A Great Game (36 page)
Authors: Stephen J. Harper
Professionalism was hardly disappearing. On the contrary, in some sports it was emerging as not only a separate, but also a higher, tier. For instance, it was already noted that amateur running meets were becoming a training ground for those aspiring to be the next Tom Longboat. The aboriginal runner was now achieving great success in his new career as an open professional. In a rematch of the London Olympics staged at Madison Square Garden, Longboat easily prevailed. In 1909, again in New York City, he won another contest that declared him “Professional Champion of the World.”
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The first evidence of the same phenomenon could also be seen in hockey. There was, for example, talk in Ottawa that hockey's Cliffsides would amalgamate with the Senators'
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second squad. This would, in effect, make them a pro farm team, even if their players remained officially amateur.
Yet, in the fall of 1909, it was the future of the stand-alone world of professional hockey that was very much in doubt. Merrick, and amateur leaders like him, had long predicted that the paid game could not survive
detached from its amateur roots. With pro leagues and teams folding faster than new ones could spring up, many thought he was right.
Alex Miln had suddenly and surprisingly joined these growing ranks of pro hockey doubters. Faced with the prospect of another unprofitable season in the Ontario Professional Hockey League, he had decided to fold his Toronto Professionals rather than take a gamble by joining the premier big league, the Eastern Canada Hockey Association. Looking at the high travel costs of the Eastern league, the small markets of the Ontario one, and rising player salaries everywhere, he may well have concluded that pro hockey simply could not be viable. With an unprecedented commercial crisis about to beset the ECHA, Miln's decision looked prescient.
A direct descendant of the original Amateur Hockey Association of Canada, the ECHA and its predecessors had always been the country's top league. Its most recent victors, the Ottawa Senators, were Stanley Cup champs and kings of the pro hockey world. Indeed, the league had almost always held the trophy.
Below the surface, however, it was a deeply troubled organization.
Pro hockey continued to be racked by contract jumping, unruly on-ice behaviour, unresolved off-ice battles and, especially, escalating payrolls. However, the ECHA had a unique problem. Since the return of the Montreal Wheelers and Montreal Victorias to the amateur ranks, the imbalance of the remaining four-team league had become glaring. The Eastern league had only two real contenders: the champions from Ottawa and the Montreal Wanderers. The Montreal Shamrocks and Quebec Bulldogs were increasingly poor also-rans. It meant the championship would invariably boil down to the games between the two elite clubs. Such predictability was not a recipe for commercial viability. Even as winners of the Stanley Cupâlong considered the golden goose of the box officeâthe Ottawas had lost money in 1908â09.
As the 1909â10 season approached, these pressures began to unwind the long-standing business alliance between the Ottawas and the Wanderers. The clubs agreed changes in the league needed to be made, but could not arrive at a consensus as to how. The proverbial stuff really hit the fan, however, when the Redbands decided to move to a newer but smaller rink, the Jubilee Arena. The other teams believed this would cut
into their dwindling gates. Led by Ottawa, they began to plot against the Wanderers.
Finally, on November 25, the Senators, Shamrocks and Bulldogs withdrew from the ECHA and formed a new league, christened the Canadian Hockey Association. The CHA promptly admitted two new clubs. The Montreal Nationals were brought in to appeal to the Francophone market. A new English organization named All-Montreal was recruited to replace the stranded Wanderers.
The other eastern pro clubs may have decided they did not want the Wanderers, but it was not a judgment the Redbands were prepared to accept.
However, if any club knew how to play the game of league hopping, it was the Redbands. They would almost immediately enter into talks with
the leagues up in the northern “bush.” Although run by wealthy interests, those towns' Cup ambitions had long been frustrated by anti-ringer rules and forced exclusion from the “big-league” circuit. It was not surprising that the principals of the Temiskaming leagueâbusinessmen like Noah Timmins of Haileybury and T. C. “Tommy” Hare of Cobaltâwanted their clubs in the upper echelon of hockey.
They were backed by an even bigger player: Michael John O'Brien of Renfrew.
M. J. O'Brien was an increasingly rich and powerful railroad and mining baron, with holdings in various parts of the country. His hometown Renfrew Creamery Kings had long been the rulers of the Upper Ottawa Valley league. The previous season, they had moved into a reinvigorated Federal league, where they were also champions. These organizations shared the Temiskaming league's entrepreneurial hockey culture and played regularly against its clubs.
M.J.'s aspiring hockey-manager son, John Ambrose O'Brien, and his partner, J. G. Barnett, had been making ever more serious attempts to get into hockey's big time. The established interests of the ECHA were making it just as obvious that they were not interested, despite the league's deep financial trouble. As its clubs conspired to expel the Wanderers, it also made the young O'Brien sit in the lobby of Montreal's Windsor Hotelârejecting his application without even the courtesy of hearing him out. It would turn out to be a mistake of historic proportions.
The O'Briens' wrath was about to alter the world of professional hockey forever.
Ambrose did not simply leave the building as the ECHA thought he would. Instead, he continued to patiently wait and ended up intercepting the furious, cursing bosses of the ostracized Wanderers as they left the meeting. And so they began to commiserate with each other.
The two sides quickly discovered a natural partnership. The Wanderers needed a league; the O'Briens needed the Montreal market. Thus, a mere week later, the Wanderers combined with the Federal champion Renfrew Creamery Kings, the Temiskaming champion Cobalt Silver Kings and their close rival, the Haileybury Comets, to form the National
Hockey Association. To compete with the CHA among Francophones, Ambrose created a new franchise for the NHAâto be called
les Canadiens
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The O'Briens, father (Michael John) and son (John Ambrose), were becoming one of Canada's most powerful families. Shunned by the sport's establishment, their rival league, the National Hockey Association, would lay the foundation for the modern pro hockey business.
From rooms only a few doors apart in Montreal's Windsor Hotel, the NHA and CHA began planning for all-out war. In fact, the split in the ECHA would be followed by the most rapid rise of salaries in hockey history. The two pro associations went after key players with vengeance and desperation. The most spectacular signings were made by Renfrew, an organization soon to be famously dubbed the Millionaires. Powered by the O'Briens' virtually limitless bankroll, Renfrew sought the best players in the country. Their recruiting efforts made the infamous spending of the Edmonton pros look like small change. They lured the game's biggest star, Fred “Cyclone” Taylor, from Ottawa for a reputed salary of $5,250
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âclose to triple what top players had previously been earning. The deal made him, on a per-game basis, the highest-paid athlete in the world.
The NHA was set up by outcasts who hailed mainly from small towns. Nevertheless, it was the basis for today's pro hockey orderâand it spawned “a new club,” the Montreal Canadiens.
Overall, the new league was pulling ahead in the recruiting sweepstakes. Led by the Taylor signing, Renfrew was out-recruiting Ottawaâalthough the Senators did pull Bruce Ridpath from Cobalt. The Wanderers were generally holding their lineup against All-Montreal. And, after court battles over broken contracts, the Canadiens succeeded in stealing the best French players, including Newsy Lalonde, from the Nationals.
All observers agreed that this was a fight to the deathâand that it could not last long. The
Globe
, for one, confidently predicted that “there is not the slightest probability that they [the NHA and CHA] will go through the season they have mapped out in their schedules.”
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It was particularly noted that the central war zone of Montreal had five professional clubs competing for fans.
The Montreal market was actually saturated well beyond this commercial conflict. The two pro groupings would also be competing for fans with three amateur associations of Allan Cup calibre: the Interprovincial, Intercollegiate and a new entry, the St. Lawrence. All told, the city was now home to ten senior-level hockey teams.
It was the Stanley Cup champions who blinked first. The Ottawa Senators came to the NHA, looking for an armistice. On January 16, after some brief negotiations, the new league admitted them and the Montreal Shamrocks. What remained of the competing circuit was not viable, and the CHA folded.
This historic battle, fought between the traditional, middle-class hockey managers of the CHA and the rising industrialists behind the NHA, had been no contest. The power of the bankroll had trumped the vaunted legacies of the older organization and its clubs. After twenty-four years (under various names) as Canada's most prestigious hockey league, the CHA was no more.
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