A Great Game (48 page)

Forgotten, and yet the players of the original Blue Shirts, collectively and individually, made a considerable mark in the sport.

No fewer than seven members of this championship team belong to the Hockey Hall of Fame. Indeed, most of the young Torontos had professional careers that extended through the 1920s and into the 1930s. Few of these, however, were spent in the Ontario capital.

The notable exception was Harry Cameron. He would be the only one to play on all three pre-Leaf Cup squads: the Blue Shirts of 1914, the Arenas of 1918 and the St. Patricks of 1922.

Although the Blue Shirts franchise faded after 1914, the group arguably did win one more Stanley Cup together. This occurred after Livingstone's club was plundered to stock the PCHA's new franchise, the Seattle Metropolitans, in 1915. Former Blue Shirts Frank Foyston, Hap Holmes, Jack Walker, Cully Wilson and Eddie Carpenter (the replacement for Jack Marshall) all shared in the Mets' championship two years later. This club was also notable as the first U.S.-based team to hold the Cup.
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The phenomenon of the “Seattle Blue Shirts” (my term) would be replicated nearly eighty years later, when captain Mark Messier led a number of players from his former Edmonton championship team to a Stanley Cup with the Rangers—i.e., the so-called “New York Oilers.”

Speaking of Jack Marshall, old “Jawn” did not quite retire following the 1914 championship after all. He did some spot duty the next season, but knew enough to leave once the Livingstone era began. Returning to Montreal, Marshall played occasionally with the Wanderers until 1917, when he turned forty. He died there in 1965, shortly after his induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame. An obituary stated that Jack never knew about his honour, being by then eighty-eight and “lost in the mists of memory.”
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Allan Davidson was one of only two Blue Shirt champions who did not have a long hockey career. Scotty was killed in action in Belgium in 1915, reputedly after refusing to retreat during a battle. Despite his relatively brief shinny story, his exploits on and off the ice were recognized with induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1950.

The other man to have a brief presence in the sport was Roy McGiffin. Since his junior days, McGiffin had spent the off-seasons in Dinuba, California, where he was in the fruit business. Leaving hockey after the 1914–15 season, he ended up in the American military during the First World War. In fact, Flight Lieutenant McGiffin was an instructor in aerobatics in the U.S. Army Air Service. A daredevil to the end, he went
down near the end of the war while looping his aircraft outside Wichita Falls, Texas.

There is quite an irony in a player like McGiffin having a fate similar to the American hockey prodigy Hobey Baker. Baker was, it will be remembered, also killed in a 1918 plane accident while serving in the U.S. air force. One can imagine heaven's hockey rink hosting two of the most radically different characters ever to lace up a pair of skates. We can picture the great Princeton star trying to lead the rush as Minnie hacks, harasses and hotly tests his legendary eternal patience.

And so the Stanley Cup champion Toronto Hockey Club has been largely left to the graces of heaven and history. Yet if it has been for the most part forgotten, its predecessor of the same name—erroneously christened the “Maple Leafs” many decades later
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—has been utterly so. Even in the accounts of the 1914 playoffs, Toronto papers would sometimes note the previous Cup challenges of the Wellingtons and Marlboros, strangely omitting the (much more competitive) one of Alexander Miln's Professionals.

Some of this may be attributable to Miln himself. The man who directed the original Torontos had renounced his professional past and returned to rabid amateurism not long before pro hockey took hold in the city for good. Pulled down as manager with the demolition of the old Mutual Street Rink, he became a minor figure in the local shinny scene.

Miln remained active in other sports, and by 1915 was a thirty-seven-year-old bachelor employed as Ontario representative of the British-American Bank Note Company. That is when, like so many members of Toronto's elite, he eagerly signed on to fight for the British
Empire in the Great War. Alex rose rapidly through the depleting ranks to become an army major. Younger brother Jack Miln also enlisted and attained the rank of lieutenant.

The tragic death of Major Miln on November 18, 1916, was prominently featured in all the city's dailies. Yet only the
Toronto Star
remembered that the all-round amateur sportsman had once been “manager of the Torontos, champions of the Ontario Professional League.”
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Miln was not the only one associated with the original Torontos to serve and die in the First World War. The brief Professional and former Marlboro star Herb Birmingham left a clerical job at Toronto City Hall to join the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1915. Lieutenant Birmingham died from battle wounds on August 10, 1918. He was survived by a wife and numerous family members, including brother Hilliard. The Birmingham family was prominent in politics, his brother and late father being leading Conservative political organizers in the city and the province.

Eight other onetime Toronto Professionals traded hockey jerseys for the uniform of the Canadian Army: Harry Burgoyne, Charlie Ellis, Walter Mercer, Skene Ronan, Zina Runions, Donald Smith, Rolly
Young and the man I have called the “elusive” Bert Morrison. While all survived the conflict, Bert must nevertheless be classed as a casualty.

In the case of Morrison, the mystery to be solved was his disappearance early in the 1908–09 season. Vague reports as the campaign progressed had suggested that he was “ill.” In the code language of the time, this may have referred to a drinking problem. Unfortunately, a tracing of Bert's military career gives credence to this theory—and more.

Morrison's war story is a sad one, indeed. The saga begins with his enrolment late in 1916. At that point, Bert was a sales representative for his father's brass manufacturing company. Although deemed fit, he was almost thirty-seven years old.

Bert was shipped overseas, but by 1917 had begun forfeiting pay due to various ailments. The following year, he vanished for three weeks, and, when finally discovered, was clearly suffering from a serious breakdown. He was hospitalized for some nine months. His medical records indicate severe mental illness—what we would today label as schizophrenia. Previous alcohol and drug abuse are also suspected in the doctors' reports.

Morrison was released from the military in April 1919. He then spent the better part of the next decade in a London, Ontario, mental institution. Discharged in 1929 to the care of family members, he was subsequently certified as mentally incompetent.

Bert was never able to work again and lived in virtual anonymity in Toronto. Yet the reclusive bachelor remained in generally good physical health. He outlived all his kin, passing away four decades later at the age of eighty-nine.

Walter Mercer's war story is not sad, but it is perplexing. After apparently finishing his hockey career in Brantford in 1910, the right winger of the Professionals' Cup challenge team headed to British Columbia. Yet Mercer still claimed to be a “professional lacrosse and hockey”
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player when he enlisted there in 1915. Even more oddly, he appears to have falsified his birthdate on his attestation papers, declaring himself to be a full five years younger—twenty-five rather than thirty years of age.

Mercer had a good service record before heading back to B.C. at the end of the conflict. Yet files indicate he maintained the revised longevity for the rest of his life. Thus, when he passed away at Sunnybrook Hospital in 1961, he was said to be in “his 71st year.”
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Chuck Tyner played with Mercer in Brantford during the 1909–10 campaign, where he was the manager. Like Wally, Chuck exited the game at the end of the season. He also fought in the First World War, though, in getting there, he took a very different path than his teammates did.

For reasons unknown, Tyner left Canada shortly after his days as a
professional goalkeeper ended, apparently simultaneously forgoing his ambition to become a medical doctor. He went first to Vermont. By May 1914, Tyner, who was Anglican, had become a graduate of Seabury Theological Seminary in Minnesota. He then headed to Nebraska, where two brothers were also Episcopal ministers, and where his future wife, Mary Sprague, had been born.

Tyner had settled into his theological career for only a few years when, approaching forty and apparently still restless, he took a sabbatical. It was a stint in the U.S. Army after the Americans finally entered the war. Tyner was not a chaplain; he was a full-fledged combatant. Reverend Charles fought hard and became something of a correspondent for his hometown paper in Lincoln, Nebraska.
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