Episode Transcript
[00:00:10] Speaker A: 4 p97 welcome back. It's Taylor McKee and this is your first real course content of the semester. You've listened to the first audio lecture which details the course syllabus. It details how the semester is going to work. You're going to be learning about the assignments as we get closer to each of the due dates, something that is important. Now, as you're listening to this, the fourth form response on Brightspace that has been posted your weekly questions. You're also going to have an audio response question posed to you at the end of this lecture as well. So you're going to have to have that in at the end of the week as well. Tutorials for how to submit an audio response are available on the audio response section of Brightspace, so make sure you have a look there this first week. Again, it's just important that we have everything under, under our belts and we understand how the rhythm of semester is going to work. But just as a reminder, each and every week there's going to be a conform response and an audio response that you're going to submit weekly based on these audio lectures and these slides themselves. So in order to keep yourself as engaged as possible, if you are at home listening to this on your laptop, you can pull those slides open. If you're on your phone, you can do that as well. You can follow along with the slides. You don't have to have the slides in front of you. If you're out at the gym or you're walking around and you're on Spotify, you can listen to it like that and go back to the slides later. It's really up to you. But just as a reminder, you will have to reference the slides in your audio responses and in your form responses as well. So those slides are posted, your form response question is post on brightspace. And with no further ado, let's get into your first course content of the semester, which will be delivered by me.
There is going to be a few lectures that are going to be delivered by me and then there's going to be quite a few lectures that are going to be delivered in conversation with me and a guest speaker. So this first week is just me. We're going to be talking about the origins of the professional game and then next week we'll start talking about the structure and format of professional hockey. So, looking forward to delivering this content to you. Real quick, let's get started with our course content.
So at this point, I think we should get started by discussing the origins of the professional game. So it's important as we start off on this adventure through the game of hockey that we have some sort of general outlines about what it is that we're going to be getting into.
So, as you may have guessed from the course description, this is an advanced analysis of the hockey industry. And to understand the hockey industry, we have to know a little bit about what factors shaped the creation of this industry itself. This did not arrive fully formed. This is not an industry that just simply appeared out of nowhere. There's many, many, many different reasons that professional hockey looks the way it does today. But let's begin our discussion. In the earliest years of professional hockey in Canada and North America, really. Now, again, there's, there's a lot of questions about firsts and, and to be perfectly frank, and I'd say this from speaking at a conference or speaking with colleagues, I really, really, really don't care about the question of where hockey was created. I really don't think it's an interesting one. Certainly not relevant for the purposes of this course. But I what I do care about is where the history of the organized game comes from.
So whatever version of the early hockey history, whether it's Halifax or in the Netherlands or in the UK or in Ontario, bc, you name it, it doesn't really matter.
The game was played in many different forms in many different countries for many, many, many years before the 19th century. But the birth of organized hockey, and there's a reason that we're going to start by discussing organized hockey. And it's going to become clear to us, I think, by the end of today's lecture, because organized hockey and the idea of the forces that forced hockey to become organized, there's a reason why we're going to focus on those aspects because they have a major, major influence on the way the game evolves.
Now, it is generally accepted that the birth of the organized game of hockey took place in Montreal in 1875. And the first sort of recorded organized game of hockey was played on March 3, 1875, at the victorious skating rink in Montreal. We sort of get into this a little bit on the slides and some of the players. The first game were the McGill University students who were established playing McGill playing rules, which featured common rules in other games, which is no forward passing, which is from rugby, face offs, which were from lacrosse and nine aside, which at that point was common to lacrosse and rugby. This was a mishmash game, but it was also used by, at that point, rugby players who were trying to attempt to stay in shape out of season. Now, what's important? Why are we focusing on a game being played at this specific location? What is the purpose of, of focusing right here? Well, it's important to consider, again, who it is that is playing in this very first game. Again, McGill University. And if you're not familiar with Montreal, that's okay. If you're not familiar with the Montreal sporting history. And again, I could go off for hours and hours about Montreal being the cradle of organized sport and Canadian sport history, but maybe you've already done that, Maybe you've already taken a sport history course. Maybe you already know all those things. And that's totally awesome if you don't just know that Montreal was sort of the center of organized sport in Canada in the 19th century.
But very specific part of Montreal, very specific slice of Montreal was there at the very first organized game of hockey, as we recognize it, in 1875. This isn't just any group of people. This isn't a random collection of players. This isn't just a bunch of people who are looking to have fun. This was a very specific, very, very chosen, very intentional group of people that got together to play this game. Now, their intentions of staying in shape to play rugby are sort of not what I'm getting at here. What I'm getting at is these are upper middle class Anglophone Montrealers. This is not necessarily intended to be a game for the general public. Again, they had a very specific purpose behind that. So this is the very first organized game of hockey played in Montreal. Montreal, a very specific part of Montreal. Again, a very distinct linguistic and religious part of Montreal as well. When we're talking about McGill University.
So this is a lot of stuff that I want you to keep in mind as we move throughout the history of professional hockey in general is the earliest origins of the game itself.
Where does it come from? What we recognize as hockey, who are the purveyors of it? What forces shape what we recognize as the professional hockey industry.
And when you can start to recognize two things that are extremely important when you're studying any subject matter, but certainly when you're studying history and something that I try and bring to the study of history, and most historians do as well. And they basically say that, look, when you study history, you're studying two things, continuity and change, right? What has changed and what has stayed the same.
Those are the two key aspects of the study of history. Continuity and change, Right? Look for those two things when you're studying. Now, that doesn't just apply, though, to the study of the Past. In my humble opinion, you can study continuity and change in the history and the development of business, in the development of labor relations and sport. You can study them in the history of marketing. Continuity and change are two very, very, very key and important concepts. And when you apply the study of continuity and change to this subject matter specifically, it's gonna reveal a lot about the industry as a whole. So let's think about again, this very first game. And there's a sort of trivial aspect of it, well, non trivial for me as someone who researches hockey violence, but this game quite famously ended in a fight.
Now again, the reports of this fight are extremely unreliable in terms of what the rationale for the fight was. But the best we can guess is the fight actually was about ice time. They went over their ice time and there was a confrontation and maybe there was a bench broken and maybe there were punches thrown, we don't really know. But there definitely some sort of altercation that ended it. And many people that point to the history of violence's place in hockey history say, oh, the very first game of hockey was. Was ended in a fight. Well, it's probably true, but it's truth more that the very first game of hockey ended with a fight about ice time, which if you've played the game, is probably a much more relatable concept. Ending as the. Is the notion that we have to fight to get ice or the scarcity of ice time. Most Canadians who've played hockey understand that concept as well. So there might be something even more inherently Canadian about that very first game played in Montreal in 1875.
So expanding out from there 10 years later, 1885, we have the Montreal City Hockey League, which is Canada's first hockey league of any real organizational purpose. And there are four teams. The Victorias, the Crystals, the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association. I want you to remember them. And McGill. McGill's had a team in this very first city Hockey league. A year later, the Amateur Hockey association of Canada is formed and the Ontario Hockey association is formed.
1890, an original Ontario Hockey association team from Ottawa featured Arthur Stanley, the son of then Governor General of Canada, Lord Stanley, who donated a silver cup to be won on a challenge basis. Okay, so this is from the slides. If you need to look back at this, don't worry about taking notes right now because those are on the slides. But I want us to consider this again here. Again, I'm not here to drill into a bunch of trivial knowledge about the history of hockey, though I think it's interesting. But. Well, we'll get to this in a second. First City Hockey League, you got four teams, two of which are non traditional in the way we'd understand hockey teams. One of them is an amateur athletic association and one of them is a university. Not just any university, again, a prestigious anglophone university in Montreal.
A year later, you have an amateur hockey association formed in Canada. Now, again, it is inherently likely to me that by fourth year in a sport management program, you may have had some discussion about what amateur sport means.
You might even know a little bit about the history of amateur sport in Canada and how it's a very contentious topic that has a lot of really, really, really ugly fights over what being an amateur means throughout Canadian sport history. If you don't know or I'm actually curious about this, and I wish we could be in person going back and forth, but when I say amateur, what comes to mind? Right. If you're thinking about this right now, what are you thinking of?
Do you think not good? Does it think if you're an amateur at something, does that mean you're not as good as a pro?
Is this idea of, you know, when you start as an amateur and you progress to a professional, is that you imagine a sort of a transitional state between professional status and amateur status? When you begin, does it mean simply you don't get paid and those two things have become conflated? I think in some senses that if you're not paid to do something, especially when it comes to sport, you're not as good.
But amateur status, especially going back to the 19th century, is far more complicated than simply good or bad or compensated or not. It's a very, very, very thorny issue. And if you know anything about Canadian sport history from this period or Even throughout the 20th century, you know that it's extremely controversial and it's racially charged, has class based notions of what proper means, what a muscular Christian gentleman is supposed to act and behave like. Again, it is possible to me that you're coming into this subject matter with a little bit of expertise in this. It's also possible to me that you have no idea what, what I'm talking about. When you look at this very first city league and when you look at these very first four teams and you look at this, the early purveyors of hockey in Ontario and in Quebec, note how important amateur is. Note how important it is to consider who is allowed to be in these leagues. This is very important.
Now a part of this amateur hockey association that's formed in Ontario, the oha, you get Arthur Stanley, and you get the Stanley cup right now. This is a piece of the professional hockey industry that exists obviously to this very day. It's the pinnacle of the National Hockey League. I don't need to tell any of you that. I'm sure if you're in this class, you likely already know about what the Stanley cup is. But consider its origins is a donated from an aristocrat landed aristocrats son's hockey team.
It's a gift given by some of the richest and most powerful men in the country at this time with deep, deep ties to colonial England.
Given as essentially a reward for his son's hobby. Not something he was paid for, not his profession, but a hobby at that point in his life.
This is a very important thing to keep in mind when we see how much of the early parts of the game have lasted way into the 20th, 21st century, and certainly throughout the 20th century, how much of the industry itself is actually influenced by factors that were at play in the 19th century.
That's going to as far back as the 1870s. So let's consider again that influence of who was allowed to play here in these early hockey. And we're going to talk about this a little bit next week as well when we discuss amateurism in some depth as well. But these are important factors to the development of Canadian hockey history and certainly the Canadian hockey industry as a whole.
To finish the second half of this first week, though, and again, the purpose of this first week is essentially just to get us acclimated to the process, make sure all of us are on the same page, and make sure we're all comfortable and familiar with the material itself and how this is going to work. But still, I would like to take a little bit more time to talk about that notion of amateur because again, it is extremely important if we understand some of the dynamics at play, when we talk about the way that professional players are compensated, if we talk about the way the collective bargaining agreement is structured, some of the legacies of the way that players are treated by the media, you name it. This is extremely important to consider this legacy because it lasts a long time. Now, you might think that the notion of what an amateur is or amateur hockey is a dusty old relic of the 19th and 20th centuries. And again, just as a summary of what amateur really means in this way, it means essentially you again, were not financially compensated and that you are playing hockey essentially for the pure love of the game. Now, in the early 19th century, though, and the mid 19th century in other sports as well and in the late 19th century, in hockey's case, it was a great honor to be an amateur athlete. It was something that was very, very, very, very important to athletes that they would maintain their amateur status. There's a number of reasons for it, but one of the most important reasons was only amateurs were permitted to play at the Olympic Games.
So to maintain your amateur status, you couldn't have been paid. But amateur status, and this is something we're going to talk about a little bit in more depth next week. But if you're not familiar with Canadian sport history, maybe you've never been familiar with this, but you could lose your amateur status in very, very, very, very, very numerous ways. It is likely that most of you sitting in this room would not have been considered an amateur. If you ever, if you'd ever paid, been paid or compensated to teach skating lessons, for instance, have you ever played against anyone who had ever been compensated in any way for their services as a hockey player or on the ice, you have lost your amateur status. And some sports had had extremely exclusionary measures for who could even be amateur. Now, women weren't even written into many of the early policies. It was assumed that women were not, of course, allowed to be amateur athletes at this point in the late 19th century. It wasn't even written into many of the bylaws. Some of them did, but most of them didn't even mention women because it was an assumption. Some of them were trying to get more creative in the ways in which they had not allowed people to become members of their sporting organizations. Famously, we like to look at the Montreal Curling Club, which was founded in 1807, and their early bylaws spend so much time talking about, you know, how they're going to have dinners and how they're going to have all these great social events and when they're going to curl, which, by the way, was Wednesday at noon. That was their first original meeting times for curling. If you had to pick a time of day less convenient for any working person, you pick the middle of the week, in the middle of the day. Deliberately, this was a feature of the system. The idea was, we don't want anyone working with their hands for a living to play on these teams.
Think back to that early Montreal City League. You have the Montreal Amateur Athletic association, which, again, to have amateur status, you couldn't be doing this thing for money. You couldn't be doing this thing for a living. You had to be doing it just because you loved it. Now, many of these other amateur groups also wouldn't let in laborers. That seems really counterintuitive to us. Right? I think we understand the fact that we don't want to play in, say, even a beer league with a bunch of people who used to be pros. We understand that there's a competitive balance issue at play here. But amateur status was something different. It was about regulating who could and who could not play. It was not governed by something we refer to as the performance principle. It's not governed by we want the best athletes, the best hockey players. No, it was we only want to play against people who are from the same social group that we are.
That's essentially what boils down early amateur debates.
So again, consider that the role of amateurism in the development of Canadian hockey, because again, amateur status was extremely important in the early years. And amateur hockey was a point of pride in the early years of Canadian hockey. In fact, in the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, amateur hockey was the only form of respectable hockey in the eyes of those who wrote books, those who wrote newspapers. And this was essentially, if you wanted to be a rabble rouser, if you wanted to be a drunk or a gambler, maybe you'd indulge in being paid for your labor. And this wasn't just about hockey. But I want you to, as we finish this discussion about amateurism, consider the Montreal Pedestrian Club, which you don't need to know anything about pedestrianism or what it was, but essentially it's competitive walking. It's incredibly wild to look back on, and it certainly is a relic of the 19th century, one that hasn't really carried on very further. But in their amateur bylaws, to be a member of the Montreal Pedestrian Club. Many other clubs had very complicated ways of describing who could and couldn't be a member. And they tried to do things like the curling club did, scheduling our meetings at Wednesday at noon. And it was like, oh, how can we do this? How can we say this without actually saying it? But the Montreal Pedestrian Club gives us a great gift. They just go out and say what they meant. They said you couldn't be a laborer and you couldn't be an Indian.
There's the exact lines from the bylaws of the pedestrian club. Now, again, that language is obviously outdated and this refers to indigenous people. But you see there, it's not about performance. It's not about making sure we can all be the best athletes we can be or try and win championships. It's about keeping people out. And if you think the pedestrian club wasn't related to the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association. We'll talk about this more next week about how these amateur associations were intrinsically related to each other. Now again, you might think to yourself, what does this have to do with the hockey industry? But some of this stuff doesn't make any sense when we talk about the 20th century. Some of the conditions that were created that created the professional hockey industry don't make any sense unless you go back to these years where hockey was being formed in Canada. Some of the attitudes that laying around towards athletes in general in Canada, but hockey players especially are informed by ideas that have their roots this far back. I promise you it's true.
To finish off this week's content, here's a passage from John Cheekit Wong, who is one of Canada's foremost hockey historians, passage from his book Lords of the Rinks, describing the very first Stanley cup.
[00:18:44] Speaker B: Handed out on March 23, 1894, the Toronto Daily Mail reported on the first Stanley cup championship match at the Victoria Rink in Montreal the previous night.
According to the reporter, there was never before in the history of the game such a crowd present at a match or so much enthusiasm evinced. There were fully 5,000 persons at the match and tin horns, strong lungs and a general rabble predominated.
The report went on to describe the match as a hard struggle and a great contest in which Montreal defeated Ottawa by a score of 3 to 1.
For many hockey enthusiasts and writers, past and present, this was a watershed event for several reasons.
First, the trophy and the competition have withstood the test of time as the symbol of supremacy in the sport. In today's parlance, that supremacy is equated with professional hockey. Second, the governing organization of professional hockey, the National Hockey League, has always proudly claimed that the Stanley cup is the oldest championship trophy in professional team sports. To generate excitement for the sport, promoters of hockey often referred to stories of past struggles in the quest for this trophy.
Thus, the trophy stands as a symbol that connects the present to the past.
One connection that has persisted through the years is that the players have always competed for the honor of being champions.
All else is secondary. This love of the competition story resonates especially well for those who may have become skeptical, perhaps even cynical, about professional athletes and team owners in today's heavily financed and marketed sports world.
[00:20:23] Speaker A: Foreign to finish up this week's lecture, I would like you to prepare an audio response based on the slides Based on the two lectures. Well, actually just one, as only one of them had content based on the article. So in this audio response I'd like you to draw on all of those materials. So you're going to be submitting your audio responses via the Audio Response tab on BrightSpace and your response is going to be to this question based on the materials covered in Week one, what are some of the enduring lessons that can be learned from this period in hockey history for today's hockey industry?
So what are some enduring lessons that can be learned from this early period in the professional hockey industry that we went over this class and this week in the reading and on the slides that apply itself to the contemporary hockey industry?
So again, I'd love for you to reference something that you you learned in this lecture, something you learned in the article, something you learned in the slides and demonstrate how that can affect the the contemporary hockey industry and do so via an audio response. If you've got any questions about the audio response, feel free to send me an email. I hope you all have a wonderful week and I'll talk to you again soon.
