A few weeks before Varsity’s disappointing loss, something happened that would change the future of hockey in Canada. Smythe received a message from Col. John S. Hammond of the newly created New York Rangers, who was looking for a general manager. Hammond worked for Tex Rickard, the larger-than-life Manhattan impresario and boxing promoter who had bought Madison Square Garden and moved it to a new location well away from Madison Square, presiding over the formal opening just a few months earlier.
Rickard had a team and a building, but lacked players and a manager who knew the game. He and Hammond had both been persuaded that hockey would draw well in New York, providing the Garden with a regular revenue stream between the boxing matches that were Rickard’s bread and butter, but neither had more than a passing acquaintance with the game. They needed someone who did, and Smythe had been recommended by Charles F. Adams, the grocery magnate who owned the Boston Bruins. Adams had watched Smythe’s Varsity squads regularly beat up on local college teams and was impressed. Smythe was young, cocky, energetic and already well into a feud with Boston’s equally thick-skinned coach, Art Ross, but he seemed to have a facility for building winners. Adams suggested the Rangers give him a try.
Hammond duly offered a contract, and Smythe signed on March 25, 1926, accepting $5,000 his first year and $7,500 for each of the next three, plus 5 per cent of the Rangers’ net profits, with a $2,500 minimum guaranteed for the first year. Either side could back out with appropriate notice, with Smythe guaranteed his salary plus $5,000 if he was fired before March 1927. The details would prove to be important.
Smythe’s entry into professional hockey was the first step down a road that would lead to the creation of the Toronto Maple Leafs, the construction of Maple Leaf Gardens, and the establishment of a dynasty that would last forty years and win eleven Stanley Cups. Along the way it would create a pantheon of Canadian hockey heroes – too many to begin to list – and a handful of national icons. It would make Smythe one of the best-known figures in the country, see his arena become a national sports shrine, and turn Saturday night into a near-religious experience as Canadians from one coast to the other gathered around the radio to listen to Foster Hewitt describe the latest exploits of Canada’s favourite team. It would also alter the fortunes of the NHL, which Smythe helped transform from just another pro league into the dominant sports organization in the land, and the only league allowed to compete for the Stanley Cup. By the time Smythe retired, he would have built a prosperous enterprise so unshakably healthy it would withstand recession, depression, war, scandal, and an entire generation of perilously awful management.
For the moment, though, Smythe’s opportunity presented a problem on the home front. While he was understandably elated, it was a move that alarmed Irene. She was a young mother with two children, living in a small house near her husband’s gravel business. She was accustomed to her husband being absent in the hockey season, but the prospect of the whole family – Stafford was five and Miriam three – moving to New York wasn’t part of her long-term plans. Toronto was growing rapidly enough, but New York was ten times the size and a world away in terms of its pace, intensity, and sophistication. Everything about it was bigger, faster, and more demanding. It was far away from everyone she knew, and she could expect to see even less of her husband.
To reassure her, Smythe promised they would make their permanent home in Toronto while he commuted. He set out to find her a bigger house, scouted neighbourhoods, and quickly settled on a pleasant new area named Baby Point on the western reaches of the city overlooking the Humber River. It had a solid and comfortable feel, dotted with large, stone-fronted, English-style manor houses with mullioned windows and flagstone walks, many of them backing on to deep ravines with mature trees. It was also just down Jane Street from the pit. Smythe bought a ravine lot and paid an architect $15,000 to erect a large, comfortable home, big enough for their growing brood, but not the sort of ostentatious monster home a self-made man eager to show off his success might build today. He and Irene would live there the rest of their lives, adding other properties along the way but always with Baby Point as the place to which they came home.
The new job meant Smythe would be spending six months a year in New York, dropping in to see his family when the Rangers played in Toronto, and the other six running his gravel business. It wasn’t a perfect arrangement, but to Irene it was preferable to uprooting the clan and shipping them to a big, strange city away from their friends and families. Nine months after they moved into the new house, their third child, Hugh, was born.
That spring was a propitious moment in the life of the NHL and hockey in general. Just as Smythe had returned from the war at the moment amateur hockey was entering its golden age, so he was getting out as it was about to be eclipsed forever by the professional game.
A decade after its formation, the NHL was finally seeing some success. From three teams in 1918 it had grown to ten for the 1926–27 season, and interest was building in the U.S. northeast. As usual, American involvement stirred mixed feelings in Canada. The three latest additions to the league, in New York, Chicago, and Detroit, shifted the balance significantly. Instead of a seven-team league with four clubs in Canada, the NHL was now a ten-team league with six in the United States.
At the same time, the NHL’s most serious rivals disappeared. For years the league had vied with western competitors for players and prestige. The main threat was the British Columbia–based Pacific Coast Hockey Association, owned and operated by the Patrick brothers, Lester and Frank. Another western-based league, the Western Canada Hockey League, had teams in Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, and Saskatoon/Moose Jaw. The western teams had plenty of talent, including Eddie Shore, Cyclone Taylor, Dick Irvin, and the Patricks themselves, but western Canada didn’t yet have the population to support a league of its own, much less two, and both leagues had died out by the end of the 1926 season.*
For the NHL, the timing was perfect. The east had both money and population and plenty of interest in hockey. The NHL quickly granted franchises to Chicago and Detroit and approved a second team in Manhattan, where the New York Americans had already begun play. The Chicago team was owned by Maj. Frederic McLaughlin, who named it the Black Hawks after his First World War machine-gun battalion, and let his wife design an Indian-head crest for the jerseys. The newly named Hawks had spent the previous year as the Portland Rosebuds, led by Dick Irvin, a serious-minded centre from Regina who had scored thirty goals in thirty games. McLaughlin bought the Rosebuds to stock his team – spending somewhere between $100,000 and $200,000 depending on which report you believe. In Detroit, the new owners bought up Lester Patrick’s Victoria Cougars, who had won the 1925 Stanley Cup, the last non-NHL team to do so.1
The new owners were just what professional hockey needed: wealthy men in large markets who could build big arenas and sell the game to an American audience. So many U.S. teams were signing up that NHL governors reluctantly agreed to split into two divisions, with a U.S. division comprising New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh,† and a Canadian division including Toronto, Ottawa, the Maroons and Canadiens from Montreal, and, incongruously, the New York Americans. Like Rickard, though, most of the new owners had little more than a passing understanding of the game itself.
There are two distinct versions of how Tex Rickard came to own a hockey team. Personally, he wasn’t much interested in the sport. He’d built his name as a boxing promoter, turning his friendship with heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey into a spectacularly successful run of record-setting fight promotions, sometimes building an entire stadium just for one fight, then tearing it down afterwards. The Garden had been built for boxing, which was wildly popular, but not enough to keep the lights on every night. Rickard needed something to fill the gap.
Frank Boucher, who knew Hammond and spent his career with the Rangers as player, coach and manager, said Hammond convinced his his friend and business partner that hockey was the answer to their problem. Hammond had been to Montreal, where he took in a few games at the old Mount Royal arena, which he complained was “cold as Greenland” and so crowded he couldn’t get out of his seat to warm himself between periods. But he was impressed by the enthusiasm of the patrons and the excitement of the game, and he figured people in New York would be just as enthusiastic.2
A second version maintains that it was Rickard who was lured to Montreal for a Canadiens game, where he took one look at Howie Morenz and pledged that if Morenz would play in New York he’d agree to buy a franchise.3
Both Rickard and Hammond were characters it would be difficult to invent. Rickard was one of the best-known men in New York at a time when it was stuffed with celebrity competition, from Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig to Duke Ellington and George Gershwin. There were reputed to be twenty thousand illegal drinking establishments in Manhattan alone, despite Prohibition, and mobsters by the carload to keep them all supplied.
Rickard came to the Big City by way of the Wild West and the Klondike gold rush. He was born in Missouri, one farm down from the James family. His mother claimed she missed his first cry because a posse happened to be passing, chasing Jesse and Frank. He made it to the end of the third grade before quitting to spend a decade herding cattle and riding the range on ranches around Kansas. When his young wife and newborn died, he lit out for gold country, making and losing several fortunes in the Klondike and Nome gold rushes, mostly running a series of saloons and gambling joints he anointed with the same name, The Northern. Eventually he headed south to Nevada, where he opened a new Northern in the town of Goldfield and got into the boxing business as a way of attracting customers to the flyblown desert location. He prospered as a promoter and took out a ten-year lease on Madison Square Garden in 1920 when it was losing $25,000 a year. Five years later he built a new version twenty-five blocks away, on top of what had been the city streetcar barns.
Hammond was born to a family with deep roots in the military and iron manufacturing. He trained at West Point, where he starred as a sprinter, competing in the 1904 Olympic Games. He also took up polo, and was working as a military attaché in South America when he met Rickard, who had taken a sabbatical from digging gold and hustling fights to start up a cattle business. Hammond quit the army and the two teamed up in a number of oil and cattle ventures. When Rickard moved to New York, Hammond went with him and was put in charge of overseeing new ventures.
Whether it was Rickard or Hammond who first hit on the notion of a hockey team for the Garden, they initially agreed it would be better if someone else owned the team. They found their man in a well-known bootlegger named Big Bill Dwyer. Dwyer lived in a suite at the Forrest Hotel, which featured an open bar and plenty of women of easy virtue.
He liked the idea of being a hockey impresario. Frank Calder, the NHL president, was less enthused. When Smythe and Ottawa Senators owner Frank Ahearn once accompanied Dwyer to a lunch meeting, Calder was appalled: “Don’t you fellows know he got a bullet through the overcoat last week?” he demanded.4 Hammond arranged for Dwyer to acquire a franchise and some players, and the New York Americans were born. They debuted at the Garden in 1925 and were such a hit Rickard and Hammond quickly decided they needed their own team, instantly dooming the Americans to also-ran status.*
It was probably preordained that Smythe would clash with the polo-playing, aristocratic Hammond, who had exactly the sort of pedigree Smythe resented. Colonel Hammond had learned his military skills at soldier school; Lieutenant Smythe picked his up while getting shot at in Europe. The colonel wrote a handbook on artillery; Smythe studied artillery by firing it at Germans. Smythe was confident of his ability, having spent years producing winning teams in Toronto. “I knew every hockey player in the world right then,” he would brag.5 Hammond, on the other hand, knew what it took to pack the Garden and excite a New York crowd. Smythe might have been a superior hockey man with a strong record and plenty of chutzpah, but on Broadway he was still just a little guy from Toronto whom nobody had ever heard of.
He set out to build the Rangers a team, armed with a short list of players. The collapse of the two western leagues had flooded the market with talent, but there was also plenty of competition and he knew he had to move quickly. One of his first stops was Port Arthur in pursuit of Lorne Chabot, the big, sad-eyed goalie who had twice stymied his bid for the Allan Cup. Chabot was a large man, an inch over six feet, in an era of small goalies. It was commonly accepted that small, quick men were better in net because they moved faster. Chabot didn’t move quickly. Sometimes he barely seemed to move at all. When not busy, he liked to lounge on the crossbar “like a mantle-piece” according to one observer, chewing gum and rarely saying a word. He was superstitious and a bit vain, always shaving before a game because he thought stitches showed up less on a clean-shaven face. When under fire he would flop around the crease in a style that left more than one coach unimpressed. But he had a decided facility for stopping pucks, which was all that Smythe cared about.
From Port Arthur Smythe went to Minnesota to watch Ching Johnson and Taffy Abel, who played as a defensive pairing for the Minneapolis Millers in the U.S. amateur league. Johnson was 210 pounds and solid muscle; Abel outweighed him by 15 pounds, most of it flab. Johnson, big, balding, and cheerful, loved body contact and appeared to be grinning while he played, especially after hitting somebody. When you ran into Johnson, teammates said, it was like slamming into a wall. Hitting Taffy, on the other hand, was like falling into a pillow.
Still, at a time when restrictions on forward passing forced players to try to carry the puck past the defence, getting by Taffy and Ching was a formidable task. They moved quickly for big men and had the ability to smother the play of attacking players. Ching, whose real first name was Ivan and whose nickname came from his habit of acting as cook during summer camping trips – a job usually reserved for Chinese hired hands – was careful with his money and gave Smythe a hard time during bargaining, constantly walking out to “phone his wife,” like a car salesman pretending to check with the manager.* Abel was even worse. On the day Smythe was leaving town, he still didn’t have a deal and asked Abel to meet him on the train. When the train lurched into motion he blocked Abel’s exit. “ ‘Taffy,’ I said, “the money’s good, you won’t do better, and the next stop is two hundred and fifty miles away. If you don’t sign, you won’t be getting off this train until then.’ ” Abel signed and leapt off the moving train.6*
Smythe intercepted Bill and Bun Cook in Winnipeg while they were on their way to see a man from the Montreal Maroons. The Cooks had been playing for Saskatoon in the WCHL, with Bill usually leading the league in scoring. Smythe badly wanted both brothers, though Bill was the star of the two. Bill Cook was a serious, intense man who had spent four years in Europe during the First World War, then signed up for two extra years fighting Bolsheviks in Russia. He loved to shoot the puck, but wasn’t much for passing. “When I want that puck, I’ll yell for it, and you get that damn puck to me,” he’d say.7 Frank Boucher, who would centre the brothers, said Cook’s on-ice cry “was the most amazing half-grunt, half-moan, half-yell I ever heard. He’d let this weird sound out of him, which meant he was in the clear.”8 Smythe signed them both, for an eminently reasonable bonus of $5,000, the greater share going to Bill. The Cooks in turn recommended he sign Boucher, who Smythe had never seen. Taking them at their word he sent a cable to Hammond, who obediently bought Boucher’s rights.
Frank Boucher would spend three decades in the NHL as player, coach, or manager, and never come to like Conn Smythe. The trouble started right off the bat, at their first meeting on a train platform in Ottawa, where Boucher had been summoned to meet his new boss. Boucher had spent a miserable summer caring for his wife, who’d been ill since giving birth to their first child, and he’d lost a lot of weight. He thought his rights belonged to Boston and hadn’t realized he’d been traded to New York until that morning, when Ahearn called and told him Connie Smythe was in town and wanted to meet him. Boucher later related the conversation in his memoirs:9
“Smythe. S-m-y-t-h-e.”
“Well, who is he and what’s he want to see me for?”
“I’m not sure, Frankie, but I assume he wants to talk about your contract. He’s recruiting players for the Rangers, you know.”
“The Rangers? But I’m going to Boston.”
“Good God Frankie,” Ahearn shouted. “Where have you been? You were sold to the Rangers a month ago.”
The meeting at the train station didn’t go well. Author Trent Frayne, who co-wrote Boucher’s memoirs, recounted that when Smythe was peeved his bright blue eyes turned into “round dimes of ice.” Smythe was less than impressed when he sized up his scrawny new centreman, and Boucher got the ten-cent eyeball treatment.
“What do you weigh?” he demanded.
“Around a hundred and thirty five,” I said.
“I paid fifteen thousand dollars for you?’ Smythe grunted. “Bill Cook must be crazy.”10
Adding Boucher meant the Rangers were all but complete. Teams consisted of one main forward line and a pair of defencemen, with a handful of spares. The forwards played up to forty-five minutes a game, the defence up to sixty minutes or more, if there was overtime. Goalies often had no backups – if one was hurt during a game, everyone waited while he got stitched up.
Smythe’s no-nonsense approach to negotiations had secured the entire new Rangers team, eleven players in all, for $32,000. It was a remarkable feat, even for the time. The winner’s purse for a single Dempsey-Tunney match in 1927 was $990,000. Babe Ruth was earning $70,000 a year, double the entire Rangers payroll. In a few short weeks, Smythe had managed to put together a strong squad willing to play for what amounted, in New York terms, to peanuts.
Training was set to open October 18 at the Ravina Gardens, a rink in the west end of Toronto near High Park. Pre-season fitness wasn’t taken too seriously by most teams. The schedule was just forty-four games, recently raised from thirty-six. Players turned up in November and played themselves into shape in the opening weeks. Smythe, though, was a stickler for conditioning and intended to put the players through an extended training program, with roadwork in the mornings and skating in the afternoons. He immediately got into a quarrel with Boucher, who objected when Smythe informed him he’d be paid the same $3,500 he’d earned the year before. Boucher argued that Toronto was a lot more expensive than Vancouver and demanded a raise. They got into a shouting match before Smythe relented and agreed to a $1,500 increase.11
The rookie manager wasn’t in any better odour with Hammond, who had developed serious doubts about the opinionated little man from Toronto. Their temperaments were similar: each considered himself the boss of any enterprise of which he was part. Hammond wanted a team he could sell on Broadway. That meant big names, colourful characters, and outsized personalities. New Yorkers didn’t care about quiet, gum-chewing goaltenders from Port Arthur, even if they had won two Allan Cups. Hammond and Rickard were accustomed to dealing in large figures; the colonel would happily have doubled the $32,000 payroll if Smythe had delivered even one big-name player.
Hammond urged Smythe to make a bid for Babe Dye, an all-round athlete who had played halfback for the Toronto Argonauts football club and been offered $25,000 to play baseball in Philadelphia. Dye had averaged more than a goal a game over the previous six years with the Toronto St. Patricks. Although easily the team’s best player, he was being offered at a reasonable price because the St. Pats needed money. Hammond was eager to make a bid. Smythe refused. He considered Dye too much of a one-man band. Smythe emphasized team play and felt a big star on an otherwise nondescript team upset the balance. He noted the St. Pats had a lousy record despite Dye’s scoring prowess. When word came through that Dye had been sold to the Black Hawks, Hammond was irate. He intercepted Smythe, who had been at the theatre with Irene, and informed him Dye had gone to Chicago for $15,000. Smythe shrugged it off. “I wouldn’t want Dye on my team, no matter what the price,” he told Hammond. “He wouldn’t help this team one day.”*
Soon after, Lester Patrick got a telegram in Victoria, B.C., inquiring whether he was interested in managing the Rangers. The next day Hammond called to confirm the offer, and Patrick accepted. He was just forty-two, but already had the stature of a grand old man of hockey. He and his brother had built the first artificial ice rinks in Canada and had launched the Pacific Coast League to ensure there were teams to play in them. They’d introduced a dozen or more changes to the game, regularly altering rules and introducing innovations. Lester was the more regal of the two, tall, stately, and grey-haired, looking more like a Victorian gentleman than a confirmed rink rat. If anyone had the mix of gravitas and showmanship to suit New Yorkers, it was Lester Patrick.12
A few days later Smythe got a call to meet Hammond at Union Station. When he got there, Patrick was with Hammond. “I knew without being told that I no longer was coach of the New York Rangers,” Smythe said.13 Hammond told him Patrick would be taking over immediately. He offered $7,500 to buy out Smythe’s contract instead of the $10,000 he had been promised. Too upset to argue, Smythe agreed.
With Smythe’s co-operation, Hammond put on a song and dance for the local papers to explain the sudden change. He called a press conference at the King Edward Hotel October 25 and declared that everyone was parting as friends. Smythe was leaving, he said, because the Rangers had decided they needed a year-round coach, and Smythe had decided he couldn’t abandon his sand and gravel business in Toronto and move to Manhattan.
“I am sorry to lose Smythe,” Hammond told the Star’s Lou Marsh. “He has done exceptionally valuable work for us in getting together this team and I am certainly sorry to lose him. He is a bright young man of exceptional executive and business ability, and we could use him to advantage if we could only pay him enough to induce him to drop his business here.” Any suggestion that the Rangers were dumping Smythe to go with the more experienced Patrick was “sour,” he said.
Marsh accepted the explanation without challenge, reporting that Hammond was “a superior type of man” who “inspires loyalty.”
“Smythe and the Rangers part with the friendliest of feeling,” he reported.14
It was all balderdash. Smythe was crushed and Hammond was happy to be rid of him. Over the next few days Smythe grew increasingly irritated at being stiffed out of his extra $2,500. He felt Hammond and Rickard didn’t know enough about hockey to appreciate the quality of the team he’d assembled. Rickard tried to soften the blow, inviting him to the Rangers opening game and promising tickets to several Broadway shows, at the Garden’s expense. Smythe tossed the invitation aside, but Irene retrieved the letter and insisted they go. It turned out to be a lucky thing for her husband that she did.
* Lester Patrick owned and played for the Victoria club in the PCHA. When the league folded, he was the last owner/player until Mario Lemieux in Pittsburgh more than seventy years later.
† Bruce Kidd, The Struggle for Canadian Sport (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 207. This book gives 1926 census figures as New York (5.9 million), Boston (787,000), Chicago (3 million), Detroit (1.3 million), and Pittsburgh (637,000).
* Bill Dwyer didn’t get to see his team’s first game in 1925, having been arrested for bootlegging a few days earlier.
* Ching’s nickname was perfectly acceptable by the standards of the time, which didn’t share today’s greater social and ethnic sensibilities. While possibly just inside the bounds of acceptability by modern standards, the chant fans put up when he was on the ice – “Ching, Ching, Chinaman!” – would be considered beyond the pale.
* Although he liked the Johnson/Abel defensive tandem, Smythe almost didn’t sign Abel. When Smythe turned up to scout the team, he noticed Abel was playing with a ragged old stick and decided he wasn’t the sort of player for the Rangers. He changed his mind after Abel explained that someone had stolen all the team’s sticks the night before, forcing him to scrounge whatever replacement he could find.
* Babe Dye had a strong first season with the Black Hawks, leading the team in goals with twenty-five and placing second in scoring to Dick Irvin. However, at training camp the next year he broke his leg and never regained his previous level of skill. He scored just one goal over the next three seasons before retiring in 1931.