Stephen J. Harper - A Great Game: The Forgotten Leafs and the Rise of Professional Hockey

Toronto Professional Hockey Team, 1907

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To Canadas military families, past and present.

We have a great game, a great country, and a great empireif you gentlemen are as great as the possibilities of the O.H.A, if we Canadians are as great as the possibilities of Canada, and if we Britons are as great as the glory of our Empirethe flag of amateurism in your hands will be as safe from harm as the Union Jack was in the hands of your fathers and mine!

J OHN R OSS R OBERTSON , P RESIDENT , O NTARIO H OCKEY A SSOCIATION , 1905

March 14, 1908: Saturday night at the Montreal Arena at the corner of St. Catherine Street and Wood Avenue. Also known as Westmount Arena, the ten-year-old hockey rink with the natural ice and the novel rounded corners is the largest in the country. Along with many hundreds who will stand, 4,500 fans will cram into the rows of hard wooden seats they can soften and warm with rugs available for rent.

Outdoors, it has been a mild, springlike day at the tail end of a soft winter in which the St. Lawrence River has remained open longer than it has for thirty years. Indoors, a battle for the Stanley Cup is about to begin.

The visitors from Toronto step onto the ice amid the polite applause of the spectators. The local papers have reported that this upstart team is a decent aggregation, but no one expects them to beat the home side. Their Montreal Wanderers have successfully dominated hockeys top tier for the better part of three seasons.

One of the Ontario challengers is well known toand highly regarded bythe Montreal fans. He is a grizzled veteran pro lining up in the key position of rover. He is flanked, however, by two even better forwards.

At centre stands a young French Canadian who will someday be regarded as one of the greatest competitors of all time. And at left wing is the best player the city of Toronto has yet produced, with both great triumph and tragedy ahead of him. In a moment, the game will start and this handsome young stars speed and skill will stun the overconfident Montrealers.

The Wanderers are about to have the fight of their lives.

But if the visiting team has been underestimated by Montreal observers, the hockey establishment back home in Toronto holds it in utter contempt. They may resent Montreal, but they detest this club, their own club, even more. Torontos leading newspaper has dismissed its Cup aspirations as the delusions of false alarm hockey statesmen hoping to collect some fast bucks from the gate receipts.

In fact, from its beginnings the club has been the object of disdain and ridicule by the hockey powers in its hometown. Upon its formation in the fall of 1906, the same journal had wishfully mused that professional hockey in Toronto promises to flourish till the frost comes. Then like other flowers it will fade away and die.

Things got no better the following season, when the team joined a full-fledged pro league. All the world is laughing, declared the powerful Toronto Telegram , at a so-called professional hockey league that can only get players that real professional leagues dont want. Its not a professional league at all. Its a disqualified amateurs league.

In fact, the whole league experiment seemed jinxed. For the first game, a team from Berlin (later to be renamed Kitchener) had come to town by train, but the Saturday papers were not even thinking about hockey. They were consumed with the sudden passing of Ned Hanlan at the age of fifty-two. The Boy in Blue had been Canadas first-ever world championa rowing prize he captured before 100,000 spectators on the River Thamesand he had been the citys most beloved athlete for years. The death of Edward Hanlan removed the most famous oarsman that ever lived, proclaimed the Globe . Nor is it likely that any other who comes after him will occupy so large a share of public attention.

Things were even worse inside the rink, where a big winter thaw had taken its toll. The Monday papers were far more interested in the The team had again lost its season opener by a shutout, this time 30. It seemed some local scribes even held them responsible for the weather.

Yet the progress of the organization has proven remarkably steady and swift. Indeed, by the time of its arrival in Montreal less than three months later, it has been able to ice the best hockey team ever to wear a Toronto uniform. Less than a year and a half into its existence, the club has genuine hopes of capturing the Cup, much to the delight of its fansbut only of its fans.

The truth is that in Toronto the hockey bosses are hoping the team will lose the game. They would rather their team and Lord Stanleys mug did not even exist. We know this because they say sooften and loudly.

Who were these Stanley Cup contenders and what happened to them? History has told us they were the original Toronto Maple Leafs. In fact, they were never, ever, called by this name. They were simply the Torontos, sometimes (at times sarcastically) the Toronto Professionals. So determinedand successfulwould be their naysayers in obliterating their existence that even their name would be long forgotten.

Their opponents are some of the most powerful people in Toronto. They are in the midst of leading one side in the national Athletic War. It is an extraordinary chapter in Canadas social historya sort of witch hunt against professional sports so intense and so divisive that the country may not enter the coming summers Olympics in London, England.

Today, none of this makes any sense, not in a time when Forbes magazine has certified that Toronto boasts the most valuable professional hockey franchise in the world.

A century ago, however, Toronto was a very different place.

From Good Beginnings to the Osgoodes

Its grand to be an Englishman in 1910

King Edwards on the throne

Its the age of men

T HE L IFE I L EAD , FROM Mary Poppins

It was the dawn of a new century. The sun, it was said, never set on the British Empire, and Toronto was a burgeoning bit of the Empires vast Canadian dominion. Toronto liked to be called the Queen City, which was certainly preferable to the pejorative Hogtown. The moniker reflected perfectly the self-image and aspiration of itsexclusively WASP and malecivic leaders. As the song from the Disney musical Mary Poppins would so perfectly put it, it was considered a grand time to be alive if you were part of the English realm.

There was great optimism in the air. Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier perhaps best expressed it in 1904, in an address to the Canadian Club in Ottawa: I think that we can claim that it is Canada that shall fill the twentieth century. Such was the growing confidence across the land.

What links the Toronto of the early 1900s to that of the early 2000s is the experience of change and growth. Though a primitive time by todays standards, technological progress had been sufficiently bold and rapid that it was unmistakable. Further, such advancementand the positive social development it would make possiblewas keenly anticipated.