History of hockey, hockey, hockey, hockey, hockey all the time...

Since 1905 the Champlain Society has been publishing one volume a year, always (or at least for many years) hardbound in handsome red covers, of  documents on a Canadian historical subject.  

Yesterday, I got one in the mail. This year's book is A Hotly Contested Affair: Hockey in Canada: The National Game in Documents, edited and introduced and commented on by Andrew C. Holman. It's maybe a livelier read than some Champlain volumes. Holman has selected widely from literature and journalism as well as more official hockey documents.

The Champlain Society, having understood not everyone who supports Canadian history wants a long line of redbound hardcovers gradually filling their precious shelf space, has started opening other membership options. As well, it offers for purchase a handsome paperback version of A Hotly Contested Affair. Read all about it here, and consider being a member, avec ou sans book.

I've been working on the papers of B.C judge, collector, and controversialist Archer Martin (1865-1941) for the DCB recently.  His correspondence for 1905, I recently was amused to see, includes an invitation to become one of the 200 founding members of the Champlain Society, along with the great and the good of Canadian historico-literary society. He declined, writing, "At present I cannot, to speak frankly, afford to do so…. Anything I can do other than financially…"

They have probably heard that a few times since.

Howie Morenz and the Franklin Expedition

The new DCB entry online today is Howie Morenz, the Canadiens hockey star who died at 34 after a mid-game accident at the Montreal Forum in 1937.

I remember learning as a child that his funeral was held at the Forum, where his casket was placed at centre ice. I misunderstood this to mean he was buried at centre ice. For a while, every time Hockey Night in Canada showed a Montreal game, I was a bit creeped out by the awareness of his frozen body entombed just below the playing surface.

Much later, this memory came back to me powerfully when the archeologist Owen Beattie exhumed the frozen preserved bodies of those Franklin expedition casualties who had been buried on Beechey Island. Exactly!

History of hockey (all the time)

Could that be Johnny Bower there?

Did the Franklin expedition take a hockey team to the Northwest Passage?  Puckstruck ("the culture of hockey and vice versa") is on the story, When will the Parks Canada divers bring up that stash of hockey sticks in the holds of Erebus?

While we are waiting, Jughead want to play for you "Hockeyhockeyhockeyhockey hockey all the time":

Hockey history: that booing in Vancouver in 1972

Vancouver, Phil's not pleased

Amid all the fortieth anniversary coverage of the Canada-Soviet Union summit series of 1972, there have been references to the events in Vancouver on September 8, 1972, when the Canadian team was beaten 5-3.  Preparing to head to Moscow, down 2 to 1 (one tie) in the series, the team was loudly booed by the Vancouver fans.

There is a famous video of Phil Exposito declaring his "disappointment" in the fans. That judgment seems to have been picked up by most of the commentators in the fortieth-anniversary commemorations.  I heard the terrific writer Dave Bidini on TVO's "The Agenda" the other night, declaring it was unacceptable for Canadian fans to have booed the Canadian team in adversity.

There's a Toronto-Montreal basis to those comments. (Even the video link above, from the Vancouver Sun, accompanies a story by Red Fisher, a central Canadian sports reporter who to my mind misses the essential context.)

Hockey hockey hockey hockey hockey -- hockey all the time.

Denis Smith draws our attention to Puckstruck, a blog on the culture of hockey and vice versa with a fair share of historical sensibility.

Sample Puckstruck item, drawn from the New Yorker of November 27, 1937:

The young lady who sat behind us at last Sunday’s hockey game remained silent through the first period, evidently spellbound. Then she remarked to her escort, “I don’t know who these idiots are, but they certainly know how to skate.”