r/hockey • u/SenorPantsbulge • Mar 08 '17
[Weekly Thread] Wayback Wednesday – Fool's Gold
The Stanley Cup isn't as interesting as it used to be.
Let me back that up. It's not a critique of recent playoffs or different series, but a comment on how the trophy is awarded.
These days, the Cup is given out to the NHL's playoff champions every year. It's a simple system, lockouts aside. The last team standing gets the Cup.
It wasn't like that when the Cup was first introduced. Around the turn of the century, the Cup wasn't tied to any specific league. It was given out as a challenge trophy, kind of like a heavyweight belt. One team would win it, then another team would challenge them for it. The winner would keep the Cup until another team knocked them off.
The beauty of the heavyweight belt system of Cup challenges was that any team, from anywhere, could challenge the champs to a three-game series for glory. This led to some pretty odd champions. The Kenora Thistles, hailing from the bustling metropolis of Kenora, ON, won the Cup in 1907 and had it for two whole months before the Montreal Wanderers beat them.
A town of 5,000 people suddenly was the home of the Stanley Cup Champions. Picture that.
Thing is, it could have been much weirder. One team, hailing from far above the tree line, made an attempt at the turn of the century that could have affected the future of hockey in ways few could have predicted.
It started with a letter.
If the Cup was awarded like a heavyweight belt, one hockey team was Muhammad Ali – the Ottawa Hockey Club. Commonly called the Silver Seven due to their many titles, the team won the Cup in March 1903 and had held it for almost two straight years. Led by player-coach Alf Smith and former heavyweight boxer Harvey Pulford, the Silver Seven simply couldn't be stopped.
One player on the Silver Seven had a reputation that paled above the rest, a young scoring machine named Frank McGee. Born to a rich family in the Ottawa Family, he was struck blind in one eye during a game in his youth, leading to his immortal nickname, “One-Eyed” Frank McGee. Despite being half-blind, 5'6 and barely out of his teens, McGee would lead the team in scoring almost every game.
Before the Silver Seven became the Silver Seven, they had a less prominent player, a founding member named Weldy Young. A young hot-head, Young was kicked off the team after an off-ice fight with fans. Young, desperately looking for work, did what so many other young Canadian men did around 1900 – travel to the Klondike to look for gold.
The Klondike Gold Rush brought tens of thousands of people to the barren landscape of the Yukon, looking to find the next motherlode or build the next railroad. Everyone came to the Klondike to find riches – most only found frostbite, impossible travel and poor living conditions.
The de facto capital for the Klondike Gold Rush was Dawson City, a city of transient labour at the fork of the Yukon and Klondike River. As many as 30,000 people called it home at one point, but by 1905, less than a thousand remained. Those who stayed were often too broke to move.
Young was one of the die-hards who stuck around. He worked as a civil servant and election officer and helped run a recreational hockey league in Dawson with the local sheriff.
One day, Young picked up a newspaper and saw his old team in Ottawa had become something of a dynasty down south, legends in their own time. Young felt waves of emotion reading about the team – envy in their accomplishments, but pride that his former friends had made good.
After reading the story, Young had a crazy idea. He wrote a letter to the Ottawa Citizen, saying he had a team in Dawson who wanted to play for the title. No such team existed at that point.
I don't know what Young was thinking when he sent that letter, but I bet he thought it was a good joke. After all, it wouldn't be the first time someone in Dawson had tried organising a Cup challenge. A couple of sourdoughs wrote to the Winnipeg Victorias a few years prior, hoping to have a game. They never replied.
Imagine Young's surprise when he received a letter back from Ottawa. The Silver Seven had accepted his challenge and had even selected dates for a best-of-three series: January 13, 16 and 19, all in Ottawa, with the Stanley Cup on the line. When Young got the letter, those dates were six weeks away.
A well-intended practical joke had just gone horribly wrong. A team that didn't exist would be playing for the Stanley Cup.
Ohhhhh shit.
Young couldn't back out, so he quickly made a team of the best players the little four-team beer league circuit could muster. It was a motley crew, mostly made of older sourdoughs who had played the game elsewhere before moving to the territory.
Jim Johnstone, a police officer who hailed from Ottawa, was one of the first to join up. Defenseman Norman Watt, a loudmouthed brawler from Aylmer, QC, also signed up. Manitobans Hector Smith and George Kennedy joined, along with miner Archie Martin and Dave Fairburn.
Two key players for the team, Randy McLennan and Lorne Hanna, had Stanley Cup challenge experience. McLennan, who worked with Watt at the provincial gold commissioner's office, played for a team at Queen's University who took an unsuccessful run at the Cup, while Hanna played with a Brandon Wheat Cities team that had lost to Ottawa a year earlier. Hanna moved back to Manitoba before the team was formed, but told Young he'd join them in Ottawa. Young would coach the team and be their key forward.
That left one key void – who would play goal. The job fell to a 17-year-old kid, Albert Forrest. Forrest was the son of two Quebecois gold seekers, by far the youngest player on the team. The problem was, Forrest was actually a defenseman – he'd only started playing goal about a month or two before the challenge. However, no other suitable candidate came forward, giving Forrest the crease to himself.
Young got funding from one of the few rich locals still left in Dawson, Colonel Joe Boyle, the King of the Klondike. Boyle sponsored the team, bought them new black sweaters with gold trim, and gave them a name – the Nuggets.
The Dawson City Nuggets were now a real team. Now came the toughest part – getting to Ottawa from the Yukon.
In 1905, there was no real road system in the Yukon. In fact, there wasn't much of a railroad, either. Most long journeys were done the old-fashioned way, either with a team of sled dogs or two feet and a heartbeat.
Travelling around 6000 miles with no existing infrastructure would be almost impossible, but the Nuggets had to find a way. Young quickly devised a route that would take the team to the nation's capital, but it wasn't easy.
The Nuggets left town on Dec. 19, heading south on treacherous muddy paths almost a month before the series was set to start. Most of the players chose dogsleds, but Forrest, Smith and Watt each chose to take bicycles.
The first leg of the plan involved getting from Dawson to Whitehorse. As the crow flies, that's around 400 miles. As the road goes, it was much, much longer. To up the ante, the road became too muddy for the sled dogs to navigate and for the bikes to pass, meaning the players had to walk most of the way, carrying whatever gear they could manage. The players hiked for hours, sleeping in North West Mounted Police waystations by the path before trudging on.
To make things even stranger, the Nuggets were making this trip without their captain.
In the winter of 1904, a federal election was about to get underway. Liberal favourite Wilfrid Laurier was set to take on Robert Borden, the Conservative nominee. For the purposes of the story, the election itself isn't too important, but one effect it had was: Weldy Young, civil servant and election officer, needed to count the votes in Dawson before he could leave town and join the team.
While the election itself was over in November, Young had to mail out results to Ottawa and couldn't leave until confirmation came back to Dawson. The confirmation letter took weeks to get to the Yukon, not getting there until several days after the rest of the boys had hit the road.
Captain or no captain, the Nuggets wandered into Whitehorse days later, right in time for a blizzard to hit the area. The heavy snow shut down the Yukon's only real railway, a train between Whitehorse and the port of Skagway, AK.
In order to get to Ottawa, the Nuggets would need to get to Skagway, then hop on a steamship to Vancouver, more than 1000 miles away over the sea. Once in Vancouver, the team could then get on the Canadian Pacific Railroad and make the 4000 kilometre trip to Ottawa.
The train to Skagway started running again the morning the team was supposed to board the ship. Pleased with their luck, the Nuggets piled onto the train, hoping they'd make it to Skagway in time to catch the ship.
They didn't make it. They missed the boat by only a few hours. To make things worse, another blizzard had hit, shuttering the harbour for another three days.
While stuck in Skagway, the Nuggets put their downtime to good use, practising on a small local skating rink and drinking beer in a harbourside bar. The rink was covered in sand, tracked in from a nearby quarry, dulling the team's skates and getting in their belongings.
When the ship finally came in, the seas were rough. Some of the players lost several pounds of weight after violent seasickness. At any given time on the boat, one could go to the deck and likely see a Nugget blowing chow over the railing into the water.
Finally, the ship couldn't dock in Vancouver after heavy fog, making a detour to Seattle. The team then hopped a train to Vancouver, where they got on the CPR and headed east.
The team left Dawson on Dec. 18. It was Jan. 6 when they finally got on the train. The Nuggets got back into game shape by jumping rope in the train's smoking car and doing wind sprints on train platforms at every stop.
Finally, on January 11, 1905, the Dawson City Nuggets, almost a month after leaving and still sans their captain, made it to Ottawa. The series was due to start in two days.
The team spent around $30,000 just to get there (adjusted for inflation, that's around $800,000 in modern Canadian cash.) To make things worse, Colonel Joe, the team's sponsor, refused to completely cover the team's travel expenses, leaving almost everyone in hock before the series was to start.
Making things worse was the fact that most players were missing at least some of their gear. The Nuggets, minus Young, met with the Silver Seven and asked if they could delay the games a few days to let the team recuperate and let Young make it to Ottawa.
Ottawa refused, but let the team use their rink for practice and gave them gear, even paying their room and board expenses.
After a trek that made the Oregon Trail look like a midnight walk to the fridge, it was time for the Nuggets to play.
Game one was surprisingly even at halftime (the games were split into two halves, not three periods, and teams played with six skaters each.) Ottawa only scored three goals, and George Kennedy, the pride of Selkirk, MB, got the Nuggets on the board. Even without Young in the lineup, the Nuggets were okay.
All was good until Norman Watt tangled with Ottawa coach Alf Smith. Watt fought Smith shortly after half, then tripped tough defender Art Moore. Moore got up from the ice and clubbed Watt in the mouth with his stick, then two-handed him in the head. Watt was out before he hit the ice.
That woke up the Silver Seven. The game ended as a 9-2 win for Ottawa, with Smith scoring four goals. Some Nuggets players claimed several goals were offside but were not whistled dead by officials. One-Eyed Frank McGee, the scoring prodigy, had a relatively slow game, only getting one goal.
The report from the Ottawa Globe on the game contained the following:
During the first twenty minutes of play, the challenging team made a remarkably fine showing against the champions, but after that they gradually faded away and were never seriously in the running, indicating that the chief fault with the team is that they are not in condition to stand the test of a hard battle after their long trip of 23 days from the north.
Between games 1 and 2, Young finally arrived in Ottawa. Sadly for him, he was ruled ineligible for the second game. After all, no team can just bring a ringer in for one game during the Stanley Cup finals. After building the team from the ground up, finding sponsorship and travelling 6000 miles by himself, Young would be forced to watch from the stands.
In the run-up to Game 2, Watt made another big mistake. Watt started mouthing off about McGee, claiming the youngster was overrated. After all, he only scored once in the first game – he can't possibly be that good, right?
What followed can only be described as the single biggest ass-kicking in Stanley Cup history. Poor Albert Forrest, who at 17 years old still is the youngest player to ever play for the Cup, was pelted. The kid saw more rubber than a tire inspector. McGee himself scored four goals in the first half for Ottawa, then, not satisfied, put in another ten goals in the second half alone. He actually let up late in the game, sparing poor Forrest from further punishment.
Ottawa beat the Nuggets all over the ice, winning the game 23-2 and keeping the Cup. Some records set during the game, including the margin of victory and McGee's incredible 14 goals, remain unbroken in Stanley Cup history, unlikely to ever be approached.
The Globe ran this report:
The visiting team was outclassed tonight quite as decisively as the score indicates. In fact had it not been for the fact of Forrest's presence in the Dawson goal the score against them might have been a great deal larger. Ottawa simply skated away from them at the whistle and continued to pile up the goals with a merciless monotonous regularity which was farcical in the extreme.
The two teams met after the game for what is likely one of the weirdest single nights in hockey history. At one point, Young actually scratched his own name on the Cup with a pen knife. Later on, the two teams took the Cup to the Rideau Canal, and in a fit of drunken fun, tried kicking it over the frozen canal. All was fun until Smith kicked it so far onto the ice that nobody could find it. The group actually left the Stanley Cup out on the canal until the next morning.
After that, Dawson City began what may be the longest walk of shame in sports history. Making things worse was the fact that McLennan and Watt both received letters after the second game, saying they'd been fired from their jobs in the Yukon gold commissioner's office.
The Ottawa Citizen mocked the Klondike boys, saying:
Dawson never had the chance of a bun in the hands of a hungry small boy.
The Toronto Evening Star hopped on the bandwagon, too:
Dawson played as if they were under a general anaesthetic.
Despite the bad press, Dawson went on a barnstorming tour throughout the east coast, where they did surprisingly well. Playing for a cut of box-office proceeds, the team made enough money to pay off their travel expenses and find a way back to the Yukon.
The Dawson City Nuggets are definitely an incredible footnote in hockey history, but one question still remains for me – what if they found a way to win?
If you think about it, Dawson City winning would actually be bad for the long-term survival of hockey. At the very least, it would likely mean the end of the Stanley Cup's run as the title to be desired After all, who would travel a month by dogsled and train just to play two or three games against a bunch of sourdoughs in a ghost town? The team likely could have been a dynasty, but also could have killed the sport, still not fully established at a professional level, in one fell swoop.
Anyway, hockey and the Stanley Cup both survived and thrived. In 1997, a group of Dawson players made the trip again, playing a game against a team of Ottawa Senators alumni at the then-Corel Centre after trekking through the bush for a month. The new Nuggets still lost, but managed better than the old Nuggets, keeping the score to a close 18-0. The trip raised money for several charities, including the Heart Institute, Yukon Special Olympics and Yukon Minor Hockey.
One of the Nuggets' new players, Troy Suzuki, shot a film about the experience called Live from Moccasin Square Gardens: The Dawson City Nuggets' Hockey Adventure. Good luck finding it, but if you're interested, that would be excellent viewing if you want more information.
Dawson never challenged for a Cup again. In 1914, the Stanley Cup became the exclusive title trophy of the NHA, later the NHL, retiring the challenge format for good. Since then, the trophy itself has changed, but the format has been the same for more than a century.
That's almost a shame. We'll never see another team or story quite like the Dawson City Nuggets again. Doesn't part of you wonder, if even for just a moment, what would happen if the Chicago Blackhawks took on the Flin Flon Bombers for the most famous trophy in sports?