Hockey and Canadian History

Unit 1:

One half of the course, as you know, is about the “nation”. As you're reading through the course materials, you’ll hear a lot about this notion of “nation building”: Professor Anthony Smith said that: ‘Nations and nationalism are intrinsic to the nature of the modern world and to the revolution of modernity.’ This makes a lot of sense when we consider “when” the modern game of hockey began to flourish.

Indeed, hockey maybe as popular as it is because of “when” it came along: the beginning of the “modern age” (which was really what many scholars refer to as “late modernity”). This was, for Canada, the beginning of the nation’s industrialization and urbanization period. Canada was also a very young nation (Confederation occurred in 1867; the first “modern” hockey game occurred less than eight years later). Hockey came into vogue at a time when so many of Canada’s leading people were trying to build a nation, as well as a national and cultural identity. Hockey, as you will soon see, fit so many purposes.

In 1993, Richard Gruneau and David Whitson published Hockey Night in Canada: Sport, Identities and Cultural Politics. It remains one of the most important works about hockey from a scholarly perspective. The authors spoke to the idea of the imagined nation, and who that included, and who it did not:

“Hockey has a capacity to induce the recollection of familiar experiences and to subtly connect this recollection to a seemingly less complicated image of Canadian society. In a time of uncertainty, and in a Canada increasingly characterized by difference, this comfortable familiarity and ability to convey an older sense of Canadian identity have an engaging and enduring appeal. They help sustain our ability to imagine a national community. However, this older sense of Canadian identity is rooted in an image of a common culture that has often papered over some of the most deeply rooted inequalities and conflicts in the society…‘Canadianness’ is something to be analysed rather than romanticized. And, in the analysis, the game’s associations with other cultural identities – identities associated with locality, consumerism, ethnicity, class, race, and gender – need to be brought more directly into the account.”¹

You should keep in mind the authors’ important observation that “Canadianness” should be analyzed not romanticized. In other words, you need to dig deeper in your own work. Your paper can’t just be a “play-by-play” or a biography of your subject. You need to be thinking about how you will develop your thesis/argument. All of the readings and much of the other works referenced on the site have theses. Try to find them! You will find that when you approach the historical data in this way, you will be working from a scholarly place, a place where you can begin to develop your own critical analysis.

Unit 2:

Canadian society was being reorganized during the industrialization period in Canada during the second half of the nineteenth century:

Sir John A. Macdonald’s “National Policy”:

• High protective tariffs;

• Settling the west;

• A national railway to unite the new country.

Modernization/Urbanization/Industrialization:

• The railroad connects people and businesses;

• Industrialization causes urbanization.

With the railroad, businesses – and people – become inter-connected throughout the nation. The nation sees a rise in steel, iron and coal industries and later they hydro-electricity industry. With such industrialization came urbanization.
The growth of an urban industrial society saw a great many Canadians, who, interested in making a better wage, migrate from the rural areas and farms to find work in the factories of Canada’s big towns and cities. In 1867, 80% of Canadians live on farms, in hamlets or small villages. By 1914, 50% of Canadians were now living in urban centres. Factory life meant “order”, living by the clock and by the factory whistle. Hockey too, reflected the scientific age. Old folk games were associated with old traditions, superstitions and religion. New modern games, such as hockey, reflected the scientific age and had to be organized and “orderly”.

Some historians argue that “modern” sport was another way for the elite classes to control the lower classes. Leisure time used to be reserved for holidays or harvest time. Now, it was a regular part of the factory workers’ routines. Still, this new leisure time came with its own set of issues. Social entrepreneurs (upper middle class Anglos) and “Social Gospellers” (like the Methodists) wanted to solve the problems of new urban society (such as alcoholism, gambling and general poor health). These people encouraged others towards “Rational Recreation”: walking, reading and playing sports. It was an idea that came out of Britain and the Victorian ideals of “Muscular Christianity”.

Many also felt that with urbanization, the nation’s manhood was being jeopardized, and that men really needed these muscular games to feel like men. It was felt by many that games such as hockey was really for the better of society as it provided potentially great soldiers who could defend the Dominion. It was hoped that the by playing or watching hockey, the lower classes might come to these good and useful moral bi-products of the rough game of hockey.

There were a great many folk games being played in Canada and the British Isles that resembled ice hockey. This suggests an evolution of the game rather than a definitive birthplace such as Kingston or Ottawa or even Windsor, Nova Scotia. Several folk games directly informed the gradual evolution of what we know as ice hockey.

These games included:

• Ricket: popular in Halifax which used a cricket ball on ice.

• Shinty: from the Scottish Highlands played with a ball and sticks (If you’ve seen the Disney movie Brave, this is the game that Merida is playing at the beginning of the movie).

• Hurling: A Gaelic game played in Ireland with a ball and sticks.

• Bandy: An ancient Northern European game of 11 aside.

There were also several modern games that hockey borrowed from as it became modernized. These games include:

• Rugby: from which hockey borrowed the “on-side” format and physical contact

• Cricket: from which hockey took some of the equipment, including the ball (before the puck) and later, the wicket-keeper’s pads for the gaoler

• Lacrosse: the First Nations’ game which hockey borrowed the 7-man aside approach and the “bully-off” to commence play

• Field Hockey: from which the Halifax-born and McGill-educated lawyer James Creighton derived most of the “Montreal Rules” for the ice version

James Creighton organized the first “modern” game of ice hockey on 3 March 1875 between two teams from McGill University. It was played indoors at Montreal’s Victoria Skating Rink. Creighton later published the “official rules” in the Montreal Gazette in 1877. The game engendered significant interest in hockey, and clubs began to form across the city.

After that first “modern game”, hockey was then presented at Montreal’s Winter Carnivals during the 1880s. This is when the game really took off. Considering all of the folk games and the different approaches that helped to inform hockey’s evolution, there had been wide variance in how hockey was being played. This was especially true when teams from Montreal would play teams from Ottawa, Winnipeg or even further afield places such as Halifax, where hockey was played quite differently. Still, rules were incredibly important and reflected the need to organize sports. In this way, hockey became “institutionalized” or standardized. Institutions and institutionalized in this sense does not necessarily mean big imposing buildings, but rather, as Gruneau and Whitson wrote in their work Hockey Night in Canada: Sport, Identities and Cultural Politics (1993), “a way of doing things.” Sports – and hockey in particular – began to shed the folksiness of centuries previous when games were played at holiday time, with no clear format, agenda or even purpose other than perhaps pleasure. By the 1880s, many team sports in Canada now had official clubs, governing bodies that enforced rules, schedules and programs of games that had been formally organized. And the games, like the factory whistles and the train, went off on time.

Hockey was played by a small circle of elite men. These men were committed to British public school sensibilities (note: public school in this sense actually means private school). The early teams of the Amateur Hockey Association of Canada (AHAC) were comprised mostly of teams from Montreal with the odd one from Ottawa and Quebec.

These teams were usually filled by:

• Doctors

• Lawyers

• Businessmen/Clerks/Bankers

• Civil servants

• University students

• Aristocrats/Gentry (like the Rideau Rebels that had two of Stanley’s sons on the team)

These players all adhered to the same public school tenets: playing the game for the game’s sake and not playing just to win! In this way, hockey was the perfect game for the nation-building that was going on at the time in finance, art, literature and culture. Hockey fitted beautifully into the image of Canada that the small elite circle was trying to establish.

We must remember that Canada at this time was a satellite of Britain; whatever was in vogue in Britain, the Mother Country, was likely very much in vogue in Canada. Love of the monarchy and the most popular monarch of all-time in Queen Victoria, pervaded the Empire and was especially acute in Canada. At the turn of the twentieth century, the British Empire extended over a quarter of the earth’s land surface and Britannia – as the song said – ruled the wave as they had the world-leading naval power.

English Canada wanted very much to celebrate its Britishness by waving Union Flags, holding Dominion Days and going nuts during Victoria’s Jubilee. The Union Flag was even featured in Canada’s official flag. Most Canadians were proud to be a part of the British Empire.

Lord Stanley of Preston (aka The Earl of Derby; aka Frederick Arthur Stanley), was an expert diplomat and was Canada’s sixth Governor General from 1888 until 1893. Stanley was very close to the Royals and Victoria, so became a celebrity in Canada and wherever he went, he drew hundreds and sometimes thousands of well-wishers.

He fell in love with hockey through his children, almost all of whom were involved in the game. With Stanley’s name on it, the cup cemented hockey as the Canadian game. Nation Building included building a national culture/identity; this included sport.

The French-Canadian vision for the Dominion did not always line up with the Anglo-Protestant vision for nation building. French-English relations were extremely strained at this time. There were a variety of thorny issues during hockey’s infancy that had direct ramifications on the game. These issues included: the Jesuits Estates Act; the School/Language Debate; and growing French nationalism. With the Louis Riel affair still in recent memory, these ongoing issues between Canada’s “two solitudes” picked at the scabs of French-English relations. The fallout of which would resonate into the next century and through the Conscription Crisis during the First World War. Many influential members of the French-Canadian communities across the nation see hockey – at least initially – as something that is Anglo, dangerous, and something that is to be avoided.

Somehow, the French will adopt the game and make it part of their own culture. Yet, if French-English relations were so strained at this time, how on earth did French-Canadian hockey players come to be so dominant in the game and eventually boast the most-winningest team in Stanley Cup history in the Montreal Canadiens?

Hockey historian Michel Vigneault convincingly claims that it was the Irish hockey players of the late nineteenth century who transferred the knowledge of the game to French Canada through the common ground of the Roman Catholic religion. Hockey then, is delivered through the churches and the Jesuit Colleges to French Canada.

Unit 3:

When England declared war against Germany on 4 August 1914, Canada was automatically at war with Germany. 619,636 Canadians enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Forces (CEF) during the war, and around 424,000 actually served overseas. Approximately 61,000 Canadians were killed (imagine a sold-out baseball stadium of young men and women) while another 172,000 were wounded. Hockey players are keen to enlist for a variety of reasons.

According to various social agents at the end of the nineteenth century, the Dominion of Canada was suffering from a so called ‘crisis in masculinity’. When the British Garrison left Canada and Canadians to defend themselves in 1871, many Canadians asked who was going to defend the nation. With a sharp increase in urbanization and industrialization, many felt that the nation’s manhood was not receiving the attention it needed.

Lord Stanley had some serious, some would say valid concerns about Canada’s military and militia in post-Confederation Canada. There was, after all, a move to militarism around the globe. Everyone, it seemed, was preparing for war. Remember, long before the First World War (1914-18) began, and even before the Boer War (1899-1902), there was a real fear of conflict between Canada and the United States. It wasn’t that far-fetched in the 1880s and 90s. With industrialization, many men were now working in factories and offices leaving young boys to be brought up by their mothers. Believe it or not, a lot of people began to fear what would become of the Canadian male.

Sport – and hockey in particular – was seen as a perfect remedy to this ‘crisis’ and would help prepare the nation’s young men to become good soldiers.

To safeguard itself against the perceived crisis, Canada adopted a doctrine of “manliness” and “masculinity”. It was systematically enforced throughout the nation’s schools, libraries, boys’ clubs, toy shops and, of course, in sports clubs and teams, including and especially hockey.

At the end of the nineteenth century, there were two ideas of “manhood” and “strenuous” or “muscular” sport:

1. There was the so-called “respectable” form of the upper-middle classes (this is the aesthetic that we’ve been talking about that emanates in the British Public School system), it was aggressive, but served a purpose and it went along with those other tenets we talked about earlier: sobriety, industry, respectability, etc…

2. The other idea was the “rough” form of the working-class males. You’ve got these workers in the factories and they need something that helps to define them – the factory and work did not necessarily define them – and hockey was a way for them to express themselves, express their “toughness”, and their “physical prowess”. Here, they could fight, rough house and claim their “manhood” and “masculinity.”

But men from the upper-middle classes and bourgeois also wanted to reclaim their manhood. As Barlow stated, hockey “became a means for these bourgeois players to reclaim some of the physical vitality that they, as a class, perceived themselves to have lost through the process of urbanization, industrialization, modernization, and bureaucratization.”

Rough hockey (whether it was respectable or not) really appealed to a lot of men from different classes and backgrounds. Arthur Farrell (1899) who played for the 1899 Stanley Cup Champions the Montreal Shamrocks said that: “Hockey is a game for men, strong, full-blooded men. Weaklings can not play in it.” Farrell also wrote the first how-to-play book for the Spalding Sports Company.

Hockey was ultraviolent, but it was, as we’ve discussed, played within a particular set of recognized strictures and middle-class cultural norms. Hockey did this dance with its spectators, societal norms and even the law, with the purpose of finding out what was and what wasn’t acceptable. In this way, violence (and sometimes brutal violence as we will soon see) becomes accepted as “part of the game”.

Let’s make no mistake about it: violence was a big part of the appeal of hockey. And this part gets rooted in the game early on where we’ve got a variety of on-ice “manslaughters” that somehow get explained away in the courts as being part of the game. And savagery makes it Canadian…oh that might sound harsh, but is it not true? This violent nature that defined hockey, the game, became associated as a distinct Canadian sport. It was vital to the forging of a uniquely Canadian identity that was different from the British influence and different from the American one too; it represented the stoic frontiersman, surviving and thriving in the unforgiving Canadian landscape (which was the same sort of thing that was appearing in Canadian artwork and literature at this time).

Hockey at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century was incredibly violent. There were four on-ice deaths in 1904. Stick-swinging incidents to the helmetless-heads were common. In 1904, Alcide Laurin, a Francophone player for the Alexandria club, was hit on the head by Allan Loney, an Anglophone member of the team from the Protestant community of Maxville. Laurin later died as a result. While he was charged with manslaughter, Loney walked free. Likewise, in 1907, Ottawa Victoria’s Owen “Bud” McCourt was struck on the head by the stick of Charles Masson of Cornwall. McCourt died. But Masson, like Loney, never spent a second in jail. The police magistrate Daniel Danis concluded: “Under the circumstances, I cannot believe that any jury or any court would hold this young man guilty of murder. There was certainly no evidence of any intention to do anything more than the usual injury that is committed in this game.”

So often, this brutal violence was considered just part of the game. It was accepted that the game was “rough” and that by entering the ice, players had signed a sort of unwritten contract that allowed for a certain amount of violence. Assaults that on some occasions caused death were not, it seems, punishable by law as the participants had observed an unwritten waiver making ‘brutality’ permissible. And though there were penalties for violations of the game’s rules, the penalties issued were no great deterrent to on-ice violence. Not only did spectators accept the violence, they expected it! Violence and injuries in the game were, very early on: “normal”, “acceptable” and “expected”.

Senior and amateur hockey leagues were really effective instruments of recruitment. Remember, many social agents, politicians, educators and the like saw the importance of hockey as not only a guardian of masculinity, but also of military preparedness. Good hockey players might very well make good soldiers!

War as Hockey; Hockey as War

With this brutal violence in mind, hockey was already very much war on ice. War and hockey shared many similarities outside of violence:

• Military Drills (target practice, attack formations)

• Discipline of Military Life (following orders, rules, etc…)

• ‘Rank’ System (Coach, Captain, Assistant Captain, etc…)

Over 100 senior-level hockey players enlist in the CEF. At least 13 of these did not return. These men enlisted for a variety of reasons, including:

• Joy/Thrill of Fighting/War

• Imperial Patriotism (Anglo-Protestant Hegemony defending the Empire)

• Canadian Patriotism (French-English Fighting side-by-side)

• Hyphenated-Canadian Community Pride (different ethnic communities)

• Pals Battalions (defending/avenging friends)

Let’s take a look at each of these in a little more detail in the next sections.

“One-Eyed” Frank McGee

Many Canadians, never mind hockey players, did not want to miss the “adventure” of the First World War. Some people are reticent to consider the fact that some men actually enjoy the thrill of the fight. I think it’s safe to say that one-eyed Frank McGee was one of those guys.

This was a guy who, if you remember from the film, had lost an eye in a game, but continued to play at very high level, winning Stanley Cups with the Ottawa Silver Seven and scoring 14 goals in one game. In another playoff game McGee played with a broken arm. To trick the opposition, who were of course going to try to hit the injured arm, McGee wore a bulgy brace on the good arm, and only a thin bandage on the broken one.

During the war, McGee received a fairly serious wound in one of his knees. Now, with one eye and only one good leg, you could forgive McGee for wanting to take a clerical job safely behind the frontline. McGee, however, became a motorcycle dispatcher instead. This meant that he is riding his bike back and forth from HQ to the frontline. While riding at Courcelette, McGee was blown to pieces by a shell. His body was unrecoverable for burial.

Many Canadians wanted to defend the Empire, to serve King and Country. They felt a deep duty to do this. The Royal Military College at Kingston produced a pretty significant group of hockey players that formed the Kingston Frontenacs. One RMC grad was Allan “Scotty” Davidson who captained the Stanley Cup Champion Toronto Blueshirts in 1914. He was the best winger in the game. In only 40 NHA games, Davidson had scored 42 goals. In September 1914, about six months after he had won the cup, Davidson enlists in the CEF. By April of the following year, Davidson is dead. He was shot trying to rescue a wounded Canadian soldier during a trench raid at Givenchy. 

Others shared a different idea of patriotism. Talbot Papineau, for example, was a wealthy French-Canadian and a former goalie for the Oxford Canadians (this was an important hockey team in England made up of mostly of Rhodes Scholars at Oxford, including future Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson).

Papineau wanted more of his French-Canadian brethren to enlist in the CEF and fight alongside the English-Canadians. He really believed in the “idea” of Canada, of two cultures fighting together. Of course, many French-Canadians observed an informal boycott on volunteer enlistment. And when the idea of Conscription was introduced by Borden in the famous “Khaki Election” of 1917, French-Canadians rioted in the streets of Quebec.

Papineau was very vocal about the importance of French-Canadians serving in the war. He was very well educated, had money, was fluent in both official languages and many pegged him to be a future PM for the country. He died serving as an officer with the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI) on 30 October 1917. Before he went over the top he apparently turned to his second in command and said: “You know, Hughie…this is suicide.”

There were other communities that weren’t really fighting for “King and Empire”, but rather to gain respect from the Anglo-Protestant Hegemony. Two of the most obvious examples are the Montreal Shamrocks and the Winnipeg Falcons.

The Shamrocks, were Irish Montrealers, Catholic, and stood in stark contrast to the Anglo-Protestant elites of the Montreal AAA. And they were good! The Shamrocks won the Stanley Cup in 1899 and 1900. Years later, the team captain, Harry Trihey, actually put an Irish Regiment together to fight in the First World War. It’s a very interesting story and gets even more interesting when the regiment actually gets over to Europe where the regiment got broken up. Nevertheless, Trihey and company had rallied behind the idea that “small nations must be free”. The team was fighting – at least in part – to show the British that the Irish were loyal and that Ireland should have Home Rule (aka Independence from Britain).

Then there was Frank Fredrickson and the Winnipeg Falcons. The Falcons were made up of young men from Winnipeg’s Icelandic community who were basically discriminated against by the city’s Anglo-elite. The Falcons couldn’t even get a game against the Anglo teams in Manitoba until 1915. These guys enlisted in the CEF to prove their mettle and to represent the Icelandic community. Buster Thornsteinson and George Cumbers didn’t come back. Both men perished during the war while Frank Fredrickson, the star of the team, actually narrowly survived when the ship he was travelling on was torpedoed.

In the end, the Falcons did more than represent the Icelandic community. After the team came back from the war, the remaining Falcons won the Manitoba League title, followed by the Allan Cup and then the first Olympic Gold Medal for ice hockey at the 1920 Summer Games in Antwerp, Belgium.

Then there was the phenomenon that saw many young men from the same street, community, club or team sign up together. This practice was outlawed following the war. Consider that if there were a lot of casualties in one particular battle, it meant that a whole street or community had lost its men. Case in point: Newfoundland at the Battle of Beaumont-Hamel on 1 July 1916. The Newfoundlanders were slaughtered during this battle and the island was never the same. To this day Canada Day remains bittersweet for people from the “Rock”.

This practice occurred in hockey. This was especially so with university hockey teams such as RMC in Kingston, McGill and the University of Toronto. Only four days after they won the Ontario Junior Championship, the entire University of Toronto Varsity hockey team enlisted. The team included Conn Smythe who would later charge a German trench by himself armed with only a revolver where he shot a couple of Germans and brought two prisoners back. Later on, Smythe was captured by the Germans and became a prisoner of war.

The war left a considerable impression on hockey’s landscape. The Memorial Cup, which is awarded to the top junior hockey club in Canada, was donated by James Richardson, whose brother George (from the Kingston Frontenacs) was killed at the front.

And, when Conn Smythe returned to Canada after the war, he sought to bottle the spirit of the nation’s fighting men in his own professional hockey team. Smythe bought the Toronto St. Patricks in 1927 and renamed them the Toronto Maple Leafs: the symbol emblazoned on the uniforms of Canadian soldiers.

Unit 4:

In the years that followed the urbanization and industrialization of the nation, a consumer culture began to take root in Canada. For the first time, workers had money – albeit a modest amount – for leisure and entertainment. Now, a variety of companies and organizations were competing for the workers’ entertainment dollars. At the same time, electricity, which would have a profound and obvious effect on the indoor game of hockey, was becoming increasingly available to many Canadians, including those in the rural areas. By the early 1910s, most people in Southwestern Ontario had access to relatively low-cost hydroelectricity. Berlin (now Kitchener) became the first community in Ontario to obtain hydroelectric power from Niagara Falls which was 180 kilometres away. On 11 October 1910, the power was officially switched on in the Queen Street Auditorium: Berlin’s hockey rink.

Hockey had to compete with a host of different forms of entertainment, many of which were as new as the game itself. These included:

• Legitimate Theatre (e.g., Shakespearian plays)

• Vaudeville/British Music Hall

• Cinema/Picture Houses

• Exhibitions (e.g., the CNE)

• Amusement Parks

• Art Galleries

• Public Libraries (which were also a new concept at the turn of the twentieth century)

• Other Sports and Sporting Venues

Companies and organizations, including those that ran ice rinks and hockey teams, recognized that workers were now consumers too. They also recognized that these members of the lower classes were less concerned with British Public School tenets (like self-improvement and morality) and were more concerned with their own sense of community. They supported their local team. They also wanted to win and were willing to pay for it. In this sense, rink owners recognized that they can make a good profit by “selling” hockey; they could also keep their rinks operational.

Hockey rivalries were drawn across class lines, racial lines and religious lines but also, and especially, community lines (sometimes even street v. street). Newspapers helped to sell the game by playing up these various rivalries. With the introduction of photographs and through devoting more ink to the game, newspapers grew the “national” game by developing a “star system” which caught the reader’s imagination. They also ramped up the antagonism between rival communities and hockey fans ate it up.

There were various expenses that hockey teams and rink owners had to consider:

• How did teams pay for players who had to get time off of work?

• How did they pay for teams to get from one place to another by rail?

• How did they pay for accommodation for the team when they were playing an away game?

These sorts of hard expenses made it necessary for hockey teams to be sold as a product. For it to work financially, hockey became a commodity, with a proper schedule/competition(s) and facilitated by competent referees.

At the same time, a lot of people began to question why it was okay for rinks and companies to make money at the gate, but that paying a player for playing or for lost time at work was frowned upon. These arguments exploded the amateur cause, especially when it was common knowledge that most of the teams in all of the various leagues were already paying their players under-the-table.

In essence, what the amateurs really feared was the commercialism that created a “win at all costs” mentality. This was against the British Public School sensibilities and the amateur code. The community’s thirst for victory would see, it was feared, “spectacle” triumph over “sport”; passion/violence over moral discipline/self-improvement; and winning at all costs over playing the game for the game’s sake.

They Hockeyist:

As time marched on, fans increasingly wanted their team to win. They became less concerned with where their players had been born and raised and more concerned with icing the best team possible. This attitude introduced the hockeyist: the mercenary professional; the hired gun who was skilled at his position and willing to play-for-pay. And while those who sponsored teams may have been paying lip service to the “amateur spirit”, they were also paying some of their best players under-the-table, or fixing up employment in town for a particular player, or, in most cases, both.

Bizarrely, the first openly professional league was in Michigan. The league was formed courtesy of a dentist named John “Doc” Gibson. The International Professional Hockey League began in 1904 with teams in Houghton, Portage Lake, Calumet, Sault Ste. Marie, Pittsburgh and a team called the Canadian Soo. It was to this league that some of Canada’s best players at the time went, including Frederick “Cyclone” Taylor. It lasted three seasons before the running joke of “amateur” hockey in Canada had nearly reached the punch-line.

Back in Canada in 1905, the Temiskaming Hockey League was moving towards open professionalism. Mining towns like Renfrew, Haileybury and Cobalt had wealthy owners who wanted the best players so that their team could beat their rivals. The Renfrew Creamery Kings were particularly stacked, so much so that they were nicknamed the Renfrew Millionaires. In 1909, Renfrew paid the Patrick brothers $3,000 each to play for two months of hockey. And the team paid Cyclone Taylor $5,250 for the same short schedule…this at a time. Cyclone made more money in 13 games than Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier made all year!   

By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, it was apparent that the best senior hockey was almost completely professional.

In the amateur camp, however, the song remained the same. This refusal to bend the amateur code led to a very public “Athletic War”. Indeed, there were key advocates who tried their best to impede the march to professionalism. John Ross Robertson of the OHA, for instance, issued lifetime bans for those players who had received money for playing hockey in an amateur league (they banned Cyclone Taylor, for example, and that’s why he went south to play in the IPHL).

But these measures could not stem the tide of professionalism. Amateur teams simply made too much money (even really stuffy ones like the Montreal AAA) to apply too strictly the full definition of amateurism at hockey’s senior level. In 1909, the Amateur Athletic Union of Canada – the predecessor to the CAHA (1914) – was formed to uphold the philosophical differences between amateur and professional hockey.

Henceforth, the top amateur team would compete for the coveted Allan Cup. Meanwhile the Eastern Canadian Hockey League held on to some trophy called the Stanley Cup which is what the professionals would compete for.

The ECHA soon folded and the National Hockey Association (NHA) took over the cup and hockey’s best senior players in 1909 with teams like the Cobalt Silver Kings, Haileybury Comets, Ottawa Senators and the Renfrew Creamery Kings, and three teams from Montreal, the Shamrocks, the Wanderers, and a new team that reflected French Canada’s interest in the game, the Montreal Canadiens.

It must be remembered, however, that the allure of the amateur game remained for some time. In 1914, for instance, the Toronto Blueshirts beat the Victoria Aristocrats to win the Stanley Cup. The total attendance for the three-game series was 14,260, out of a possible 22,500 capacity at the Arena Gardens. At that same time, the local OHA senior teams had drawn over 14,000 in only two games at the same venue. The amateur game remained important for several years to come.

The more the game was governed by economic concerns, the more rink owners could charge their spectators and pay their players. Fans began to “purchase” their allegiance to a team with their leisure dollars. Collectively, consumers identified with a particular team, simply by attending the game or wearing the colours of their squad. This is where hockey marketing and branding really begins.

Fans could now purchase their way into the brand of a particular team by paying at the gate and later by purchasing a scarf or jersey. In return, the fans “expected” that if their team didn’t win, that at least they would be competitive. Again, it was desirable to have the home-town boys to cheer for, but not if the home-town boys weren’t very good. Hiring a professional hockeyist was becoming perfectly acceptable and expected.

Sporting goods companies were also getting in on the act of selling the game. Companies like Spalding were interested in selling as many sticks, pucks, skates and, in this case, books to the hockey-crazy market as possible. Montreal Shamrocks’ star Arthur Farrell wrote likely the first book on the game entitled: Hockey: Canada’s Royal Winter Game.

Everyone, it seemed, was making money off of hockey except, at least for a little while, the players themselves. As Professor Colin D. Howell explained:

“The expanding sporting universe of the late nineteenth century had economic spinoffs for various businesses. There was money to be made from manufacturing sports equipment: ice and roller skates, uniforms and swimsuits, boots and shoes, bats, balls, lacrosse and hockey sticks, billiard tables, bicycles, fishing and mountain climbing gear, guns for hunting, boats, sleighs, toboggans, harness-racing sulkies, bowling pins, helmets, protective padding, and the ubiquitous jockstrap.” ¹

Historian Tony Joyce identified businesses and occupations that directly benefitted from sports including hockey. These were:

• Photographers

• Printers

• Reporters

• Policemen

• Gamblers

• Pool Sellers

• Telegraphers

• Blacksmiths

• Harness Makers

• Stewards

• Carpenters

• Labourers

• Caretakers

• Illuminators

• Railways

• Steamers

• Newspapers

• Taverns

• Hotels

• Manufacturers of Uniforms

• Manufacturers of Shoes

• Manufacturers of Sporting Equipment

• Ticket Sellers

• Lawyers

• Doctors

• Architects

• Salesmen

• Veterinarians

• Grooms

• Managers

• Refreshment Sellers²

Eventually, the players themselves would be added to this list.

Unit 5:

What's Going on in Canada (1900s-1930s)

Technology

Technological advances in various sectors greatly affected the way in which hockey was disseminated throughout the nation. The increased importance of newspapers, the use of the telegraph and, crucially, the rise of radio all contributed to the game’s profile and allure.

The Great Depression

Despite these technological advances, the Great Depression crashed down on 29 October 1929. It was on that bleak and infamous day that the world’s stock markets were set into a free-fall. The Canadian economy would remain firmly in the grips of the Depression until the outbreak of the Second World War a full decade later. By the time Maple Leaf Gardens was built in 1931, close to twenty percent of Torontonians were unemployed. By 1935, one-quarter of Torontonians were on relief.

Not surprisingly, the Depression exacted a toll on the family. Marriages plummeted by forty percent. Young adults were now, necessarily, remaining much longer in the nest than they had been prior to 1929. Women, who had been fighting for more opportunities in the workforce for years, were often the primary breadwinners for many families. While this put food on some tables, it likewise affected the psychology of those idle men who felt role-less, shamed and lost.

Despite, or perhaps even because of the Depression, newspapers remained very important. Decades earlier, between 1874 and 1900, the number of newspapers tripled in Canada. These new newspapers were less Conservative and religious in tone (although there was still a bit of this). Importantly, they spoke to “populist” opinion and were far more in touch with the common man. Still, these newspapers were also profit-driven and sport pages become essential to this new breed of newspaper (and later, to the old newspapers too). Newspaper sports sections began to include photographs, detailed descriptions, roster/lineups, and sometimes a reprint of the play-by-play telegraphy of important games. In this way, hockey helped to sell newspapers. The sensationalized, ritualistic review of the games found in newspapers helped to fuel hockey’s “star-system”. This same process happens again with radio and later television. By the 1920s, Nat and Lou Turofsky were begin to shoot high-quality and iconic photographs of hockey players, many of which appeared in the sports sections of newspapers. In fact, Nat Turofsky became the Toronto Maple Leafs’ official photographer.

The telegraph is another technological advance that affected the early game. Telegraphs reported the scores of games. This became central to the romantic notion of Canada’s love for the game: people would huddle outside CPR stations or various other town centres which had access to the telegraph. Here, they would wait in the cold to hear the score read out from the ticker-tape by some CPR clerk. This was as close as you could get to Hockey Night in Canada, circa 1905.

On really special nights, rink-side telegraphers transmitted up-to-the-minute reports from the game through Morse code. Imagine standing outside in minus 20 degree weather just to hear the railway clerk come out and say “Smith bodied hard to the ice…still 0-0.”

Wavelength

It could be argued that radio had one of the most profound effects on the growth of the game. Not everyone, of course, could afford a radio in Depression-era Canada. Just as owning a piano or an electric phonograph had been, so too was radio ownership a distinguishing marker of one’s class. Indeed, “superheterodyne radios” in gothic cabinets could be the centrepiece of a family’s main living space. While every family wanted one, these radios were not cheap.

In fact, the whole concept of radio was expensive. The erection of broadcast towers and stations across such a vast country as Canada was going to cost over $3 Million in the late 1920s. This was separate from the expected annual operating cost of $2.5 Million. Yet, many influential Canadians saw the necessity of radio. A Royal Commission on Radio Broadcasting in 1929, for instance, highlighted the need for radio and its potential in promoting national unity.

Ted Rogers’ Batteryless Radio Receivers were unveiled at the Canadian National Exhibition in 1925. At this time, there were approximately 92,000 receiving sets in Canada. In the space of only five years, there were 500,000 radios in Canada. Rogers’ Batteryless Radios were popular but pricey, retailing at over $350.

Most Canadian stations at this time, however, were only broadcasting from between two and twenty hours a week. American stations, on the other hand, were far more reliable. American stations such as CBS and NBC Radio were acutely aware of how popular their sports broadcasts had become and had no qualms in increasing their sports coverage. As such, they were able to penetrate the Canadian consciousness with American themes. This was a bit of a nightmare for those Canadians whose wish was to “educate and inform” through radio. High-brow intellectuals were worried that so many people are being exposed to “American” sports, culture and pastimes. These intellectuals want to return to the Victorian ideals of self-improvement, education, and so forth. They want to protect these “Canadian” ideals (read: British ideals). And so the NFB and CBC emerge to try to offer an alternative to US commercial entertainments and to sports in general (at least at first). But these few intellectuals are rather completely out of touch with popular sentiments. People wanted to dial in to hockey.

This was a time when Canada was slowly becoming less a satellite of Great Britain and much more like its giant neighbour to the south. The relationship between hockey and radio emerged during the Americanization of pro-hockey, when most of the teams were governed by American interests and paid by American dollars (though the labour force – the players – remained largely Canadian).

In response to these criticisms, hockey cleaned up its act and put on a “top hat”. The late 1920s was a great time of building in the NHL. Big new arenas appeared in various cities. Those that couldn’t manage to build a new arena that had at least 15,000 seat capacity could no longer compete (that’s when the Hamilton moves to New York and become the Rangers; and some of the WHL teams move to the NHL). NHL owners wanted their hockey rinks to be, as Maple Leafs owner Conn Smythe said, somewhere a “guy can bring his gal to”. Now, it was thought, wives and girlfriends might dress up to come to the game. Men would wear suits and yes, sometimes top hats. It was all very civilized, except, of course, on the ice itself.

These new arenas themselves become important to the mythology of the game. History and memory is not just about events, it is also about “where” these events take place. New rinks such as Madison Square Garden, the Montreal Forum and Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto are crucial to growing the game in actual financial terms, but also in the development of an enduring, romantic mythology.

From its earliest broadcast, hockey proved to be something that could excite the listener. The quickness of the play simply made for a thrilling radio show. And no one could thrill hockey fans better than Foster Hewitt. Foster Hewitt’s first hockey broadcast took place on 16 February 1923 at the Arena Gardens in Toronto. That night, Foster recapped periods one and two of an intermediate contest between Kitchener and the Toronto Argonauts, then proceeded to do a live play-by-play of the third period. Foster performed the play-by-play using a telephone mouthpiece from within a tiny, enclosed glass booth at ice level. With a keen interest in radio, the then eighteen year old Hewitt was given a unique opportunity, one that would penetrate the consciousness of the city and later, the entire nation.

Foster’s play-by-play shrunk the space. One did not actually need to be at the game to feel its excitement. If you could tune in, Hewitt’s call washed over you and took you away from what was, for many people living in the 30s, a drab reality. More than this, he helped people cultivate their own imaginations allowing them to picture a game that didn’t actually exist. It was a game that was only restricted by the limits of the individual listener’s own inventiveness; it was hockey’s own “theatre of the mind”.            

History was made on 7 January 1933. That night, the Leafs game was picked up by a network of radio stations across Canada. While the Leafs lost 6-1 to the visiting Detroit Falcons, the Maple Leafs’ appeal, once regional, was now finding frequency across Canada. Hewitt’s broadcasts had opened up a truly national conversation.

The “magic” of radio added to the mythology and mystique surrounding these new ice palaces and hockey at large. By 1933, General Motors’ NHL hockey broadcasts on Saturday nights became immensely popular. From coast-to-coast, Canadians began to follow the Maple Leafs. The Kid Line, King Clancy and even the broadcaster Foster Hewitt became household names throughout the nation.

By the end of the 1930s, Imperial Oil’s Hockey Night in Canada was regularly drawing 2 million listeners. There were only 11 million people in Canada, so nearly a fifth of the entire population are listening to hockey on a Saturday night! This was truly a national ritual. Add to this the naturally antagonistic relationship between the Habs and the Leafs, and you have real cultural drama unfolding across the radio wavelengths. Generations of Leafs and Canadiens fans sprouted up across Canada because of these radio broadcasts; the majority of these fans had never even been to Toronto or Montreal.

Radio dissolved space and engendered a sense of “national” community, at least in English Canada. The same thing happens in Quebec, where Phil Lalonde and Roland Beaudry’s French broadcasts of the Canadiens do the same for that team throughout the province.

While adding to the mythology of the game, radio also generated great revenue from advertisements. And radio ads increase the economic value of hockey. When it was new and experimental, NHL owners did not necessarily recognize the economic value that radio was generating. This soon changed, and broadcasters would now have to pay for the “rights” to broadcast a game. It was not a lot of money at first, but it was the beginning of a trend that continues today where teams actually make more from television and radio rights than they do gate receipts.

While it may have largely been American-financed (given the imbalance in the number of Canadian and American teams in the NHL), hockey on the radio united Canadians during the 1930s like few other cultural activities had before and in a way that few have since. As Gruneau and Whitson attested:

“Never had so many Canadians in all corners of the country regularly engaged in the same cultural experience at the same time. Stories and characters from NHL games emerged as the stuff of Canadian folklore: Red Horner “knocking people into the cheap seats,” Eddie Shore’s injury of Ace Bailey, the tragic death of Howie Morenz. Hockey Night in Canada began to create for hockey, and in particular NHL hockey, a deeply rooted, almost iconic place in Canadian culture, regardless of the fact that the NHL had become a continental league dominated by U.S. money.” ¹

This enactment of Canadian culture en masse, would forever inform hockey’s relationship with the nation.

Unit 6:

We’re looking at a few different time periods in this unit. First, we will witness how French Canada came to adopt a game which had largely been played by the Anglo elites. When modern hockey was in its embryonic stage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the parish priests of Quebec, along with that province’s French-speaking upper-classes immediately felt threatened by the Anglo-game of ice hockey.

Still, hockey did catch on in Quebec, but it developed within a prevailing political ideology that was inflexible. This stiff political ideology complemented the Catholic Church’s ultramontane vision. Maurice Duplessis, who was Quebec’s Premier from 1936 to 1939, and then again from 1944 to 1959, reigned during this time period which is now referred to as La Grande Noirceur or the “Great Darkness”. It was a conservative period, with the church at the centre. The church executed full control of French society including education, health care and social services. This did not change until 1960, when the political winds shift and the Quiet Revolution commences.  

We will also be looking at hockey during the Second World War in this chapter. By the end of the 1930s, Adolf Hitler had successfully brought an end to world peace. The German Chancellor and Nazi leader first sought to impose his warped fascist ideology across the European continent, and then later around the world. When German troops invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany. One week later, on 10 September 1939, Canada also declared war on Germany. And with this, Canadian men and women were now engaged in what would become Total War.

There was a difference in perception in the epicentres of what many historians refer to as “The Two Solitudes” (English and French Canada). The “traditional” (though maybe not always accurate) perceptions of these two places in the heart of the twentieth century were as follows:

• “Toronto the Good” (Toronto) v. “Sin City” (Montreal)

Toronto was English, Conservative, Protestant, and strikingly different from the French Catholic culture of Montreal. The latter also had a “darker” underbelly that became famous during the days of prohibition.

Hockey, perhaps not surprisingly, played up these differences to help sell the game. In part, these differences were exploited on radio, beginning in the 1930s, when coast-to-coast radio broadcasts made Maple Leaf players and broadcaster Foster Hewitt household names. Around the same time, Canadiens games are broadcast in French, which greatly raised the profile of the team in Quebec and in other parts of Canada, especially the Maritimes.

Religion and the French language had been the two pillars of Quebec society since the days of New France. By the middle of the twentieth century, hockey would become the third pillar of Quebec society. Yet, for a long time, it appeared that hockey wouldn’t stand a chance in La Belle Province. Parish priests in Quebec, along with that province’s French-speaking upper-classes felt threatened by the Anglo-game of ice hockey. The church believed that they alone could preserve French culture in Canada. Initially then, the Catholic Church condemned Anglo-Protestant sporting pursuits including hockey.

This stance was in stark contrast to the prevailing tenets that English-speaking Canada adhered to, those of “scientific play” and “rational recreation”. In this case, the church saw sport as something that was “socially dangerous”. It was for this reason – and also the fact that the Anglo-Protestant elites of Montreal weren’t likely to invite French Canadians into their exclusive boys’ clubs – that French participation in the game was negligible during modern hockey’s infancy.

Yet, the appeal of the game was irresistible to many French-Canadians, and slowly, the game spread through Catholic colleges as the French learn from their Irish schoolmates and Catholic brethren. At the same time, French-Canadian businessmen wanted to emulate the Anglo-Protestant elites of Montreal; just as there had been the MAAA for the Anglophones, now there was the Association Athletique d’Amateurs le National (or Le National for short). This club wanted to prove that the French-Canadian was not inferior to its English-Canadian counterpart.

Le National, was really the first hockey team that drew on the talents of Montreal’s French-Canadian population. But they were in a rival league, the CHA, and not the healthier NHA, in which the Canadiens would play.

But the game still struggled in French-Canada because, as we discussed earlier, it suffered from a double-whammy: 1) French-Canadians were largely excluded from English social clubs and 2) the Catholic Church (and by extension, the church run schools) was not – at least initially – supportive of participation in the game.

Yet, hockey persevered, mostly because French-Canadians really wanted to play and also because the French-Canadian press was picking up on the importance and appeal of the game. Somewhat shockingly, La Presse called hockey “the national sport of Canada” way back in 1896. In this way we can see that French-Canadians at least how important the game was becoming to the nation at large.

Amateur teams in Montreal had already been separated along ethnic lines (French, English, Irish, etc…). One particular team that was designed to engage the French population of Montreal and the province of Quebec at large had actually been created by the English. And while it was French-Canadian owned from 1910 until 1935, it has otherwise been owned by non-French-Canadians or by corporations run mostly by English-speaking Canadians. Of course we are talking about the Montreal Canadiens.

Owners – regardless of what their ethnicity was – recognized a potentially lucrative French-Canadian market; their money was just as good n’est pas? Yet, the Canadiens did not become popular overnight. Le National supporters were furious with the arrangement, and there were several letters written by French-Canadians encouraging people not to support the Canadiens.

Why then did the Canadiens become so popular? French-Canada got behind the team because the French-Canadian press got behind the team. Radio and later television added to the iconography of the French-Canadian player. These were the “flying Frenchmen”. And they were good. Really good!

Eventually, it was the Montreal Canadiens that became the safeguard of French culture in Quebec (despite having some English-Canadian players and non-French-Canadian ownership). In fact, the Habs’ first bona fide – Howie Morenz – was actually from Stratford, Ontario. Still, the Canadiens became the true porte-étendards of French culture in Quebec and Canada. Everyone that identified with those initial habitants of French-Canada could, and likewise did identify with the Canadiens or the “Habs”.

The blue and white of the Maple Leafs had their own mythology. If the Canadiens were the guardians of French-Canadian culture, then the Maple Leafs reflected the tenets of English, Protestant Canada. Indeed, the Leafs’ narrative was a sort of modern and commercial version of the British Public School tenets: courage, “gentlemanly conduct”, propriety, discipline, etc... It might be argued that the whole premise of the team – being the emblem of Canadian soldiers during the First World War – was and remains based around Canada’s Armed Forces. Just as it had been born out of the trenches during the First World War, the Maple Leafs franchise further galvanized its link to Canada’s military during the Second World War.

Somehow professional hockey – like the NHL and the AHL – was considered an essential service during the Second World War. As Ross’ chapter reveals, hockey was considered:

• Culturally important

• Crucial to civilian morale (Thomas Church, a former Toronto Mayor, calls MLG a “patriotic enterprise”)

• An important distraction (just like movies or the theatre, hockey offered a good diversion from the war)

• Important to the troops overseas who were listening to games that were specially broadcast where the Canadian soldiers were stationed

• Financially important because the NHL contributed monies (through the exchange rate) to the Foreign Exchange Control Board and raised monies through various charity games and through the amusement tax, all in the name of the war effort

The NHL, however, despite a few hiccups with the odd player who was called up and the passport crisis that made it a little difficult for some players to cross the border into the US to play, was still able to remain profitable during the war. In other words, despite their contribution to the war effort, the league still made money.

The Dissenting Voice

Not everyone saw hockey as a “patriotic enterprise”, and – over the course of the war – some people felt that men who were physically fit enough to play the very demanding game of hockey. This is why a lot of the teams during the war were filled with older, married men, or really young players who weren’t yet eligible for service.

Non-Permanent Active Militia (NPAM)

The National Resources Mobilization Act, which had passed on 21 June 1940, required that hockey players undergo 30 days of training. The period of training was later extended to four months. By April 1941, men in non-essential employment were attached to their NRMA units as long as the war lasted. In the summer of 1940, NHL players were signing up to do their essential NPAM training. By joining, players were committing to training and, theoretically, the possibility of being called up to active service. In other words, Militia training via NPAM units allowed players to satisfy the required training as outlined in the NRMA Act. This allowed Canadian players to keep on playing hockey.

The Shadow League

Despite the earnestness of many NHLers, many would one day question the league’s commitment to the war effort. Various behind-closed-doors machinations would ensure that the vast majority of NHLers who had enlisted would not actually see any real active duty. At the same time, military hockey teams sprouted up across the country and were soon filled with NHLers who had enlisted. Crucially, these military teams displayed a peculiar, not-so-shrouded favouritism toward their best players: the NHLers. Over time, a war-weary public would come to question why usual army protocol was subverted when it came to marquee NHL enlistees, when others were being hurried through the system and shipped over to war.    

Tommy Gorman And The Habs

General Manager Tommy Gorman was able to keep many of the Canadiens out of military service by ensuring that they took jobs in munition manufactories and shipbuilding yards. This move, along with the savvy scouting that brought army rejects Elmer Lach and Maurice Richard into the Habs’ fold, helped to lay a foundation on which the dominating Canadiens teams of the late 1940s and 1950s were built upon. Not surprisingly, Montreal’s success did not sit well with Toronto, Conn Smythe, the Maple Leafs and its wildly loyal and patriotic legion of fans.

Excepting some important contributions, Quebec was far less engaged in the war than the rest of the country. And, just like the First World War, another Conscription Crisis near the war’s end would once again reveal the cleavage that existed between the “two solitudes”. It did not help that some French-Canadian intellectuals in the 1930s were openly sympathetic towards Mussolini and Franco, believing that the fascist leaders were key to thwarting the spread of communism. Some French-Canadian journalists were even vaguely – and sometimes not so vaguely – anti-Semitic. These facts helped to add fuel to the already hearty fire that burned between Anglo-Protestant Ontario and Franco-Catholic Quebec. While players such as Maurice Richard would indeed try to enlist (he was rejected due to injuries he had received while playing hockey), there was a perception among Leafs fans that French-Canadian players were not doing their duty. With Apps, Schriner, Broda and the likes enlisted and “doing their duty”, this natural antagonism between the Buds and the Habs became especially sharpened.

Conn Smythe, the Maple Leafs’ majority owner would later reenlist in the Canadian Army and would one day run his own battery before getting wounded in France. Likewise, several Maple Leaf players enlisted in various branches of the military. Smythe publicly campaigned for Conscription and was vocal in his critique of how Prime Minister Mackenzie King was handling the war.

Smythe could also boast that several Leafs like Turk Broda, Syl Apps and Sweeney Schriner enlisted in the war effort. Yet, as we’ve discovered, most of the NHLers who enlisted in the Canadian Army in the Second World War did not really see any action; not, at least, like the First World War hockey players (which we looked at earlier). These players usually ended up playing on military teams.

Syl Apps, for instance, really embodied the old British School Sensibilities: he didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t swear, served in the military, competed as a pole vaulter in the 1936 Olympics, was a gentleman, a gifted player and was probably the Leafs’ greatest captain. Nevertheless, there was a perception among Leafs’ fans at least, that their guys were willing to go to France to fight Hitler, while many French-Canadians weren’t. And having the Leafs associated with the war and soldiering was important to building the Maple Leafs’ narrative. This association with the iconography of war and patriotism, continued to help build (and sell) the Maple Leafs mythology.

Where it gets a bit confusing is when one considers that the Montreal Canadiens also drew (and continue to draw) a link to the military past of the nation. A portion of John McRae’s famous First World War poem “In Flanders Fields”, for instance, was inscribed on the wall of the Habs’ dressing room in the Montreal Forum, which begat the imagery of “passing the torch” down from one Canadiens’ great to another. It is a practice that still exists today, especially on the Canadiens’ first game of a new season. The Canadiens could likewise boast Kenny Reardon, who actually did see active combat during the Second World War. As you are finding out, when you critically assess something, the image is rarely tidy, or black and white.

Hockey nevertheless played an important role in helping Canadian soldiers and civilians survive the darkness of the war. Just as they had listened to the Leafs to forget about the Depression, so too did Canadians listen to the Leafs to forget about the war. Foster Hewitt’s call had been a place to retreat to, a place where troubles were, at least for a moment, put on hold. 

In his work on hockey and the Second World War, Historian J. Andrew Ross demonstrated how important hockey had become to the nation – and to the United States as well – during the war:

“…the importance of the national sport was made manifest through an acknowledgement of its contribution to civilian and military morale. Until the war, the state had had little influence over, or interest in, hockey. When the war began, many assumed that the sport would be put on hold, but as the war intensified, diplomats, bureaucrats, politicians, and businessmen were required to acknowledge the value of hockey as entertainment on the home front and to accommodate public opinion by constantly negotiating and defining this role against mobilization requirements. Far from being frivolous fodder for the sports pages, the debate over hockey reproduced the social tensions and conflicts over the extent and character of individual, business, and national participation in the war that stretched into the highest reaches of Canadian and American government policy-making and administration. In the end, the debate in these arenas was forced to accommodate a society that, while not rejecting the war outright, was not willing to submit either its economy or its national social identity entirely to the war’s demands." ¹

Even in war, hockey had some serious cachet with the people. And the NHL knew it.

Now let’s fast-forward to the post-war period. Apart from the obvious binary relationship with the Maple Leafs, a flashpoint in Habs’ mythology occurred during the Richard Riot on St. Patrick’s Day, 17 March 1955. Maurice “Rocket” Richard, a French-Canadian icon who was always a target on the ice, got into a fight with Hal Lacoye of the Boston Bruins. In the ensuing melee, Richard punched one of the officials, linesman Cliff Thompson. Afterwards, Clarence Campbell, the English-Canadian President of the NHL suspended Richard for the remaining three regular season games and the playoffs.

Campbell showed up to the next Habs home game and got pelted with tomatoes. That same night, a smoke-bomb went off in the Forum, and so began a night of rioting on the streets of Montreal.

Quiet Revolution

The riot was also a flashpoint for French-Canadian nationalism. This was the moment that some historians feel started or at least added to the Quiet Revolution. Richard was so loved by French-Canada. He was a hero who, in the opinion of many French-Canadians, had been wronged by English-speaking NHL President. The riot was, at least in part, a release of years of pent-up emotion from the La Grande Noirceur era.

In the immediate years after the Richard Riot, French-Canada began its move away from the church as the centre of the French-Canadian society. In Quebec’s 1960 Provincial Election, Maurice Duplessis’ “Great Darkness” reign came to an end, following which the state took precedence over the church in Quebec’s education system and social services. It was also a time when Quebecois become the masters – for the first time – of their own economy. Though it may be somewhat romanticized at times, the Canadiens, through Richard, et al, are indeed inexplicably linked to the French-Canadian grand narrative.

Unit 7:

During modern hockey’s infancy in the late nineteenth century, and indeed well into the twentieth century, the “expected” and “appropriate” athletic body was a masculine one. This, in effect, celebrated manliness. At the same time, the athletic female body was considered a peculiarity. It was something that deviated from Canada’s societal norms.

The construction or idea of the female body at this time was to follow Victorian ideals of prudery and propriety. These ideals played into a construction that regarded the female body as weaker, prone to illness, and not fit for sport (and certainly not ice hockey).  

To be masculine and manly at this time was to be tough and resilient. The exact opposite was true of women. To be feminine was to be fragile, docile and often “in need of rescuing”. This was, of course, in stark contrast to later notions of the highly eroticized and ideal conception of the “beautiful body”, which is also, of course, a construction too. 

As we’ve stated earlier, the female body was considered by many to be “weak”, “deviant” and “prone to health issues and nervous disorders”. This was no popular perception, whispered here and there among average Canadians; rather it was a view that had great currency within highly influential spheres of Canadian society, including the medical and scientific fields and also religion.

Many male physicians, for instance, actually believed that “female frailty” would and should keep the majority of women out of sport. While exercise was okay, it was geared to women’s reproductive health. Rough games – and games with body contact like hockey – should be, it was thought, totally avoided. Remember, as late as 1885, women had just started riding England’s new “safety bicycle”. This seemingly innocuous pastime was actually a big deal. Canadian medical journals at the time debated whether or not riding a bike produced “a distinct orgasm in women” and also various other “undesirable” physical ailments and possibly mental illness too. If this is how they felt about cycling, you can imagine how they felt about hockey! In short, sport (and especially games like hockey) was considered unfeminine and therefore unhealthy for the “frailer” sex.

We know that hockey-playing women did not suit the idealized “female body”, but they also didn’t suit the idealized/imagined conception of hockey itself. For the vast majority of Canadians hockey was the preserve of males: a masculine game; a bond between father and son, brother and brother, teammate and teammate; and a mythology focussed on male hockey stars. It was (and arguably still is) the prevailing attitude in what is gendered hockey culture. The women’s game, the very minute Isobel Stanley in her white coat steps on the ice with a stick, challenged this.

The upper and middle-class conceptions of the “ideal female” imagined women as child-bearers and raisers first and foremost. Perhaps ironically then, it was women from these classes that made up the earliest female hockey players. Just as males from the upper-class Anglo-business elite and professional classes were the first to play modern hockey, so too were the first female players from Canada’s elite. Specifically, the majority of hockey’s earliest female players were university students. University of Toronto, McGill and Queens, for example, all boasted female teams by the first decade of the twentieth century. University female athletes were incredibly important in terms of how they broke down barriers and challenged the popular perceptions of what “appropriate” female behaviour was.

But just as we witnessed the lower class male factory workers wanting to lace up the skates around the turn of the century, so too did women from the lower orders want to play hockey. In this way, the popular game of hockey – at least in terms of the sexes – evolved in much the same manner.

After the First World War, Canada entered the so-called “Golden Age” of women athletics. It was here in the 1920s and 1930s that women took part in a much wider range of sports: not just tennis, bicycling and figure skating, but also baseball, track and field and yes, hockey.

Interest in the game was, unsurprisingly, commensurate with newspaper and radio coverage of women’s sport. Sports columnists such as the Globe and Mail’s Bobbie Rosenfeld (who was herself an incredibly gifted athlete) and Alexandrine Gibb of the Toronto Star did much to raise the profile of women’s sport and hockey in particular. Just as the sports writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had produced “hockey heroes” like Dan Bain and Cyclone Taylor, so too did these women produce female hockey heroes.

The Ladies Ontario Hockey Association (LOHA) introduced a space for women from all classes to play hockey. Between 1922 and 1940, the LOHA was an important Women’s Hockey League. The league attracted urban and working women. It was the first governing body for women’s hockey at the community level in Ontario.

The LOHA tried to align itself with men’s hockey to achieve recognition. This had mixed results. Likewise, the league had – at least in the early part of its existence – men in advisory roles. Still, the LOHA was, at least by 1925, effectively a woman’s sport run by women. This was a remarkable achievement given the age.

The LOHA, however, met with criticism and resistance from the male dominated athletic bodies in Canada. In 1923, the LOHA was denied official recognition by the CAHA. While many men were supportive of women’s hockey and women’s sports in general, a great many men were not. W.A. Fry, the President of the CAHA, for instance, felt that women already had tennis, swimming, skating and track and field, so why did they need to have hockey too? Fry and many others like him believed that women should stick to games that did not involve “personal contact”.

Hockey’s male intelligentsia of the 1920s believed that despite the obvious interest women had in playing the game, hockey was an “inappropriate” sport for females. It was out of this backlash from certain men, that women’s hockey became a “non-contact” sport by the mid-1920s. Bodychecking was henceforth not allowed in women’s hockey. It still isn’t. In some ways the construction of the “fragile” woman remains. Nevertheless, the LOHA hooks up with the Women’s Amateur Athletic Federation in 1925 and this really helped to legitimize women’s hockey, at least for the players involved.

Preston Rivulettes
Perhaps the most famous women’s team in pre-Olympic hockey, the Preston Rivulettes lost only twice and tied only three times in 350 games between 1930 and 1940. Preston won the Ontario title every year. The problem was that over time, no one wanted to join a league that was a one-horse race. Teams didn’t want to lose to the Rivulettes. And in no small way, the team’s success actually ended up hurting the LOHA.

Hilda Ranscombe
Ranscombe was by far the leading scorer and the most dominating player of her era and remains one of the best female players of all-time.

Elizabeth Graham
University of Queens’ Elizabeth Graham became the first goaltender ever to regularly wear a mask in ice hockey in 1927. There is a Heritage commercial for Jacques Plante donning the mask for the first time, which changed the course of NHL history. This was 32 years after Elizabeth Graham had regularly worn one.

Even after bodychecking was forbidden, violence remained in the women’s game too. You’ll remember that earlier we discussed how violence helped sell the game of hockey? Well almost the exact opposite was true in the women’s game. Fights, aggressive play and injury were common within the women’s game, but even though these women players were emulating their male counterparts, they drew criticism for doing so, and not just from males, but also from females involved with the game. Witness Alexandrine Gibb (remember she was a sportswriter for the Toronto Star and very influential in the women’s game), who believed:

As you can see, this behaviour went against the nation’s societal norms. It was “unladylike” and ran contrary to Victorian notions of the “female body”. For Canadian society, it was perfectly all right for guys to kick the crap out of each other on a Saturday night and have it broadcast it to a national audience. It would not be the same for women.  

Nevertheless, women resisted the construction of the ideal “female body” and the ideal “female athlete” simply by playing the game. By resisting the construction, they challenged male-dominated hockey culture. And women’s hockey is still doing just that.

Hockey has been a contested space where concepts of gender have been imagined and reimagined. Professor Colin D. Howell argued:

“…sport is about many things: about our relationship with nature and animals, about how we define respectability, about how we build allegiance to community and nation, about money and profit, and about how society creates audiences and constructs heroes…At its most basic level, however, sport is about the body: how it is used, how it imagined, how it is watched, and how it is disciplined to meet the requirements of living or to conform to social expectations.”¹

Despite the inroads that women’s hockey began to make over the course of the twentieth century, it still faced tremendous challenges. Even the simple act of securing ice time was an issue. And not just for women’s pick-up games, but for the senior game itself. The Preston Rivulettes’ semi-finals against Cobalt in 1938, for example, got bumped for the OHA’s intermediate “A” Section semi-finals. In other words, even in Preston, where the most famous women’s team of all-time were playing, preferential treatment was given to the men’s clubs.

Women hockey players have suffered from a century of excuses from hockey culture and the nation at large. At first, it was thought that playing hockey was far too much to bear for the “frail woman” and “weaker sex”. Canadian society had an idea of what the female body should be, and a hockey player wasn’t it. In the Depression era, societal norms were such that there was hostility to women in non-traditional roles (wives/mothers) and that working and sporting should be left to the males. Also, the rise in the importance weighted to professional hockey rather took the wind out of the women’s game in terms of media and radio coverage. This inhibited the growth of a mythology around the women’s game. It simply couldn’t compete with Foster Hewitt and the Leafs, the Kid Line, the Rocket, Gordie Howe, and so on.

In the 1950s, there was a call to return to this ideal domesticity. This was after the war, during which women had taken the jobs of men to help with the war effort. With the men now back home, there was a reversal to traditional roles throughout Canadian society. This is sometimes referred to as the “father knows best” era.

It was really not until the Second Wave of Feminism during the 1960s and 1970s, that women’s hockey began to establish itself on terra firma and created a space for not only the possibility of a new “female body”, but also for new female hockey heroes and unprecedented interest in the women’s game. In particular, the 1972 Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, made a number of recommendations relating to women’s sport which had been ridiculously underfunded when compared to male athletics. This was, finally, real change.

1972 Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women

The Report changes funding regulations and gives women’s sports – including hockey – a fighting chance.

1970s and The OWHA

From the late 1970s onward, the Ontario Women’s Hockey Association (OWHA) created a new space for female hockey stars including Angela James. James dominated the OWHA and was the league’s MVP six times.

1990 World Championship

The World Championship for women’s ice hockey was inaugurated in 1990 and with it the modern women’s game was born.

Olympics

The big jump comes in 1998 at the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. Here, women’s ice hockey is included as an official Olympic sport. Twelve years later, and nearly 40 years after the Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, 10.3 million people watched the Women’s Olympic Gold Medal Game between Canada and the US in 2010.

Hockey Hall Of Fame

In 2010, Canada’s Angela James and American Cammi Granato became the first female inductees to the Hockey Hall of Fame. The Hall’s brotherhood had to make way for a sisterhood. It was about time!

A League of Their Own

In the summer of 2023, after years of struggling in different leagues and labouring within often ad hoc organizations, it was announced that the best female players in the world would now have one, unified professional league to compete in.

Unit 8:

After the Second World War, two Superpowers, each with their own political ideology became engaged and entrenched in a prolonged “Cold War”. Here, the Soviet Union wanted to demonstrate to the world that communism was the best ideology. The United States of America – and much of the western world – believed capitalism to be the best political ideology. What ensued from the 1950s right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 would prove to be a very tense time for the world. There was a very real threat of nuclear war.

With this in mind, Canada lined-up culturally and ideologically with its neighbour to the south, the United States. Canada and the United States worked in concert to defend against a possible nuclear missile attack from the USSR. During the 1950s, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, commonly known as NORAD, began to put defence mechanisms in place. The Distant Early Warning Line (the so-called DEW Line) was established in Canada’s north as to warn of Soviet activities. It was during this very tense and scary time in world affairs that one of the most important hockey series in history took place.

Diplomats at the Canadian Embassy in Moscow begin to propose some friendly hockey games against their Soviet counterparts. Here, the “Cold War” atmosphere – at least among the diplomats – began to thaw a little. Things began to accelerate when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau became the first North American leader to visit the Soviet Union. In essence, Trudeau wanted to show that Canada could act independently of the USA. He was greatly criticized for this in some circles. Regardless, Trudeau became “chummy” with the likes of Castro and Kosygin. This relationship certainly helped the Summit Series to materialize. 

Eventually, Soviet and Canadian diplomats and those in the two nations’ hockey hierarchies settled on a friendly 8-game series. The Summit Series was scheduled for September 1972. Four games were to be played in Canada while the remaining four would be played in the Soviet Union.

Most Canadians considered the Summit Series to be a mismatch that heavily favoured Team Canada. After visiting Moscow, NHL scouts foolishly assured Canadian hockey officials that the Soviet amateurs would not pose a serious threat. Despite success at several international tournaments, including ones where Canadian amateur teams were involved, the Soviets had still yet to prove their worth against the professional stars of the NHL who were, of course, the best Canada had to offer.

For their part, the Soviets had been winning in the Olympics and the World Championships, but never against Canada’s best players who were in the NHL. The Soviets desperately wanted to play the NHLers to prove that they were the world’s hockey super power. Still, no one expected them to beat Canada.

The Soviets’ hockey technique was as creative as it was foreign to the Canadians. Far more compelling than the foreign technique, however, were facts apparent to even the most casual hockey fan: the Soviets skated faster and were in superior condition than the Canadians. At the end of 60 minutes of the first game, the ‘Red Machine’ had decidedly taken game one by a score of 7–3. Canadians were in a state of disbelief. The loss was a national disaster for Canada.

The Summit Series became a politically charged event that had far broader ramifications than just the outcome of a hockey game: it was communism v. capitalism, a “Cold War” on ice. The Soviets’ roster was selected from that nation’s elite league and the players were enjoined by the state to demonstrate the superior socialist system to the world through their hockey greatness. Vladislav Tretiak, the brilliant Soviet goalkeeper, remembered:

Much of the diversity between the two national teams had been directly influenced by existing political ideologies. The distinct anonymity of the Soviet players reflected the socialist system: there were no stars, only the team. The ‘individual’ effort so prevalent in the Canadian game was sublimated in Soviet hockey to such an extent that current Russian great Sergei Fedorov dubbed the Soviet players of this era ‘hockey robots’.

By the end of game four, Canadians finally began to admit to themselves that their claim to hockey supremacy was in serious jeopardy. In Toronto, Team Canada had defeated the Russians 4–1 in game two, a victory that temporarily restored the confidence of the nation. But this confidence was soon shattered in games three and four. A 4–4 tie in Winnipeg saw the Canadians blow a two-goal lead, but it was much worse in Vancouver, where the Russians won 5–3, a score that flattered Team Canada, who were booed off the ice.

It was at this nadir that the Canadian goal-scoring ace, Phil Esposito, changed the course of the series when he challenged the Canadian public. After the game, the crestfallen Esposito addressed the country on live television:

The speech not only fired up his teammates, but Canadians across the nation began to consider the difficult conflict ahead. In 14 days, some 3,000 loyal Canadian supporters travelled to Moscow to watch the remaining four games at the Luzhniki Sports Palace. The rest of Canada watched the games via satellite and rallied around their team.

The intensity grew with every game in Moscow. Although the Soviets avoided recognising their own stars, the Canadian coaching staff had no trouble in identifying the stand-out players, and struggled to find a way to shut down the scoring prowess of one player in particular: the sensational Valery Kharlamov. Coach John Fergusson issued a private challenge to centre Bobby Clarke, asking him to break Kharlamov’s ankle. Clarke agreed. Years later Clarke unabashedly said of his actions, “I kinda hunted him down and I gave him a whack across the ankle … I was never ashamed of doing it.” Kharlamov was rendered much less effective for the remainder of the series. Some Canadian players, however, did not think Clarke’s work was ‘a great thing to do’. Paul Henderson confessed in a radio interview that he had been disappointed by Clarke’s conduct. Following the Clarke episode, the series, which had already been a chippy affair, became especially violent.

The ‘war’ had come down to the eighth and final game. Canada had to win, as a draw would have been enough for the Soviets to claim victory. Public interest in the game in both countries was enormous. In Canada, school gymnasiums were transformed into cinemas and thousands of students and teachers gathered around black and white televisions to watch. Urban centres across both countries became ghost towns as factories and offices countries shut down for the final game.

Author Lawrence Martin confirmed that ‘large numbers of Soviet workers did not report to their jobs that day. The game was as big an event in the Russian republic of the Soviet Union as it was in Canada.’

In a country that had a population of only 21 million in 1972, more than 15 million Canadians tuned in to watch game eight. In fact, the Series comes down to the final 34 seconds of the eighth and final game, when Foster Hewitt made that most famous call:

Game 8 is widely considered to be the most important hockey game ever played. Paul Henderson’s goal is ranked fifth place between Vimy Ridge (fourth) and Canada in the Second World War (sixth) in the Dominion Institute’s Top Ten Greatest Events in Canadian History.

As Kelly Hewson attested, Henderson’s goal is a “deeply mythologized element of Canada’s construction of its nationhood.” The nation stood still on 27 September 1972. The nation held its collective breath and when it finally exhaled, Canada was victorious. It has been described as our “JFK moment”. As author Michael McKinley confirmed:

Just as those Americans who were alive at the time remember where they were when JFK was assassinated, so too do Canadians remember where they were when Henderson scored with 34 seconds left.   

Does the mythology of this game, however, hide some of the “truth” of the series? For instance, Canadians didn’t think the USSR had a chance to win, and yet they came within 34 seconds of doing just that! Also, we found that the Soviets were highly skilled and had opened up the game in new ways that confounded the Canadian players when they first saw them. There was also the brutality of the series: Bobby Clarke’s infamous breaking of Valery Kharlamov’s ankle with a merciless slash, or Phil Esposito’s declaration that he would have killed to win the series. Legendary Soviet coach Anatoly Tarasov described the passion of their adversaries thusly: “The Canadians battled with the ferocity and intensity of a cornered animal.”

The series had profound effects on the game of hockey. It was never the same. The fear that the series had spawned in the heart of Canadian hockey brought forth an overhaul of the national system. Fortunately for Canada, the arrogance that had defined the leading minds of Canadian hockey had been forever deflated in September 1972. Following the series, Canadian hockey experts embraced the Soviet approach to training and adopted many of the Russians’ on-ice strategies. Incessant skating drills, year-round fitness training, wingers crossing over to the other side if they chose to, defencemen taking a look and turning around to start a new rush: these were all Soviet techniques and approaches that were adopted by the Canadians after the series. They are so ubiquitous in hockey games now, that you’d hardly notice them. But these approaches were brand new to Canada in 1972. With this in mind, it might be argued that the fusion of these two hockey cultures would, over time, make the winner of the Summit Series an even stronger hockey nation.

English Professor Brian Kennedy spoke to just how important the Summit Series was to even the most casual hockey fan living in Canada in 1972:

“By quite unexpectedly threatening Canadians’ presumed mastery over the sport of hockey, the Russians created a situation that came to have lasting symbolic value. Thus, it might be argued that the events of September 1972 helped to create the Canada of today through giving a generation of people a touchstone moment with which to mark their participation in a shared culture. Perhaps this is why the series is still commemorated both in popular culture – through its continued mention during hockey commentary, in casual conversation, and through the production of kitsch – and in popular history.”¹

Kennedy also argued persuasively that the series might not be the same cultural touchstone for Canadians today. Remember, the population of Canada in 1972 was only 21.8 million. In 2023, Canada surpassed the 40 million mark.

Unit 9:

• As you know, when the nation was in its infancy, the new, modern game of hockey remained the exclusive preserve of white males from the upper echelons

• Not only were non-whites discouraged from playing the game for economic reasons (it was too expensive then and some would argue convincingly that it's too expensive to play now!), but in some cases they were kept out of participating in hockey on the basis of race

• The “Myth of the Vanishing Indian” was being constructed across North America during the nineteenth century. Many people actually believed that Indigenous populations across Canada and the United States would slowly die out or be completely assimilated into the dominant Euro-Canadian society

• Homosexuality was a criminal offense in Canada until 1969

• Innovations in the second half of the twentieth century such as Para Hockey and Blind Hockey, would open up the game to many more people who had hitherto been shut out of the game 

The Colored Hockey League

The Colored Hockey League operated in the Maritimes from 1895 through to the 1930s. When most hockey leagues across the country during this period kept non-whites out, the Colored Hockey League gave black athletes an opportunity to play the game. 

The league was an admixture of sport and faith as the Baptist Church played a central role in the lives of the players and organizers of the league. Henry Sylvester Williams and James Borden formed the league with an eye to using hockey as a way of advancing the lives of Black Canadians. It was also hoped that the game might attract families back to the church. The league included, among others, the Africville Sea-Sides, the Dartmouth Jubilees, the Halifax Eurekas and the Halifax Stanley. The league’s official rule book was the Bible.

The End for Africville
Interest in the CHL from Nova Scotians in general was actually strong (championship games would often attract 1,000 spectators of different races). This all changed when the railways expanded their services into Halifax. As a result of the railway expansion, the Black community of Africville suffered. Land was annexed from Black Nova Scotians to make way for the new train routes. An ugly and racist legal battle ensued and soon, interest in the Colored Hockey League waned. Newspapers – pressured as they had been from government officials – stopped covering the league. The CHL nevertheless managed to operate right into the Depression era.     

Legacy
The Colored Hockey League was an important part of hockey’s early history. The league predated the famous Negro Baseball League and even the NHL! Importantly, it afforded a space for Black Canadians to take part in the national pastime when there were no other opportunities.

There was an unwritten – and sometimes written – code for most sports in Canada during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and that was that non-whites were not be permitted to play with whites. There were some exceptions made for boxing and for exhibition matches for some sports such as lacrosse where white teams would play Indigenous ones. Generally speaking, though, Blacks did not participate with white athletes in a meaningful way until well after the First World War. And even after that, participation was sparing.

For hockey – excepting the Colored Hockey League of course – there were a few examples of Black players who managed to play in an organized league. In 1899, William “Hipple” Galloway, who would be better known as a baseball player, played hockey for a team based out of Woodstock in the Central Ontario Hockey Association. Later, in 1916, Fred “Bud” Kelly suited up for Frank Selke’s 118 Battalion in the Ontario Hockey League. Kelly was, according to Selke: “the best Negro hockey player I ever saw.” Then there was Sam Agee from Ontario, who travelled north to star with the Renzoni Hockey Team in Dawson City, Yukon. In 1910, Agee, considered the first Black player to play in Canada’s north, led his team to victory in the Dawson City Hockey League Championship.
 
Herb Carnegie
Arguably the best Black hockey player never to play in the NHL, however, was Herb Carnegie. Born in Toronto and off of Jamaican descent, Carnegie played with the Buffalo Ankerites during the 1940s where he was part of the Black Aces Line. The line included Herb’s brother Ossie and another Black Canadian from the Maritimes, Manny McIntyre. Carnegie was named the most valuable player in the Quebec Provincial League for three consecutive seasons from 1946-1948. Herb tried out for the New York Rangers in 1948 and was offered a contract to play for the Rangers’ farm team. Herb decided to stay in the Quebec league where he made more money. Carnegie later joined the Quebec Aces of the QSHL where he starred alongside future Montreal Canadiens legend Jean Beliveau. Most contemporaries and historians who saw Carnegie play confirm that the only reason he never played in the NHL was because of his race.

Willie O’Ree
Willie O’Ree is considered to be hockey’s own Jackie Robinson for breaking the game’s colour barrier. While Taffy Abel and Larry Kwong certainly came before him, O’Ree was the first Black player to make it in the NHL. O’Ree was called up to the Boston Bruins on 18 January 1958 where he made his debut against the Montreal Canadiens. O’Ree would play a total of 45 NHL games – all with the Bruins – with the last one coming in the 1960-61 season. It would be another 13 years before another Black man, Michael Marson, would play in the NHL as a Washington Capital (though Alton White played in the WHA in 1972).

Since then, several Black hockey players have become household names across the country and have led their respective teams in many ways:

• Tony McKegney had a very solid NHL career. McKegney, from Sarnia, Ontario, scored 320 goals (including one 40-goal season in 1987-88 with the St. Louis Blues), and registered 639 points over 912 regular season games in the NHL. 

• Grant Fuhr became the first Black goalie in the NHL and the first Black player to win a Stanley Cup when he helped the Edmonton Oilers to victory in 1984. Fuhr would collect five Stanley Cup rings during his career. The six-time NHL All-Star became the first Black player ever to be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.

• Jarome Iginla became the first Black captain in NHL history in 2003. The five-time NHL All-Star remains the Calgary Flames’ all-time leader in goals, points and games played. It was Iginla who assisted Sydney Crosby’s “Golden Goal” at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver to win the Gold Medal for Canada. In 2020, Jarome Iginla was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.

• Angela James starred in the Central Ontario Women’s Hockey League for several years during the 1990s. James represented Team Canada several times registering 34 points in 20 games over four women’s world championships. In 2008, James, alongside American Cammi Granato, became the first women to be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.

The Canadian Government and Indigenous People in the Nineteenth Century

Government legislation such as The Gradual Civilization Act (1857) and The Indian Act (1876) were measures aimed at – it was thought at the time – “civilizing” the Indigenous peoples of Canada. Christian organizations across Canada with the assistance of government funding began to develop residential “schools” as a means of converting, “civilizing,” and assimilating Indigenous people into Euro-Canadian society. Canada’s first Prime Minister Sir John A. MacDonald hoped that these initiatives would “take the Indian out of the child.”

Residential Schools

We now know that the residential “school” system was tantamount to a cultural, and, for thousands of young people, actual genocide. When Indigenous children arrived at these institutions, their hair was cut, they were given uniforms, and were compelled to speak only English or French. As a result, many forgot their own language. Many of these children were also malnourished and lived in overcrowded rooms. Those overseeing the children were paid poorly, were often unqualified, and some, as we know now, were sexual predators. The “students” spent half the day in-class and the rest of the day worked for the “school”. In reality, these institutions were more like child-labour camps than schools. Despite this, hockey would, for some young people, offer a respite from the horrors of these institutions. As Richard Wagamese’s award-winning novel Indian Horse shows, many young Indigenous children loved and in many ways needed hockey to help them survive the Residential "School" system.

Despite many obstacles, some Indigenous players were able to beat the odds and play top-tier hockey. It was, unsurprisingly, a slow process that took many decades. Even then, only a very few Indigenous players made it to the top levels of the game. The Métis player Antoine-Blanc "Tony" Gingras, for example, won two 2 Stanley Cups with the Winnipeg Victorias in 1901 and 1902. Likewise, Paul Oronhyatekha Jacobs, from the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, played one game in the NHL in 1918 with the Toronto Arenas. The first Indigenous player to crack an NHL lineup and to play regularly, however, actually hid his indigenous roots.

Clarence “Taffy” Abel 
In an effort to escape being sent to Residential “School” in 1905, Clarence “Taffy” Abel was able to “pass” as white. As a result, Abel was able to enjoy a life in hockey: captaining the US Team in the 1924 Winter Olympics, and, surreptitiously, breaking the NHL’s unwritten colour barrier in 1926 when he signed with the New York Rangers. Abel did not disclose his Indigenous heritage until 1939 when his Ojibwe mother passed away, some four years after he had retired from the NHL as a Chicago Blackhawk. Abel won Stanley Cups in 1928 and 1934.

A Long and Narrow Way

It took a long time for other Indigenous players to crack the lineups of the NHL. Indeed, over the course of a couple of decades, it appears that there were only a couple of Indigenous players to skate in the big league: Henry “Buddy” Maracle played eleven games for the New York Rangers in the 1930-31 season; later, during the 1953-54 season, Fred Sasakamoose became the first residential school survivor to play in the NHL when he joined the Chicago Black Hawks for eleven games. Still, Indigenous players, like other non-European-Canadians, were often kept out of the game for a variety of reasons including racism (Remember, First Nations people were only granted the right to vote in 1960! That’s really not that long ago in terms of history).

Making their Mark

Happily, more and more Indigenous players have been able to summit the mountain and shine in the world’s most important ice hockey league. Here are a few important examples:

• George Armstrong (Kanien'keha:ka [Algonquin]) A seven-time NHLAll-Star, George Armstrong spent all of his 21 seasons with the Toronto Maple Leafs. Armstrong remains the longest serving captain in Toronto Maple Leafs’ history (1957-1969). George led Toronto to four Stanley Cups during the 1960s.

• Pierre Pilote (Innu) As a member of the Chicago Black Hawks, Pierre Pilote was an eight-time NHL All-Star. Pilote won the Stanley Cup with the Black Hawks in 1961. From 1963 through 1965, Pilote won three consecutive James Norris Memorial Trophies as the NHL’s best defenceman.

• Reggie Leach (Ojibwe) As a member of the Philadelphia Flyers, Reggie Leach led the NHL with 61 goals in the 1975-76 season. In 1976, Leach became the first skater (non-goalie) from a losing team to win the Conn Smythe Trophy as the most valuable player in the playoffs.

• Bryan Trottier (Métis) In 1975, Bryan Trottier won the Calder Memorial Trophy as the NHL’s best rookie as a member of the New York Islanders. In 1979, Trottier won the Art Ross Trophy as the league’s leading point-getter (134 pts). Bryan helped take the Islanders to four consecutive Stanley Cup victories (1980-1983), and won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the MVP of the playoffs in 1980.

• Carey Price (Ulkatcho) Carey Price is arguably one of the best goaltenders of the twenty-first century. Price has won a lot of hardware during his career as a netminder for the Montreal Canadiens, including the Vezina Trophy as the NHL’s best goaltender, the William M. Jennings Trophy for fewest goals allowed by a goaltender, the Hart Memorial Trophy for being the MVP of the NHL and the NHL Players’ Association’s Ted Lindsay Award as the league’s best player.

Hockey in Canada and in the NHL is still a predominantly white sport. This, however, is slowly changing. The 2021-22 NHL season saw the highest number of non-white players in a single season to date, with 55 players who identified as Black, Asian, Latino, Middle Eastern, and/or Indigenous. Yet these players were still very much in the minority, making up less than 5% of the total number of players. In academic scholarship and journalism, Black and Indigenous players have recently begun to gain more coverage in hopes of presenting a more diverse picture of the sport.

Larry Kwong
While Willie O’Ree and Fred Sasakamoose are deservedly recognized as ground breakers in hockey, Chinese Canadian player Larry Kwong is often overlooked for his historic contribution to the sport. When Kwong came onto the ice for the New York Rangers on March 13, 1948, he became the first Asian to play in the NHL, only one year after Jackie Robinson had broke into major league baseball, and five years before Sasakamoose and ten years before O’Ree would break barriers of their own. But despite being the top scorer for the New York Rovers, the Rangers’ minor league team, that single shift would be Kwong’s only opportunity to play in the NHL. After seeing other players from the Rovers get promoted ahead of him, Kwong requested to leave feeling he would never get substantial NHL ice time despite his excellent record.

Kwong spent the rest of his playing career in senior hockey leagues racking up awards in Quebec and England, often outscoring players who would go on to become NHL greats. As a coach in Europe, he would continue to break barriers by becoming the first person of Chinese descent to coach a professional hockey team when he became a player-coach of HC Ambrì-Piotta in Switzerland. Despite these accomplishments and his impact on the game, Kwong has not been inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, although there have been recent campaigns to have him included as a builder of the sport.

A Multicultural Nation, a Multicultural National Sport?
Besides Black and Indigenous players, the NHL increasingly has players of Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latino descent, with the vast majority coming from Canada. Of non-white players who have played throughout the NHL’s history, approximately 74% were or are Canadian. Whether this statistic is simply representative of Canada’s dominance in producing top-level hockey players that would guarantee that some Canadian players of colour would eventually make it to the NHL, an indication of Canada’s particular multiculturalism as represented through its national sport, or the intersection of the two is not easily answered. What is not in question, however, is the impact many of these players have had, a few of whom are listed below, in making the sport more inclusive while also creating history themselves.

• 1958: Canadian John Hanna would become the first player of Lebanese descent in the NHL

• 1989: Robin Bawa would become the first Punjabi Canadian, and first person of Indian descent
  to play in the NHL

• 1990: Korean Canadian Jim Paek would become the first Korean-born player in the NHL. One
  year later, when he won the Stanley Cup with the Pittsburgh Penguins, he would be the first
  Asian player with his name on the cup, a feat he would repeat again in 1992. His Penguins jersey
  now hangs in the Hockey Hall of Fame

• 2022: Lebanese Canadian player Nazem Kadri became the first Muslim player in history to hoist
  the Stanley Cup when he won it with the Colorado Avalanche

Hockey Night in Canada: Punjabi Edition
Diverse representation in hockey is not just changing on the ice, but in media and fan representation as well. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the weekly Saturday-night broadcast of Hockey Night in Canada: Punjabi Edition on OMNI television. The concept first started in 2008 as part of a CBC experiment with broadcasting games in multiple languages (Punjabi, Mandarin, Cantonese, Italian, and Inukitut) leading up to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. As a result, Harnarayan Singh would end up calling the first game of the 2008 Stanley Cup final, and Hockey Night Punjabi would take its first steps, eventually being the only one of the language programs to survive. But it would take the initiative of Singh, co-announcer Bhupinder Hundal, and producer Nathen Sekhon to make it a success by bringing it to OMNI and, most importantly, acquiring an old Sportsnet studio that would allow HNIC Punjabi to look like the Hockey Night in Canada all Canadians would recognize.

The success of Hockey Night Punjabi is perhaps the clearest demonstration of the changing understanding of who a hockey fan is in this county, decentring the whiteness and English/French duality that has dominated Canadian hockey media for much of its history. And its own commitment to showcase announcers that represent the range of diversity within the Punjabi-speaking community, make Hockey Night in Canada: Punjabi Edition leaders in the movement that Hockey is for Everyone.

2SLGBTQ+ Players and Levels of Acceptance

Hockey’s long history of designating an aggressive masculinity as central to the sport has had a profound impact on those players and fans who may not fit into this definition. As previously discussed, the concept of hockey as a male domain resulted in women’s exclusion from the game for much of hockey’s history. Yet the hyper-masculine locker room culture of hockey has also resulted in many members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community feeling unwelcome in the sport. In the past twenty years, however, this has begun to change as queer athletes and fans have made room for themselves in hockey, unwilling to hide who they are just to enjoy their national sport. 

Men’s Hockey

In men’s hockey, there has never been an openly gay player in the NHL or on Team Canada. The predominance of gay slurs in locker room culture, equating being gay with weakness, has been identified as a key factor in prohibiting gay players from feeling like they would be accepted. Over the past 15 years, however, this has slowly begun to change thanks to the actions of players who have and continue to advocate for a change in hockey culture. 

In 2009, when Canadian Brendan Burke, son of former Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Brian Burke, came out to his hockey teammates at the Miami University, it was leaked to ESPN. After the leak, Brendan and his father appeared on TSN to discuss being gay in hockey and the need for support of gay hockey players not just in college but at all levels of the sport. After Brendan’s death in a car accident in 2010, his brother Patrick co-founded the You Can Play Project in 2012, partnering with the NHL in 2013 to help end homophobia in professional sport.

In 2010 Chicago Blackhawks player Brent Sopel would bring the Stanley Cup to Chicago’s Pride Parade, acknowledging the hockey fans in the 2SLGBTQ+ community. 

In 2016, Brock McGillis, a former goaltender in the Ontario Hockey League and semi-pro hockey in Europe, would be the first professional player to come out as gay. In an online essay, he specifically called out hockey’s hyper-masculine homophobia and dressing room culture as reasons why he waited until retiring to come out. 

In July 2021, Luke Prokop became the first openly gay player currently under contract to an NHL team. Selected by the Nashville Predators in the 2020 draft, Prokop would come out six months later and has since become the first openly gay player in the Western Hockey League, the first to play in the Memorial Cup, and is on his way to becoming the first out player in the NHL. 

Despite these advancements, there have been recent setbacks within professional men’s hockey. NHL Pride nights, in which teams wear Pride jerseys during warmups, both brought awareness to 2SLGBTQ+ issues as well as creating an impression that queer fans were an accepted part of the hockey community. Pride nights have been part of the NHL since 2013, but in 2023, for the first time, seven players - including James Reimer and Eric and Mark Staal - refused to wear the jerseys, and three teams who had previously featured them, chose not to include rainbow jerseys in their warmups. As a result, the NHL caved and have done away with special jerseys altogether for the 2023-2024 season. While the league says this is to avoid controversy, it also effectively erases one of the few visible symbols of 2SLGBTQ+ acceptance in professional men’s hockey.

Women’s Hockey

Without the burden of hyper-masculine locker rooms, 2SLGBTQ+ players have found greater acceptance in women’s hockey, with players openly coming out much earlier than men’s hockey. Star player Angela James was out through her entire playing career, and in 2010 became the first openly gay player to be inducted into Hockey Hall of Fame. The women’s Olympic hockey team, perhaps the most elite level of women’s hockey in Canada, has long been a place of acceptance of queer athletes. In 2022, it would become “the gayest Winter Olympic team of all time” with seven openly queer players on the roster.

Trans athletes, both women and men, have found acceptance in women’s hockey leagues as well. Harrison Browne played professional hockey in the National Women’s Hockey League from 2015-2018. In the middle of his professional career, he came out as a transgender man in 2016, waiting to hormonally transition until after he retired in 2018 to avoid anti-doping regulations.

After quitting hockey in her teens because she didn’t feel comfortable in the locker room culture, Jessica Platt started playing hockey again after her transition to a woman in 2012. She played in the Canadian Women’s Hockey League beginning in 2016, and with the league’s support, came out as transgender in 2018 while still playing for the Toronto Furies.

Safe Hockey Spaces: 2SLGBTQ+ Hockey Teams, Leagues, and Competitions

Not always willing to deal with the toxicity of the dressing room or having to conform to the gender binary of sport, many 2SLGBTQ+ players find it safer and preferable to play in queer leagues. 2SLGBTQ+ teams and leagues, such as the Cutting Edges Club out of Vancouver, the Edmonton Rage, les Dragons de Montréal, the Toronto Gay Hockey Association (TGHA), and Queer Hockey Nova Scotia, can be found across Canada, particularly in larger cities. The oldest ones date back to the early 1990s, while others are just a couple of years old. 

Along with teams and leagues, comes the chance to compete. While still uncommon, there are a few tournaments in Canada’s queer hockey scene. The oldest and largest Canadian tournament for 2SLGBTQ+ players is the Canada Cup, co-founded by the TGHA and les Dragons de Montréal. Beginning in 1993 as a friendly match between the two leagues, it now alternates between the two cities, hosts 18 teams from across North America, and has been held nearly every Thanksgiving weekend since that first game. In 2023 two new tournaments were founded. In June, Toronto held its inaugural Pride Hockey Tournament for city’s queer and trans players. In July, Queer Hockey Nova Scotia hosted Halifax’s very first queer hockey tournament with six teams from Canada and the US competing for the Halifax Pride Cup.

The Disabled and Hockey

The term "Hockey is for Everybody" is not just for abled-body people but for all athletes and fans of the sport. Canada has been a world leader in creating and dominating different disciplines of disabled hockey. But while some advances have certainly been made, there are still many athletes who wish to participate but find hockey for people with disabilities underfunded and under supported by Hockey Canada.

Para/Sledge/Sled Ice Hockey

Perhaps the most recognized form of disabled hockey is Para ice hockey also known as Sled or Sledge hockey. Invented in Sweden in the 1960s, Para hockey was designed for athletes with physical impairments to the lower half of their bodies. Players move around the ice sitting on a bladed sledge and use two sticks to play: one for shooting, and another with a spiked end for pushing. It became a Paralympic Winter sport in 1994, and, except for 2002 and 2010, Canada has won medals at every Games, including gold in 2006. 

Within this sport there are, however, familiar themes of a lack of representation and support for women in hockey. At the international level, Para hockey has been a mixed event since 2010, but Canada has never chosen a woman to be a part of the Paralympic team, and only added its first female player, Raphaelle Tousignant, for an international competition in 2023. And while the men’s national Para hockey team has been a part of Hockey Canada since 2003, the Canadian women’s national team is not and, due to a lack of funding, many female players must fundraise or pay to participate. 

Standing/Amputee Hockey

Standing/Amputee Hockey was first created as part of a US-Russian exhibition match for amputee skaters at the World Ice Hockey Championship in 2000. The sport is played upright and follows standard hockey rules but allows for players with amputations or physical impairments to use a prosthesis to control the stick or to skate. The Canadian Amputee Hockey Committee was created in 2001 to promote the sport for Canadian players and Canada would win six straight International Standing Amputee Hockey Federation (ISIHF) World Championships from 2003-2012. Yet, unlike Para ice hockey, Standing/Amputee hockey is not a Paralympic sport or a part of Hockey Canada.

Blind Hockey

A uniquely Canadian sport, Blind hockey was invented in 1936 in Brantford, Ontario at a children’s school for the blind and played exclusively in Canada for more than 70 years. It came into its own as a sport in 1972 when the Toronto Ice Owls Blind Hockey Team was founded. The Canadian Blind Hockey Association was created in 2009. The sport was first played in the US in 2014, and currently Canada and the US are the only countries with national teams. To play, recreational players must be visually impaired, but competitive-level players must be classified as legally blind. 

Blind hockey has some modifications to make the game accessible and safe for blind players. The puck in Blind hockey is larger than a standard puck, made of hollow steel, and contains ball bearings which rattle when it moves allowing players to track it. Goaltenders must be fully blind or blindfolded and play in front of net one foot shorter than a standard net. No other players are allowed inside the crease to protect the goalie’s safety, and white jerseys are not permitted as they are hard to distinguish from the boards and the ice. Blind hockey also contains a unique rule, called the Pass Rule, which dictates a team must complete a minimum of one pass after they cross the offensive blue line before they can score. Once a team has done so, the referee sounds a whistle to alert all players that the pass has been completed. 

Deaf Hockey

Deaf hockey, for Deaf or hard of hearing individuals, originated quite early in Canada. Records of hockey teams at Deaf schools can be found as early as 1895 in Montreal and 1907 in Manitoba. The rules are the same as standard hockey, and two Deaf players, Jack Ulrich and Jim Kyte, both Canadians, have played in professional hockey leagues. Ulrich played in the Pacific Coast Hockey Association and the National Hockey Association from 1912-1916. Kyte remains the only legally deaf player to play in the NHL, where he played 598 games from 1982-1997.

Currently, men’s and women’s Deaf hockey both fall under the Canadian Deaf Sports Association, which was founded in 1959. The Canadian Deaf Ice Hockey Federation was founded in 1982, and the national men’s team in 1986. Eligible players must have a hearing loss of 55 decibels or more and are not allowed to wear hearing aids while playing. The only modification in Deaf hockey is the use of strobe lights to indicate a stoppage in play. 

While Canada has been a leader in making hockey accessible to all who wish to play, some athletes feel that Hockey Canada can do better when it comes to supporting Deaf, Blind, and Amputee hockey, in the same way it does for Para hockey. Currently Hockey Canada counts a player’s prothesis as an equipment modification, excluding players who need it from playing outside of amputee leagues. Financial support for these teams is also quite low, leaving Canadian players to fund their own way to international competitions to represent their country in its national sport.

Unit 10:

• Like so many other countries, Canada has taken its place in an increasingly global market

• Canada and the US have become something of a “continental monoculture”, indistinguishable from each other in many ways

• Technological advances and the opening of new markets greatly affects hockey and its revenue streams

Big City Game
As you know, civic pride and boosterism does not always spell success. As NHL teams have come to rely more and more on a variety of revenue streams outside of the take at the gate (people who actually buy tickets to see the game), local enthusiasm for a hockey team only goes so far. The Ottawa Senators of the 1930s simply could not compete with the other franchises of the day. What followed after Ottawa and the New York Americans’ exit from the NHL was a quarter-century of relative stability in the NHL: the so-called “original six” era. But this meant – at least to many people – that only “big” cities such as New York and Chicago could sustain a hockey franchise. This was not new. You will recall that the same thing happened in the 1910s and 1920s when the NHL was monopolizing hockey talent and building big new ice palaces to house their teams. This meant that a team like the Kenora Thistles could never challenge for the Stanley Cup again.

Has the same thing happened again? Could a NHL team thrive in a place like Saskatoon? Sure, the prairies are hockey-crazy, but the market is even smaller than Winnipeg (which is one of the league’s smallest markets). 

Revenue Streams
Indeed, NHL teams can no longer simply rely on proceeds from the gate. Even if a team sold-out every game, it wouldn’t matter if they couldn’t generate revenue streams from other sources. These sources include:

•    Television and Radio Broadcast Rights
•    Corporate Partnerships and Sponsorships
•    Municipal and Regional Governmental support (especially in building new facilities)

These auxiliary revenue streams are crucial to a team and the league’s success so that they can off-set the huge costs of running a NHL franchise, including:

•    Enormous player salaries
•    Promotional campaigns, materials and sundry
•    Updating and, in some cases, erecting new facilities that cost hundreds of millions of dollars

This income model for modern sports franchises in North America has, as you can see, changed dramatically over time. With national and regional cable television contracts and corporate partnerships with franchises (e.g., both Bell and Rogers sharing a significant in MLSE; Rogers Sportsnet buying Hockey Night in Canada, etc…), the business model for the NHL makes it very difficult indeed for smaller markets to consider having a franchise. It also requires a “salary cap” so that existing smaller market franchises can remain healthy and at least somewhat competitive.

Moreover, technology has opened up the hockey market even further. Teams are no longer just seeking  regional or even national support (e.g., the Blue Jays are really Canada’s baseball team, and they even market themselves this way!), but they are also looking at finding a space in international markets (e.g., hockey on British television; NHL merchandise in Sweden; exhibition games in the Czech Republic, and so forth). While these new potential revenue streams may excite certain people (not least of which, the NHL’s Board of Governors), others are concerned that the idea of “Canada’s Game” has been lost to unfettered capitalism and is yet another example of globalization. What do you think?

As you’ve witnessed, community pride and the demand to win at all costs, were central to hockey’s move from an amateur pastime to a professional sport in the early twentieth century. Yet, community pride has also been behind the “obtaining” and “saving” of various NHL franchises (witness: Winnipeg Jets I and Winnipeg Jets II). Conn Smythe played the “Civic Card” back in 1926 to J.P. Bickell and the rest of the board overseeing the Toronto St. Pats. Smythe basically asked them if they wanted to be known as the ones who let Toronto’s professional hockey franchise move to Philadelphia (which very nearly happened). The St. Pats became the Leafs and the rest is history.

Having a sports franchise is, in many ways, a badge of honour for cities. A NHL franchise enhances a city’s status in, what Gruneau and Whitson referred to as “a transnational economic and cultural hierarchy of cities.” The argument is that to really be a world class city, you need to have a sports franchise (or, in our specific case, a NHL franchise).

But does a NHL team really belong to a city? Do owners – who obviously want to make a profit – stand by idly if their team is haemorrhaging money? Of course not, and being competitive in what is now a global sports market requires a very dispassionate view about what a team may or may not mean to the people of the city in which they play. The franchise must make money.

It’s not just the “fast-food” element to the franchise. Consider that the average surgeon in Canada in 2023 made approximately $550,000 a year. This, of course, is a very decent living for a very important job where lives are at stake. Now consider that the average NHL salary in 2023 was $3.2 million. That’s about six times the amount a surgeon makes for saving lives. Also consider some markets such as Toronto and New York where the ticket price is very high, that many families simply can’t afford to attend any games. Add to this the disconnect that many people feel with NHL players and their exorbitant salaries, not to mention several work-stoppages and the threat of future ones, and you can see how many people feel disillusioned about “their team”.

Our imagination – as it is applied to cultural identity – is certainly not limited to, as Brian Kennedy has suggested, “enacting imaginary violence” from the safety or your own seat at a sporting event. Dr. Kelly Hewson also pointed out that hockey is “visual” and that it “engages the act of imagination and this in turn facilitates mental construction of the nation and the national identity.”

The question remains, however, if these “constructions” are trustworthy or not? Constructions of hockey as it relates to the national identity are often sentimental, overly-romantic and not always inclusive of the whole of Canada. These constructions may actually obscure or falsify the reality, or “truth” of the nation.

This national mythmaking not only affects us here in the nation, but it can also be applied to our national identity abroad. How do others see Canadians? Is the construction of the game of hockey and the Canadian national identity – as it appears outside of this country – in need of further nuance? Is it okay if other countries see us as sharing a North-American “monoculture” with the United States? Or is it important for Canada to be separate from US identity and iconography? Are we okay with hockey not being just Canada’s Game anymore?

Continental Monoculture

How has the “Americanization” of Canada and hockey affected the Canadian national identity? Some scholars argue that with a global market, “nation”/patriotism becomes irrelevant. If this is true, and if big-time hockey is now, as Grant has argued, relative only to profit-making, can hockey really help distinguish the Canadian nation from the US anymore? Are we now living in a “continental monoculture” where the US and Canada are indistinguishable from one another?

Consider: there are more than twice as many American teams in the NHL than there are Canadian ones. Do you believe there is a conspiracy to keep Canadian teams in the NHL to a minimum, or do you think smaller markets such as Quebec or Kitchener-Waterloo would simply not be able to sustain a NHL franchise?

Villains or Cousins

Certainly, hockey has not thrived in every American city that has boasted a NHL team (see: Atlanta, Kansas City, Cleveland, etc…). That said; several non-traditional hockey markets have been converted into hockey-loving cities (see: Colorado, St. Louis and now Las Vegas).

Do you feel that the Americanization of hockey has “stolen” something from Canadians? If yes, is it something tangible, or is it just, as Buma has suggested, a myth? Are American hockey markets worthy of “Canada’s Game”? Or do you feel, as Andrew Holman does, in that hockey has served as “a link between ordinary Canadians and ordinary Americans”?

Perhaps we have lost a myth. Perhaps we are really pining for something that never really existed. In some ways, some of us are longing for a return – at least in part – to the old amateur code, those British Public School sensibilities, that called for playing the game for the game’s sake; playing for fun; returning, bizarrely enough, to that original purpose of the game that a small, elite circle of men had in mind when they organized the modern game of hockey in the late nineteenth century.