Column: As we battle virus, don’t forget 1919 Stanley Cup
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Anyone who scoffs at all these drastic measures to deal with the coronavirus outbreak, who wonders if it really is necessary to shut down sports around the world, needs a primer on the 1919 Stanley Cup Finals.
The tragic turn of events is right there on the silver chalice, engraved alongside all the championship teams.
“Series Not Completed.”
Yep, there was once a Stanley Cup that had to be called off before the decisive game when Spanish flu swept through the teams.
A star player even lost his life.
As every sport grapples with this unprecedented shutdown and ponders the proper timeline to safely get its athletes back on the fields and into the arenas, a championship hockey series from just over a century ago should at least be lurking in the back of everyone’s mind.
“I think it underscores that athletes are a lot more intimately connected than they might seem,” said Steve Chapelle, who has written a book on the series, “No Decision: The 1919 Stanley Cup Final.”
“You can take the fans out of the arenas to protect the players,” he added Friday. “But everybody on the court or on the field or on the ice still gets so close to each other.”
The Spanish flu, which actually might have started in Kansas and claimed tens of millions of lives during its three-year carnage, had been raging since at least early 1918, when the Montreal Canadiens boarded a train for a grueling cross-country journey to face the Seattle Metropolitans in a best-of-five series for the Stanley Cup.
After a week of travel, which included a couple of exhibition games along the way and was capped by a ferry ride from Vancouver to Seattle, the Canadiens finally arrived in the United States to play for the title.
Chapelle’s research found no mention of the flu outbreak in newspaper articles previewing the series. But it didn’t take long for the pandemic to overshadow what was happening on the ice.
With the series tied at two games apiece (another contest ended in a tie), both teams were wracked by illness, sending several players to the hospital with temperatures up to 105 degrees. The Canadiens were especially hard hit, winding up with only three healthy players.
Montreal coach George Kennedy, who also fell ill, reportedly offered to forfeit the series to the Metropolitans, but their coach, Pete Muldoon, rejected the offer in a remarkable act of sportsmanship.
In the end, it didn’t really matter. Health officials shut down Seattle Ice Arena to prevent the illness from spreading — not long before the final game was scheduled to be played.
Four days later, Canadiens defenseman Joe Hall succumbed to the flu. He was 37.
“His family was summoned from Brandon,” Chapelle said, referring to the Manitoba city that Hall called home. “His wife and a couple of kids, and I believe his brother, were on their way. But he died before they could get there. Frank Patrick (president of the Pacific Coast Hockey Association) had to go to the train station to give them the bad news.”
Hall was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1961. His biography on the hall’s website says he left “his mark on the hockey world as a warlike defenseman who himself met a tragic end.”
Two years after the ill-fated series, the pandemic claimed another victim. Kennedy never recovered and died from lingering complications two months shy of his 40th birthday.
As the coronavirus sweeps the globe, Chapelle realizes the story was pertinent on a whole different level.
“No matter how big and strong and well-conditioned you might be, you’re still vulnerable,” Chapelle said. “When something like this gets inside of you, you’ve got trouble.”