BY LUCAS AYKROYD
Only 100 years late, the long-gone Cougars finally get the Stanley Cup celebration they deserve — but they’re not the only puck stars around here.
When Shakespeare wrote in Twelfth Night, “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them,” he might have been describing Victoria’s hockey history. We’ve spawned or hosted a disproportionate number of puck milestones, sometimes due to big personalities and sometimes through luck and coincidence.
“Greatness” is a much-abused term nowadays. However, the 1924-25 Victoria Cougars certainly merit it as the last non-National Hockey League team and last B.C. team — take that, Vancouver — to win the Stanley Cup. At a time when no Canadian club has captured the Cup since the 1992-93 Montreal Canadiens with Patrick Roy in net, that’s a good old-fashioned, feel-good story.
Granted, the emphasis is undeniably on “old-fashioned.” For 1925 was the same year Charlie Chaplin released The Gold Rush and F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby. Are you ready to party like your great-, maybe even great-great-grandparents?
Godfather of Hockey
While Victoria’s hoisting of the big silver mug on March 30, 1925, is less heralded than the aforementioned artists’ accomplishments, there are plans to mark the centennial this March 27 and 29-30 in Oak Bay, Victoria and area. The Stanley Cup will be here — appearance dates and times still to be nailed down — as the Victoria Hockey Legacy Society, which brought Scotiabank Hockey Day in Canada to the city a year ago, rolls out a series of celebratory events in concert with local organizations. Among them: an alumni game featuring a more contemporary array of former major junior Cougars and a March 27 music night that caps off a $5,000 grand prize songwriting contest. (Feeling creative? Submit your song to vhls.ca by February 28.)
“The Century Celebration is a chance to come together and have fun, raise everyone’s spirits and pay tribute to the Victoria Cougars putting our region on the hockey map by winning the greatest trophy in all sports 100 years ago,” says society co-chair Brenda MacFarlane.
Yet this is more than a commemoration of long-gone ice warriors mostly named Harry or Harold. The ripple effect of that victory has clearly propelled Victoria’s hockey greatness. I say this as a sports writer — born and raised in Victoria — who has covered hockey for outlets like the New York Times, ESPN and IIHF.com since 1999.
So what registers on the greatness meter here?
The 1924-25 Cougars defeated the consensus greatest hockey franchise of all time — the Canadiens, now winners of an all-time record 24 Cups — three games to one. Hockey Hall of Fame sniper Frank Frederickson, who also won the inaugural 1920 Olympic hockey gold medal with the Winnipeg Falcons in Antwerp, Belgium, starred with two goals in the ’25 clinching game.
Of course, the Cup would never have come to our provincial capital without Lester Patrick. The Cougars’ coach and general manager remains, without exaggeration, the godfather of modern hockey.
As Helen Edwards notes in The History of Professional Hockey in Victoria, B.C.: 1911-2011, when Victoria’s pro team debuted on January 9, 1912, at the Patrick Arena at Cadboro Bay Road and Epworth (then Empress) Street in Oak Bay, it was the “first game played on artificial ice in Canada.” (Sorry not sorry, Toronto and Montreal.)
Patrick didn’t merely co-found the Pacific Coast Hockey Association with his brother Frank, a fellow Hockey Hall of Famer. “The Silver Fox” also devised more than 20 rules that hockey still uses today. Numbered jerseys. Blue lines. Penalty shots. Forward passes. The list goes on. Pretty decent for a fellow who lived on Linden Avenue in the heart of South Fairfield.
Even after the Western league folded in 1926 and the Cougars were sold off to Detroit, they would ultimately morph into a storied Original Six NHL franchise as the Detroit Red Wings. (Ah, to dream of Gordie Howe and Steve Yzerman on Victoria ice.)
Minor and Major Triumphs
And here’s where my lived hockey experience comes in. I grew up a few blocks from Patrick’s home. I didn’t witness Victoria’s minor pro triumphs of the mid-20th century, including titles for the 1950-51 Victoria Cougars (yep, our civic passion for recycling extends to hockey team names) and 1965-66 Victoria Maple Leafs. However, the first game my dad took me to featured the 1980-81 Victoria Cougars thumping the Portland Winterhawks 7-0. Those major junior Cougars — the Western Hockey League champs — set a record that still stands with 60 regular-season wins. And they were an iconic bunch.
In net, coach Jack Shupe’s team had Grant Fuhr, a future five-time Stanley Cup champion with the Edmonton Oilers. Fuhr, a Black hockey pioneer, was labelled the greatest goalie in NHL history by Wayne Gretzky.
Other key Cougars included Geoff Courtnall — who not only played 1,049 NHL games, including five Vancouver Canucks seasons, but also dated Sarah McLachlan — and Barry Pederson, whose NHL playoff points-per-game of 1.52 is shockingly fourth all-time behind only Gretzky, Mario Lemieux and Connor McDavid. (Check QuantHockey.com, all you skeptics.)
Speaking of “The Great One,” historians pinpoint the 1988 Gretzky trade from Edmonton to the Los Angeles Kings as a turning point in hockey history (and Canada’s perception of itself as in thrall to the U.S. economically and culturally, if you want to go down that rabbit hole). And where did Gretzky’s first Kings training camp take place? You guessed it. I was there at the old Memorial Arena — now replaced by the Save-On-Foods Memorial Centre at Blanshard and Caledonia — to witness Number 99’s greatness.
That included sticking my 13-year-old arm around an imposing arena manager — Gretzky’s only security in those innocent days — and into a limo for Wayne to take a copy of his eponymous 1984 biography out of my hand, autograph it and hand it back just before being driven away.
Victoria has both showcased and humbled international hockey’s greatest names. Case in point: goalie Vladislav Tretiak, voted to the International Ice Hockey Federation’s Centennial All-Star team in 2008.
Three years before starring against Team Canada in the historic 1972 Summit Series, the Soviet legend was in net when a less-glitzy Canadian national team won 5-1 at Memorial Arena before 5,388 fans on December 21, 1969. And three years after backstopping the USSR to Olympic gold in 1984, Tretiak found a smaller spotlight in Victoria. I joined a long lineup to get his new autobiography signed outside Hillside Shopping Centre’s Bolen Books.
Victoria’s hockey legacy has kept growing in recent years. Considering nobody plays on frozen outdoor ponds around here, it’s pretty great that Victoria-born Jamie Benn became an NHL scoring champion with the Dallas Stars in 2014-15.
Not only did Victoria attract close to 6,000 fans per game while co-hosting the 2019 world junior hockey championships with Vancouver, but we also witnessed current NHL superstars like Canucks captain Quinn Hughes and his brother Jack Hughes, the number one overall pick of the New Jersey Devils, strutting their stuff with the Americans. (Not to mention how Victoria organizers showed cultural leadership by encouraging beloved underdog Kazakhstan to adopt Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” as its goal song.)
Future On the Ice
What can this city do to cement its future hockey greatness? If the Victoria Royals could go further than the 1980-81 Cougars and secure not only a WHL title but also a Memorial Cup as major junior national champions, that’d be sweeter than a first date at the Dutch Bakery & Diner.
If the Victoria Royals could go further than the 1980-81 Cougars and secure not only a WHL title but also a Memorial Cup as major junior national champions, that’d be sweeter than a first date at the Dutch Bakery & Diner.
Can you imagine how astonished Atlanta and Houston — not to mention Quebec City and Hamilton — would be if Victoria jumped to the front of the line and landed an NHL franchise? Unfortunately, in real life, that concept doesn’t work, much like the dried-up ballpoint pen I handed Maurice “Rocket” Richard to sign my program after a mid-1980s old-timers game.
Given the worldwide explosion of women’s sports, Victoria’s next IIHF venture might be to bid on a women’s world championship. Kamloops successfully hosted that tournament in 2016 — surely it would flourish in the City of Gardens. B.C. has the next budding women’s hockey superstar in 17-year-old defender Chloe Primerano. To watch her author a Shakespeare-worthy masterpiece on Victoria ice would be a great day for hockey.
