house team of the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association (MAAA) was soon to become elite hockey's first dynasty. On a trip to the city in the winter of 1887, Paton found Torontonians oblivious to the rage sweeping the East. He decided to order a bunch of sticks and pucks from Montreal, and then organized practices among associates in Toronto. It being the end of the season, these efforts seemed to come to naught as the spring thaw arrived—but the seed had been planted.

The following winter, some of these athletic gentlemen would proceed to organize a hockey team out of the Caledonian Curling Club. About the same time, others started one at the Granite Curling Club. And, on February 16, 1888, the Granites hosted and beat the Caledonians 4–1 in Toronto's first official hockey match.

For the two clubs, at least, this was a watershed. The Granites had taken the first step in a storied journey through hockey history. The Caledonians
vanished from the scene early, leaving but one important mark. Their rink on Mutual Street would become the city's premier hockey venue for many years to come.

Most students of the Toronto Maple Leafs, or of National Hockey League history in general, know that the team's first home was the Arena Gardens, a.k.a. the Mutual Street Arena. Less well remembered is that Mutual Street was itself the site of an even earlier rink. In fact, it was twice the site of natural-ice facilities before the arrival of the artificial variety.

The first mention of a rink on the west side of Mutual between Shuter and Cruickshank (later Dundas Street) can be traced to 1874. On that date the land belonged to John Willoughby Crawford, the lieutenant governor of Ontario, and would soon pass to his widow, Helen. The following year, the outdoor facility was formally christened by the Caledonians.

On December 10, 1885, a permanent indoor structure replaced the open ice sheet. One week later, to the music of the Royal Grenadiers band, patrons attended a “grand fancy dress carnival” to officially inaugurate the state-of-the-art “New Caledonian Rink.”
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The club would continue to open its ice to the paying public six days a week for curling and skating. The “Mutual Street Rink,” as it quickly became known, had clearly not been intended for hockey; nevertheless, in the years that followed it established itself as the city's leading site for sport and trade exhibitions of all kinds.

Despite its official birth in the winter of 1888, Toronto hockey would remain an infant orphan for a couple more years. Little subsequent activity appears to have occurred during either that or the following season. Teams seem to have been loosely formed and games organized just as informally. The country's top league, the Montreal-based Amateur Hockey Association of Canada (AHAC), tried to contact clubs in the Toronto area in the fall of 1888, but heard nothing back. The Queen City just did not seem all that interested.

The seminal moment for Toronto hockey would not come until the 1889–90 season, and the visit of Ottawa's Rideau Rebels.

There may never have been a less appropriately nicknamed team than the Rebels. Officially the Vice-Regal and Parliamentary Hockey Club, it consisted of members and officials from both houses of Parliament as well as representatives of Rideau Hall. Among its players were some of Lord Stanley's children; future Cup trustee Philip Dansken Ross; and James George Aylwin Creighton, the man behind Montreal's first organized hockey match back in 1875.

The Rebels initially belonged to no league, sought no championships and played only exhibition matches. Sporting plain crimson sweaters with white accessories, the club existed to promote the new game across the young country. Through it the members, including Stanley sons Edward, Victor and Arthur,
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demonstrated both a deep commitment to the sport of hockey and a wider sense of nation-building.

The prospective visit of the Rebels seems to have spurred hockey activity and organization in Toronto that season. Genuine excitement built as the famous team approached the city in the governor general's
private rail car. For the very first time, real hockey passion was sweeping Ontario's capital.

“The visit of the Parliamentary and Viceregal hockey team of Ottawa to Toronto has been looked forward to with great interest for some time,” reported the
Daily Mail
. “Hockey is one of the most popular winter games in Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec, and other eastern cities, while in Toronto the game has not been extensively played.”
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It declared that the game “is somewhat like lacrosse, but far quicker, and the excitement is at fever heat all the time.”
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The sport, at this time, was but a distant relative of the game Canadians would come to worship. It was played on natural ice by seven a side, rather than today's six. Teams carried no more than two spares. The participants wore skates that involved a leather boot and rudimentary blades: the Starr Manufacturing Company of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, a major skate manufacturer, sold “Silver King” hockey blades—early tubes—for $10 a pair. It also carried sticks carved from a single piece of wood.

The skaters wore no special protective equipment apart from short, simple shin pads (with no knee protection) and padded “gauntlet” gloves that could be purchased at Eaton's for $1.75 a pair. Goalies wore cricket pads and were not allowed to drop down to stop or smother the puck. There was no forward passing. Players could carry the puck—in the earliest years, a round wooden disc, by the mid-1890s made of vulcanized rubber—up the ice and past checkers only by using a series of lateral passes. More often, they would simply backhand the puck high down the ice and then pursue it. There was no such thing as a slap shot.

The Vice-Regals had arranged two games with local sports clubs, and big crowds were expected for both. The visitors received a huge ovation as they stepped onto Toronto ice that afternoon of February 8, 1890. The presence of Arthur Stanley added considerable enthusiasm to the proceedings.

The Rebels were coming off a 4–3 victory over the Lindsay club the previous evening. Alas, their schedule was a tad intense for a group of middle-aged men. Despite quickly taking a lead of 5–0, they barely held on to beat the Granites 5–4. “The excitement towards the close was intense,” reported the
Mail
, “as the home team were having the best of the
play and were making strenuous efforts to equalize, which, however, they failed to do.”
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That night, playing their third game in twenty-four hours, the Ottawa club lost 4–1 to the Toronto St. Georges at the Victoria rink. The two teams played “before a very large and fashionable attendance, who took great interest in the game, applauding the good play of the visitors and local men alike.” Ice conditions were superb, and though the Rebels were clearly exhausted from so much hockey, the play was described as “excellent.” The newspaper account was long and detailed, describing the play lavishly for those who had not attended. Young Stanley made “a clever shot for goal” that was stopped by St. Georges' point F. W. Jackson. Rush after rush is described: tides turned, shots were taken, all while “the applause was deafening, the fair sex heartily joining in.”
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The games had been exciting—full of skating, passing, scoring, checking and even a bit of fighting. The club attended a couple of banquets before heading back to Ottawa the following evening, but they left behind a city transformed. Winter would never again be the same in Toronto. Soon the Granites and the St. Georges, along with the Victorias and the New Forts (from the local infantry school), were organizing a tournament for a loosely defined Toronto championship. Out-of-town dates were also being arranged. And teams of all kinds—institutional, commercial, church, school, ethnic, women's—would begin to appear.

Toronto was following the same pattern of development in its early hockey scene as had occurred elsewhere, particularly in Montreal and Ottawa, where the game was already well entrenched. This was the opposite of how an established sport grows. Today, it is the hockey league or association that is first established. The league creates franchises and schedules, and only later do its teams enter into competitions with outside entities. In the early days, however, clubs were organized first, and independently, with no overriding agency governing the structure of teams or players.

Typically, the first hockey clubs were established by existing institutions. In Toronto and elsewhere, the leading organizations were the athletic clubs. Teams were also started by the athletic branches of colleges
and government organizations (particularly such institutions as police and fire departments and the military). Commercial entities as well were an important source of hockey clubs. In Toronto, the chartered banks produced some of the earliest and highest-quality teams.

Once hockey clubs came into existence, they would seek to arrange games. These “challenges” would grow to multi-team affairs and lead to the creation of tournaments. The final organizational step would be the creation of a league with an annual schedule.