The Manger of American Hockey

THE ICE THAT BORE AMERICA'S HOCKEY GOD

Canada, the country that allegedly invented hockey (an Iroquois Indian tribe in Ottawa is the best guess) has never respected it's neighbors to the south, even if our Minnesotans are virtually indistinguishable from their northern counterparts. But Canadian hockey snobbery is justifiable: Canada can enter 5 teams in every international tournament and have 5 gold medal contenders if they entered by province.

You can feel the disdain for American hockey in the sports talk at the pubs, the kitchen tables and within the Canadian media; I lived it for a couple of weeks in Edmonton during the World Juniors earlier this month, a tourney in which Team USA did NOTHING to diminsh the Canucks superiority complex. All of the above might merely be stating the obvious, but it gives vital perspective to the century-old article quoted below.

In the 1910's American hockey was fledgling at best, though it was being played interscholastically at Ivy League colleges. American players were groomed by New England prep schools, with St. Paul's of Concord, New Hampshire turning out the majority of the elite players. The most gifted of them all was the legendary Hobey Baker, the man whose name still adorns the trophy for today's college player of the year.

After he graduated from Princeton in 1914, Hobey played for an amateur hockey club based in New York called St. Nick's, a collection of blue-blooded sportsmen who had played for the Ivy League's Big 3 (H, Y, P). In the 1915-16 season. St. Nick's went up to Canada and played their best amateur teams, beating them all. In those days Canada's amateur teams were taken very seriously, rivaling their professional clubs in terms of talent, if not depth. St. Nick's defeated the reigning champion Montreal Stars 6-2 in the opening game of the Ross Cup, which was essentially a World Championship of amateur hockey. Afterward the Montreal Press, the "Paper of Record" in the province, wrote the following:

"Uncle Sam has had the cheek to develop a world class hockey player. We had heard him advertised as a great hockey player, and we had always smiled a cynical grin at the thought. He wasn't born in Montreal, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Toronto or the other famous breeding grounds. We refused to see how an American could win over such a handicap and arrive. A few minutes of Baker on the ice convinced the most skeptical. He could catch a place and a star's place on any of our professional teams. The blonde-haired boy was a favorite with the crowd. We didn't want the St. Nick's to win, but Baker cooked out goose so artistically that we enjoyed it." (December 12, 1915)

No other American hockey player has received such praise from Canada in the ensuing 97 years. Baker's performance at the 1915-16 Ross Cup was the driving force in getting him elected into Canada's Hockey Hall of Fame, entering with the inaugural class of 1943.

He honed his skills outdoors in Concord, NH on the same frozen ponds pictured above. He spent 7 winters in at St. Paul's, training religiously whenever the ice could support him, staying on past sunset to perfect his stickhandling in the dark. He entered Princeton a finished product, by far the best player at Old Nassau as soon as he arrived. For American hockey, those ponds of St. Paul's might as well be referred to as "The Manger," the breeding ground of America's hockey deity.