Ice hockey players in Canada during the first two decades of the 1900s, whether professional or amateur, didn’t play in as many league games per season as would later become the norm during the latter half of the same century. But outside of also competing in a number of different exhibition games per season, a large portion of the players were also involved with other sports, either on a professional or amateur level.
The overall participation level in more than a singular sport among the hockey players of the time was so high that one could classify it as more of a rule than an exception. The most popular sports in Canada to compete in outside of hockey were lacrosse and football, both of them physical team sports just like hockey. But individual endurance sports such as rowing and paddling were also high on the participation list among hockey players.
As most of the other sports were non-winter sports, the seasonal shifts made it possible for hockey to carve out its own room and draw participants from a rather broad talent pool, as players didn’t have to pick and choose between sports as much in the winter time. And it also gave the players a better chance to stay in athletic shape over a larger part of the year.
Toronto native Harvey Pulford, a Hockey Hall of Fame defenseman with the Ottawa Hockey Club between 1893–1908 and a four time Stanley Cup champion, was something of a golden standard for a turn-of-the-century multi-sport athlete. A role that would later be mimicked by Lionel “Big Train” Conacher in the 1920s and 1930s. Outside of hockey Pulford, a sturdy physical specimen at 5 feet and 11 inches and around 200 pounds, was also a prominent athlete in rowing, paddling, lacrosse, football and boxing.
A successful member of the Ottawa Rowing Club, Capital Lacrosse Club and the Ottawa Rough Riders football club, Pulford won championships in every sport he engaged in. On August 13 of 1910, while retired from hockey, 34-year old Pulford captained the Ottawa Rowing Club’s eight-man crew to a North American championship title on the Potomac River in Washington, D. C. after they had beaten out second placed Argonaut Rowing Club from Toronto in a hard fought race.[1]
Harvey Pulford
Another prolific multi-sport athlete in hockey during the early 1900s was Edouard “Newsy” Lalonde from Cornwall, Ontario. Both hockey and lacrosse were popular pastimes in Cornwall, and Lalonde came to excel as a hard playing goal getter in both sports.
As a hockey player Lalonde would most notably play for the Montreal Canadiens, winning a Stanley Cup with “Les Habitants” in 1916, and earning a Hockey Hall of Fame induction in 1950. But he was equally prolific in lacrosse, and made a heftier amount of money swinging the netted stick than he made playing hockey, earning $5,000 with the Vancouver Lacrosse Club for just one season in 1912.[2] Lalonde was so successful regarding the financial aspect of the game that Vancouver newspapers at times jokingly compared him to American business magnate John D. Rockefeller.
While Newsy Lalonde spent the majority of his hockey career in Montreal, his lacrosse career was split between Vancouver and Montreal, playing nine seasons in Vancouver and five in Montreal for the Montreal Nationals. It was Vancouver sports promoter and tobacconist businessman Con Jones who first lured over Lalonde to British Columbia in 1909, to play for the Vancouver Lacrosse Club. In 1966 Lalonde was named as a charter member of the first class of inductees to the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame.[3]
Newsy Lalonde
Bruce Ridpath, a right winger with the 1911 Stanley Cup champions Ottawa Senators, and later a manager of the Toronto Blueshirts in the National Hockey Association (NHA), was not only an avid puck chaser with a neat goal scoring upside, but also an avid canoeist and stunt paddler, being dubbed an “aquatic wizard” in the local Ottawa Citizen newspaper.
In 1908 Ridpath toured Europe where he performed in his canoe and demonstrated other aquatic stunts in front of royalty in Great Britain, Germany and Spain, drawing $300 per week for over three months of work. Among the stunts performed were tricks where he would turn flips with his canoe and walk above water in his own patented water boots.[4]
Bruce Ridpath’s playing career in hockey was cut short after just two seasons in the NHA, when he was hit by a car on Yonge Street in Toronto on November 2, 1911, at an age of 27.[5] He suffered a fractured skull in the accident, and although he survived his initially life-threatening injuries, he never fully recovered from them to revive his prior athletic form.
Bruce Ridpath
Montreal Wanderers found a new goalkeeper for the 1914–15 NHA season, to replace Billy Nicholson, in 25-year old Ottawa native Charlie McCarthy, who in previous seasons had played with his brother Frank on various teams in British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario. McCarthy made a fine showing during the season, and helped the Wanderers to a tied first place finish in the standing with the Ottawa Senators. In the subsequent league playoffs between the two teams the Senators edged out the Wanderers 4 goals to 1 over two games (4-0, 0-1), with McCarthy recording a shutout in the final game in Montreal.
Despite earning the starting job on the Wanderers in 1914–15, McCarthy held out prior to the 1915–16 campaign, wanting more money from team manager Sammy Lichtenhein to stay in Montreal. When Lichtenhein didn’t give in to his demands, McCarthy instead put all of his focus on his other sport: boxing. While boxing in New York in December of 1915, McCarthy wrote a sour message back home to Canada, claiming he was done with hockey:
McCarthy made his professional boxing debut in 1914, and then went on to appear in a steady stream of lightweight bouts against opponents in both Canada and the United States, eventually earning the title of Canadian lightweight champion. McCarthy’s boxing career was briefly interrupted by military service in the midst of World War I, with both the Canadian and American armies, but he continued to throw his left hook in the boxing ring into the early 1920s.
Charlie McCarthy
While figure skating perhaps wasn’t the most popular sport among hockey players at the time, it still had its outstanding exception in Norman Scott from Ottawa. As a hockey player Scott, a left winger position wise, came up through the Ottawa City Hockey League where he played for the Ottawa Cliffsides and Ottawa Coopers in his late teenage years. With the Coopers during the 1909–10 season he scored 13 goals in 6 games, fourth best in the league and at a higher goal scoring pace than future Hockey Hall of Fame inductee Eddie Gerard of the Ottawa New Edinburghs.
For the 1910–11 season Scott had relocated to Montreal to attend McGill University, and while at the school he played for its hockey team in the Canadian Intercollegiate Athletic Union (CIAU). Scott co-led the league in scoring in 1910–11 with 9 goals in 4 games, with McGill finishing third behind the University of Toronto and Queen’s University teams. In 1911–12 McGill finished first in the standing, and then defeated the University of Ottawa in the league final to claim CIAU championship honors, with Scott again contributing with 9 goals in 4 games over the course of the season.
While in Montreal Scott became a member of the Winter Club of Montreal figure skating club, out of which he competed in both single and pair skating. On February 13, 1914 he won both single and pair skating Canadian championship honors at the Laurier Avenue Arena in Ottawa, teaming up with female companion Jeanne Chevalier in the pair skating competition.[7] The following month, on March 21, Scott also claimed single and pair skating American championship honors at the Arena Rink in New Haven, Connecticut, again teaming up with Chevalier for the pairs title.[8]
Norman Scott’s athletic career, which also included competitive golf with the Royal Ottawa Golf Club, was interrupted by World War I where he saw service in France with the Royal Air Force. He came back from Europe in early 1919, and in 1920 he won another Canadian single figure skating championship.
Although his hockey career never left the amateur ranks, Scott was once regarded as a promising top prospect in the game. He was said to have been given a big offer to join the Ottawa Senators of the NHA while he was still in his teens.[9]
Norman Scott
Also among the American hockeyists at the time were there a significant participatory overlap between different sports. The most famous American hockey player at the time, Hobart “Hobey” Baker of Princeton University and the St. Nicholas Hockey Club of New York, was also an avid football player while a student at Princeton University. But Baker, when asked by the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in December 1914, didn’t hold back his answer on which of the two sports he preferred the most:
Hobey Baker, much like Charlie McCarthy and Norman Scott, also made a tour in France during World War I, as a fighter pilot. Baker survived active combat in the war, but hours before he was due to leave France for America, on December 21 of 1918, he died after a plane he was test-piloting crashed at an airfield in Toul in the northeastern parts of the country.
Sources:
[1] Ottawa Citizen, Aug. 15, 1910
[2] The Daily Province (Vancouver), Mar. 4, 1922
[3] Vancouver Sun, Jan. 22, 1966
[4] Ottawa Citizen, Aug. 10, 1910
[5] Montreal Gazette, Nov. 3, 1911
[6] Ottawa Citizen, Dec. 11, 1915
[7] Ottawa Citizen, Feb. 14, 1914
[8] Ottawa Citizen, Mar. 23, 1914
[9] Ottawa Citizen, Feb. 3, 1919
[10] Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Dec. 30, 1914
Posted on Behind the Boards (SIHR Blog)
The overall participation level in more than a singular sport among the hockey players of the time was so high that one could classify it as more of a rule than an exception. The most popular sports in Canada to compete in outside of hockey were lacrosse and football, both of them physical team sports just like hockey. But individual endurance sports such as rowing and paddling were also high on the participation list among hockey players.
As most of the other sports were non-winter sports, the seasonal shifts made it possible for hockey to carve out its own room and draw participants from a rather broad talent pool, as players didn’t have to pick and choose between sports as much in the winter time. And it also gave the players a better chance to stay in athletic shape over a larger part of the year.
Toronto native Harvey Pulford, a Hockey Hall of Fame defenseman with the Ottawa Hockey Club between 1893–1908 and a four time Stanley Cup champion, was something of a golden standard for a turn-of-the-century multi-sport athlete. A role that would later be mimicked by Lionel “Big Train” Conacher in the 1920s and 1930s. Outside of hockey Pulford, a sturdy physical specimen at 5 feet and 11 inches and around 200 pounds, was also a prominent athlete in rowing, paddling, lacrosse, football and boxing.
A successful member of the Ottawa Rowing Club, Capital Lacrosse Club and the Ottawa Rough Riders football club, Pulford won championships in every sport he engaged in. On August 13 of 1910, while retired from hockey, 34-year old Pulford captained the Ottawa Rowing Club’s eight-man crew to a North American championship title on the Potomac River in Washington, D. C. after they had beaten out second placed Argonaut Rowing Club from Toronto in a hard fought race.[1]
Harvey Pulford
Another prolific multi-sport athlete in hockey during the early 1900s was Edouard “Newsy” Lalonde from Cornwall, Ontario. Both hockey and lacrosse were popular pastimes in Cornwall, and Lalonde came to excel as a hard playing goal getter in both sports.
As a hockey player Lalonde would most notably play for the Montreal Canadiens, winning a Stanley Cup with “Les Habitants” in 1916, and earning a Hockey Hall of Fame induction in 1950. But he was equally prolific in lacrosse, and made a heftier amount of money swinging the netted stick than he made playing hockey, earning $5,000 with the Vancouver Lacrosse Club for just one season in 1912.[2] Lalonde was so successful regarding the financial aspect of the game that Vancouver newspapers at times jokingly compared him to American business magnate John D. Rockefeller.
While Newsy Lalonde spent the majority of his hockey career in Montreal, his lacrosse career was split between Vancouver and Montreal, playing nine seasons in Vancouver and five in Montreal for the Montreal Nationals. It was Vancouver sports promoter and tobacconist businessman Con Jones who first lured over Lalonde to British Columbia in 1909, to play for the Vancouver Lacrosse Club. In 1966 Lalonde was named as a charter member of the first class of inductees to the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame.[3]
Newsy Lalonde
Bruce Ridpath, a right winger with the 1911 Stanley Cup champions Ottawa Senators, and later a manager of the Toronto Blueshirts in the National Hockey Association (NHA), was not only an avid puck chaser with a neat goal scoring upside, but also an avid canoeist and stunt paddler, being dubbed an “aquatic wizard” in the local Ottawa Citizen newspaper.
In 1908 Ridpath toured Europe where he performed in his canoe and demonstrated other aquatic stunts in front of royalty in Great Britain, Germany and Spain, drawing $300 per week for over three months of work. Among the stunts performed were tricks where he would turn flips with his canoe and walk above water in his own patented water boots.[4]
Bruce Ridpath’s playing career in hockey was cut short after just two seasons in the NHA, when he was hit by a car on Yonge Street in Toronto on November 2, 1911, at an age of 27.[5] He suffered a fractured skull in the accident, and although he survived his initially life-threatening injuries, he never fully recovered from them to revive his prior athletic form.
Bruce Ridpath
Montreal Wanderers found a new goalkeeper for the 1914–15 NHA season, to replace Billy Nicholson, in 25-year old Ottawa native Charlie McCarthy, who in previous seasons had played with his brother Frank on various teams in British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario. McCarthy made a fine showing during the season, and helped the Wanderers to a tied first place finish in the standing with the Ottawa Senators. In the subsequent league playoffs between the two teams the Senators edged out the Wanderers 4 goals to 1 over two games (4-0, 0-1), with McCarthy recording a shutout in the final game in Montreal.
Despite earning the starting job on the Wanderers in 1914–15, McCarthy held out prior to the 1915–16 campaign, wanting more money from team manager Sammy Lichtenhein to stay in Montreal. When Lichtenhein didn’t give in to his demands, McCarthy instead put all of his focus on his other sport: boxing. While boxing in New York in December of 1915, McCarthy wrote a sour message back home to Canada, claiming he was done with hockey:
“Sam Lichtenhein was too generous. Offered me enough money to pay my board, see a nickel show and take a car ride to and from the Arena every morning. Think I’ll stick to the ring.”[6]
– Charlie McCarthy on Montreal Wanderers manager Sammy Lichtenhein
– Charlie McCarthy on Montreal Wanderers manager Sammy Lichtenhein
McCarthy made his professional boxing debut in 1914, and then went on to appear in a steady stream of lightweight bouts against opponents in both Canada and the United States, eventually earning the title of Canadian lightweight champion. McCarthy’s boxing career was briefly interrupted by military service in the midst of World War I, with both the Canadian and American armies, but he continued to throw his left hook in the boxing ring into the early 1920s.
Charlie McCarthy
While figure skating perhaps wasn’t the most popular sport among hockey players at the time, it still had its outstanding exception in Norman Scott from Ottawa. As a hockey player Scott, a left winger position wise, came up through the Ottawa City Hockey League where he played for the Ottawa Cliffsides and Ottawa Coopers in his late teenage years. With the Coopers during the 1909–10 season he scored 13 goals in 6 games, fourth best in the league and at a higher goal scoring pace than future Hockey Hall of Fame inductee Eddie Gerard of the Ottawa New Edinburghs.
For the 1910–11 season Scott had relocated to Montreal to attend McGill University, and while at the school he played for its hockey team in the Canadian Intercollegiate Athletic Union (CIAU). Scott co-led the league in scoring in 1910–11 with 9 goals in 4 games, with McGill finishing third behind the University of Toronto and Queen’s University teams. In 1911–12 McGill finished first in the standing, and then defeated the University of Ottawa in the league final to claim CIAU championship honors, with Scott again contributing with 9 goals in 4 games over the course of the season.
While in Montreal Scott became a member of the Winter Club of Montreal figure skating club, out of which he competed in both single and pair skating. On February 13, 1914 he won both single and pair skating Canadian championship honors at the Laurier Avenue Arena in Ottawa, teaming up with female companion Jeanne Chevalier in the pair skating competition.[7] The following month, on March 21, Scott also claimed single and pair skating American championship honors at the Arena Rink in New Haven, Connecticut, again teaming up with Chevalier for the pairs title.[8]
Norman Scott’s athletic career, which also included competitive golf with the Royal Ottawa Golf Club, was interrupted by World War I where he saw service in France with the Royal Air Force. He came back from Europe in early 1919, and in 1920 he won another Canadian single figure skating championship.
Although his hockey career never left the amateur ranks, Scott was once regarded as a promising top prospect in the game. He was said to have been given a big offer to join the Ottawa Senators of the NHA while he was still in his teens.[9]
Norman Scott
Also among the American hockeyists at the time were there a significant participatory overlap between different sports. The most famous American hockey player at the time, Hobart “Hobey” Baker of Princeton University and the St. Nicholas Hockey Club of New York, was also an avid football player while a student at Princeton University. But Baker, when asked by the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in December 1914, didn’t hold back his answer on which of the two sports he preferred the most:
“Hockey is the only game. I have always thought it was a better sport than football.”[10]
– Hobey Baker on preferring hockey over football
– Hobey Baker on preferring hockey over football
Hobey Baker, much like Charlie McCarthy and Norman Scott, also made a tour in France during World War I, as a fighter pilot. Baker survived active combat in the war, but hours before he was due to leave France for America, on December 21 of 1918, he died after a plane he was test-piloting crashed at an airfield in Toul in the northeastern parts of the country.
Sources:
[1] Ottawa Citizen, Aug. 15, 1910
[2] The Daily Province (Vancouver), Mar. 4, 1922
[3] Vancouver Sun, Jan. 22, 1966
[4] Ottawa Citizen, Aug. 10, 1910
[5] Montreal Gazette, Nov. 3, 1911
[6] Ottawa Citizen, Dec. 11, 1915
[7] Ottawa Citizen, Feb. 14, 1914
[8] Ottawa Citizen, Mar. 23, 1914
[9] Ottawa Citizen, Feb. 3, 1919
[10] Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Dec. 30, 1914
Posted on Behind the Boards (SIHR Blog)
