A Great Game (41 page)

The two organizations were thus left with just each other. So they decided they would meet in a “city professional hockey championship” of three games. Even that, in due course, got whittled down to a single match.

For that match, the Torontos and Tecumsehs would have to come up with players. However, the few name players signed had already moved elsewhere. Only Edwin “Mag” McGregor, an OPHL veteran and the interim Tecumseh captain, had opted to stay. His decision was not hockey-related—he was studying at the city's dental college.

Because neither the Blue Shirts nor the “Indians” had ever been significant hockey powers, they now had to create on-ice squads mainly from their lacrosse teams. Strangely, the Tecumseh lineup did not include either Lawson Whitehead or Harry “Sport” Murton. These two lacrosse men were both good enough to have tried out for Miln's old team, with Whitehead having played in one game. Conversely, the Torontos rehabilitated a former Professional, thirty-year-old Jack Carmichael, as a link to the past. In goal, they placed local amateur star Harry Holmes, who would prove to be their connection to the future.

Thus, on January 25, 1912, the two clubs entered the Excelsior Rink with a collection of marginal players, untested on the ice and discernibly out of condition. To kick off this new professional era, the teams played
NHA-style six-man hockey in three periods. The Toronto Blue Shirts beat the Toronto Tecumsehs, 5–3. The Indians had the overwhelming margin of the play, but goalkeeping was the determining factor. The game was anything but pretty.

Although hotly contested, the match was severely limited by the deficiencies of its participants. Unable to play quality hockey, the lacrosse rivals became increasingly aggressive. Referee Lou Marsh—another journalist deeply imbedded in the sports he covered—seemed incapable of containing the escalating violence. The
News
, marvelling that no one was seriously hurt, gave a taste of the evening:

McGregor was all but put out of business by what looked like a deliberate cross-check by Morrison. Six teeth fell out of his mouth when he was bumped like peas out of a pod, but he picked up the gold one and skated off the ice. He showed his gameness by returning, but his real reason for coming back apparently was to get “even.”
¹⁵

Despite the irony of poor toothless McGregor studying to be a dentist, there was, in all this, a silver lining to be found. The long-standing lacrosse rivalry between the island Tecumsehs and the mainland Blue Shirts had sustained their supporters' interest in the contest.

When the gong had finally rung, the fans went home looking forward to next season.

Some question remained as to what that next season would look like. While an off-season reconciliation took place between Quinn and the NHA, Querrie continued his war of words with the association throughout the spring and summer of 1912. His threatened International league did not look entirely idle.

This conflict was doubtlessly egged on by the virulent anti-NHA campaign of the local OHA-controlled newspapers. John Ross Robertson and his allies had by no means given up their battle against professionalism in the city. Story after story complained about the NHA's treatment of the Ontario capital. The press also bemoaned its “bobtailed” (or “curtailed”) six-man game. This innovation appears to have been genuinely
unpopular in both Toronto and Ottawa—Ridpath being one of the leading critics. Most seriously, amateur interests alleged that match fixing was common in the professional league.

The rigging accusations seem to have been based on nothing more than the fact that the 1911–12 NHA season had been a close one. The suggestion was vigorously denounced by respected hockey man Jack Marshall. The veteran—a member of the aborted Toronto pro practice squad of 1905–06—was spending much time around town. The official reason was to referee local matches, as he had all but retired as an active player.

In any case, by the fall of 1912, the NHA had managed to patch things up with the owners of the new arena. Solman helped smooth things over by authorizing the transfer of the Tecumseh Hockey Club to Billy Bellingham and Eddie McCafferty, leaving Querrie out in the cold when the International scheme fell through. But this would not be a relationship built on love. The spats of 1911–12 foreshadowed almost constant tension between the association and its Toronto interests over the subsequent five years. In the meantime, both the league and its local owners decided their shared interests lay in a secure plan for use of Toronto's new hockey shrine.

Quite a palace it was. While the Arena Gardens is now remembered as the inadequate old place eclipsed by Conn Smythe's Maple Leaf Gardens, it was one of the continent's top facilities in its day. An amphitheatre capable of seating more than 7,000, with numerous contemporary amenities, eastern Canada's first artificial-ice rink was an impressive monument. The steel-and-brick structure covered a significantly larger area than its wood-and-stone predecessor. Yet it soon picked up a colloquial designation almost identical to that of the old Caledonian building: the “Mutual Arena.”

While the purpose of the Arena Gardens had always been to house professional hockey, its owners were under no illusion about the high level of local support for the OHA. After all, the old association still had most of the city's newspapers in its hip pocket. The arena thus granted the use of the facility to no fewer than eight amateur clubs that first year. They were also handsomely rewarded at the box office for doing so. The amateur bosses, after a miserable year split between the Excelsior and west-end Ravina Rink—where Teddy Marriott now toiled as the icemaker—no longer had any qualms about this sort of “mixing.”

Also, as much as the local papers liked to run down the NHA and its Toronto clubs, press coverage at the end of 1912 began to shift as surely as snow started to cover the fallen leaves. Stories of boardroom battles and rumours of inevitable implosion were giving way to reports on the race to sign players. A recovering Bruce Ridpath was back in the saddle as manager of the Torontos and in the thick of the hunt. So was his Tecumseh counterpart, veteran goalie Billy Nicholson.

Ridpath and Nicholson missed getting Fred “Cyclone” Taylor by a whisker. The Queen City clubs had bid the highest amount of money, but, because the NHA continued to designate the superstar as Wanderers' property against his wishes, Cyclone left for the West Coast. In going to British Columbia, Taylor secured the status of the PCHA as a second “big league” for many years to come. However, with salaries again rising because of the bidding war, the number of circuits continued to diminish. Only the Maritime league seemed to (at least temporarily) buck the trend. The Saskatchewan League finally closed up shop, as did the New Ontario one. They had been raided out of existence by the stronger bodies.

In mid-December, the two local teams began their tryouts. Montreal's pro clubs also got into the act, coming up from Quebec to get some early-season practice on the new artificial ice surface. On December 21, the Wanderers and Canadiens even played an exhibition match in Toronto to show off the more open six-man game. It was a fast, spirited contest before a big crowd, with the French team featuring former Professionals Donald Smith and Newsy Lalonde. The latter was conspicuously at the centre of yet another violent confrontation, this time leading to charges against Wanderer tough guy Sprague Cleghorn.

At last, on December 25, 1912, the reborn Toronto Hockey Club played its first game in the National Hockey Association. The team lost 9–5, but that would prove to be incidental. It had played before a gathering 4,000 strong and in a first-class facility. It had done so as part of Canada's leading league, which pitted the country's biggest cities against each other in pursuit of the highest prize in the game.

An important step was taken that Christmas night at the Arena Gardens. A Toronto team in blue faced a Montreal team wearing the
tricolore
. One of the clubs even wore the maple leaf that evening. Ironically, it was the visitors.

Both teams, as has been noted, were descended from the very same franchise Ambrose O'Brien had created in 1909. More important, they had a common future, now over a century old. While it was far from obvious at the time, Toronto's greatest hockey rivalry—the struggle with the Montreal Canadiens—had begun.

The Blue Shirts Take the Stanley Cup

Little chance of any great hockey developing in this game.
¹

—
Toronto Telegram

On Christmas Day 1912, the Toronto Hockey Club re-emerged as part of an established sports organization, housed in a modern rink and playing in a stronger league. That league included a crosstown competitor and clubs in Montreal, Toronto's great national rival. Yet despite the large and enthusiastic crowd that had turned out, the pros still had ahead of them a serious battle for support and survival in the Queen City.

The amateur game in the Ontario capital retained its big traditional following, its powerful media allies and a strong national symbol in the Allan Cup. In the winter of 1911–12, the city had been transfixed by the (ultimately doomed) Toronto Eatonias and their run at the Canadian championship. In comparison, the professional encounter between the Torontos and Tecumsehs had been a pathetic competitor.

But Toronto's amateur hockey order had a persistent Achilles' heel. Much as John Ross Robertson and the other Ontario Hockey Association
moguls might protest otherwise, the greatest prize in the game was still the Stanley Cup, and it was contested by professional teams.