“Born of a Spirit That Knows No Conquering:” Innovation, Contestation, and Representation in the PCHA, 1911-1924.
Abstract
The Pacific Coast Hockey Association (PCHA) was a professional North American hockey league that operated from 1911 to 1924. With markets in Victoria, Vancouver, New Westminster, Seattle, and Portland, the bourgeoning league was a viable competitor to the NHA and offered a distinctive approach to the developing sport. Through innovations and rule changes, the PCHA made significant strides in player safety, in line with the vision of “clean” hockey promoted by the league’s founders, Frank and Lester Patrick. In turn, these innovations were represented through newspaper accounts from the period, which helped promote a modern, scientific, and highly-marketable brand of hockey in Western Canada.
This dissertation challenges existing assumptions regarding early professional hockey in Canada and masculinity. I focus on one league, the Pacific Coast Hockey Association (PCHA), and assess the ways that violence was mediated in newspaper reporting. The PCHA promoted a clean and safe version of the game, separate from subsequent iterations of hockey, from the 1930s to the present. Significantly, the league is also considered one of the most important and financially successful forbearers to modern hockey, a game which today features violence as one of its most marked characteristics. However, although many of the PCHA’s innovations have been celebrated as essential to Canadian hockey history, such as player numbers, the blue line, or forward passing, the PCHA’s efforts to curb violence have not been recognized by critics or fans. This project therefore offers a corrective to the longstanding belief that hockey’s violent past was reflective of a widespread acceptance or condonement of violent gameplay.
To accomplish this task, I offer a narrative analysis of twenty-first-century Canadian newsprint, providing a material record of this resistance. This project thus provides a substantive investigation of hockey violence in B.C. newspapers, specifically the Vancouver Sun, Victoria Daily Colonist, and New Westminster Daily News, viewed through the critical lens of representation. By tracing three periods of the league’s development, birth, expansion and experimentation, and decline, I will demonstrate how newspaper reporting of PCHA games helped communicate a new vision of hockey, and hockey violence, that offers an instructive paradigm for the modern game.