Even if you don't like hockey, this is one amazing historic video

Fantastic find, JR. It's always a pleasure watching Maurice "Rocket" Richard fly down the ice. Simply amazing.

 

I guess Grantland Rice attached his name to this before people attached their names to projects.

Couple of historical inaccuracies: the puck was never a three sided cube. I wonder where the hell that came from?

Maybe Double J can help out here but I don't remember there ever being nine men a side. There used to be six skaters including the rover position which was eliminated somewhere around 1916 or 1917. Some of you have seen the picture of my grandfather's Ancaster hockey team from 1908. He was the rover but there were certainly not nine players.

 

That could have been Doc Emrick narrating.

 

"Think, Bart. Where have you seen roman numerals before? I know...Rocky V! That was the fifth one. So, Rocky five plus Rocky two equals...Rocky VII! 'Adrian's Revenge!'"

 

Very cool stuff! I especially like that the establishing shot of McGill University is the music building where I did my Masters degree. Can't miss the big statue of Queen Victoria out front.

 

Amazing find! And, no, organized hockey never featured nine a side, and the three-sided cube bullshit is just that, bullshit.

 

That was fun to watch. It was funny seeing those fights in the Habs/Leafs game. Everyone went into them with sticks swinging, including the one guy as noted earlier who basically took a baseball swing with his stick.

And the amateur at around 4:30 of the video dove headfirst and nearly pulled a Kris Draper by smashing his face on top of the short boards.

 

You might be surprised. I don't know if the amateur/semipro hockey culture allowed for less acceptance than the amateur baseball culture, and I don't know if it was the same in Ontario/Quebec, but I can tell you that all-black and even integrated baseball teams were welcomed on something closely resembling friendly terms throughout Western Canada (particularly MB and SK) in the 1920s, '30s and '40s.

Obviously, the social rules of that era always had to be followed (the players couldn't eat in some restaurants or stay in some hotels, couldn't be seen in public with white women, had to put up with all the casual racism, occasionally found it smart to let the white hosts win, etc.), but for the most part, these all-black and integrated teams were mostly treated with decency, especially in the places where they were actually playing ball.

Part of why those teams did well there, sadly, was because a lot of people in the farmlands and rural towns had never encountered a black person and felt more compelled to be curious than to be outright hostile, which was the case in many places where the races mingled on a day-to-day basis.

Again, these things are true about the all-black and integrated baseball teams of that era. But there was a long culture of blacks playing baseball and forming teams organically, and I don't know if that was true for hockey. So maybe it was different for the all-Legion team in the video. But maybe not.

 

There an all black hockey league in the Canadian Maritime provinces dating back to the mid 1800s. The link is to a book that chronicles the Colored Hockey League from the 1890s.
http://www.blackicebook.com/blackice/index.cfm?fuseaction=book.welcome

 

Good grab, Doc.
Didn't even know about that league

 

Still can't see Cami Granato or Haley Wickenheiser in one of those little skirts on the ice.