A Great Game (4 page)

By the end of the 1889–90 season, the preconditions for the founding of a hockey league had been met. This was not just true in Toronto; thanks in part to the work of the Rideau Rebels, it was also the case throughout much of southern Ontario.

Thus, on November 27, 1890, the “Hockey Association of Ontario” was established at Toronto's Queen's Hotel. Here again, the influence of the Rebels club was critical. Among the sixteen mainly middle-aged gentlemen who attended the founding meeting were the Honourable Arthur Stanley and Lindsay's John Augustus Barron, MP, the Rideau captain and chair of the meeting.
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The governor general, Lord Stanley, had agreed to be honorary patron.

The Ontario Hockey Association, or OHA, as it quickly came to be known, set out to establish much-needed order among the province's emerging hockey scene. This order, however, would reflect the exclusively British, bourgeois character of these Ontario organizers, and from the outset it had a distinctly puritanical and authoritarian streak. The first item of business, not surprisingly, dealt with the issue of rough play. Barron, speaking as chair, noted that the Vice-Regals had found Toronto hockey—then largely unconnected to the rest of the shinny world—tending to the violent side.

Others had made similar observations. The impression given is of something like lacrosse on ice. Toronto the Good was troubled, as the
Mail
stiffly observed in its report of the Rebels–Granites contest: “It is greatly to be regretted that in a game between amateur teams some players should so forget themselves before such a number of spectators, a good proportion of whom on the occasion referred to being ladies, as to indulge in fisticuffs.”
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The OHA was not out just to establish a schedule. It would make sure that Ontario hockey was “clean” hockey.

Under the guidance of the OHA, hockey boomed throughout the province. The OHA ran senior, intermediate and junior series touching virtually every corner of the province. By its 1898 annual meeting, it had expanded from thirteen clubs to forty-two, accounting for fifty-four teams, and was growing rapidly. Only a decade after its first game, it could be said that “Toronto has more hockey clubs than it has any other kinds of athletic organizations.”
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Besides numerous clubs in all three provincial divisions, Toronto possessed an array of hockey associations that fed into the OHA system. These included the Toronto Church Boys Brigade Hockey League, the Toronto Junior Hockey League and the Toronto Lacrosse Hockey League, founded by lacrosse clubs to give themselves a winter activity. At the top of the totem pole was the Toronto Bank Hockey League, a high-calibre senior circuit with an on-again, off-again relationship to the OHA.

In the Ontario Association itself there had been six Toronto clubs among the thirteen founding members. The first to emerge from the pack was Osgoode Hall. In 1893–94, the famous law school became the city's first senior provincial champion. However, the achievement was marred by controversy. Indeed, the first Osgoode title would highlight the first of the two recurring themes that underlay virtually every OHA controversy: an alleged Toronto bias.

The groundwork for the trouble was laid at the OHA annual meeting in December 1893. Toronto delegates won virtually every position on the executive, leading the Hamilton
Times
to label it the “Toronto Hoggy Association”
²²
—a shot at the Queen City's derogatory nickname of Hogtown. The proverbial stuff hit the fan, however, when the executive ordered that the OHA senior final be played at the Mutual Street rink on February 28.

For the Ottawa Hockey Club, this was the final outrage. Now the reigning Ontario champions for three seasons, it believed it had earned the right to host the final. Going to Toronto would not only mean additional travel expense, but a higher risk that the ice would be poor at season's end. Before their semifinal against Queen's University, the Ottawas pulled out of the competition. Even in Kingston, public opinion was on their side.

The Ottawa–OHA spat got ugly. After Osgoode defeated Queen's on slushy ice to win the championship, the Ottawas refused to return the OHA's Cosby Cup. They claimed that, as three-time winners, they were taking permanent possession of the trophy—a common sports tradition of the era. Only after Major A. Morgan Cosby himself refuted that interpretation—and the Ottawa club received lawyer's letters—did the former champs relent.

The motives of the OHA in this dispute remain unclear. Perhaps Toronto interests did not want a far superior and far-off club. Perhaps they
were tired of scheduling around Ottawa's dual membership in the OHA and AHAC. In any case, Ottawa was gone from the Ontario league forever. Henceforth they would play exclusively in the Quebec association.

Of course, by 1894 the OHA championship was no longer the highest prize to which an Ontario team could aspire. The “Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup from Stanley of Preston,” almost immediately known as the Stanley Cup, now embodied national supremacy, as far as Canadian hockey fans were concerned. And the Toronto Osgoodes wanted their shot. This time, however, a scheduling controversy would work against the provincial capital.

The Cup trustees, P. D. Ross and Sheriff John Sweetland, both of Ottawa, had decided that the league holding the trophy would first settle its own title and then accept challenges. Unfortunately, the AHAC regular season that year resulted in a four-way tie, which led to protracted negotiations between the clubs, followed by a lengthy period of playoffs. Accommodating the OHA was the least of the AHAC's concerns.

The defending champion Montreal Wheelers were eventually victorious. But by the time they clinched, on March 22, the chances of playable ice for a Cup final, even in Montreal, were remote. Osgoode Hall, now out of practice, let its challenge to the MAAA quietly pass.

The Toronto Osgoodes remained a serious OHA contender for the next several years. After the departure of the Ottawa Hockey Club, however, the next OHA dynasty fell to Queen's University. The Kingston club won the senior title in four of the next five years. The one exception was 1897–98, when the “Legalites” again beat Queen's to take the title. For whatever reason, Osgoode made no attempt to challenge for the Dominion championship and quietly vanished from the Stanley Cup scene.

The year of the Toronto Osgoodes' second senior title coincided with a big battle over the second of the OHA's recurring themes of controversy: the definition of an “amateur.” When the founders of the OHA spoke of “clean” hockey, they meant far more than an absence of rough play; they also had in mind a moral philosophy of athletics. That philosophy was
“amateurism”—and the term then meant much more than not paying athletes.

Amateurism embraced the belief that sport for its own sake, not for money, was the root of all virtue in athletics. Indeed, professionalism in athletics was believed to be the source of all vice. Without money, sport was regarded as a noble calling in which the young man nurtured heroic qualities—endurance, courage, self-sacrifice for the team—all to attain the glory of the championship. Once paid, the athlete was labelled socially disreputable, morally deviant and, as we shall see, even disloyal to the nation. The belief was simply that, once professionalized, athletics were no longer “sport” at all, but simply the worst kind of illicit moneygrubbing.

Today, such a stark dichotomy may strike the reader as almost unbelievable. It is, however, exactly how hard-line amateur advocates saw the world. Indeed, a significant element of society was determined to destroy the career—on
and
off the ice—of any young athlete who accepted money to play sports.

An account of the plight of young John P. “Jack” Carmichael, which appeared in the
Toronto
News
on February 2, 1901 (with his name misspelled), illustrates perfectly the disgrace in which some held paid athletes. Carmichael's previous hockey friends refused to be on the same
ice surface with the “now notorious professional” and a prospective employer denied him “a lucrative position.” His crime? He is reputed to have accepted a small fee for playing a game “gentlemen” played only for sport and fun.

In the eyes of the amateur sporting authorities of the day, to be professional warranted a lifetime ban. One would be barred not just from the sport in question, but from any sanctioned athletic activity and all associated social circles. And a professional was not merely someone who accepted pay for play; it included anyone who ever played with or against a professional. So serious was the charge of professionalism that, contrary to British legal traditions, the accused was required to prove his innocence.

The reality is that the argument over professionalism in sport was one of the great moral debates of the era throughout the Anglo-American world. The paying of athletes in those days has been compared with the use of performance-enhancing drugs today. The key difference is that the latter is almost universally condemned—at least where such drugs are intentionally employed. Conversely, the question of professionalism a century ago created deep social divisions.

Why amateur advocates believed these things so passionately—indeed, fanatically—is now rather hard to explain. Suffice it to say that “respectable” sports in Great Britain had long been the preserve of “gentlemen” who neither needed nor sought remuneration. There were clear class distinctions when it came to sporting activities. “Gentlemen” were, of course, amateurs. “Professionals” were, for all intents and purposes, “undesirables.”
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Amateurism had its roots in the noncommercial society of the aristocracy. The nobility had established elite recreations as an offshoot of military training. In an evolving United Kingdom, the ascendant bourgeoisie gradually assumed aspects of this athletic culture. It also developed the exclusive sports clubs, with a proscription on pay gradually replacing explicit class criteria.
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Amateurism also dovetailed with the dominant Christian thinking of the period. The idea that “play” could be “work” seemed nonsensical to the values of both industrious Protestantism and otherworldly Catholicism. Play was for boys; work was for men. Athletics could not be seen
as an occupation. Rather, its social utility was viewed as restricted to the development of the young.
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The most robust manifestation of such ideas in the Victorian era was the concept of “muscular Christianity.” While the idea could be traced back to the apostle Paul, it was the contemporary writings of such authors as Thomas Hughes in England and Ralph Connor in Canada that re-energized the thinking. Hughes's
Tom Brown's School Days
, published in 1857, was hugely popular for decades.