Sport: Hockey: Mid-Season

(See front cover)

The puck left Marty Burke's stick so fast that few of the spectators in the Chicago Stadium knew what had become of it until they heard its sharp crack as Burke's teammate, Paul Thompson, stopped it. Expecting Thompson to try a difficult side shot for the goal, eight players turned sharply on their skates, churned up a white cloud of ice. But back spun the puck to Burke, who, almost as if he were practicing goal shots alone on the rink, sent it sliding past two defensemen, past Goalie Worters—and a red light flashed behind the goal. The Chicago Black Hawks had won, 3-to-2, the victory they needed to stay in first place in the American Division of the National League.

The Black Hawks' victory over the New York Americans was the most important professional hockey game played last week but there were others equally exciting. Drawn by municipal pride, love of the game, desire to gamble or vicarious sadism, 100,000 people witnessed them in seven U. S. and Canadian cities.

In Toronto, night before they played Chicago, the Americans defeated the Toronto Maple Leafs, 2-to-1. Emms (Americans) received a gash on his head which required seven stitches.

In Montreal, the Maroons interrupted a slump by beating the St. Louis Eagles, 5-to-2.

In Detroit, the Montreal Canadiens got three goals in the first ten minutes, then let the Detroit Red Wings catch up and finally tie the score, 4-all.

In Manhattan, the New York Rangers had a 3-to-0 lead over Detroit in the last period. The Red Wings made three goals in four minutes. Then, while a wildly jubilant crowd hurled torn paper, orange peel, bottle tops and peanuts from the galleries, the Rangers rallied in the last ten minutes, won 5-to-3, leaving them undefeated in their last twelve games.

Ten years ago there was one professional hockey team in the U. S., the Boston Bruins which at its biggest games sometimes attracted crowds of 3,000. For the 1925-26 season the National Hockey League, a Canadian organization which then included four of the best teams in Eastern Canada, was remade to include three U. S. teams. Since then, professional hockey has flourished so rapidly that it is now, next to baseball and horse-racing, the most important money game in the U. S.

In 1933-34, 1,750,000 people paid approximately $2,000,000 to see the 231 National Hockey League games in the U. S. and Canada. Approximately 150 major-league hockey players earned salaries between $3,500 and $7,500. Of the 1,461,000 sports-addicts who paid admissions to Manhattan's Madison Square Garden in 1933-34, 440,000 went to see professional hockey games. This season, attendance in most of the cities represented by big-league hockey teams is ahead of last year's. By last week, the major-league hockey season was sufficiently advanced for experts to make their prophecies on how it will end next month, when the three leading teams in the two divisions-of the League play a complicated round-robin tournament for the world's championship Stanley Cup.