‘WE GOT CHEATED’

How Canada’s 1964 Olympic hockey team was robbed of a medal. ‘The shepherd and his flock have been fleeced’

Brian Conacher has a sprained right wrist, but that is not what was bothering him on a recent afternoon in Toronto. The wrist would heal, but some hurts last forever. And forever, for Conacher, refers to the 1964 Winter Olympics, and a last-minute flurry of hockey/backroom dealing/diplomatic chicanery that deprived the first-ever edition of the Canadian nationalhockeyteamofamedal at the Innsbruck Games.

“We got cheated,” Conacher says.

Indeed, we (aka Canada) most definitely did. Canada, with its love of hockey lore, lauds its heroes and gentlemen. Howe and Orr and Henderson, Gretzky and Beliveau, Bower and more. But every great sweeping national narrative should include a villain or two. And arguably the worst ill seed ever to take an underhanded swipe at Canadian hockey was John Francis (Bunny) Ahearne.

Ahearne was an Irishman, and president of the International Ice Hockey Federation. He managed the Brits to a gold medal at the 1936 Games. It was Ahearne, in concert with Avery Brundage, the American president of the International Olympic Committee, whose career was dogged by allegations of anti-Semitism, that stabbed Canada in the back at the penultimatemomentatthe1964 Olympic tournament.

Months before, all was happy and good for the Canadian national team — an international hockey experiment conceived by Father David Bauer. Bauer was a hockey-coaching Catholic priest of great renown at St. Michael’s College in Toronto. He witnessed the rise of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Sweden as hockey powers, and believed that if Canada—whichhadn’twonOlympic hockeygoldsincetheEdmonton Mercurys grabbed top spot in 1952 — didn’t quit sending our best senior club teams to compete, and get serious about the international game, the country would never win gold again.

“Father Bauer, in many respects, was a visionary, a pioneer in recognizing how good European hockey had become,” Conachersays.“Itbecameevidentthat the Canadian style — rough and tumble, ‘we’ll beat them in the alley if we can’t beat them on the rink’ type of attitude — was passé.”

Bauer scoured Canadian and American college ranks to find top players whose rights, for the most part, were owned by NHL teams. Conacher, for one, was a Leafs prospect, but had opted to go to university instead of turning pro. Bauer then moved the players to a house on the University of British Columbia campus in the fall of 1963, where they took classes during the week and travelled here, there and everywhere on weekends, playing hockey.

The priest, whose religious calling deprived him of an NHL career — Bauer’s brother, Bobby, won two Stanley Cups with the Bruins — could actually play. And he taught his “Nats” the fine art of two-way hockey. The strategy worked. Canada opened the Games with an 8-0 win over Switzerland. The blowout could have been much worse for the Swiss, had Father Bauer not instructed the Canadians to refrain from running up the score. It would prove a fateful act of forbearance, in the end, which came down to — or so it appeared — a gold-medal game between Canada and the USSR.

Canada carried a 5-1 record into the final contest, having lost to the Czechs; the Soviets were a perfect 6-0. And, sigh, Canada lost again — 3-2 — to the Russians.

“It was a heartbreaking game,” Conacher recalls. “Everybody in that game left everything they had on the ice.”

The heartbreak only got worse. Unbeknownst to the Canadians — or anyone at the Olympiahalle rink that day — Ahearne and Brundage met during the final. Not after it. Not before it. During. Their dilemma was thus: if Canada fell, which they did, there would be three teams (Canada, Czechoslovakia and Sweden) left with identical 5-2 records.

So ... a three-way tie? For Olympic silver? Great! But no, that couldn’t be, or so Ahearne and Brundage decided, as they hastily agreed upon a tiebreaking formula based on goal differential, an equation that dropped Canada — the team that had shown mercy to the Swiss — from second to fourth.

And. It. Gets. Even. Worse: the Canadians only learned of their fate when they arrived — on the ice — to collect their Olympic medals. Later that night, the crestfallen players gathered in Father Bauer’s room. Marshall Johnston, a winger from Birch Hills, Sask. — and the future general manager of the Ottawa Senators — summed up the events of the day.

“The shepherd and his flock have been fleeced,” he said at the time.

“It was a bitter disappointment,” Conacher says now. “And it gave you, I think, a very bitter feeling about the Olympics.

“That part is most unfortunate.”