1914 minutes book

Where it all began

100 years later, a look back at the birth of Hockey Canada

December 4, 2014
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NOTE: The following is an excerpt from “It’s Our Game” by Michael McKinley, which celebrates the 100-year history of Hockey Canada. The book is available now, online and at all major bookstores.

At 10 a.m. on the morning of Dec. 4, 1914, Canadian history was made. It was not a military triumph in the cold and bloody trenches of Flanders, where the soldiers fighting and dying in the colours of the Canadian Expeditionary Force now knew that they would not be home by Christmas. This history was far more genteel but no less significant in the forging of the national identity: next to the country’s majestic Parliament buildings in a chandeliered meeting room of the Chateau Laurier, Ottawa’s two-year-old grand hotel, a group of 21 hockey executives gathered to change the world.

Of course, on that chilly morning in late autumn, the stated purpose of hockey’s guardians seemed clerically humble, meeting to create “a governing body for the sport of hockey.” The Toronto Daily Star added the spin the next day, shouting out in an almost relieved headline, “National Hockey Body Formed at Last,” explaining that this new group would have “jurisdiction over the amateur game throughout the whole of Canada.”

Indeed, the men at that historic inauguration represented hockey’s breadth and complexity in a vast country just past its 47th birthday: from New Westminster, B.C., there was Reverend Albert E. Vert, a Presbyterian minister and local amateur athletics champion; from Winnipeg there was C.C. Robinson, an executive of the historic Winnipeg Victorias Hockey Club, winners of the Stanley Cup in the days of horse and carriage; from Montreal there was the American-born entrepreneur Leo Dandurand, future owner of the soon-to-be fabled Canadiens, and there was also William Northey, founder of the Canadian Arena Company, and chair of the meeting. In between those worthies there were representatives from Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ontario, with as many from Manitoba – six – as there were from Quebec.

The gathering reflected the breakaway growth of the sport in the Canadian landscape. Just four decades after James Creighton had staged the world’s first indoor hockey match in Montreal, the sport was so popular in Canada that it now needed a national government.

Rather, it needed a body to oversee the amateur game, now that hockey had gone so robustly professional. As Canada settled to the west, hockey went with it, and by the turn of the 20th century there were elite league teams, school teams, company teams, and women’s teams across the country.

By 1904 the game had such a range of players and popularity that the world’s first professional hockey league took off to rich success in the United States. In Canada, the game was still resolutely amateur, as and a result the great hockey event of the late winter of 1905 saw the Dawson City Nuggets, an amateur team from the Yukon, travel by bicycle, steam ship and railway across Canada to challenge for the Stanley Cup in Ottawa. They captured the imagination of the public, but got a pasting from the slick Ottawa Silver Seven, who sent them back to stare at the Northern Lights and contemplate their 32-4 beating over two games.

Hockey became professional in Canada in 1908, which only served to focus the distinction between those players who were paid, and those were not. And so in Ottawa on that December morning in 1914, the men who assembled at the Chateau Laurier also took a crack at creating an organization to govern both professional and amateur hockey, an idea “promptly opposed by many of the representatives present.”

But they won the agreement from Allan Cup trustee William Northey that this trophy would become the chief prize awarded by the new governing body. Montreal banker, steamship line owner and Canadian blueblood Sir H. Montague Allan, C.V.O. had donated the cup in 1908 to encourage excellence in amateur hockey after the Stanley Cup increasingly became the domain the championship trophy of the professionals. And now, it would become the symbol of excellence for Canada’s newest sporting body, one which would govern and grow the game for the next century and beyond.

After thanking the hotel manager for use of the room, the founders adjourned and went about their business of the day, having just created the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association.

For more information:

Esther Madziya
Manager, Communications
Hockey Canada

(403) 284-6484 

[email protected] 

Spencer Sharkey
Manager, Communications
Hockey Canada

(403) 777-4567

[email protected]

Jeremy Knight
Manager, Corporate Communications
Hockey Canada

(647) 251-9738

[email protected]

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