Canadian Pro Football History

Our friend R C Christiansen, author of the book, The Border Boys, joins us in the Pigpen for some more great Canadian Football history, and this time he shares his knowledge with some info from his book about pro football North of the border decades prior to the CFL.

Author R. C. Christiansen shares his knowledge on the shared paths of early football in both the United States and Canada. He wrote a book, The Border Boys, which touches on the subject. Information in this post is from the outline of the author himself as he shares with us some of the founding moments, people and teams of Canadian Pro Football.

This info is just the tip of the iceberg of what R.C. has researched and written so eloquently about. So think of this as the appetizer and read on, listen to the podcast above and get a copy of the book Border Boys at the link above. Now let's get into some early pro football of Canada.

We got a chance to learn a little bit about Lionel Conacher in our Jersey Dispatch post and podcast earlier this year. This man was truly amazing and the more I larn about him my jaw drops.

He was known as the "Canadian Jim Thorpe" for his success as a well rounded athlete as well as "Big Train" and “The Freight Train” by others due to his head-on approach to sports play. Conacher is what many may say a modern-day Renaissance Man, as he excelled in sports at all levels and was a political leader in the Canadian Parliament.

R.C. tells us even more as he says Conacher excelled in multiple sportsbesides football, including lacrosse, baseball, boxing, wrestling, hockey, and track back as an athlete in high school. Lionel was big in the boxing arena; he was once the Canadian boxing champion in the  light heavyweight division and once even had an exhibition bout against world heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey!

In football he played as amateur leading the Toronto Argonauts to the Grey Cup title in 1921. Once his amaeur status was broken though he joined the ranks of professional hockey in 1925 and played for the New York Americans, the later with the Chicago Black Hawks, and Montreal Maroons. 

The guy may be the most diversely decorated athlete the planet has ever seen being recognized as:

• Greatest Male Athlete of the first Half-Century in Canada in 1950.
• Canadian Sports Hall of Fame inducted him to their ranks in 1955.
• Canadian Football Hall of Fame enshrined his brilliant gridiron contributions in 1963.
• Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame placed his name in honor at 1966 festivities.
• Hockey Hall of Fame welcomed Lionel in 1994 to their prestigious museum.
• And to this day the Canadian Press gives the Lionel Conacher Award to its male athlete of the year!

This guy was something special right? Well guess what else Lional Conacher did? He startd a real movement towards having professional football in Canada. That story starts in 1932, while he was still playing hockey with the Maroons. Lionel still wanted to play football, but in Canada at the time there was not an option for a fella to take a gridiron field that had been paid a paid athlete. The Interprovincial Rugby Football Union had recently expelled two Ottawa football players because they had played professional baseball. Lionel related to this story and knew many others Canadian athletes that lost their amateur status still wanted to compete on the football field. He also looked how football in the States was really starting to get popular. Heck the NFL had been playing for ovr a dozen seasons by then.
So Conacher did something about it an decided Eastern Canada should have outright professional football teams that would
compete for fans in IRFU cities. He decided right there and then that he would manage, coach, and play on a professional team that he would help establish in Toronto.

The following July he publically announced that Canada would officially have two professional football teams; one in Toronto that he would be a part of and also one in Montreal. These two teams would never meet up against eacjh other for some reason, but the plan was to promote pro football to Canadiens and eventually grow a league of maybe 8 to 10 teams across the country.

Conacher got sponsor for his Toronto team, Crosse and Blackwell foods brand and they nicknamed themselves, the Chefs. He added some talented athletes the Chef roster too including; his brother and fellow hockey star Charlie, Joe Savoldi a former fullback of Notre Dame's undefeated 1929 and 1930 seasons, and Mayes “Chief” McLain, a former NFL member of the Portsmouth Spartans and Staten Island Stapletons in 1930-31. They decided to play by traditional Canadian Rules; 12 men, 3 downs and 110 yard fields. One differenc was that they would allow blocking ten yards down field and on kick returns which were both illegal by regular CAAU rules of the day.

Meanwhile the other professional team that started up in Canada in Montreal, had Joe Cattarinich leading the way to field a professional football team there. Cattarinich was a co-general manager of the Montreal Canadiens Hockey Club, along with Jack Laviolette, during the team’s inaugural season in 1909-10 as a member of the National Hockey Association, the precursor of the NHL. Joe in fact played for Montreal early on at first as a defenseman and later as a goalie. Like Conacher, he was a great athlete and really started to shine as an executive in sports. Cattarinich's won three Stanley Cup Titles as the team’s owner in 1924, 1930 and 1931. He was well respected in sports circle all around and was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1977.

In football matters in 1932 Cattarinich joined forces with some admired business partners, H.A. Louie Letourneau and Leo Dandurand, and people often referred to the trio as the “Three Musketeers” of promoting sports. The three went to work and decided to take a different approach to Pro football in Canada. They would recruit many former American collegiate players and use American NFL rules. The had one exception to give it a bit of Canadian flavor though, their game was modified to include the Rouge.

Joining the squad was former Olympians: John Jack Spellman, Earl McCready, Charlie Strack also joined by wrestlers Tony Siano, Bibber McCoy, and Jack Wallis. The team landed an outstanding coach too in Shag Shaughnessy formerly of McGill University's program. With most of the roster from the North East and living around Boston, they used that city as their practicing area.

This team would be known by the moniker of the Mount Royals and they proudly suited up in the colors of the Montreal flag. R.C. Christiansen passionately describes these uniforms as having: "cardinal red pants, white socks, and white jerseys emblazed with a red diamond over the heart and with black numerals."

Like we said these two teams that started together in 1933 never played each other. 

Tornoto played games against teams from: Rochester, the Arpeakos ina home and home series as well as the Buffalo Bison. In 1934 Coancher rebranded the squad as the Wrigley Aromints, when he gained sponsorshipo from William Wrigley Jr. and the Wrigley Gum Company. As the Aromints they played another Rochester New York team and one from Tonawanda.

Montreal played teams fro Portland, Maine; Pere Marquette Knights, and the Philadelphia Trojans. They too changed their name to the Bone Crushers and played a few more games against the Lowell Indians and the Medford Athletic Association.

Christiansen leaves us with this cliff hanger:

" Thus ended Lionel Conacher’s experiment with professional football in Canada. Proponents in Western
Canada viewed the trial as a success. Bob Elson, a sportswriter for the Province in Vancouver, British
Columbia, suggested that Canadian football teams in the Big Four, who had suffered from low gate receipts
so far in 1934, should field an all-star team and play an exhibition game in Western Canada using the rules
the Aromints had introduced."

For the rest...we need to get our hands on a copy of Border Boys!

The banner photo is of Lionel Conacher as a football player for the Toronto Crosse and Blackwell Chefs in 1933. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

A Very Special thanks to information obtained from R. C. Christiansen and his brilliant research and book.