Eric Zweig > Quotes

“Montreal had a metropolitan population of over 400,000 in January of 1907. It was Canada’s biggest, richest, and most important city. Kenora, with a population of about 6,000 people, was, and will likely forever be, the smallest city ever to win the Stanley Cup.”
― Eric Zweig, Art Ross: The Hockey Legend Who Built the Bruins

“Out of the meeting came Jimmy Gardner of the Wanderers swearing like a trooper… Gardner came out and he sat down in a chair near me. He was so mad he could hardly do anything but swear — and then he turned to me and said, ‘Say, you O’Briens have other hockey teams up North haven’t you? In Haileybury and Cobalt?’ I said we had; at least we helped support the teams up there. And he said, ‘Ambrose, why don’t you and I form our own league? You’ve got Haileybury, Cobalt and Renfrew. We have the Wanderers.…’” O’Brien also remembered it as Gardner who suggested that he bankroll another French-Canadian team for their new league, which they started up a week later on December 2, 1909, and called the National Hockey Association (NHA). Two days after that, the NHA unveiled its French team, which the Montreal Gazette said would be called Le Canadien, although the Ottawa Citizen correctly labeled Les Canadiens.”
― Eric Zweig, Art Ross: The Hockey Legend Who Built the Bruins

“New faces with the Wanderers in 1911–12 included Sprague and Odie Cleghorn, who both enjoyed strong seasons. The Cleghorns were as rough as anyone who ever played the game, and Sprague may have been the meanest man in hockey history. “Sprague was as wild as they came,” remembered Newsy Lalonde, who had more than his share of run-ins with him. He told Stan Fischler in a 1970 interview that Cleghorn “once said he had counted the number of stretcher-case fights he had been in and the grand total was fifty. Imagine that! Fifty!”
― Eric Zweig, Art Ross: The Hockey Legend Who Built the Bruins