Sport: Imported Canadian Club

With the collegiate hockey season in full swing, the team that most experts rate the best in the U.S. has yet to use a single American. For that matter, the University of Denver's Coach Murray Armstrong has only one American to put on the ice—second-string Goalie Paul DiNapoli of Belmont, Mass. With the exception of DiNapoli. every player on Denver's 20-man squad is a Canadian.

Last week, as Goalie DiNapoli once again sat on the sidelines, his Canadian teammates, true to form, trounced Michigan Tech by scores of 5-1 and 2-0. The supremacy of Denver's Canadians, holders of last season's collegiate hockey championship, is hard enough on U.S. pride.

Harder still is the fact that Denver is defending its title against other top U.S. college teams manned almost entirely by Canadians. The Canadian hockey invasion has set off one of the bitterest fights in U.S. college athletics.

Getting the Race Horses. As the most successful U.S. college recruiter of Canadian talent, Denver's natty Murray Armstrong makes no apologies for the tactic that has won 98 of 140 games, last year turned out a team that beat the Olympic squads of the U.S. (which won a gold medal at Squaw Valley), West Germany and Sweden. A Canadian himself, Coach Armstrong coolly cites the lesson he learned during his career as a National Hockey League player: "The key to success in any athletics is recruiting. You can't make a race horse out of a mule. I simply go where the best hockey is played—in western Canada—and look for players with good brains."

Ranged alongside Armstrong in the dominant Western Collegiate Hockey Association are such other far-north recruiters as Colorado College, Michigan Tech and Michigan. Against him stand a clutch of Eastern coaches whose colleges refuse to recruit Canadians and who hotly charge that a flock of the Canadian invaders are really pros by U.S. standards.

It is indisputable that many of the imports come from Canada's Junior A leagues, which serve as unofficial farm teams for the N.H.L. and which pay promising players an average of $60 a week. Under Canada's tolerant eligibility rules, an athlete does not become a professional unless he plays on an avowedly professional team. Armstrong stoutly maintains that none of his boys ever got salaries in the Junior A's. Such claims bring a hoot from Minnesota Coach Johnny Mariucci, one of the few Americans who ever made the N.H.L. and a man who resolutely builds his team around Minnesota-born players. "If you find a boy like that," snaps Mariucci, "bring him to me. I'll tell him he's been cheated. They all get paid."

Limiting the Invasion. The Western Collegiate Hockey Association now deprives Canadian players of one season of U.S. college eligibility for every year they played the game in Canada after their 20th birthday. And under pressure from irate anti-Canadian coaches, the policy committee of the National Collegiate Athletic Association this month will debate a far tougher measure: total loss of eligibility for a man who has played in any league that pays any of its players. In the meantime, Denver is looking forward to another championship this year. Shrugs one Denver fan: "All I care about is that our Canadians beat every one else's Canadians."