Did black league invent the slapshot?

Summers playing baseball may have inspired forgotten Halifax Eurekas hockey hero

DANIEL MARTINS
CanWest News Service

HISTORY - Ask a hard-core hockey fan who took the first slapshot, and they will probably tell you it was hall-of-famer Frank (Bun) Cook.

But if you ask hockey historian George Fosty, he'll tell you it could have been Eddie Martin of the all-black Halifax Eurekas, 100 years ago.

Most people have never heard of Martin, or the Eurekas, or the Coloured Hockey League, despite the fact the league marked the high point of a black hockey tradition among the Canadian children and grandchildren of freed slaves.

"What we see in Nova Scotia is these isolated communities that grew up around white communities, and they just seemed to develop this unique brand of hockey," says Fosty, who is speaking this week in Ottawa to mark the start of Black History Month.

Just how special a brand it was became apparent when the league +was founded in 1895. It numbered perhaps a dozen teams, and eventually included 400 players from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.

No idle weekend association, the league was a professional body, taken seriously by players Fosty says may have been the source of many hockey "firsts."

Most black hockey players played baseball during the summer months, resulting in a style more prone to high-sticking than was normal at the time, and possibly the source of Martin's slapshot.

Even defensive play was more dynamic. Fosty says black goalies weren't afraid to get down onto the ice if that's what it took to stop a shot, a standard goaltending style today that was frowned upon 100 years ago. They were also more likely to skate out and take an active part in play.

Blacks were playing the great game since the early 1800s, Fosty says, but it wasn't until rapidly changing church policy later in that century that more teams began to sprout, especially in Nova Scotia.

Church leagues
The thriving, close-knit black communities in the province were often centred around their congregations. But by the later 1800s, the congregations and their ministers were getting old, and the younger ministers needed to find some way to keep kids coming to church.

"They just looked out onto the ponds and saw all these black kids playing hockey, and they said, 'Well, let's create church leagues, '" Fosty says. "This is how it started, as a friendly (game) between churches and a way to bring younger people in.

"Also, you've got to remember, when the younger kids came to church, they were the ones who would take the wagons and bring in the older people."

The league's founder, James Kinney, was a lay minister and general manager of the Halifax Eurekas. He viewed the league as the embodiment of black pride and independence in Nova Scotia.

Although there was no official policy of segregation, few black players appeared on the rosters of major Canadian teams at the time.

"We didn't see anything that said they couldn't play, they just didn't invite them," he says. "And nobody of black African descent ever appeared on any rosters. We did check some initial rosters in Nova Scotia leagues hoping we'd see some black names, but there was nothing."

The high point of the league was in 1905, says Fosty. After then, he says, the elite in the Maritimes worked to undermine it.

However, he says the campaign to keep black players off the hockey rinks they shared with other leagues was subtle.

Bad ice
"Rather than banning the league or forcing them out, they simply moved their schedule further ahead one month, knowing that the ice conditions would be bad," he says. "When half the ice is water, it's hard to skate. It slows down the game, people don't come to the games; they don't pay to see that."

That, combined with subtle economic and social pressure, crippled the league, which lingered on a little into the 1920s, before vanishing from the public record in 1925.

Fosty says most newspapers, with the notable exception of the Acadian Recorder, barely covered the games, and when they did, they treated it as a joke.

"They just deemed these guys not worthy of recording," Fosty says. "We've got almost 400 athletes that we've looked at, that we've got background information on, and they don't appear in 99.9 per cent of the sources."

Fosty and his brother Darill spent years poring over archived Maritime newspapers and church records, and interviewing church elders, in the course of their research, culminating in their book, Black Ice: The Lost History of the Colored Hockey League, published in 2004.