Ice hockey’s diverse history may
surprise even lifelong fans.
The sport’s first professional league? The Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes was an all-Black league founded by Baptist pastors and prominent Black intellectuals in Nova Scotia in 1895 with a league mandate to advance Black equality through a sport that instills leadership, grit, community, and camaraderie among its pillars. It drew huge crowds, after Sunday services, and prospered for three decades.
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Which player invented the “slap shot” technique?
Eddie Martin in 1906, playing in that same Colored Hockey League six decades before the NHL’s Bobby Hull, among others, scared goalies into wearing protective face masks to survive errant slapshots.
This face belongs to Terry Sawchuk, a 36-year-old goalie at the time for the Toronto Maple Leafs. Over his career, before facemasks became standard in the NHL, Sawchuk earned more than 400 stitches. While most of his wounds healed, the scars shown are a recreation by a professional make-up artist and doctor during a LIFE Magazine photoshoot to illustrate the amount of damage sustained.
The National Hockey League was founded in November 1917 at a Montreal hotel.
Even the most casual hockey observers know Canada is crazy for the game. Many know the Stanley Cup is its most treasured and storied trophy, named after Lord Frederick Stanley, a Canadian governor. Lesser known, but perhaps equally important in the sport’s history, is Stanley’s daughter, Lady Isobel Constance Mary Gathorne-Hardy (nee Stanley). She was the driving force behind persuading her father to donate the famed three-foot-high cup as the country’s annual award to the sport’s best team. The Stanley Cup was established in 1892. Lady Isobel was 17 at the time. Earlier, at 15, she had played in one of the first-ever organized games of women’s hockey on record, nearly a decade ahead of the first-ever women’s hockey league formed in Quebec in 1900. Clearly, teenage girls then like today can be a force of nature that no dad can turn down. As an adult, Lady Isobel is credited with urging her papa to popularize the sport across Canada.
Lady Isobel Stanley at 18 years old. Photograph taken in 1893 in Ontario, Canada.
Another important person to note in the sport’s history is Lester Patrick—a legendary figure who was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in the “Builder” category in 1947. Many hockey fans may recognize the name. But what may surprise many is how Patrick and his brother, Frank, founded the Pacific Coast Hockey Association (PCHA) pro league in 1911 with the profits from their father selling his Nelson, B.C., lumber company. The Seattle Metropolitans joined the PCHA in 1915 and two years later became the first U.S.-based team to win the Stanley Cup–a fact something many Seattleites do know.
Seattle Metropolitans: the first professional hockey team to win the Stanley Cup
The Seattle Metropolitans in 1919.
The Patricks’ and the PCHA contributed more than robust early history for Pacific Northwest hockey. The region’s pro hockey league innovated the sports in many indelible ways, along with the Patrick brothers being the early investors in artificial ice rinks in British Columbia. The PCHA founders also introduced the blue lines that mark each team’s defensive zone (or the opponent’s offensive zone) along with other innovations, such as passing the puck forward, devising assists as a boxscore stat to credit passers on a goal, moving to three 20-minute periods instead of two 30-minute halves, creating a playoff system, allowing the puck to be kicked everywhere except into the net, and putting numbers on the player’s sweaters (yes, stylists and linguists, Canadians prefer to call them sweaters because the Metropolitans’ and other PCHA teams’ uniform tops were indeed sweaters).
Opening match between the Philadelphia Arrows and the Boston Cubs in the Canadian—American League, 1932. Video provided by British Pathé.
THE NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE
Later in the Metropolitans’ Cup-winning year, the National Hockey League was founded in November 1917 at a Montreal hotel. The Boston Bruins, still in the league today, were the first American team to join the National Hockey League in 1924 and the first franchise to sign a Black player, Willie O’Ree, to its NHL roster in 1958. The Bruins were founded by Boston grocery store magnate Charles Adams, who proceeded to buy the entire Western Hockey League (which was renamed the Pacific Coast Hockey Association) for $300,000 from Lester and Frank Patrick in 1926. The league disbanded while Adams made the purchase to own the rights to such highly regarded players as Eddie Shore and Frank Boucher, who went on to enjoy legendary NHL careers.
1930 Stanley Cup
Lester joined the NHL New York Rangers in 1926 as a coach and general manager. He won three Stanley Cups (1928, 1933, 1940) with the Rangers and even famously served victoriously as emergency goalie in the 1928 Cup Final when the team’s lone goalie was injured and couldn’t finish out the game in one of New York’s wins. Patrick retired from the NHL in 1946 but now without leaving a distinct Pacific Northwest mark on a sport that now welcomes Seattle back to the league.
