Lögberg-Heimskringla - 25.03.2005, Blaðsíða 8

8 • Lögberg-Heimskringla • Friday 25 March 2005
ers. They were shunned by the
elite Winnipeg City League and
weren’t allowed to compete.
That only made the Iceland-
ers more determined and they
formed their own league that in-
cluded teams from Selkirk, Por-
tage la Prairie, and Winnipeg’s
AAA Lea'gue.
At times adversity and alien-
ation can provoke greatness, and
out of that situation a hockey
powerhouse grew. It finally
manifested itself in 1920 when
the Winnipeg Falcons won the
Allen Cup, and with it, the right
to compete in the 1920 Olympic
Games in Antwerp, Belgium.
They won the gold. But that’s
another well-documented story.
Our first record of Cully’s
career begins in 1909, when he
started playing hockey in ear-
nest with the Vikings. He was
17 years old. The next year he
started the season with the Win-
nipeg Falcons, but his talents
soon brought him to the attention
of the Kenora Thistles, who had
won the Stanley Cup in 1907 in
a matchup against the Montreal
Wanderers. To this day, Kenora,
Ontario retains the distinction
of being the smallest town to
ever host a Stanley Cup winner.
There he played for a portion of
the year before finishing off the
season with the famed Winnipeg
Monarchs.
The Monarchs were the elite
Winnipeg team at the time, and
for the young Icelander it was a
validation of his emerging abili-
ties as a player. Cully went back
to the Falcons for the 1911 sea-
son, but the pro scouts were out
and about on the Prairies, and
he’d been noticed. It was time to
move on.
Cully officially joined the
pro ranks in 1912 when he signed
with the Toronto Blueshirts.
They belonged to the National
Hockey Association, an east-
em league that included the
Montreal Canadiens, Montreal
Wanderers, Ottawa Senators,
and Quebec Bulldogs. The NHA
was Canada’s recognized pro-
fessional league at the time and
teams competed for the Stanley
Cup. Cully scored 12 goals in 19
games in his debut, and though
the Blueshirts did well during
the season, the Bulldogs won
the Cup.
For 21-year-old Cully, the
next season was a dream come
true. The Blueshirts finished at
the top of the standings along
with the Canadiens. Neither
team had ever competed for the
championship before and spirits
were high as the series opened in
Montreal. The Canadiens had a
powerhouse team that included
Newsy Lalonde and the legend-
ary Georges Vezina in goal, and
Montreal came away with a 2-0
home ice victory. The teams then
travelled to Toronto for game
two and the first Stanley Cup fi-
nal ever played on artificial ice
at the Arena Gardens. On March
14,1914, the Blueshirts whipped
the Canadiens 6-0, taking the
NHA and Stanley Cup champi-
onship based on the two-game
total point series.
Now depending on the
source, there’s been some con-
fusion as to who the Torontö
Blueshirts met in the 1914
Stanley Cup final. Some sta-
tistics show Victoria of the Pa-
cific Coast Hockey Association
meeting Toronto for the cham-
pionship. The PCHA was a new
league that had been formed on
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the West Coast in 1912 by Frank
and Lester Patrick, and during
the 1913/1914 season Victoria
had come out ón top. Within a
few days of Toronto beating
Montreal, the Victoria team
headed east with the purpose
of facing off against the NHA
champs.
However, Victoria had not
formally submitted a challenge
and the NHA trustees didn’t
recognize the legitimacy of a
series against Toronto. In sports-
manlike fashion, the two teams
decided to play anyway and
the Blueshirts ultimately swept
a best-of-five series. It was an
historic matchup in a number of
ways. Not only was it the first
time the top teams from the two
leagues met, but it also began
a process that would include
PCHA teams competing against
the NHA for the Stanley Cup. It
was also the start of an east-west
rivalry that helped spread hock-
ey’s popularity across the coun-
try and into the United States.
These were exciting times
for the sport. Hockey was evolv-
ing, and Cully was in the thick
of it.
During the next season, the
Blueshirts struggled and ended
up in fourth place with an 8-12
record. On the scoring front,
though, it was a great year for
Cully, who led the team with
22 goals. He also amassed an
incredible 138 minutes in penal-
ties that year, quite a feat consid-
ering the team’s 20-game sched-
ule. The 1914/1915 season was
Cully’s last with the Blueshirts.
In three years with the team, he
had a respectable 43 goals to his
credit and had also gained no-
toriety in another area. Cully’s
hard-hitting style and penchant
for a good mix-up had earned
him a total of 216 minutes in
the penalty box. He was quickly
gaining a reputation as the bad
boy of hockey.
Out on the West Coast, the
Patrick brothers were introduc-
ing hockey to a whole new au-
dience. At various times the Pa-
cific Coast Hockey Association
incíuded teams from Victoria,
Vancouver, New Westminster,
Spokane, Washington and Port-
land, Oregon. But in 1915, a
brand new team was added that
would make hockey history.
With the Seattle Metropoli-
tans, the Patricks were deter-
mined to make hockey a success
in the west, and they began raid-
ing the eastem NHA of its best
players. The Toronto Blueshirts
were a favorite target, and in
1915 Cully found himself in
Seattle along with four other
Blueshirt players that included
fellow forwards Bemie Morris
and Frank Foyston, and goalie
Harry “Hap” Holmes. Moving
to the West Coast proved to be
one of the most important deci-
sions Cully ever made. In spite
of where hockey took him in fol-
lowing years, Seattle would be
home for the rest of his life.
1915 was also one of the
most important years in the
history of hockey, when the
PCHA reached an agreement
with the NHA to compete an-
nually for the Stanley Cup.
This truly began the process of
making hockey a North Ameri-
can game. But it also presented
a number of challenges. Up to
that point, hockey had been in-
venting itself as it went along,
and the two leagues were proof
of that. The most important
difference was that the NHA
iced the six positions we’re fa-
miliar with today and had two
substitute players. The PCHA
featured six players on the ice
plus a freewheeling rover. One
substitute was allowed on the
bench. Over the next couple of
years it was one of the dilem-
mas that had to be dealt with
and worked out each time the
two league’s top teams met for
the Championship.
The Seattle Metropolitans
debuted on home ice on De-
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