THIS DAY IN HISTORY: JANUARY 5, 1912

Pro hockey came to Vancouver 101 years ago, when the Vancouver Millionaires beat the New Westminster Royals 8- 3 in the first game at the Denman Arena. The teams made up two- thirds of the new Pacific Coast Hockey Association financed by the Patrick family. Frank and Lester Patrick were famous players back east who had come to Nelson to work in their father’s lumber business. When dad sold his company, the Patricks built arenas in Vancouver and Victoria and launched the PCHA, with Frank heading the Vancouver squad and Lester playing for Victoria’s Senators. Hockey was a much different game in 1912. To begin with, there were seven players on the ice ( the seventh player was called a “rover”). There were no substitutions on the fly, there were no forward passes, and goalies had to stand up. The Patricks would change all these rules, helping to usher in the modern game. ( For more details, check out Empire of Ice, Vancouver hockey historian Craig Bowlsby’s book about the PCHA.) Tickets for the first game were $ 2 for box seats, $ 1.50 for the promenade, $ 1 for a reserved seat, and 50 cents for unreserved. The Vancouver World newspaper hyped the game as the city’s “first real exemplification of the winter sport,” but only 3,000 people showed up, leaving the 10,500- seat arena rather empty ( The World reported it looked like “Lonesome Town”). The anonymous World reporter wrote that the game “was not Stanley Cup hockey by any means,” but had flashes of “individual brilliance in play, which took the hearts of the fans on a toboggan.” The Millionaires had lured star forward Newsy Lalonde to Vancouver from Montreal, and he responded by scoring the team’s first goal a minute into the game. “The way he ... manufactured stuff all on his lonesome, at times, was just another indication of the fact that ‘ Newsy’ is just about the best there is.” He was eventually named to the Hockey Hall of Fame, along with Millionaires teammates Frank Patrick, Si Griffis and Tommy Phillips.