The Canadian Experience at the 1936 Olympic Hockey Tournament

190 WONG Sport History Review, 2003, 34, 190-212 © 2003 Human Kinetics Publishers, Inc. Sport Networks on Ice: The Canadian Experience at the 1936 Olympic Hockey Tournament John Wong Amid heavy snowfall, the ocean liner Duchess of Atholl sailed slowly out of the Halifax harbor on January 19, 1936. Among her passengers head- ing for Europe was the Canadian Olympic Hockey team, which had been playing a series of exhibition games during the preceding few weeks in preparation for the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Ger- many. As defending Olympic champion, the Canadian team was the heavy favorite to retain the title. Since the introduction of ice hockey as part of the Winter Olympic program in 1924, Canada had won the gold medal in ev- ery Olympic competition, handily defeating her opponents by lopsided scores in most of the matches. The closest contest any of her opponents could give Canada came in a two-all tie by the United States during the 1932 Olympic Games at Lake Placid, New York, and there were· few doubts about the chances of the 1936 Olympic squad to defend the title success- fully.1 The optimism of Canadian supremacy in the sport of ice hockey rested not only with the quality of the players the country produced but also on the efforts of the sport’s governing body, the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association (CAHA), to promote and regulate the sport. Established in 1914, the CAHA had seen its membership grow steadily. Whereas its professional counterpart, the National Hockey League (NHL), limited its expansion to major cities in the northeastern and midwestern United States and Canada, the CAHA had provincial branches covering the Dominion of Canada in the 1920s. This organizational growth, in part, was a result of the CAHA’s pursuit to control amateur hockey. Under the banner of amateurism, the CAHA allied with other Canadian national amateur-sport governing bodies, establishing a dragnet that ruled organized Canadian amateur sports with an iron hand. With the Amateur Athletic Union of Canada (AAUC) at the helm, this network of organizations agreed to abide by the amateur J. Wong <[email protected]> is with the Exercise and Sport Sciences Department at Colby-Sawyer College, New London, NH 03257. 190 SPORT NETWORKS ON ICE 191 code, punish violators of it, and honor sanctions from other member organizations, thus effectively giving the network a monopoly over organized amateur sports in Canada.2 As the Canadian Olympic hockey team departed for Europe, however, this powerful network of amateur sports was showing signs of decay. Dissension appeared within both the CAHA and the AAUC. In part, the impact of the Great Depression eroded the amateur ideal that bound these organizations together. Economic hardship made dogmatic observation of the strict definition of an amateur, as interpreted by the AAUC and its members, difficult. Especially at the elite level, amateur athletes found it increasingly tempting to exchange their athletic skills in return for money and jobs. Until the mid-1930s, several attempts had been made to relax the definition of an amateur by more liberal-minded sport administrators, but without avail. Within a year of the 1936 Winter Olympics, however, the CAHA, one of the most powerful amateur-sport governing bodies, wid- ened the dispute between proponents of strict amateurism and the liberal faction in amateur sports in Canada by withdrawing its AAUC membership. The withdrawal of the CAHA from the AAUC upset the power struc- ture in Canadian amateur sports. New relationships had to be negotiated and established in the governance of Canadian sport. The end result was the expansion of the hockey network in Canada to include professional and international amateur bodies. Legitimacy and Control: The Amateur-Sports Network and Hockey in Canada The seeds of trouble with amateur hockey in Canada antedated 1936 and had to do with the legitimation and control of amateur hockey during a time of upheaval in the Canadian sporting world. Legitimation and control, according to sociologist Paul DiMaggio, characterize the process of organizing in times of uncertainty. In such an environment, it is imperative for organizations to “determine which partners will be perceived as most legitimate and which will be reliable, either because they are constrained from staging a coup or because they share the orientations and goals of the organizers.”3 Such conditions existed in the early twentieth century, when Canadian sport organizations struggled with the question of amateurism in an “athletic war.” Alarmed by seemingly increasing incidents of athletes being paid for their services, proponents of a strict definition of an amateur battled against those who wanted allowances for the intermingling of amateur and professional (paid) athletes. This conflict between the hard- liners and liberals occurred both in specific sports such as hockey and la- crosse and also in national governing bodies such as the Canadian Ama- teur Athletic Union (CAAU). By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, however, the hard-liners had won the battle. A liberal splinter group, the Amateur Athletic Federation of Canada (AAFC), had failed to.

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