The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.1959, Blaðsíða 24

22
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Winter 1959
TOM JOHNSON—Top Defence Hockey Player
It was not a flash in the pan when
the Falcon Hockey Team—with one
exception, all of Icelandic descent and
born in Manitoba—won the first
Olympic World Hockey Champion-
ship in 1920. It was rather a propitious
concentration of Icelandic athletic
ability, traceable to the Vikings of old,
and fostered through centuries of
struggle with the elements on an is-
land in the North Atlantic. That,
innate athletic bent was bound to
disperse and it has found expression
in curling, basketball, and in track
and field events, in all of which stars
have arisen during the four score years
Icelanders have been settled in North
America.
Evidence of prowess on the hookey
ice was first revealed in Cully Wilson—
both parents Icelandic. Born and
raised in Winnipeg, he started playing
hockey early and in 1912—13, when
still in his teens he joined the profes-
sional ranks in Toronto—one of the
very first Winnipeg hockey players to
play professional hockey. Cully was a
leading professional hockey player for
about twenty years both in the east
and on the west coast. He has the
singular distinction of having scored
three goals in slightly more than one
minute.
Space does not permit mention of
the hockey players of the Falcon
Hockey Club era, led by Frank Fred-
rickson, and later, in the juniors, led
by Wally Fridfinnson.
Now once again that hockey prowess
has burst forth in Tom Johnson of
the Montreal Canadiens, the Stanley
Cup winners of 1958—59 and the three
preceding years.
Tom Johnson
Last spring Tom won the double
distinction of being voted the best
defence player in the National Hookey
League, and being awarded the James
Norris Memorial Trophy as the regular
defence player “who demonstrates
throughout the season the greatest all-
round ability in that position.” To win
these laurels with a championship
team at the height of its glory is a
great achievement.
Thomas Johnson was born in Bald-
ur, Manitoba in 1928. He is a son of
the late Thomas Johnson, who was a
good athlete, excelling in curling. An
uncle to Tom Johnson Sr. was the
late Hon. Thomas H. Johnson, the