To the boys from McGill, what happened that winter night in a Montreal skating rink was just an experiment. They never dreamed they were making history. When the puck dropped, they gave the world its first official hockey match.
And in that moment, a new game and a new country made a lifelong bond. We were the nation that was created when the game was created. A game of survival played against winter. The promise of life in the season of death. Hockey's tough, it's dangerous, it's wonderful.
Hometown dreams born on frozen ponds. And epic journeys in a quest for glory. It's the story of miners and mill workers.
And the winter stage where any man can be king. Of the struggles and triumphs of the women who fought for their place in the game. There was a time when I first started coaching hockey that the only person who was watching our game was the Zamboni driver.
Hockey's story spans two centuries in a vast country coming of age. A story of hucksters and heroes. Of victory and betrayal. A game that divides us and unites us like nothing else can.
I don't know what it is about hockey. When people get into it, it's just in their blood. It's Canada's gift to the world and a measure of our place in the world.
Are we going to... Have challenges? Absolutely. But nobody's going to take away the fact that it's our name. That'll never be taken away.
It's the game of our kids and the game of our lives. A game that tells the story of a nation. To play shinny, one had to have a good stick, no umbrella handle. So early in the fall, boys would go up the sides of the mountain to hunt for small trees growing on the steeper slopes.
Those trees had roots that curved sharply into the bank, and when trimmed and dried, made ideal sticks with which to play the game. Even before Canada was a country, it was a ritual that marked the passing of one season and the beginning of another. Winter. Or, more precisely, hockey season. We took advantage of every opportunity.
Holidays, and often times after school, we were on the ice. It was skate, skate, skate as hard as you can go. Take a rest, and go after that puck again until you're thoroughly exhausted. The strange thing is, winter's greatest sport was born in summer, under the hot sun of Egypt, and Persia, and Greece. When the Athenians built the Parthenon 2,500 years ago, one of the stone carvers, a sports fan, left a record of his passion.
A marble relief shows two teams with crooked sticks and a ball waiting for the stone. for the referee's signal. Except for the missing skates, and the fact they're buck naked, you'd swear it was a center ice face-off.
You know, as humans, we're players. I mean, that's what we do. I mean, we mess around. We, you know, we see a rock and we kick it.
And if you kick a rock, somebody else is going to kick it too. And they may kick it in the opposite direction. And games begin. As civilization spread westward, so did its games.
Taking root in Europe and the British Isles, they called it Vandy, or Hurley, or Shinty. All stick and ball games. All hockey's ancestors.
But it's the skate that sets the game apart. By the 1600s, the Dutch had perfected the metal blade and had the right idea. But instead of hockey, they came up with a game called kolfen.
If this looks like a threesome standing on the first tee, it's because they're playing ice golf. The English and Irish nearly got it right, adapting the game of Hurley to the new marriage of steel and ice. Almost hockey, but not quite.
It wasn't until the old country games arrived with the immigrants on the shores of Nova Scotia that the last missing pieces were found. The new arrivals found the natives already had their own stick and ball game. The French called it La Crosse. In the native tongues, it had many names, including one that means little brother of war.
The Aboriginals considered sport as a rehearsal for battle. And consequently, in these games, it was winner-take-all, literally, sometimes. The opposing players might be killed. They would certainly be roughed up, because you wanted to win.
Because when you were in battle, you had to win, or you didn't. be dead. I think the immigrants saw how seriously they played these games and imitated them consciously or subconsciously when they played their own.
A rough game and a rough country both are taking shape at the same time. same time. Many will lay claim to the title, birthplace of hockey.
By the early 1800s, there are stories of schoolboys playing a form of the game on the frozen ponds and inlets of Nova Scotia. And British soldiers from the Kingston Garrison are seen scrimmaging on the ice of Lake Ontario. Hockey was not invented, it evolved. But Canada's imprint on it is unmistakable.
In 1866, the Star Manufacturing Company of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, produces a revolutionary new skate. An ingenious design that clamps firmly to a boot with a rounded blade for better maneuverability. For the next half century, Star skates are the gold standard around the world.
Even Leon Trotsky, future leader of the Russian Revolution, longs for a pair. Our relatives and friends, when going to town, would sometimes ask what I wanted. My eyes would shine. I want Halifax skates, I would cry.
But they would forget their promises. I lived in hope for several weeks, and then suffered a long disappointment. Star also sells hockey sticks, handmade by Mi'kmaq carvers. They're cut from the hornbeam tree, nicknamed Ironwood for its resiliency, or Stinkwood. Because the soda smells so bad.
Mi'kmaq sticks sell all over the continent for 45 cents a dozen. And each hockey stick at the time was like a Stradivarius. It was unique in its own way.
There were no two hockey sticks that were alike. First of all, no two pieces of wood are alike. But also the carver made a difference, and his nuances and how he carved the stick.
It's a beautiful metaphor for Canada. which I think was formed by the forest. The industry of the forest is the first sort of rooted industry in Canada, and out of this rooted industry comes what has become our sporting symbol, the hockey stick.
It's the stick that gave the game its name. Perhaps from the old French word hoquet, which means shepherd's crook, or maybe it's from the Iroquois hoquis, meaning tree branch. Wherever it came from, it stuck. The game in the mid-1800s is a wild game.
chaotic affair no set boundaries no time limits few rules the number of players determined only by how many could fit on the ice it was probably more of a scrum game because similar to maybe a little bit of rugby to feel hockey where everyone can sort of Magnet was magnetized by the puck and so you had to be around the puck or close to the puck and that's kind of how you moved around sort of like Pac-Man. That's how the game was played. Crowded and clumsy, but James Owen Creighton loved it. Born in Halifax in 1850 and schooled at King's College, Creighton had grown up playing pond hockey. At the age of 22, he takes a job as an engineer on the Lachine Canal in Montreal.
It's the biggest city in the country, population 150,000. A city on the brink, where a bustling harbor and modern factories share space with an open sewer running through downtown. Creighton keeps up his skating and takes up rugby, playing for the McGill University Football Club. Their match against Harvard in 1874 is a turning point in the sporting history of North America. New Englanders see in rugby the seeds of a game they'll call football.
But James Creighton sees another sport altogether. That winter, he recruits his rugby teammates, outfits them with Mi'kmaq sticks and star skates, and lays out the rules. The game shall be commenced and renewed by a bully in the center of the ground.
Charging from behind, tripping, collaring, kicking, or shinning shall not be allowed. No player shall raise his stick above his shoulder. When a player hits the ball, anyone on the same side... Then, on the night of March 3rd, 1875, Creighton books the Victoria Skating Rink for a couple of hours and invites a small audience.
Hockey had moved indoors. And now, instead of the wide-open game played outside for the last 75 years, it has boundaries, squeezed into a space roughly the size of a gladiator ring. They play by rugby rules, so it's illegal to pass the puck forward.
Stick handling is the only way to attack. And body checking, the best way to defend. The goal posts are 8 feet apart, and the goalies are forbidden from falling or kneeling to make a save.
They play 9 men a side, no substitutions. Everyone goes the full 60 minutes. Strange to modernize maybe, but there's no question, it's hockey. God didn't point to Montreal on March 1875 and, you know, a lightning bolt and suddenly there was this new game.
But all the elements have fed together into one place, the biggest city in the country, the most important city in the country, though, you know, Halifax certainly has its place. Everything just mushrooms and explodes from there. I mean, there's no getting around that. Whether you want to say that's the first game or not, it's where the game changes.
The score is 2-1, partway through the second half, when the troubles... starts. A few members of the skating club had seen enough and wanted their ice back. So the first official hockey game in history is called early because of a fight. Even so young, the game had demonstrated a potent capacity to inflame passions like no other.
Eight years after Creighton's little experiment, hockey is still a kind of boutique sport. The pastime of an exclusive little club of English Montreal gentlemen, most of whom had learned the game at McGill University. There are fewer than 100 league players in the whole country. Like journalist P.D. Ross, they're true believers.
Best game I know of, hockey. Got my skates, down to the river to play on the ice. Hard work all afternoon.
Feeling used up. Too much exercising between hockey and dancing. Determined to quit dancing. It is wealthy people in wealthy sporting clubs who have the time to indulge in leisure pursuits who come up with these games and make up the rules and play them in their universities and in their social clubs. And eventually the rest of the greater population is exposed to these and it starts to spread out.
But it definitely doesn't come from the ground up. It starts from the top and works its way down to the populace. But to spread, hockey needs a showcase.
And in 1883, opportunity comes calling. That year, Montreal hosts the first Winter Carnival. Every hotel and boarding house is booked, and tourists are pouring into the city by the trainload. P.D. Ross files reports for the Toronto Daily Mail.
There must have been a thousand sleighs and cutters on the street between three and four o'clock, and people of all description in them glide along to the music of their bells. Montreal is today the best advertised city on the continent. The centerpiece of the carnival is a marvel of frozen architecture.
A real winter palace built with 10,000 blocks of ice cut from the St. Lawrence River. But sports are the main attraction. Debagging, snowshoeing, horse races and a curling bonge field. And this year, Montreal's newest winter spectacle, ice hockey.
And for the first time the game has a world stage to play on. Newspapers have just started printing a sports page. And P.D. Ross makes sure hockey is in on the ground floor. This morning the carnival sports opened with the first of the hockey matches on the river.
The Quebec and Montreal teams were pitted against each other. The game is one of the finest and fastest on earth. I think the significance of it is we finally have kind of almost a homegrown product that's accepted, that people of all strata in society say, hey, that's worth going to see.
And I think it's important that it's in Montreal, which is the most important city in Canada at the time in terms of legitimizing something. If it's accepted in Montreal, it's going to be accepted everywhere. But the game still awaits its greatest patron, and he arrives in the nation's capital in 1888. Canadians could be forgiven for suspecting the Queen's new man in Rideau Hall might be a dry twig.
He wears a title as long and intimidating as a Quebec winter. First Baron of Preston, 16th Earl of Derby, Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Bath. In fact, Governor General Frederick Stanley is made for Canada.
He's a sporting man who likes to hunt, loves racehorses, and has a passion for fishing. He'd never seen a hockey game until that first winter in Canada, but all it took was one. And he comes here, and he meets the Canadian winter, and he goes to the Montreal Winter Carnival, and he comes walks in in the middle of a hockey match with his wife and a vice-vigil aid and a couple of his kids in tow.
And after they play God Save the Queen, stop the match to do this, the game resumes and Stanley falls in love. From that day, hockey took up residence on the outdoor rink at Rideau Hall. His lordship isn't much of a player himself, but his kids take to it like naturals.
His daughter, Isabel, is in the lineup for the government house team that wins the first women's hockey game ever played, thus prompting her peers back in England to sniff that she's too much inclined to be like a boy. Rideau Hall also fields a men's team. The brainchild of Stanley's sons, Edward and Arthur. The captain of the squad is none other than James Creighton.
The man who'd brought hockey to Montreal is now law clerk to the Senate, and still a keen player. They call themselves the Rideau Rebels, a name Edward Stanley chose because it all started as a bit of a lark. We were not too well looked upon by the authorities. and I think that our name, The Rebels, shows very clearly the feelings that existed amongst us. ...other hockey players towards us.
The mere thought of it connects me with one of the happiest times of my life. The rebels take hockey on the road, giving it the kind of exposure only royalty can attract. They'd take Lord Stanley's private rail car, and they'd go into Ontario and play matches, along with James Creighton, who was also on the team. It's an extraordinary collection of individuals. The Governor General's sons and Creighton...
Kind of hockey evangelicals, if you will, going out into the hinterland with the imprimatur of the Governor General on it, and the guy who stages the world's first indoor game, going around barnstorming. Before the family returns to England in 1892, the Stanley boys cajole their father into a $50 investment with a London silversmith, a modest little cup. That any team in the Dominion can challenge for and none can keep.
Hockey has its greatest prize. When I was growing up, we lived hockey. Hockey on the creeks, hockey on the ponds, hockey on the rivers. Hockey on the road, if necessary. We just moved from one kind of rink to another.
Perpetual motion. In 1895, you can buy a pair of star skates by mail order for a dollar and a one-piece Mi'kmaq stick for 25 cents. Hockey is bursting out all over the country.
Bankers face off against each other in Regina, plumbers helpers play in Ottawa, and firefighters in Calgary. The young Jubilees of Dartmouth and the Eurekas of Halifax play for the Coloured Championship of Nova Scotia. And the first women's teams are forming in universities in Quebec and Ontario.
The CPR had just finished the last 100 miles of track in a steel highway that now links the country from coast to coast. Discounted fares are offered to hockey fans, and local rivalries spill over into contests between cities and provinces. The Winnipeg Victorias had come late to the game, but they have the advantage of winter ice that comes early and stays long. They also have one of the finest athletes in the country. Dan Bain never drank or smoked and claimed he had no time for women.
Dan Bain collected championships. He won his first at the age of 13 in roller skating and they just kept coming. Gymnastics, lacrosse, the Pairs figure skating crown, three consecutive cycling championships.
Dan Bain. could win at anything. I couldn't see any sense in participating in a game unless I was good.
I kept it a sport just long enough to nab a championship and then I'd try something else. In 1895 that something else is hockey. Bain answers a help wanted ad inviting tryouts and wins a spot on the Winnipeg team.
By now the championship is in its third year. And Montreal teams have won the silverware every time. The Montreal Victorias are considered unbeatable. But in February 1896, the Winnipeggers head east to challenge for the cup, with a Manitoba Free Press reporter in tow.
Out from the west go seven of the Prairie Capital's most stalwart sons to do battle. We have shown that Winnipeg is the curling center of the world, and if the Stanley Cup is brought to the bull's eye of the Dominion, we will have proven our right to be called the hockey center of the world. It realizes the vision that Lord Stanley had. You have a team from the West, which in those days was the hinterland, coming East to play in a big series.
You have all sorts of modern inventions which tie the country together, telegraph, the railway, etc. All of a sudden this vision of Canada is realized in a hockey sense. And we have this Challenge Cup which represents the championship of Canadian hockey. So Winnipeg comes into the heartland of establishment Canada.
It's a phenomenon that no one has seen before. The game is played in the old Victoria... Skating rink under the same roof where 21 years earlier James Creighton had first brought hockey in from the cold But this time the place is packed to its elegant rafters The Winnipeggers skate out in scarlet sweaters and blazing with a gold bison. Their goalie, Cecil Merritt, sports a pair of white cricket pads, an innovation born of necessity since his teammates had perfected a wicked wrist shot.
The Winnipeg team plays fast and tough, something Dan Bain is particularly proud of. It was play 30 minutes, rest 10, then play another half hour, and with no substitutions. When we passed, the puck never left the ice. And if a wingman wasn't there to receive it, it was because he had a broken leg.
Thanks to the CPR, the country is not only tracked, but wired. And tonight, for the first time, hockey fans back in Winnipeg could follow a game they couldn't see. It's spotty and time-delayed coming down the telegraph wires, but still, it's play-by-play. This night, Dan Bain leads the team in penalty minutes and gets an assist on the winning goal late in the second half. Cecil Merritt, with his white cricket pads, is so good, one reporter declares, declares the Winnipeg goal might as well have been boarded up.
Montreal goes down to defeat and the Cup goes west. The Manitoba Free Press gloats that the fans who bet on Winnipeg cleaned the place out. Montreal tonight is clothed in sackcloth and ashes and the sports have gone to sleepless beds with empty pocketbooks. The peg contingent, on the other hand, have enough money to start a private bank. No less than 2,000 cold plonks.
went down into the jeans of the Winnipeg supporters. The newspaper also reports that the Stanley Cup holds exactly two gallons of beer, thus noting the birth of another fine hockey tradition. When the heroes come home, Winnipeg puts on Canada's first Stanley Cup parade in horse-drawn carriages down Main Street.
The idea of the West is now made real, not only to Montreal hockey players, but to an audience. There is civilization out there, not only that, but it's bringing us things now. And of course, with the opening of the railway, the West becomes even more attractive.
These guys are metaphoric for the idea of the West, where you move West and you reinvent yourself. Well, in many ways, they've reinvented hockey. But Montreal would be back stronger than ever. And by now, the first French-Canadian players are coming into the game.
They're of the privileged class, men like Louis Hurtubise, the son of a wealthy financier. And Teofil Vio, whose father made a fortune in the bakery business. They'd learned the game in the schoolyards of the classical colleges, taught by the Irish and groomed by the Catholic brothers. It's a route future stars will follow for decades to come. First of all, I always had the feeling that the brothers themselves, some of them were pretty good hockey players.
It gives us the occasion as a group of youngsters to play together, to experience. what it is to work inside of a group, inside of a team, and that really, that's where we started. In 1902, Viau and Hurtubise are called up by the Montreal Shamrocks. They're the first French Canadians to play at the highest level of the game. And it's big news in Quebec.
I mean the Francophone community has wanted four years to have this happen especially the Francophone press who see this not only I see this as a nationalist matter you know for the honour of the nation. Hockey culture has taken hold in French Canada now all over the country new players and new teams ...are appearing. Lord Stanley's trophy had worked its magic. The competition for it unites the country in a national pursuit. Hockey had become Canada's game.
Of all the fortune seekers who joined the Klondike Gold Rush in 1897, few are as bold or as lucky as Joseph Whiteside Boyle. By the time he treks into Dawson City, the place is crawling with every hustler, whore, and dreamer west of Winnipeg. But Joe Boyle dreams big. He invests in timber concessions, sawmills, and shipping docks.
And while others are panning or sluicing, he builds giant floating dredges and mines the whole Klondike River. In 1900, the Yukon gives up 22 million dollars worth of gold. And Boyle gets a good chunk of it, fashioning a stick pin from his first gold nugget. And that winter, he sees his first hockey game. Soon, he's managing one of four teams playing in the Dawson City Hockey League.
It's a hodgepodge of civil servants, Mounties, and miners. Boyle leads the campaign to build them a world-class indoor rink, complete with its own electric power plant and advertising plastered on the boards. In 1904, Boyle and the Hockeymen of Dawson stack one team with their top players and issue a challenge to play for the Stanley Cup.
It's a crazy idea. They'll have to face the formidable Ottawa Silver 7. The boys in the red, white and black are the best and baddest hockey team in the game. Everybody they play, the newspapers from the other cities, complains about how brutal and dirty they are.
Whereas the Ottawa papers just sort of dismiss them as, they're all whiners, you know, it's a tough game, we play it tough. But whether they were dirty or not, and clearly they must have been. They were good. The heart of the Silver 7 is an Ottawa blue blood named Frank McGee, nephew of Thomas Darcy McGee, the assassinated father of Confederation.
Frank is also one of the greatest comeback stories in sports history. The accident happened when he was 18, playing in a charity match to raise money for Canadian soldiers wounded in the Boer War. McGee took a puck in the face and was cut so badly, his left eye went blind. Which is an extraordinary loss to him and to the game because he's a gifted athlete.
I mean, he can put the puck in the net. Now he can't. He's lost his eye. So he takes a job where 100% vision isn't necessary. He becomes a referee.
Close enough to a seat at the table. Misses it. Decides, what the hell, I'll risk that other eye.
McGee comes back to play with the Silver 7, launching one of the greatest dynasties in hockey's record books. In the next two seasons, Ottawa defends the championship against the best in the country. The Rat Portage Thistles, the Toronto Marlboros, the Montreal Wanderers, the Brandon Wheat Kings.
None can touch the Silver 7 and one-eyed Frank McGee. They'd win 6-4 and he'd get five of them. So you can't go by how he played, but you just look. He must have been heads and shoulders above everybody else because he got the points. One-eyed Frank McGee, does that sound great?
He sounds like a gunfighter or something. The Dawson City Nuggets have no stars and no track record. They'd never won anything. Their goalie is an 18-year-old kid named Albert Forrest, who'd never been in net.
But Joe Boyle is a rich man with good connections. He convinces the Stanley Cup trustees there's a golden marketing opportunity here. And the challenge is accepted.
Well, Dawson City was a city full of dreamers. It was full of people chasing gold, chasing a fortune. So it would be a perfect place for a team that thought it could travel like 40 days across North America in the dead of winter. win a Stanley Cup. No other city is based more on dreams and the Stanley Cup is just one of those other dreams for Dawson City.
On a cold December morning in 1904, the local newspaper sees the Dawson City Nuggets off on the strangest road trip in hockey history. The first stage is a killer dog sled trip. The run of 365 miles over the ice and snow to Whitehorse will put the boys in splendid condition.
And they will be long on wind and strength when they lay out on the ice for the biggest hockey trophy under the sun. Thus begins a 4,000 mile odyssey across the country. It takes them 10 days to walk to Whitehorse.
They spend Christmas in a prospector's cabin, socked in by snow. When the storm passes... They scramble to get to Skagway, where they catch a steamer to Vancouver.
And finally, the Transcontinental for the long run east. Ottawa, January 11th, 1905. Special to the Gazette. The Dawson hockey team arrived in Ottawa. By the time they pull into town, the Nuggets are national celebrities.
They average about 160 pounds in weight and are a rugged looking blot, apparently fit to rough it up to any degree if necessary. Rugged and wrung out. Joe Boyle pleads for a postponement until his boys can recover, but Ottawa refuses.
And they're forced to play the first match of the series 48 hours later. It looks for a while like the Nuggets might make a game of it. But in the end, fatigue takes its toll and they lose the first game 9-2. Still, Joe Boyle remains confident in his post-game report to the home crowd. It was a great game, and the score is no criterion of it.
We have a good chance to win the Cup. Every prospect at Monday's game will tell a different story. The next day, one of the Nuggets even suggests that the great Frank McGee, who'd only scored once, didn't look that hot. Big mistake.
It was suspected that he might have been holding back, so as not to embarrass Dawson City. Now, there would be no quarter. In the second game, McGee is dazzling. He scores 14 goals, including a flurry of 8 in the space of 9 minutes.
The final score is a humiliating 23-2. The Ottawa newspaper complains that the fans who'd bought tickets were duped. The Dawson City crew is the worst consignment of hockey junk ever to come over the medals of the CPR. The visitors couldn't shoot, couldn't skate.
Dawson never had the chance of a bun in the hands of a hungry boy. Only the teenage goalie, Albert Forrest, is spared. But for him, one reporter declares, the score might have been doubled.
Still, Dawson City has its name etched on Stanley's cup, though the Nuggets never get to drink from it. It's a story that defines what the Stanley Cup was. It was a challenge cup. And you could challenge for it from anywhere.
And what better anywhere, you know, than Dawson City? I mean, that's about as anywhere as there is in the country. I mean, it didn't matter that they got wiped out, you know, when the games began.
But just a perfectly emblematic story. But the next year, the Cup trustees tighten the rules to shut out unproven challengers. Never again would a team like the Dawson City Nuggets get a shot at the title.
Hockey had come a long way since that first experiment in a Montreal skating rink in 1875. 30 years on the game is faster, more exciting and a lot rougher. From its genteel roots hockey has grown into a full-blooded and violent sport. Brawls are frequent and the stick works so brutal that in 1904 alone, four players were killed during hockey games.
Utah, I think the hockey's tough. The 70s, you should have seen it then. It was a lot tougher. and more violent back in then than it is now.
So everybody says, oh, this isn't hockey. It was, whoa, whoa. That's the way hockey was back then. You better look out.
You couldn't be Fahard again back then. But the violence only seems to add to the popularity of the game. Big matches now draw more than 5,000 paying customers. It was starting to become...
business starting to become something where people realized actually people want to watch this thing hockey sells newspapers fills taverns and fuels the betting halls every Everyone is cashing in except the players. Players see this happening, that money is changing hands all around them, including even in sports betting. And so it evolves at the beginning of the 20th century to the point where they now want to be paid to play and think it is hypocritical not to pay them. They're not bound by any code of amateurism.
They see that the owners aren't bound by any code of amateurism, so why should they be? Hockey's little secret is out. What began as a pleasant recreation for the leisure class is now a hugely profitable business. And the big paydays are coming.
The stage is set for a new breed of player and the rise of professionals.