I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement.
The air is getting colder. The daylight fades a little earlier each night. The first snow has dusted the streets.
Across our city, tens of thousands of young hockey players are finding their way back to the glow of the arena, to the excitement of a new season. Behind them come the parents, grandparents, coaches and volunteers, ready to spend another shivering winter cheering from the sidelines.
Beer leagues are back, the Jets are winning more than losing and soon the air above every neighbourhood will again be filled with the sounds of the outdoor rink -- blades carving, sticks clacking and excited voices piercing the cold.
Winnipeg has been a hockey city almost from its very beginnings. The game is woven into our shared story, its ghosts lingering in the places and spaces of this famous city of winter.
The story begins in 1874 with the construction of the first formal skating rink in the Red River Settlement, and in all of Western Canada. Built on the frozen Red River at the foot of Lombard Avenue, it was an ambitious structure with a self-supporting roof and heated reception rooms. A few warm days delayed the opening, until one morning the softened ice gave way and the building crashed through. Taking it in stride, a Free Press ad simply read, "Twenty-five men wanted immediately at the skating rink." Rebuilt in three weeks, its grand opening on Dec. 10 welcomed more than 300 patrons, nearly 10 per cent of the town's population.
Hockey soon followed. As new settlers arrived from Quebec and Ontario, they brought the game west. In 1890, a newspaper article titled Introducing Hockey reported that "a wave of pugilism has passed over the city, with young men playing this new game every afternoon at Mr. Austin's open-air rink, as the ambulance waits outside for the victims." The writer wondered whether the game would "flourish here."
It did. That same winter, Winnipeg's first two teams were formed, the Victorias and the Winnipeg Hockey Club. On Dec. 20, 1890, they played the first official hockey game in Western Canada on the Assiniboine River just below today's Norwood Bridge. The Victorias won 4-1.
For the game to flourish, an indoor facility was needed. The Granite Curling Club had been using a roller rink called The Royal, flooding the floor in the winter to create ice. The building stood where the Albert Street Parkade is today. When the Granite club built its own facility in 1892, the Royal Rink became an indoor arena for hockey known locally as the McIntyre Rink.
With a roof, lights and regular ice time, the two Prairie teams quickly became recognized as some of the best in the Dominion. Six years after their first game, the Vics announced they would be taking local donations to fund the arduous journey east to challenge for the new national championship trophy called the Stanley Cup.
On Valentine's Day 1896, hundreds of eager Winnipeg fans huddled into the rotunda of the CPR station on Higgins Avenue to listen for telegraph wire updates of their underdog team playing their namesake Montreal Victorias.
With a 2-0 Winnipeg lead in the second half, the crowd became anxious that no results had been given for more than 10 minutes. The station manager came out to announce that Higgie, the telegraph operator, had broken his suspenders and a delay was required for him to find a new pair. When he returned, the crowd celebrated a monumental victory with their team of local boys becoming the first from outside of Montreal to etch their name on the magnificent silver cup.
The Free Press would say, "the blizzards from the land of the setting sun showed easterners how to play hockey."
Winnipeg goalie George (Whitey) Merritt would not only record the first shutout victory in Stanley Cup history, but he would also have a lasting impact on the game by being the first to introduce a wider goal stick and goalie pads, stunning the crowd by wearing cricket pads on his legs during the game.
A few days later, the team's train would pull into the station, the Stanley Cup in the window, a Union Jack across the front and the cow catcher adorned with hockey sticks and brooms to symbolize their clean sweep of the Montrealers.
"The blizzards from the land of the setting sun showed easterners how to play hockey."
With the entire city on hand, the players were loaded into five horse-drawn cabs. With the cup alone in the lead carriage, a procession headed down Main Street lined with wildly cheering supporters. This would begin the tradition of the Stanley Cup parade.
The next winter, the Montreal team would travel west to reclaim their trophy. The old round-top arena on Albert was hastily expanded from 1,100 seats to 2,000 for the first Stanley Cup final played in the West. The eastern team would win the epic game 6-5, with Montreal's Ernie McLea scoring the first Stanley Cup hat trick.
The game would have a lasting impact. As a vestige of its days as a roller rink, the McIntyre had rounded corners at one end of the ice. Seeing that the home team was skilled at playing the angles to their advantage, the Montreal team took the idea home, with that eventually becoming the standard hockey-rink configuration.
Winnipeg players introduced two other key innovations that were taken back east: the lacrosse-inspired faceoff and the wrist shot, which replaced the traditional field-hockey-style slap shot.
By the time the Victorias played for the cup again, they would have a new home at the corner of Garry Street and York Avenue. Today the site is an office building and parkade beside the downtown Keg restaurant. Built in 1898, the Winnipeg Auditorium held 3,500 spectators and was the city's first arena designed specifically for hockey, widely celebrated as the finest in the West.
In 1902, the Victorias would win their third and final Stanley Cup in front of a packed house at the Auditorium. The game represented the first time a team from outside of Montreal was able to lift the cup in front of their hometown fans. It would not be the last time the cup was won in Winnipeg, however, as five years later, with its home rink deemed too small for such a prestigious event, the Kenora Thistles would win the Stanley Cup on Auditorium ice, the smallest city (population 4,000), to achieve the feat.
With his career over, Victorias' captain and star centreman Dan Bain would go on to become one of Canada's greatest athletes and a prominent early Winnipegger whose impact is still felt in our city today. Not only was he one of the first 20 players inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, but he became Manitoba champion in gymnastics and cycling, and Canadian champion in trapshooting and figure skating.
As a successful entrepreneur, he established Western Canada's largest grocery brokerage firm, which operated from the Bain Building at 115 Bannatyne Ave. in the Exchange District. The elegant yellow-brick warehouse is today the offices for Number Ten Architectural Group. He was also a founder of both the Winnipeg Winter Club and St. Charles Country Club, and his stunning mansion still stands at 69 East Gate.
As the popularity of hockey continued to grow, the Auditorium was soon replaced by an even larger and more modern facility, the Winnipeg Amphitheatre. Built in 1909 with a capacity of 5,000, it was the city's first artificial-ice rink, the only one between Toronto and Vancouver. The Amphitheatre stood where the large surface parking lots are today behind the Canada Life office buildings on Osborne Street North, across from the legislature. It formed part of a sports campus with the current Granite Curling Club and Osborne Stadium, the Blue Bombers' home for two decades.
In 1929, the Auditorium would become the first major arena in the world to use a hockey score clock, showing fans the score and period time. The clock was invented by Billy Martin, a jeweler and former Kenora Thistles player from Port Arthur, Ont. (current-day Thunder Bay). He personally installed it in the Winnipeg facility for a fee of $50. This innovation would soon spread across North America, becoming standard in the NHL for the 1933-34 season.
The Amphitheatre was home to the Winnipeg Falcons, a pioneering team made up mostly of Icelandic Canadians who in 1920 won the first Olympic gold medal in hockey at the Antwerp Games. The Winnipeg Hockey Club also played at the Amphitheatre and may not have won a Stanley Cup like their arch-rivals, the Victorias, but they followed the Falcons by representing Canada at the 1932 Olympics in Lake Placid, bringing home another gold medal. Their right-winger Kenneth Moore became the first Indigenous Canadian athlete to compete in the Winter Olympics and the first to win Olympic gold.
After nearly half a century as the city's hockey heart, the Amphitheatre was replaced in 1955 by the Winnipeg Arena, its famous portrait of Queen Elizabeth II watching over generations of players and fans. The suburban arena helped transform its surroundings, sparking development in what would become the Polo Park commercial district.
The Arena would host many famous games, including the third of the 1972 Summit Series between Canada and the Soviet Union. Ending in a 4-4 tie, it effectively made the eight-game series a best-of-seven, setting up Paul Henderson's historic series-winning goal in Moscow.
The Winnipeg Arena is fondly remembered as the birthplace of the Winnipeg Jets in 1972, the most successful team in the upstart World Hockey Association, winning the Avco World Trophy three times. The team is credited with being the first North American franchise to widely open the door to European players, forever redefining the NHL and professional hockey.
The Jets brought credibility to the rival league by signing NHL star Bobby Hull to the first million-dollar contract in hockey history. His famous signing took place in front of thousands of fans at Portage and Main, a scene replicated in 1981 when the NHL Jets signed star rookie Dale Hawerchuk.
Our pro hockey team makes Winnipeg a big-league city. We may be the smallest burg in the big leagues, but just like the Victorias a century ago, the game of hockey is the vehicle that allows this isolated Prairie town to be in a club with the continent's heavy hitters.
It's difficult to imagine what downtown Winnipeg would look like today without the city's professional hockey team and Canada Life Centre acting as a catalyst. The gleaming towers of True North Square sit on a former surface parking lot that was almost as old as cars themselves. A concentration of new towers has sprung up around the arena, and new opportunities like the Graham Avenue Pedestrian Mall and the reimagination of Portage Place continue to optimistically push our city forward.
Of course, Winnipeg's connection to hockey goes far beyond the professional game. Our distinctive community-club system, with nearly 200 outdoor rinks across the city, survives thanks to the dedication of thousands of passionate volunteers. These clubs are the heartbeat of our neighbourhoods and a backdrop for memories. No matter where life takes us, we always carry the identity of our childhood community club.
The game we love makes our long winters a little bit easier -- shinny with friends on the ODR, a community clad in white exploding in unison at the Manitoba Miracle goal, warming our hands on a watery cup of canteen hot chocolate, cheering on our sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, at that cold rink down the street. Winnipeg is a hockey city. The game has shaped us, and we have shaped it.