“But you let in Eddie Shore!”

“It says no Eddies. We’re allowed to have one.”

One of the common historiographic sayings is that, “History is written by the winners.” Now, this is often used as a bit of an analog to ‘might makes right’, as though it represents conquerors rushing into cities and inscribing their version of events in the blood of slaughtered children. Of course, sometimes it works exactly like that, but other times it’s a little more complicated. Sometimes what is being glossed over in the history the winners write is not the brutality or evil that brought the powerful to power, but rather the random, contingent, frankly silly accidents that underlie the foundations of venerable old institutions. For example, the NHL version of history doesn’t talk a lot about its origin story. This is not, as some say, because that origin is especially sordid or unscrupulous, but because it’s rather embarrassingly childish. Here it is.

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The NHL was not the first professional hockey league in North America. That distinction belongs to the Eastern Canada Amateur Hockey Association, which in 1908 kicked out its amateur teams, dropped the term from its name, and for one glorious season functioned as the all-pro Eastern Canada Hockey Association. A year later, in the course of a rather elaborate dispute which is not the subject of the present article, the ECHA disbanded and reformed, some four teams richer, as the National Hockey Association.

For the eight years the NHA survived, the core of the Association was comprised of four teams: the Ottawa Senators, the Montreal Wanderers, the Quebec Bulldogs (all survivors of the ECHA) and the newly-minted Montreal Canadiens. Now, the thing one must remember about the NHA was that this whole professional hockey thing was more or less completely new at the time. There had been professional players kicking around for years, but throughout the end of the 19th century and into the early 20th, the hockey ideal was the amateur sportsman, who played hockey only for the pure-hearted love of the game and earned his wages elsewhere. The pros who existed before the NHA were considered slightly shady characters, often taking their money under the table and frequently getting kicked off teams when the payments came to light. The NHA, along with its western counterpart the PCHA (Pacific Coast Hockey Association), were the first sustained attempts to make and market professional hockey as a spectator sport. It was an experiment. They were, in large part, making it up as they went along. Read the rest of this entry »