1919 Cup final offers lesson for humanity

Anyone who scoffs at all these drastic measures to deal with the coronavirus outbreak, who wonders if it’s really necessary to shut down sports around the world, needs a primer on the 1919 Stanley Cup Finals.

The tragic turns of events is right there on the silver chalice, engraved alongside all the championship teams: “Series Not Completed.”

Yep, there was once a Stanley Cup that had to be called off before the decisive game when Spanish flu swept through the teams. A star player lost his life.

As every sport grapples with this unprecedented shutdown and ponders the proper timeline to safely get its athletes back on the fields and into the arenas, a championship hockey series from just over a century ago should be in the back of everyone’s mind.

“It underscores that athletes are a lot more intimately connected than they might seem,” said Steve Chapelle, who has written a book on the series, No Decision: The 1919 Stanley Cup Final.

“You can take the fans out of the arenas to protect the players, but everybody on the court or on the field or on the ice still gets so close to each other.”

The Spanish flu, which may have actually started in Kansas and claimed tens of millions of lives during its three-year carnage, had been raging since at least early 1918 when the Montreal Canadiens boarded a train for a cross-country journey to face the Seattle Metropolitans in a best-of-five Stanley Cup final.

After a week of travel, which included a couple of exhibition games along the way and was capped by a ferry ride from Vancouver to Seattle, the Canadiens finally arrived in the United States.

Chapelle’s research found no mention of the flu outbreak in newspaper articles previewing the series. But it didn’t take long for the pandemic to overshadow what was happening on the ice.

With the series tied 2-2 (another contest ended in a tie), both teams were wracked by illness, sending several players to the hospital with temperatures up to 105 F. The Canadiens were especially hard hit, winding up with only three healthy players.

Montreal coach George Kennedy, who also fell ill, reportedly offered to forfeit the series to the Metros, but Seattle coach Pete Muldoon rejected the offer in a remarkable act of sportsmanship.

In the end, it didn’t really matter. Health officials shut down the Seattle Ice Arena to prevent the illness from spreading even more — not long before the final game was scheduled to be played.

Just four days later, Canadiens defenceman Joe Hall died at age 37.

“His family was summoned from Brandon,” Chapelle said. “His wife and a couple of kids, and I believe his brother, were on their way. But he died before they could get there. Frank Patrick (president of the Pacific Coast Hockey Association) had to go to the train station to give them the bad news.”

Hall was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1961. His biography on the hall’s website says he left “his mark on the hockey world as a warlike defenceman who himself met a tragic end.”

Two years after the ill-fated series, the pandemic claimed another victim. Kennedy never fully recovered and died from lingering complications two months shy of his 40th birthday.

Chapelle originally wrote his book on the 1919 series a quarter-century ago, but a publishing deal fell through and he filed his manuscript away.

Then, after Seattle was granted an NHL expansion franchise, he wondered if there might be interest in his project. He decided to self-publish it.

As the coronavirus swept the globe, he realized the story was pertinent on a whole different level.

“No matter how big and strong and well-conditioned you might be, you’re still vulnerable,” said Chapelle. “When something like this gets inside of you, you’ve got trouble.”

Seattle was a member of the upstart PCHA, which was launched in 1911 to challenge the East Coast dominance of what was then known as the National Hockey Association, the precursor to the NHL.

The PCHA was eventually recognized as an equal circuit, leading to an agreement that each league’s champion would face off for the Stanley Cup beginning in 1915. Two years later, Seattle became the first U.S.-based team to claim the prize, beating the Canadiens three games to one.

The 1919 final was supposed to be a celebration — the first Cup after the First World War.

In the end, the final produced nothing but heartbreak: “1919. Montreal Canadiens. Seattle Metropolitans. Series Not Completed.”

Not completed, perhaps, but worth remembering.