Westmount - birthplace of road hockey

   Ice hockey was invented in Montreal, McGill 1875, the Victoria Rink ...and so forth, but where was the joyously awful sport of road hockey - complete with its shin splits and smacks to the hands and cherry-pickin' glory hogs - invented? Westmount, around 1895.
   Yep, rich kids in Westmount were the progenitors of the sport of ball hockey.
   And not just any rich kids. Kids whose names live on today.
   Westmount was one of the first areas where road surfaces were paved with asphalt or macadam as it was called then.
One young man loaded with cash was named Art Ross. He started playing on the newly paved surfaces in Westmount with his best friend - and later rival Lester Patrick.   Patrick's family had come to Dunham in the Townships from Ireland in 1848 and moved to Drummondville in 1870 and then on to Montreal as their father's lumber business did increasingly well. Joseph Patrick had an office at Guy and St. Catherine (northwest corner) and Dorchester and Fort.
   Other Westmount kids involved in those first road hockey games would also go on to glory. As a kid Montreal Wanderer D-man Sprague Cleghorn would also play along in the road wars. Cleghorn was a Westmounter (Lovells lists Cleghorns at Mount Pleasant). His brother Odie also played a lick, but more on that later.
   When it came to ice hockey, Art Ross wasn't always kind to his hometown of Westmount. Rather than play for the Wanderers, whose home rink was the Westmount Rink at the corner of Wood and St. Catherine - Ross chose to play against his buddies. In 1907 Ross was reportedly paid a staggering $1,000 to play two games for the Kenora Thistles - where he battled his old buddy Lester Patrick for Lord Stanley's Cup. Kenora beat the Wanderers but the challenge system saw the Wanderers go to Kenora and win the trophy back two months later. Ross went on to play for the Wanderers from 1910 to 1916 with one year away in Ottawa.   A lot of these details are in the excellent biography of the Patrick family, which is on google books. It's a well-written yarn, although we dispute the contention that the Patricks lived on Guy Street in the Point. (In fact the most likely listing for the Patricks during their brief stay in the Point was on Paris Street. The Guy and St. Catherine address was surely dad's office.)

Back at the old school in Point St. Charles, a good deal of the neighborhood hockey was played on a vacant lot across the street from the Patrick's house on Guy Street.

When the river ice was poor, a little sweet-talking to the chief in the firehouse a few blocks away did the trick, and the men were sent around with their hose reels.

As Joe Patrick expanded his business and founded the Pennsylvania Wood and Coal Company another family move was inevitable.

An agency for anthracite coal was obtained, and several branch outlets were opened. The family affluence was growing significantly or as Lester saw it, "I must assumed that my father was prosperous to some extend, because - with each new child - we kept moving to a better residential area."

The better residential area in 1895 was Westmount, Montreal's toniest suburb. The district was so swank that some of its avenues were paved with macadam, the revolutionary new road surface that provided glorious relief from the dust and mud of Point St. Charles, and even more of downtown Montreal. It also heralded the coming age of the automobile, although Montreal was not yet ready to plunge into the era begun just that year down in Indiana.

The Patrick boys and their new buddies saw the blessing in a different light: It was great for street shinny, which was a summer version of ice hockey. Macadam was in a sense sport's first artificial "turf," and its immediate effect was to produce a record crop of skinned knees and elbows.

Said Lester, "We played street shinny in Westmount each year until the rinks froze, but most of our summers were taken up by another game: baseball. I'd never seen the game before, but we played it instead of the lacrosse we used to play in Point St. Charles. I guess the kids in Westmount figured they were too refined for a roughhouse game like lacrosse."

One of the refined kids who showed up to play ball one summer afternoon was a cocky 10-year-old named Art Ross. This was a name that would dog the Patrick brothers for most of the next half century in a strange mix of bitter rivalry and warm friendship. It was a name that would come to mean to the Boston Bruins almost what the name Lester Patrick would be to the New York Rangers.

"In our neighborhood, " wrote Lester, "Art Ross was Mr. Big. He wouldn't have liked me to have referred to him as a rich man's kid, but we certainly thought he was just that. He had the baseball, the bat, glove, catcher's mitt and mask - he had everything. When he showed up, the game could start. He also had a lot of talent. He was a fine athlete, even then." Among the other youngsters who became part of the Westmount gang in games on the streets and the corner lots were Walter Smaill and the Cleghorn brothers, Sprague and Odie, three others who would follow the Patricks into big league hockey and onto the sport's honour roll.

From The Patricks: Hockey's Royal Family by Eric Whitehead.
The Patricks built the Westmount Rink at Wood and St. Catherine and it's said to be the first rink designed specifically for hockey. It's where the Wanderers and the French Canadian team, known as the Canadiens played until 1917, when it burned down. The Patricks soon after moved to Victoria BC and became hockey pioneers on the wet coast.

Rink burns down

  

   Art Ross played in the NHL and became a prominent executive with the Boston Bruins, although although unlike streetwise homeboy Eddie Johnston who rallied much of Montreal's West End to become Bruins fans - Ross didn't exactly get Westmount cheering for the Bs. Ross donated a trophy to the league which still bears his name. It goes to the top point getter.
   Sprague Cleghorn graduated those road hockey games to the Wanderers from 1912 until their sad demise, which occurred when the rink burnt down in 1917 following a dismal losing streak. He then suited up for Ottawa, but refused to report to both Hamilton and Toronto. He eventually played for a few games in TO prior to suiting up for the the Canadiens from 1921 to 1923. Sprague Cleghorn died in 1956. His brother Odie, who played together with Sprague on the Canadiens for a while and then went on to become an innovative coach - being the first to rotate lines - died of a heart attack just prior to his brother Sprague's funeral on June 14, 1956.
   So hats off to the boys who brought road hockey to this town.