Hockey: Mid-Season

(See front cover)

The puck left Marty Burke's stick so fast that few of the spectators in the Chicago Stadium knew what had become of it until they heard its sharp crack as Burke's teammate, Paul Thompson, stopped it. Expecting Thompson to try a difficult side shot for the goal, eight players turned sharply on their skates, churned up a white cloud of ice. But back spun the puck to Burke, who, almost as if he were practicing goal shots alone on the rink, sent it sliding past two defensemen, past Goalie Worters--and a red light flashed behind the goal. The Chicago Black Hawks had won, 3-to-2, the victory they needed to stay in first place in the American Division of the National League.

The Black Hawks' victory over the New York Americans was the most important professional hockey game played last week but there were others equally exciting. Drawn by municipal pride, love of the game, desire to gamble or vicarious sadism, 100,000 people witnessed them in seven U. S. and Canadian cities.

In Toronto, night before they played Chicago, the Americans defeated the Toronto Maple Leafs, 2-to-1. Emms (Americans) received a gash on his head which required seven stitches.

In Montreal, the Maroons interrupted a slump by beating the St. Louis Eagles, 5-to-2.

In Detroit, the Montreal Canadiens got three goals in the first ten minutes, then let the Detroit Red Wings catch up and finally tie the score, 4-all.

In Manhattan, the New York Rangers had a 3-to-0 lead over Detroit in the last period. The Red Wings made three goals in four minutes. Then, while a wildly jubilant crowd hurled torn paper, orange peel, bottle tops and peanuts from the galleries, the Rangers rallied in the last ten minutes, won 5-to-3, leaving them undefeated in their last twelve games.

Ten years ago there was one professional hockey team in the U. S., the Boston Bruins which at its biggest games sometimes attracted crowds of 3,000. For the 1925-26 season the National Hockey League, a Canadian organization which then included four of the best teams in Eastern Canada, was remade to include three U. S. teams. Since then, professional hockey has flourished so rapidly that it is now, next to baseball and horse-racing, the most important money game in the U. S.

In 1933-34, 1,750,000 people paid approximately $2,000,000 to see the 231 National Hockey League games in the U. S. and Canada. Approximately 150 major-league hockey players earned salaries between $3,500 and $7,500. Of the 1,461,000 sports-addicts who paid admissions to Manhattan's Madison Square Garden in 1933-34, 440,000 went to see professional hockey games. This season, attendance in most of the cities represented by big-league hockey teams is ahead of last year's. By last week, the major-league hockey season was sufficiently advanced for experts to make their prophecies on how it will end next month, when the three leading teams in the two divisions-of the League play a complicated round-robin tournament for the world's championship Stanley Cup.

In the International Division last week, the Toronto Maple Leafs were overwhelming favorites to keep their present No. 1 position. Fast, heavy, durable and daring, the Maple Leafs' two most spectacular assets are Forwards Harvey Jackson and Charles Conacher, who lead the League in scoring goals. In second place were the Montreal Maroons, a clever team whose crack defenseman is Charles Conacher's older brother, Lionel. Fighting for third place last week were the Montreal Canadiens, who last summer traded their best players for younger ones who have thus far failed to justify themselves, and the New York Americans, an erratic assortment of seasoned players too old to be ambitious and youngsters too ambitious to be steadily effective. Fifth and last were the St. Louis Eagles, new in name this year but actually the old Ottawa Senators.

In the American Division, with no team as weak as the Eagles, the Detroit Red Wings were last week slipping into last place, while the New York Rangers, by means of their extraordinary winning streak, were climbing into third. A notch above the Rangers were the boisterous Boston Bruins, built around sandy-haired Eddie Shore. Leading the division was the team which won the Stanley Cup last year and which most experts favor to retain it this year, the Chicago Black Hawks.

When the Black Hawks wron the Stanley Cup a year ago, a lion's share of the credit went to their spry, handsome, chattering little goaltender, Charles ("Chuck") Gardiner, considered one of the ablest in the history of the game. Two months after the final game last year, Gardiner died of a brain tumor. Whether the Black Hawks win again will depend on many things but most of all upon the man who took his place.

The opposite of his predecessor in temperament, appearance and technique, Lorne Chabot is a bulky, silent, languid French Canadian. Reared in Montreal, he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Field Artillery at 16, fought at Passchendaele and Vimy Ridge. After the War he joined the Royal Northwest Mounted Police. His professional hockey career started in 1926 when he signed up with the New York Rangers. The next season it nearly ended when, in the playoffs for the Stanley Cup, a flying puck cut his eye. The Rangers' manager, Lester Patrick, playing goal for the first time in his life, finished the game in Chabot's place, helped his team win, 2-to-1.

Goalies who have been seriously injured once are usually too wary of the puck to be of much use thereafter. Chabot proved an exception. Traded to Toronto, he helped that team win the Stanley Cup in 1932, the following year guarded its net throughout the longest hockey game on record (2 hr., 44 min.) which the Maple Leafs won, 1-to-0. Last year he played for the Montreal Canadiens. Before this season started he and three hockey-player friends went on a fishing trip. In a village saloon, one of them picked up a paper which contained the news that Chabot had been traded to the Black Hawks.

Unlike Gardiner, who had an unparalleled ability to anticipate plays and great success with the dangerous maneuver of skating out of his position to interrupt them, Chabot almost never leaves his net. Slow at regaining his feet when he falls down, he indulges in few of the acrobatic tricks that make the work of smaller goalies more spectacular. These qualities give his style of play a peculiar indolence which he exaggerates as much as possible. Instead of chattering encouragement to his teammates, the method by which most goalies relieve their nervous tension, he munches slowly a huge wad of chewing gum, rarely speaks a word during a game. Instead of waving his arms, he lounges against his cage as if it were a mantelpiece. All this helps mask his real capabilities: preternaturally quick eyes, phenomenal ability to spread his bulky frame across his goal.

Like most of his confreres, Chabot is superstitious. Over the 25 pounds of pads and guards in which all goalies are encased, tie has worn the same pair of lucky trousers for nine years. More amiable than he appears when professionally engaged, Chabot, like most hockey players, has a summer job, as ice cream salesman. His Black Hawks salary is $4,500. When on tour with the team, he wears grey spats, plays Casino with enthusiasm. In Chicago, he lives at the Croydon Hotel with his wife and two children.

Whether the Black Hawks maintain their championship form is a problem of many factors. In the same trade which brought them Chabot last autumn they acquired the fastest forward in the world, famed Howie Morenz. So far, he has been of great assistance but his legs, after twelve years of professional hockey, are weakening. A new defenseman, Alex Levinsky, one of the two Jewish players in big-league hockey, joined the team three weeks ago to bolster the defense but the Black Hawks are still shaky when their forwards grow tired. Manager Tommy Gorman who helped them win the Stanley Cup last year has been replaced by Clem Loughlin. Chicago hockey crowds, impatient because the team has done most of its winning away from its home arena, have lately taken to tossing dead fish down from the gallery.

Gestures of this sort, and the fact that attendance is not so far ahead of last year's as it should be in view of the team's prowess, irritate its owner, Chicago's Major Frederic McLaughlin who attends Black Hawks' games with his famed wife, Irene Castle McLaughlin. On Goaltender Chabot, disdainful, lazy and alert, they have no effect whatever. Occupied entirely with his job of making saves--i. e. keeping the puck out of the goal--Chabot is irritated only when he fails to do so. Last fortnight he clubbed a goal judge with his hockey stick for daring to assert that his opponents had contrived to score a goal. He was amused by news that the goal judge was suing him for $10,000.

*In the course of the regular season each of the nine teams plays six games against each team in its own division and six against each team in the other.

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