YORKTON - There appears to be something of a trend in recent sports books to extend the stories beyond the sport being written by including something of the world going on around it to.
That was certainly the case with Klondikers: Dawson City's Stanley Cup Challenge and How a Nation Fell in Love with Hockey by Tim Falconer reviewed here recently. The book included as much about the Klondike and in particular the gold rush there as it did the hockey team and its Stanley Cup challenge.
It was the same with The Eagles of Heart Mountain: A True Story of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in World War II America by Bradford Pearson which again was reviewed here. That fine book dealt with the politics of the era and the internment of Japanese Americans with the football team just a unifying thread.
It is an approach used to good advantage by Alan Livingstone MacLeod in his most recent book as well. While, Capitals, Aristocrats, and Cougars: Victoria's Hockey Professionals, 1911–1926 tells in some detail the story of the incarnations of Victoria’s professional hockey franchise, it equally expands the text to give readers a picture of the city and world around the team.
“It was by design,” MacLeod explained in are recent telephone interview, adding he wanted to created “a book not simply about hockey.”
MacLeod said he has long held a dual interest, that for hockey, and about the great wars, a previous book; From Rinks to Regiments: Hockey Hall-of-Famers and the Great War, combined the two, and his latest effort follows that course too.
Often hockey and the war intersect in the book for example this excerpt, “Allowing nine goals might have led some readers to imagine that the goaltending sieve, Fred McCulloch, was still safeguarding the Canaries’ goal but, no, McCulloch was now a soldier in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. In his place stood Norman Boswell “Hec” Fowler. Though a native of Peterborough, Ontario, Fowler had established his goaltending credentials in Saskatchewan, mostly in Saskatoon, over eight amateur seasons starting in 1908. His new role as Canaries’ netminder was Fowler’s first experience of playing for pay, his initial season as a hockey professional. Fowler’s hockey career was interrupted in 1918 for reasons both similar to and different from those that applied to Fred McCulloch: he became a soldier, but while McCulloch had volunteered for the Canadian Expeditionary Force, Fowler was conscripted.”
And, this one, which brings the book a little closer to home for local readers as it relates to a player from nearby.
“One of the Canadian soldiers who had fought – and was seriously wounded – at Vimy was one Mervyn Dutton of Russell, Manitoba. Just nineteen when he went over the top with the Canada Corps on Easter Monday, 1917, Dutton came close to losing a leg for his troubles. By 1922, his war wounds repaired, “Red” Dutton was a stalwart defenceman with the Calgary Tigers, someone who in days to come would tangle with the Victoria Cougars at the Epworth Street arena.”
It was interesting as a reader how often the players for Victoria connected back to Saskatchewan.
“There were cast changes in the Victoria lineup. Charley Tobin had packed his gear bag and joined the Aristocrats’ adversaries in Seattle. After three seasons as a PCHA pro, Stan Marples, a prairie lad, (the exact place not identified), had returned to amateur hockey to become a leading light of the Moose Jaw Maple Leafs of the Saskatchewan Senior Hockey League.”
Of course adding the world around the book meant more effort into research for MacLeod too.
“I spent a good deal more time doing the research than actually writing the book,” said MacLeod.
What that research allowed was a rare glimpse into a very different era in which the team played, although at times concerns then and now do seem to intersect, as was the case in the January 19 (1915) Colonist.
The article “suggested that deep concern about catastrophic climate change might not be a strictly twenty-first century worry. Colonist readers must have been struck by the headline, Race Must Follow Example Of Martians. Appearing before a meeting of the Victoria Astronomical Society, the Colonist reported that Mr. F. N. Denison, superintendent of the Dominion Observatory on Little Saanich Island, showed evidence of the well-defined canals delivering water from the Martian north pole to those living to the south. Mr. Denison had a warning for earthlings: given the rapid departure of moisture from our own planet, it will be necessary to follow the example thought to have been set by Martians, by constructing “world-wide systems of irrigation canals to keep desert areas fertile.”
But, of course the core of the story is hockey, a long held love for MacLeod, who terms himself “a run-of-the-mill pond hockey player.”
MacLeod grew up “very much a hockey card collector,” recalling that in 1960 a subset of the O-Pee-Chee hockey cards highlighted 27 of the greatest players of all-time, with Lester Patrick, instrumental to professional hockey in Victoria #1.
“That’s what started my interest in hockey history,” said MacLeod, who added while many Canadian kids collected hockey cards in their youth, he was one who also kept the cards into adulthood.
But even in terms of hockey MacLeod kept the book interesting beyond the Victoria team.
For example, “Amid all the misery, Victoria’s hockey fans might have taken comfort from events in far-off Chamonix in the French Alps. Frank Fredrickson and Slim Halderson had played leading roles in Canada’s 1920 Olympic victory at Antwerp, and they must have revelled in what their successors accomplished at Chamonix in the 1924 games. The Canadians won gold again, and did so even more convincingly than the Icelandic Canadians had managed four years earlier. They swatted aside the Czechs, Swedes, and Swiss by ab aggregate 85-0 margin in the opening round. The semi-final against Britain was a little closer, 19-2; then on February 3, the Canadians won gold by 6-1 over the United States.”
Interestingly, Frank Fredrickson, plays a huge role in the book as a player with an outstanding career that most will know little about.
After being the Captain and leading scorer for Canada’s first Olympic gold medal winning team, he went on to a long pro career including six seasons in Victoria including the Stanley Cup winning team in 1925.
Fredrickson went on to coach at Princeton, where he became friends with Albert Einstein.
He would eventually be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame too.
“He’s (Fredrickson) a remarkable guy,” said MacLeod.
The book is actually notable for the little nuggets of interest MacLeod includes such as; “Skilled as he was at hockey, Jim Riley may have been an even better baseball player. He batted close to .300 over nine seasons of higher-level minor league baseball, before briefly making it to “The Show” – major league baseball – with the St. Louis Browns and Washington Senators in 1921 and 1923. After the collapse of the western league in 1926. Riley played a season of NHL hockey with Chicago and Detroit in 1926-27. To this day, he is the only man ever to play in both the NHL and in major league baseball.”
And; “Before the opening faceoff the Edmonton audience paid homage to Foley Martin, a native Albertan and member of the previous year’s edition of the Calgary Tigers. Martin had died in circumstances about as quirky as those that ended the life of Lord Carnarvon. Home remedies for everything from piles to pimples, grippe to lumbago, and catarrh to corns were as lucrative a source of advertising in the nation’s newspapers as were cigarettes and tobacco products. Corns, the thick, hardened calluses growing on toes unhappy with the shoes they were jammed into were a particular focus of 1920s advertising. Instead of investing in any of the advertised treatments on offer, Foley Martin had sliced off his corn with a razor blade. The blood poisoning resulting from this self-surgery killed young Marin at the age of twenty-two. The Calgary Tigers did something special in memory of Foley Martin: they retired his sweater number – number five – the first time in North American professional sports that a player was so honoured.”
And so it goes, a book filled with Victoria hockey and the story of the world as it was around the sport.
While the hockey itself might bog down a bit in detail for a non-Victoria hockey fan, MacLeod keeps the story interesting with the added history that the book remained an enjoyable read.
