Let women play for Stanley Cup, Clarkson saysRoy MacGregor
The Globe and Mail
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
OTTAWA -- The office that created the Stanley Cup believes it should still be awarded in 2005 -- no matter what the National Hockey League says.
"The Stanley Cup is important to Canadians," Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson told The Globe and Mail yesterday.
"It's so much more than just a sports trophy -- it's a symbol of our great love of hockey."
Ms. Clarkson even has a vision of what might be possible, a vision that would be instantly recognizable by all Canadian hockey fans.
She sees the Stanley Cup, emblematic of hockey supremacy, on tour this summer to players' hometowns, places like Chateauguay and St-Nazaire in Quebec, Brampton and Kingston in Ontario, Winnipeg, and Saskatchewan's little Sedley and Shaunavon.
The dramatic difference would be in the players carrying the Cup down their various Main Streets.
Their names would be the likes of Kim St-Pierre and Danielle Goyette, Cassie Campbell and Jayna Hefford, Sami Jo Small and Jennifer Botterill, Kelley Bechard and Hayley Wickenheiser.
Names that might be etched onto the trophy alongside such names as Richard, Beliveau, Howe, Orr, Lafleur and Gretzky.
Why not?" says Ms. Clarkson, "Women's hockey has come along so far in the last few years."
She sees a showdown for the Cup between the Canadian and U.S. women's national teams as a one-time-only opportunity that should not be missed.
It would carry on the great tradition of the Cup; and, she believes, it would delight hockey-starved Canadians, six million of whom tuned in three years ago this month to watch the Canadian women, led by Campbell and Wickenheiser, defeat the United States for the Olympic gold medal in Salt Lake City.
Ms. Clarkson spoke in the same office once occupied by Lord Stanley of Preston, the Governor-General who spent 10 guineas on the silver bowl in 1892 and handed it over to sports history the next year.
Ms. Clarkson says Canada's most-hallowed sports trophy should not be forfeited over a labour impasse involving professional players and the 30 NHL franchise owners, 80 per cent of whom are located in the United States.
Canadians, she says, "would miss it if the Stanley Cup were not given to honour excellence in hockey" -- as was the original intention of Governor-General Lord Stanley.
And, since Lord Stanley's sons and daughters learned the game on the Rideau Hall rink that has been cleared every winter since 1878, it is only appropriate to give women players a chance to challenge for that trophy since the NHL men will not be.
On March 18, 1892, Lord Kilcoursie announced on behalf of the Governor-General that this "challenge cup" should be competed for "year to year." Only once has the Cup not been awarded in a calendar year, and that was in 1919, when the Spanish flu hit the two teams then playing for the Cup and left Montreal player Joe Hall dead.
This year, 2005, would then mark the first year in the entire 112 years of the Stanley Cup that it has not even been challenged for -- a possibility the current Governor-General of Canada finds unacceptable.
There is, of course, the matter of legality. Lord Stanley appointed two trustees to ensure that it went to the top amateur team each year. Once professional hockey began, the Cup simply went to the best team playing in order to maintain the trophy's prominence.
In 1947, formal care of the Cup was transferred to the top professional league, though there has long been contention over the full legality of that transfer. An Edmonton-based group --
www.freestanley.com -- has been encouraging fans to insist that the current trustees, Brian O'Neill and Scotty Morrison, are "duty-bound" to see that their charge is awarded to the best available team.
The group even recently obtained a detailed legal argument backing its initiative. Another legal opinion, from the Attorney-General of Ontario, suggests the trustees have no such "legal obligation."
Governor-General Clarkson says the only court that matters is "the court of public opinion."
"The Cup belongs to Canada," she says. "It belongs to people who care about the meaning of the Cup."
As the NHL owners' lockout dragged on into December of last year, Ms. Clarkson and her husband, author John Ralston Saul, a lifelong hockey fan, began talking casually about the possibilities of no Stanley Cup being awarded. She felt she had a "duty" to speak out on behalf of her predecessor, if only to spark public discussion on the matter.
She was determined, however, "not to interfere" so long as there was a possibility that the NHL and its players might reach an agreement, a possibility that collapsed on the weekend.
Ms. Clarkson and her policy advisers examined the archives for material that might relate to the Cup and found, to their surprise, that the first trustee, Ottawa Journal publisher Philip Ross, was concerned as early as 1909 that the public was in "a revolt against" professional hockey, a feeling echoed in recent polling about the NHL lockout and its aftermath.
The Governor-General and her advisers considered a number of possibilities, including an all-star game featuring NHL players in which the profits might go to charities or hockey scholarships. Consideration was also given to other leagues, but senior hockey already has the Allan Cup and junior hockey the Memorial Cup.
"I don't want to interfere with other Cups," she says.
The solution, then, was to give consideration to women's hockey.
While women's hockey does have a variety of championships, from the world to university, the true "challenge cup" of women's hockey has always been between the women's Team Canada and Team U.S.A.
The first time women's hockey was played in the Olympics, in Nagano in 1998, the Americans won. The second time, in Salt Lake City in 2002, Canada won.
They are the top two teams, by an exceptionally wide margin, in all of women's hockey, and they represent the only two countries who have ever laid claim to the Stanley Cup.
A showdown -- a once-in-a-lifetime competition, whether a single game or a series, for the Stanley Cup -- could be the hockey sensation of 2005. It might even gain the approval of NHL icon Don Cherry, a long-time supporter of the women's game.
Ms. Clarkson has already made tentative contact with the cabinet of Prime Minister Paul Martin, though it is hoped that good will, rather than political will, would be the determining point for the trustees agreeing to have the Stanley Cup competed for outside the realm of the NHL.
Had the NHL and its players settled, she says, she would never have pursued the thinking, as she maintains her sole interest is in seeing the tradition of her predecessor's Cup upheld. She simply feels that there is something so Canadian in seeing the Stanley Cup played for and awarded each spring that Canadians would be "hugely disappointed" if such an opportunity were allowed to slip by.
As for her recommendation that this one special time it be competed for by women, she says this would merely be reflective of the times.
"I follow Wayne Gretzky's dictum," she says.
" 'Skate to where the puck's going to be, not to where it's been.' "
