I marked the opening of the Stanley Cup playoffs by reading a book my son gave me for Christmas. A Great Game: The Forgotten Leafs and the Rise of Professional Hockey was written by one Stephen J. Harper.
Fans of Island hockey history might be interested in mention of the Victoria Aristocrats, but the book’s most arresting sentence actually comes at its very end, in the acknowledgments: “Nigel Wright … assisted with advice and liaison with Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson, whose office was forthright and constructive.”
It’s not immediately obvious why the ethics commissioner had to be involved in a book whose proceeds are going to charity, though I suppose these days if you’re prime minister, the ethics commissioner has to be involved in everything.
But it’s interesting, in light of subsequent events, that Wright was trusted with this sensitive ethical assignment.
As the reviews generally indicated, it is not a great book, though given the author’s day job, it is a wonder it’s a book at all.
But to a hockey fan and a fan of politics, it is full of interesting facts and insights. In one passage about amateurism fundamentalists, Harper uses the term “ideologue” as a pejorative, which is disappointing to those of us who hope he hasn’t lost his own ideological preference for market economics.
At the end, he seems to sympathize with the idea, proposed by former Canadian Athlete of the Year and now nationalist academic Bruce Kidd, that a purely Canadian professional league could have survived and that this would have been a good thing. That he gives this old nationalist bugbear more than the time of day is surprising.
At one stage in the wars between different sports regulatory bodies that kept springing up during the two-decade conflict over whether professionalism should be allowed in hockey, the secretary to former governor-general Earl Grey was assigned to try to settle matters.
At the end of a long and exasperating set of negotiations — sports bureaucrats were no less petty or stubborn then than they are now — he declared: “This is a big country, and we have to have big minds and big views to settle difficult points.”
I bet that’s something Harper has come to appreciate as prime minister. Approvingly, he calls these sentiments “pearls of wisdom.”
In his next book, he should discipline his unfortunate penchant for cliché. Because of bidding for players, he tells us, team owners were “literally bleeding money.” I bet they weren’t!
The hockey history bits are more fun. As is always the case with history, it’s interesting how different things were. The rinks, though covered and at least quasi-indoors, didn’t have artificial ice-making. Games could be postponed because of slush — or worse, not postponed because of slush.
In one such case, a coach complained his team had lost because they weren’t good enough swimmers.
The season was very short, with practices beginning in December and schedules running no more than 20 games, if that. The first Canadian arena with artificial ice, which opened in Toronto in 1912, sold icebox ice in the summer.
When Harper’s story starts, hockey is played with seven players, lined up in what in football is called an “I formation.”
Substitutions took place only in the case of injury and there were frequent arguments about whether a given injury was strategic. When it clearly wasn’t, the teams would agree to play with six players.
In at least one league, there were $2 fines for minor penalties and a $15 fine for an expulsion, when pro players might receive $25 a game.
If I’ve correctly followed Harper’s explication of the Byzantine ownership and league changes of the years 1900-1917, the forgotten Leafs were not the same franchise as today’s annually forgettable Leafs, but were instead the Toronto “Blue Shirts” or simply “Professionals,” who won the Stanley Cup in 1914 by beating the Victoria Aristocrats three games out of five.
The Leafs themselves came along later and were the original franchise of the Montreal Canadiens, which had lapsed before being replaced by the franchise most recently playing Tampa Bay.
For Leafs fans, common institutional DNA with hockey’s most successful franchise is as close to the Cup as they get.
William Watson teaches economics at McGill University.
