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Originally Posted by Megaforce
Great thread. I got the Brown book about the Maroons from the Westmount Library ($60 for six month membership) and it was a good resource but it lacked primary sources. I guess everybody is dead now so it lacked sources to interview.
The Maroons initially wanted to revive the Wanderers name but the owners of that name refused. I think the Maroons didn't even have an official name for a long time, they were just the Montreal hockey team.
This link is sometimes useful if you want to read original newspaper reports from those years.
There's the matter of the Victoria Rink as well. My friend Billy Georgette, piano player at Biddles (now known as the House of Jazz) has made that rink his passion. It's now a parking garage straddling Drummond and Stanley near Dorchester. He calls it the birthplace of hockey and knows everything about the place, says it was the place where they had the first real game of hockey. The standard size rink of the current NHL was supposedly based on the distance between Stanley and Drummond, due to this building.
Early hockey didn't allow forward passes. The Western league teams allowed forward passes and the east eventually relented and allowed it. Teams only had about 8 players and this went well into the 30s or so.
Getting back to the subject - I think it'd be awesome if someone could set up a small museum specifically to honor the memory of these other teams in Montreal. It'd be pretty awesome. |
I can't picture where the building is/was, I'll have to look next time I'm downtown.
I didn't know that support for the Habs vs. Maroons was kind of a 2 solitudes thing. I always figured that the fans out there in Mtl that had that 'anyone but the Habs' attitude, must have evolved from the Maroons.
I argued on the history board that it wasn't the case,in terms of how partisanship was divided, but chatting with my Mom, not a sports fan, she told me that her Dad was a Maroons fan, and they bet pennies with the Francophones they worked with on CH-Maroons games, as it was the case. When they left the picture, most fans embraced the CH and some didn't.
She said that it was always a friendly sort of thing, it , in her memory, didn't get as bitter as Habs/Nordiques. She's hardly a hockey historian though, and I'd like to read about fan allegiances in those days.