championship?
In 1883 at Montreal’s inaugural Winter Carnival, the world’s first hockey championship was held, pitting three teams against one another: the Montreal Victorias, the McGill University Hockey Club, and a team from Quebec City. The three teams vied for the sterling silver Carnival Cup. McGill University won the series. The championship was restaged at the carnival in 1884 and 1885.
What was the first NHL team to relocate?
Today it is all too common for sports franchises to pull up stakes and move to seemingly greener pastures. Hockey is no stranger to the pain of fans losing their beloved club. Think Quebec Nordiques (now Colorado Avalanche), Winnipeg Jets (now Phoenix Coyotes), the old Ottawa Senators (briefly St. Louis Eagles, then defunct, then revived as the new Senators in 1992–93), Minnesota North Stars (now Dallas Stars), and Hartford Whalers (now Carolina Hurricanes). The first team to leave its original city in the NHL was the Quebec Bulldogs, which headed for Hamilton, Ontario, with its superstar Joe Malone, to become the Tigers in 1920–21 after only one season in the big league. The Tigers didn’t last long in Hamilton, either. Despite having a pretty good team, the club’s players ended up in New York City to become the Americans in 1925–26. The Amerks, as they were nicknamed, finally gave up the ghost in 1941–42, leaving Madison Square Garden to the New York Rangers. Hamilton is still waiting for another NHL team; so is Quebec City.
Short Shelf of Fine Hockey Fiction
Boxing has Fat City (Leonard Gardner) and The Harder They Fall (Budd Schulberg), football has North Dallas Forty (Peter Gent), and baseball has The Natural (Bernard Malamud) and Shoeless Joe (W.P. Kinsella), but hockey is still waiting for its truly great lyric writer. There have been a few pretty good novels and one play, though.
• Les Canadiens by Rick Salutin and Ken Dryden (1977).
• The Last Season by Roy MacGregor (1983).
• Hockey Night in the Dominion of Canada by Eric Zweig (1992).
• King Leary by Paul Quarrington (1994).
• Salvage King, Ya! A Herky-Jerky Picaresque by Mark Anthony Jarman (1997).
• Understanding Ken by Pete McCormack (1998).
• Finnie Walsh by Steven Galloway (2000).
What is the best children’s story ever written about hockey?
In 1979 noted Quebec novelist and playwright Roch Carrier first published the short story “Une abominable feuille d’érable sur la glace” (“An Abominable Maple Leaf on the Ice”), now better known as “The Hockey Sweater” in English and “Le chandail de hockey” in French. Carrier based the story on his own experiences as a child. The narrative is simple but superb in the way it gets to the heart of the mystique of hockey for Canadians, particularly children. In the 1940s a boy’s hockey sweater wears out and his mother orders a new one from the Eaton’s catalogue. The boy is a rabid fan of the Montreal Cana-diens Rocket” Richard. However, when the new sweater and their star forward Maurice “Rocket” Richard. However, when the new sweater finally arrives, to the boy’s horror it’s a Toronto Maple Leafs sweater, not a Habs one. The boy tries to get his mother to return the sweater, but she feels that Mr. Eaton, obviously a Leafs fan, might be offended, so she insists he wear the despicable Leafs garment to his hockey game. As expected, the boy is the only one not wearing a Canadiens jersey. “The Hockey Sweater” is often thought to be an allegory for French and English tensions in Canada. It has been published in many forms, including a picture book for younger children. In 1980 an animated version, The Sweater, was released by Canada’s National Film Board to much acclaim.
Six Top All-Time Hockey Journalists
• Elmer Ferguson (1885–1972)
• Milt Dunnell (1905–2008)
• Jim Coleman (1911–2000)
• Scott Young (1918–2005)
• Trent Frayne (1918– )
• Red Fisher (1926– )
Where did the word puck come from?
A hockey puck is a hard, vulcanized black rubber disk three inches in diameter, one inch thick and weighing between five and a half to six ounces. To reduce the tendency puck of pucks to bounce, they are frozen before use. The origins of the word are the subject of much debate. The first verifiable reference in print to the word in relation to hockey was in an 1876 game account in the Montreal Gazette. Some think the word derives from the Scottish and Gaelic word puc. In 1910 a book entitled English as We Speak It in Ireland defined the word as follows: “Puck: a blow. ‘He gave him a puck of a stick on the head.’ More commonly applied to a punch or blow of the horns of a cow or goat! ‘The cow gave him a puck (or pucked him) with her horns and knocked him down.’ The blow given by a hurler to the ball with his caman or hur-ley is always called a puck. Irish poc, same sound and meaning.”
Quickies
Did you know …
that Fox Television, worried that U.S. fans would find it difficult to follow the action in NHL hockey, introduced the FoxTrax puck at the league’s All-Star Game on January 20, 1996? Wherever the puck moved along the ice, it was tailed by an oscillating blue dot on television screens. When a shot was fired, the puck developed a red trail. Most hockey fans, especially Canadians, were outraged at Fox’s simplistic gimmick. Happily, FoxTrax never caught on despite the network’s dogged promotion of it. Fox finally retired its “innovation” prior to the 1998–99 season.
Why is Calgary’s hockey team called the “Flames”?
The “Flames” have not always been a Calgary hockey team. They started out in Atlanta during the second wave of NHL expansion in 1972, where the name “Flames” was chosen to remember the torching of the city in 1864 by Union troops, led by General William Tecumseh Sherman, during their long march through the South near the end of the Civil War. When the team moved to Calgary in 1980, the name was kept in honour of Calgary’s ties to oil.
What are Black Aces?
Black Aces is the collective name for the group of players who practise with the whole team but rarely play in games. This term originated with hard-nosed Eddie Shore’s Springfield (Massachusetts) Indians teams in the American Hockey League from the 1940s to the 1960s. Shore demanded that his Black Aces perform non-hockey tasks such as selling programs and popcorn during the games they didn’t play.
Quickies
Did you know …
that in hockey the War of 1812 refers to the Toronto-Montreal game of December 9, 1953, when a bench-clearing brawl exploded at 18:12 of the third period and referee Frank Udvari gave out 18 misconduct penalties and two major penalties evenly shared between the clubs? That left each team with a goalie, three skaters, and no players on the bench for the final 1:48 of the match.
