Breaking the Ice

In spite of the war, the professional hockey season opened last week with hardly a crimp in it. This is remarkable since 90% of the big-time hockey players in the U.S. are Canadians.

National League. Only team badly jarred is the New York Americans. Five of its most promising youngsters (from the strict Provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan) were refused passports. But the Americans have become accustomed to bad breaks ever since the league took the club away from its financially embarrassed owner, onetime Beer Baron

Bill Dwyer, in 1936. Last week they shrugged their shoulders, decided to change their luck by changing their name: to the Brooklyn Americans.

Brooklyn has never backed a professional hockey team (although a Brooklyn prompter in 1897 staged the first professional hockey game in the U.S.). Whether or not its citizens will get steamed up over a team that says "my heart belongs to Brooklyn," but plays its home games across the river in Manhattan's Madison Square Garden, remains to be seen. Last year the orphan Americans finished last in the seven-team league. This may be Brooklyn's year in hockey as well as baseball, but after three games last week there was no indication of it.

More promising was the outlook for the New York Rangers, the Americans' archrivals. The 1941 Rangers lost their star goalie, Dave Kerr, who retired to go into the beer business. To replace him, Manager Lester Patrick brought from his Regina (Saskatchewan) kindergarten a 21-year-old named Jim ("Sugar") Henry. Henry has never' played anything but amateur hockey. But rinkfans who saw him guard the Ranger nets to two victories last week voted Sugar Jim the sweetest rookie to come up to the big-time in years. He may do more than his share toward keeping the Boston Bruins from skating off with the National Hockey League championship again this year.

American League is considered a minor league mainly because its franchises are cheaper and its salaries lower. Favorite to win the title for the fourth successive year are the Cleveland Barons, owned by Cleveland Inkman Albert Sutphin and managed by Bill Cook, onetime Ranger star. For several years, the National League has tried to get Cleveland to join its lopsided seven-team loop. But Owner Sutphin has turned a deaf ear.

When Sutphin bought the Cleveland franchise in 1934, Cleveland was the only club in the league (then known as the International League) that was financially independent. The others were farms for the members of the rich National League. Sutphin, a glad-hand supersalesman, set out to raise the American League to a big-time standard.

He set the style by getting Cleveland citizens to build a million-dollar ice bowl with 10,000 red-white-&-blue seats, a spine-tingling organ, beer garden, fancy press box. Fellow leaguers followed suit. Today nine of the ten clubs in the American League are financially independent (though many have working agreements with the National League).

Though Ringleader Sutphin may never realize his dream of a hockey World Series between the champions of the American and National Leagues, the up-&-coming American circuit puts on a hell-for-leather hockey show attracts almost as many spectators as the National League. Last year Cleveland's Barons outdrew the New York Rangers. Nearly as large a following had the little Hershey Bears, owned and operated by a trust fund set up by chocolate-rich Milton S. Hershey for his chocolate-bar paradise at Hershey, Pa.

Other American League teams with large followings: the brand-new Washington Lions, managed by Ching Johnson, onetime Ranger star; the Philadelphia Rockets, managed by Danny Cox, another famed old Ranger; the Springfield (Mass.) Indians, not only managed but owned by Eddie Shore, the bruising old Boston Bruin, for more than a decade the biggest crowd puller of them all.

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