Vancouver’s first sports superstar
Cyclone Taylor key to 1915 Stanley Cup win
When he was barely a teenager, Mark Taylor remembers his greyhaired grandpa stepping onto the ice in street shoes at his minor hockey practice at Kerrisdale Arena and showing him and his teammates a little trick.
There was some concern because the elderly gentleman was in his mid-80s. But, then again, he was Cyclone Taylor, Vancouver’s first sports superstar.
With the team watching wide-eyed, he borrowed his grandson’s hockey stick and executed the now-famous “lacrosse move” — laying his blade flat on the ice, scooping up the puck and cradling it ready to fire into the net past a stunned goaltender.
“He said, ‘It’s a little trick I used do,’” recalled Mark Taylor, 56.
“I remember standing behind him and saying, ‘Hey gramps, take it easy. You’re going to fall and crack your head open.’ But he had my stick and was flipping the puck over and picking it up. He was pretty good at it.
“All the kids do it now, but I had never seen that done before. I had enough trouble skating down the ice with it. I didn’t want to worry about trying to flip it up onto my blade.”
Mark Taylor actually did pretty well in hockey himself — playing 12 years professionally, including 209 games in the NHL — but he knows his famous grandfather, who passed away in 1979 at age 94, was in an entirely different stratosphere.
Fred (Cyclone) Taylor was the most dynamic hockey player of his era and arguably its best. His blinding speed and amazing puck-handling skills made him the most dangerous scorer and highest-paid player in hockey. In his 10 seasons with Vancouver in the Pacific Coast Hockey Association, the future Hockey Hall of Famer scored 159 goals in 130 games and won five scoring titles. His biggest goals, of course, were the seven he scored in the three-game sweep of the Ottawa Senators in Vancouver’s only Stanley Cup win, in 1915.
But to Mark Taylor, his grandfather seemed like any other grandpa.
“He was a character, for sure, and a very humble man. It would take a lot to get him to open up about any of his stories,” said Taylor, who is coowner, along with his brother Rick, of Metro Vancouver’s chain of Cyclone Taylor sporting goods stores.
Mark Taylor knew his grandfather was famous, but was nearly 20 before he fully realized just how great a legacy Cyclone Taylor had.
“When I was a freshman playing at University of North Dakota, we were playing Michigan Tech at Houghton, Mich., and he came down because that was where he played when he first started his pro career. I didn’t even know the story.
“They basically shut the whole town down and there were all these banners up: ‘Welcome back after 70 years, Cyclone.’ They had a big banquet. As a 19-year-old, I’m thinking, yeah, I guess he was pretty good.”
Although Cyclone Taylor was a star in the sport and was a huge story when PCHA owners Frank and Lester Patrick lured him to the West Coast in 1912, his legend faded over time after he retired and carried on with his job as a civil servant with the Canadian Immigration Branch.
“He used to take me to some of the Canucks games back then and the players all knew who he was,” said Mark Taylor. “People close to the game or current players would go out of their way to come over and talk to him. It was pretty special to him. But I’d say walking down the street, nobody would really have any idea who he was.”