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Philosopher Kings in Days of Yore and Ice

by Craig Bowlsby


Things About Governance (2026) - 7

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"Things About Governance" is a thematic series of articles, sponsored by Reality Skimming Press. Pieces in the series run from Jan-June 2026. Query us about contributing for $25 CAD a post at https://facebook.com/relskim  or by email at info@realityskimming.com

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Author Craig Bowlsby. Image credit: (ABC BookWorld, 2016).
Author Craig Bowlsby. Image credit: (ABC BookWorld, 2016).

Just who had the right to govern the newly organized sport of ice hockey, in the early days of the Stanley Cup?


In 1892, when Lord Stanley, the Governor General of Canada, donated a silver challenge cup (called the Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup) for competition by the best hockey teams in Canada, he began a strange tradition of governance. His creation saw the most simple and benign form of oversight applied to what was to become one of the most important social structures and businesses in the nation of Canada, and paradoxically one of the most difficult to arbitrate.


Lord Stanley created this simple hierarchy himself by quickly handing the Cup’s administration over to two Trustees: John Sweetland, who was both a sheriff and a doctor; and Phillip D. Ross, a newspaper editor and publisher. These two men were part of Stanley’s high social circle in Ontario and Quebec and were at the top of their professions in Canada. They were also masons, and active sportsmen.

Stanley had picked these men for their upstanding morals and keen minds, and this supreme but meager hockey council was perhaps the closest Canadian society ever came to the model of the philosopher kings, found in Plato’s works, or to the priest kings in ancient Peru, who ruled for a short time, just before the conquistadors came and destroyed them.


But Lord Stanley left these Canadian priest kings to their own devices to govern this new sporting tradition, and the Governor General then returned to England in 1893.


In contrast, the professional baseball world went through many fractious trials and tribulations from the 1880s to 1905 and was fought over by the National League and American League in several forms, and by many owners and officials, and council members, before its greatest contest, the World Series, finally became an official event with a long list of strict rules.


But up in Canada, at first, Sweetland and Ross did very little, almost like Hippocrates, the father of medicine, with his admonition: first do no harm. They issued few pronouncements about rules and tried to stay out of the limelight. Ultimately, however, they bore the responsibility for everything to do with challenging for the “Stanley” Cup, and winning the Cup, for the thousands of hockey players and their teams in Canada, and later in the United States.


At first the Trustees merely presented the Cup to the Montreal Athletic Club, in 1893, since Montreal had defeated everyone else in their league. But soon after that the Trustees decreed that only teams who had won their league championship could challenge for the Stanley Cup, and Sweetland and Ross would choose the challengers each year, of which there were several. Which meant the Cup could change hands four or five times over the four main months of winter.


At the same time, many different hockey leagues sprang up, with various rules and customs, but in all of these regulations the game had already been simplified down to only a few main factors.


Just as the two Trustees for the Stanley Cup had been chosen, the whole premise of subsequent organized hockey was built on trust and honour, which at the time was not as strange as it appears today. This was because Victorian and Edwardian society had generally developed into a voluntary moral proving ground, where fair play, righteousness and “muscular Christianity” had enveloped the citizens of the Western democracies, and in particular, the British Empire. No matter that in practice governments and armies still played “The Great Game” and would invade their neighbors on thin pretexts and happily go to war over issues of greed. The citizens of these “great” countries thought of themselves as paragons of fair play, and sports of all types had generally been folded into this ethos.

Rules, therefore, tended to be created solely on the basis of actions allowed which would maximize the narrow nature of their performance, rather than enhancing the game. One couldn’t shoot the puck ahead, because players on skates had difficulty racing back to get a puck, and those ahead of the play did not deserve to get any special advantage just because they had “loafed” around the goal.


Other prohibitions declared goalies could not go down on their knees to stop a puck, as that was clearly unfair to the attacking player; substitutes could not be brought onto the ice unless the opposing team said they could, even when a player had been knocked out on the ice; and a general custom was that no man wanted to leave the ice, which would impugn his status as a “sixty-minute man.” Broken bones, therefore, would be endured, and players would even be patched up by doctors as the game waited for them, without substitutes.


Furthermore, the traditional strategy involved in continuously passing the puck backward meant coaches had designed “scientific” criss-crossing patterns to fool and outwit the opponents, and anything that was scientific was also a sign of high civilization.


But within these simple hockey rules and traditions, games nevertheless became heated, and fights and arguments would break out, belying the sportsmanship thought to be inherent, which meant that the “muscular” part of the ethos was always straining beneath the surface.


Sweetland and Ross, and later, William Foran, a top civil servant and hockey organizer, who took over from Sweetland in 1907, generally refrained from implementing or introducing any new rules into the largest challenging leagues. After all, it seemed that the game had reached its peak of perfection, and why rock the boat?


However, by the late Edwardian period some players had begun to chafe at the restrictions which seemed to shutter the game into a decaying tradition. For one thing, the major hockey world had split into two camps when the Patrick brothers, Lester and Frank, and their father Joe (who controlled the money) created a new professional hockey league—the PCHA—on the pacific coast in 1911. The Patricks created three artificial ice arenas, and they began to stretch the boundaries of hockey in many other ways, including minor rules. So too, were the Trustees evolving, but slowly. They had already decreed (in 1906) that professional teams could challenge for the Cup and even Americans, and they had also recently decreed that the NHA, which was the dominant professional league, would now take control of the Stanley Cup, contrary to Lord Stanley’s stipulations. But any champion of the league must still take challenges from other teams, according to the whims of the Trustees.


Cover of Empire of Ice, by Craig H. Bowlsby, 2012.
Cover of Empire of Ice, by Craig H. Bowlsby, 2012.

In March of 1913, however, the PCHA Victoria Pros (also called the Aristocrats) clashed with the NHA and the Stanley Cup Trustees when they challenged the NHA champions, the Quebec Bulldogs, for the Stanley Cup, but wouldn’t agree to the Trustees’ terms. This was unheard of. The Patricks had already “stolen” players from the NHA in the previous two seasons, to the NHA’s outrage, and they now refused to play for the Cup in Quebec for two main reasons: one; there was no artificial ice in Quebec, and in March the ice might be breaking up, so there might be fewer gate receipts, and two; the Patricks wanted a best of three series, to potentially maximize those same gate receipts, instead of kowtowing to the system of a two-game total goals series, as stipulated by the Trustees, and practiced by popular tradition. In the end, both Quebec and Victoria defied the NHA and the Trustees, to play a “World Championship” best-of three series in Victoria, on artificial ice, instead of one for the Stanley Cup, which was the first major time anyone had snubbed the most important hockey trophy or its guardians.

Victoria defeated the Bulldogs two out of three games and won the “World Championship” although there was no trophy to go with it, and the Stanley Cup Trustees and the NHA were fuming at this defiance.


But the next year saw an even greater attack on the traditions of the game, once again perpetrated by the Patricks, when the single most important rule change in hockey was created, making a great explosion in the psyche of the players, the men in charge, and the fans. (See “1913, The Year They Invented the Future of Hockey,” for a more detailed account of this entire episode.)


It was in November of 1913 when the Patrick Brothers tried a fantastic experiment, called the forward pass, (or technically the “no-offside-in-centre-ice rule), which no one outside of the Pacific Coast Hockey Association wanted, and which was thought to be so vile and ridiculous by the Eastern teams, that they fought against it with every pronouncement and rule they could muster. The aberration was reviled and ridiculed from the moment of its birth, even on the ice of the Vancouver Arena.


As discussed above, part of the reason for this antipathy was the way the world thought of itself at the turn of the twentieth century, and it was quite different to our traditions in the twenty-first. Generally, most sports rules, as well as political governance, were strongly controlled by the rigid mores and predilections of the people, whether upper, middle or even lower class, who had shaped modern democratic society for centuries.


Once again, this was a question of fair play. The one single, most important rule in “modern” ice hockey was that the forward pass would be so obviously unfair to men on skates and would make it so much easier to score—by snapping the puck up to someone waiting behind the opponents, that it was manifestly impossible to imagine any kind of fair game that way.


(Paradoxically, the game of lacrosse, similar to hockey, was also a Victorian game with long traditions of well-cherished rules, and yet it already had forward passing. But lacrosse was played on a much larger field than an ice rink, with 10 men a side. There was always a group of defencemen ready to take care of long attacking passes, so such a tactic seemed fair to both sides. It was also easier to turn and defend while running on grass, than it was on ice. The unique qualities and difficulties of ice hockey demanded a carefully structured parity. Or so the players thought. It was also true that before 1870, when the first official hockey games were organized and regulated by the great James Creighton in Montreal, some leagues, especially in Nova Scotia, allowed forward passing, which was partially because the Nova Scotia games still carried the carefree spirit of free-for-all shinny. However, by 1875 most hockey games and leagues in Central Canada had rid themselves of any such “primitive” liberties and recklessness, as they saw it.)


But Frank Patrick, the owner and playing coach of the Vancouver Millionaires had been frustrated by the idea that the game of hockey could move faster and had not reached its true potential. He enlisted the team’s star player, Fred “Cyclone” Taylor to spearhead this new tactic where the players could freely pass the puck forward between the centre third of the ice. Frank’s brother Lester, who owned the Victoria team, and coached it, took much longer to agree to making it work officially, but they finally unveiled the new tactic to their fans on November 28, 1913, and waited breathlessly for the response.

To many, in the East and the West, it seemed like the Patricks were showing the rest of the hockey world how they could legally cheat.


The Patricks were now threatening to change hockey into a different game. Players knew this had already happened in another arena, in 1906, when the forward pass was added to rugby-football in the United States, and the game had changed rapidly. But, according to Wikipedia on the Forward Pass, (citing the Chicago Tribune), this had been a drastic measure to save a sport which had killed 18 players the year before. The United States government had actually stepped in and forced the game to open up, to prevent the usual massed bludgeonings in the American game.

(In Canadian football there were fewer deaths, and even though the American game allowed only a few players to be eligible to catch a forward pass, the Canadians still objected.)


The hockey world was therefore stunned and confused. Newspapers wrote in guarded terms about players’ opinions. Some players professed to hate it, while others were said to be willing to give it a chance. But many sports writers and coaches were quoted with short bursts of disdain, implying that the Patricks were crazy. Even Si Griffis, the Captain of the Vancouver Millionaires, and one of Frank Patrick’s key players, called the implementation of the new rule an “impossibility.”


Nevertheless, the PCHA pressed ahead, forcing the players to work out the kinks, and by the end of the 1913-1914 season they’d forged a well-ordered machine that mostly worked, even if it was not fully controlled or embraced


Victoria ended up winning the league championship, and at that point Lester Patrick, who coached the Victoria Pros, or Aristocrats, made entreaties to the winner of the NHA, The Torontos, (also called the Blueshirts.), to play for the Stanley Cup.


However, once again, the Stanley Cup Trustees, and the NHA and the PCHA, all clashed with the details.


The Trustees wanted Toronto to play a series first with a Sydney Nova Scotia championship team, but the Patricks felt slighted over that and pressed ahead without applying for a Stanley Cup series, and they travelled East and began a best-of-five “World Championship” series in Toronto without officially playing for the Stanley Cup. It was only after the second game that the Trustees grudgingly agreed to make the game an official Stanley Cup series.


The games were alternated according to Eastern and Western rules, and it was during this series that the Stanley Cup first saw the forward pass used, although only in the centre third of the ice. Unfortunately for Lester Patrick, his team lost the first three games, and hence the Cup, and even failed to win the one game—the second—that was played with the forward pass. The Toronto players hated the way the new tactic forced them to skate faster at all times and wear themselves out, and especially how it rewarded players for loafing ahead of the play.


When Lester returned home, he was dejected, but he and brother Frank vowed to press on with the new tactic and prove its efficacy. After all, the Wright brothers had shown that man could fly and that had seemed impossible only a decade earlier. The new technique needed to be refined to the point where its worth could be proven.


They didn’t have to wait long. In the 1914-15 season, Cyclone Taylor, the speedy star of Frank’s Vancouver Millionaires, led the team into a mastery of the new technique and they won the PCHA championship. Fortunately, the Trustees had announced this season that no longer would they accept challenges for the Stanley Cup, but rather the teams of the best East and West Leagues, which meant the NHA and the PCHA, would play for the Cup at the end of the season. This meant both the Trustees and the NHA had already given their blessing for a Stanley Cup series, and the Ottawa Senators then travelled West for what became an official alternation of East and West for the Stanley Cup Championship series.


It was here in Vancouver that the Millionaires gave full rein to their new style. In the first game they showed how they could use their great speed in conjunction with the forward pass and they beat the Senators 6-2. In the second game, played according to Eastern rules, there was no forward passing, but the style that the tactic had inspired in the Millionaires ran in their blood, and they raced around as fast as they could, still tiring the Ottawa players out, and winning 8-3. The third game saw a continuation of the first, as the Millionaires sped past the Senators, taking passes on the fly, and leaving the Senators behind. The third and final game ended 12-3 for the Millionaires, giving the Cup to Vancouver.

Finally, the new tactic had proven itself and could not be relegated to an evolutionary scrapheap.

The East still fought against the new rule, despite growing evidence that it sparked the game into a higher level of play. (In 1917 the NHA folded and morphed into a new organization, the NHL.) Seattle was the first American team to win the Stanley Cup, in 1917, taking full advantage of the forward pass, and by the Spring of 1918, when Toronto defeated Vancouver on Toronto ice, both teams were equally comfortable with the forward pass. But it wasn’t until November of 1918, when the new NHL grudgingly implemented their own “no-offside-in-centre-ice” rule for their regular season, and the forward pass genie could never more be forced back into its bottle.


As for the Trustees, there were always questions to be settled, especially for disputes between the rival leagues. But in 1926 the PCHA folded, and only the NHL remained to take control of the Cup. This meant a new era of governance by the NHL was ushered in, relegating the Trustees to a vestigial and largely ceremonial position, rather like a governor general, from whence the Cup had originally come.


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Biography


In 2014 Craig H. Bowlsby won the Brian McFarlane award for hockey history writing, from the Society for International Hockey Research. Craig’s hockey book, “Empire of Ice, The Rise and Fall of the Pacific Coast Hockey Association, 1911-1926,” was published in 2012, (Knights of Winter, publishing), while another book, “1913, The Year They Invented the Future of Hockey,” was published in 2013. (Knights of Winter.) Craig has published sports history articles for the Seattle Times, the Vancouver Province, Vancouver Courier and Vancouver Canucks program. Craig’s near-future detective short story, “The Girl Who Was Only Three Quarters Dead,” was published by Mystery Magazine in April 2022, and won the Crime Writers of Canada Award in 2023. (This story will be available in the 5th annual anthology “Best of MetaStellar Magazine,” for 2026.) In 2024 Craig won the CWC Award for best unpublished novel, for “Requiem for a Lotus,” which also won the Historical Fiction Company’s award for Best Mystery Novel for unpublished or published novels, in 2024-25. Craig’s mystery short story, “A Bullet for the Tin Man” will be available in the Sisters in Crime 4th annual Crime Wave anthology, in October 2026, with the theme, “Home Sweet Homicide.”



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