I was recently reading an article that quoted a piece from the Globe and Mail in 1938 where Dick Irvin Sr. "Recalls some hockey disappointments, and explains why super stars are fading out". I had to do a double take to be sure that it was from 1938. The quote in question is this...
"youngsters are being over-coached. I don't think young fellows who are getting in pro hockey these days are developing their own natural ability as did the players of twenty and twenty-five years ago. Let me illustrate what I mean. During my youth in Winnipeg there was very little organized hockey and no junior hockey at all. We played in the open air on corner lots and on the Assiniboine and Red rivers. Generally there were from fifty to one hundred kids chasing one puck. If you didn't learn to stickhandle... well, you never got the chance to keep the puck, and you had to learn to be adept at checking in order to get the puck.
It was just dog-eat-dog, and the kids who had skill and stamina became individual stars. They stood out far above the rest.
These days kids are coached, coached, coached from pee-wee and juvenile ranks right up through to pro. Six or seven coaches may handle a youngster before he reaches an N.H.L. coach.
Many of the kids these days have never played on a frozen river or pond...where they could play and practice all day. Instead they only have short practice hours in an artificial ice arena, and they've never got the real groundwork or background."
The last paragraph especially really got me. The idea of the majority of kids coming up in the 30s not having ever played on natural ice seems to very foreign to the picture we get of hockey from the time. And the idea that kids then only had a few hours time to practice seems very backwards to what we are normally told. That said it of course it makes perfect sense after considering that the majority of the youth of the time were in cities as they are now so they wouldn't have the space to play on natural ice or open air. But it feels like I could read this argument in the paper tomorrow.
Are they any others people have come across in a similar vein? These sorts of 'hockey arguments' feel like they are perpetually new for each generation I am sure, would be curious what things some of the older posters here have been hearing thru their entire lives.