Blue Shirts were not invited to party
As the NHL celebrated its centennial for the umpteenth time this past weekend, there are those who suggested it was inappropriate for Eugene Melnyk, owner of the Ottawa Senators, to use the otherwise joyous platform to threaten to take his team to another town if the folks in his current one don’t start showing some appreciation for his franchise (presumably in the form of government subsidies on a new downtown arena).
But really, Melnyk’s couth-less bit of strategy, cribbed from the arenademanding playbook of legions of owners before him, was perfectly apropos. The NHL was founded 100 years ago on a piece of similarly ruthless business. A cabal of owners of the National Hockey Association suspended operations on the pretence that the ravages of World War I had too brutally thinned the ranks of viable professional players. The shutdown was actually a ploy meant to rid the owners of a widely despised, Toronto-based counterpart named Eddie Livingstone. Days later, the conspiring owners resumed business under a new name: the National Hockey League.
So you can make the case that the thing the Leafs and Hurricanes were commemorating Tuesday, when they played at the Air Canada Centre on the 100th anniversary of the first games in NHL history, was less the birth of a truly new league and more the culmination of a crafty bit of “legal manoeuvring,” as Stephen Harper, Canada’s 22nd prime minister, termed it in his 2013 book on hockey history.
This week’s many glances back at the NHL’s roots brought to mind a long-ignored chapter of ice-bound lore that deserves to be remembered. The period in question was illuminated a few years back by Harper, whose book A Great Game: The Forgotten Leafs and the Rise of Professional Hockey quietly called into question the NHL-pushed origin stories of both the Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens.
One juicy tidbit: Harper contended in his 368-page tome that the Canadiens’ celebration of their club’s centennial back in 2009 came too early. His research indicated the original Canadiens, founded in 1909, became dormant in 1910. The new Canadiens — the current ones — were actually formed in 1910.
And as for the original Canadiens franchise? As Harper puts it, that “entity was sold to, of all places, Toronto.” Harper’s book also made a compelling case that the Leafs “deny” their actual history when they sell fans on the idea that the team was born in that moment in 1917 when the NHA became the NHL.
“(The) Leafs pretend not to have the origins they really do,” Harper wrote. “In reality, the NHL’s ‘new’ Toronto team used the same players, wore the same jersey and was commonly called by the same names (the Torontos and, initially, the ‘Blue Shirts’) as its NHA predecessor.”
It’s a compelling argument. And it’s worth wondering how this triumphant early patch of local hockey history — the Blue Shirts won Toronto its first Stanley Cup in 1914 — was overlooked on the watch of Brendan Shanahan, the current team president who has spent the past few years righting many of the franchise’s shameful historical wrongs. Maple Leafs team historian John Ferriman, Shanahan’s go-to sounding board on such matters, said in an interview this week that he has not read Harper’s book.
“Nobody has ever made the argu- ment that we are the same franchise as the Blue Shirts before to me,” Ferriman said.
John Wong, an associate professor at Washington State University who wrote a book on the early NHL, said in a phone interview there are “two sides to the debate.” Wong said the NHL’s version of history holds some water. The Blue Shirts suspended operations in the midst of the 1916-17 season. Not long after, the NHA was shuttered and the NHL was formed. A new Toronto franchise emerged under new ownership. The break was clean.
Still, Wong was asked if a fan who attended games at the since-departed Mutual Street Arena — the predecessor of Maple Leaf Gardens — would have noticed a palpable difference between cheering for Toronto’s NHA Blue Shirts and the team that wore blue for Toronto in the first years of the NHL.
“Most likely not,” Wong said. “The name obviously changed to the Arenas (in 1918-19). But other than that, the players are mostly the same. The location is the same. The rules are the same. I don’t think most of the fans give a flying bleep who owned the franchise.”
But the fans of that era, as with any era, surely gave a bleep about their on-ice heroes. Seven players from that forgotten 1913-14 Stanley Cupwinning team ended up in the Hockey Hall of Fame. One of those honoured, Harry Cameron, played for Cup winners with the Toronto Blue Shirts, Arenas and St. Pats — a human illustration of the line that ran through the teams.
Another of those hall-of-famers, Scotty Davidson, was killed in battle in World War I a little more than a year after captaining Toronto to Lord Stanley’s chalice in 1914. Seen through Harper’s respectful rendering of the era, it seems unjust that a man who led Toronto to its first Stanley Cup and died for his country shortly thereafter doesn’t own a more prominent place in Maple Leafs lore.
“It is understandable, but it is sad nonetheless,” Harper wrote. “In truth, Toronto’s first Stanley Cup has been largely forgotten. It remains to this day the only one of the city’s pro hockey championships not to have its banner hung in the Air Canada Centre.”
Just when Shanahan thought he’d righted all his team’s historical wrongs by retiring numbers and erecting statues and putting up even more of the black-and-white photos Tim Leiweke wanted taken down — alas, there’s more work to be done. His next project: properly memorializing Toronto’s 1913-14 Stanley Cup champions. If the Leafs don’t do it, some lover of Toronto hockey lore ought to commission a banner and raise it somewhere that makes sense. I nominate Harper.
“Why not?” Wong said. “There’s no one else claiming (that championship).”