A Great Game (9 page)

On December 1, 1903, came the announcement of a rival to Canada's
elite eastern hockey league. Since its founding in 1886, the Amateur Hockey Association of Canada—which became the Canadian Amateur Hockey League in 1898—had been the country's leading organization. Yet, during a period of rapidly expanding interest in the sport, it consisted of just five clubs: Montreal's Wheelers (a.k.a. the AAA), Victorias and Shamrocks, plus the Quebec Bulldogs and Ottawa Silver Seven.
⁴
That exclusivity had been the key to maintaining the calibre of play and the league's dominance. But it had also engendered increasing controversy and resentment that contributed to the rise of the new Federal Amateur Hockey League.

The Federal League—loosely, a successor to an Ottawa-based league called the Central Canada Hockey Association—would consist of organizations long shut out of the older circuit: Cornwall, the Capital club of Ottawa and the Francophone Nationals of Montreal.

However, it was the flagship English Montreal team that really raised eyebrows: the suitably named Wanderers.
⁵
Not backed by any established athletic club, the Wanderers became a contender overnight with the defection of virtually the entire roster of the Montreal Wheelers. The “Little Men of Iron,” who had lost the Stanley Cup the previous spring, claimed to have been badly treated by Wheelers management. They were joined by a couple of disgruntled Victorias. The Montreal amateur authorities were blissfully unconcerned about local star players apparently receiving better offers to leave their clubs and suit up with the Wanderers.

The establishment CAHL initially scoffed at the upstart circuit, only to have its position gravely weakened when the champion Ottawa Silver Seven abruptly quit the older league during the 1903–04 season. In taking the Stanley Cup with them, as well as toying with membership in the FAHL, they had measurably altered the balance of power in eastern hockey. The Silver Seven were soon to establish an on-ice rivalry and business camaraderie with the Wanderers that would dominate hockey for almost a decade.

In short, the two best teams in Canadian hockey, the Silver Seven and the Wanderers, were now professional in all but name.

With embryonic professional hockey taking hold on its eastern and northern fringes, the OHA held its fourteenth annual meeting at Toronto on December 5, 1903. Notwithstanding the changing landscape
around it, the organization was strong and united under the iron-clad control of John Ross Robertson. Its more open nature (compared to the CAHL) had brought the association wealth and growth, facts for which it never ceased congratulating itself.

President Robertson did have some concerns. He scolded the growing trend of “offside interference” (essentially, forward blocking). He also bemoaned slackness in the wearing of uniforms, which he declared part of the “harmony, propriety and attractiveness of the game.”
⁶
However, secure in his office, his fire was largely turned outward—and upward.

Robertson launched into a lengthy denunciation of the nation's governing sports body, the Canadian Amateur Athletic Union. He decried not only the CAAU's Montreal-centric nature, but also its lax enforcement of amateur principles. He noted, for example, that amateurism had hit “a low ebb”
⁷
at all levels of baseball. Tired of waiting for the CAAU
to deal with the situation, he instead called for the blanket banning of
all
baseball players from Ontario hockey.

On one level, Robertson's suspicion of baseball was understandable. Less than two months earlier, the first modern World Series had been played between the Boston Americans of the American League and the National League's Pittsburgh Pirates. It had been a sensation. Ropes were required to hold back overflow crowds at Pittsburgh's Exposition Park and Boston's Huntington Avenue Baseball Grounds. Boston won the best-of-nine series in eight games, but not before more than 100,000 fans had paid for tickets and shelled out even more in wagers.
⁸

Baseball was the first incontrovertibly professional team sport. Robertson no doubt saw this as a U.S. phenomenon, but in fact, professionalism was appearing in all the games that were native to either side of the North American border. And, of course, it did not follow from the rampant commercialism of the World Series that every baseball player at every level in Ontario was being secretly paid.

Robertson clearly viewed any professionalism, in any sport, anywhere, as a challenge for the OHA. Although this view was clearly extreme, there was evidence that the murky semi-professionalism of the Montreal hockey world could impact affairs in amateur Toronto.

For the past month, W. J. “Turkey” Bellingham, one of the Wheeler defectors, had been in town. His main purpose seems to have been to put together a team of nonlocal players—to be called, rather oddly, the Toronto Hockey Club.
⁹
The Federal League was reputed to be looking to place such a franchise in its circuit. In any case, the scheme fizzled and Bellingham returned to Montreal.

The upshot, however, was that Robertson, not content to limit OHA jurisdiction to its own rink, called for consideration of a new national governing body for Canadian sports—one that would be stricter and more representative of the country as a whole. The meeting passed a unanimous motion giving him a mandate to pursue the project. This was
a sign not only of his power in the OHA, but also of his growing influence on the Canadian sports scene. To leave no doubt, at the OHA annual banquet there were only two toasts on the menu—one to the King and the other to Robertson.

President John Ross Robertson would soon be joined by another influential media ally. The late 1903 meeting concluded with the election of W. A. Hewitt as secretary of the OHA. An all-round sportsman as well as sports editor of the
Toronto Star
, Hewitt would use his newspaper address for association business. President Robertson of the
Toronto Telegram
and First Vice-President Francis Nelson of the
Toronto Globe
were again elected by acclamation. There would not be much doubt as to how these papers would come down on future OHA controversies.

“Billy” Hewitt was the perfect aide-de-camp for the commandeering Robertson. Short, young and mild-mannered, he assumed the position of secretary on what he believed was a temporary basis. Hewitt came from a family of journalists, yet he never learned to use a typewriter. At a time when there was no separation between sports journalism and sports promotion, Billy not only was secretary of the very hockey body his paper would be reporting on, but he later served as manager of the Argonaut football team. He acted as steward at the Woodbine horse-racing track and was manager of Canada's Olympic gold medal–winning hockey team three separate times. He not only reported on the very first Olympic
hockey match—Sweden versus Belgium at the 1920 Antwerp Games—he refereed it as well.
¹⁰

Hewitt began his career as sports editor at the
Montreal Herald
, where he worked for Joseph E. Atkinson. When Atkinson left Montreal to take over the
Toronto Star
, Hewitt joined him. He was already a longtime friend of the
Globe
's Nelson, the two of them being early promoters of hockey's goal net. Though the idea was ridiculed by players and other sportswriters, the OHA was quick to approve the idea of nets and they soon became standard equipment.
¹¹

“Joe” Atkinson had become convinced that sports coverage would attract more subscribers to his paper, so he convinced Billy Hewitt to return to Toronto with him. “In my own department I had some ideas on sports writing that were considered unique,” Hewitt later wrote in his memoirs. “One was the story had to be accurate, and another that it had to be brief.”
¹²
He said nothing about conflict of interest.

The new OHA secretary would soon find himself in the midst of a series of controversies over the rising trend of professionalism. It all started when Robertson, apparently convinced that all in the organization were safe from such outside influence, went on an extended business trip to Egypt and Europe. Shortly thereafter an association director, A. B. Cox of London, moved for the reinstatement of one Harry Peel.

The Peel case was a nuanced affair. The London boy had been thrown out of the OHA more than two years earlier when his team was declared professional. There was, however, no evidence Peel himself had known or done anything wrong. Unable to play in the association, he had then gone briefly to Pittsburgh, where he had been paid the weekly rate. He soon regretted the decision to accept money for playing hockey and came back to Ontario for the amateur game. Cox made his case based on strong character references, including one from one of the province's leading clerics.

When Peel's reinstatement was narrowly accepted, all hell broke loose. The first consequence was the resignation of an outraged Francis Nelson from the executive. The reinstatement was a break from the strict OHA policy of lifetime banishment for professionalism. A storm of denunciation came from the Toronto papers and their network of agents in the hinterland.

The executive refused to accept the Nelson resignation. Yet Cox was unrepentant, stressing the concept of rehabilitation: “We are dealing with boys playing games, and not with criminals.”
¹³
Besides, he warned, accumulating exiles would only lead to a whole network of potentially professional players and teams in the province.