Calgary Tigers—A Team Of Legends

When the Western Canada Hockey League brought pro hockey to Calgary in 1921, fans in southern Alberta got the chance to witness a slew of future Hockey Hall of Famers. Of the men who suited up in the Tigers’ gold and black striped sweaters from 1921 to 1926, five—Barney Stanley, Red Dutton, Rusty Crawford, Herb Gardiner and Harry Oliver—are now immortalized in the Hockey Hall of Fame.

To say that the Tigers were a team of characters would have been a rash understatement. Wile the team’s talent level rivaled that of any club in the upstart National Hockey League to the east or the Pacific Coast Hockey League to the west, the players’ varied backgrounds made for an interesting mix.

Stanley was the veteran, a former Stanley Cup winner with the 1915 Vancouver Millionaires. He lobbied to reclaim his amateur status in 1920 so he could play and coach with Edmonton of the failed Big-4 League. A former member of the amateur Edmonton Dominions before heading to Vancouver, Stanley joined the Tigers before the League’s inaugural season and helped build the team into a Western power before heading off to the Regina Capitals and Edmonton Eskimos.

Calgary’s Red Dutton Arena is named in honour of the Tigers’ no-nonsense, blood-and-guts defender, who was seen as the toughest player in Western hockey until Eddie Shore made his debut in 1924. Dutton was badly wounded in the battle for Vimy Ridge, but he refused to let medics amputate his leg which had been cut open by enemy shrapnel. He returned home from the front of the First World War determined to return to the rink; he rehabbed his leg to the point where he became the Tigers’ top defenceman. After the Tigers folded, Dutton went on to play for the Montreal Maroons and New York Americans of the NHL (both of those teams would fold, too). In both 1929 and 1932, he led the NHL in penalty minutes.

Crawford was a legend before he arrived in Calgary. He had been on two Stanley Cup winners—winning the 1913 championship with the Quebec Bulldogs and the 1918 title with the Toronto Arenas in the first year of NHL operation.

Gardiner, who was a surveyor for the Canadian Pacific Railroad before turning to pro hockey, was a star with the Tigers throughout the surviving years of the WCHL. After the League folded in 1926, he starred for both the Montréal Canadiens and the Chicago Blackhawks.

But Oliver was the team’s superstar. From 1921 to 1926, he scored 90 goals for the Tigers, and later scored 127 goals in 11 NHL seasons with the Boston Bruins and New York Americans. Oliver was the opposite to the hard-nosed Dutton; weighing barely over 150 lbs., Oliver shied away from the penalty box.

Through the first four seasons of the WCHA, the Tigers never finished worse than 10 games over the .500 mark. They finished first overall in both the 1923-24 and 1924-25 seasons, capturing the League playoff title in 1924.

That was a landmark year for hockey in Calgary; Edmonton clubs had already appeared in the Stanley Cup finals three times, including the rival WCHL Eskimos to the north. It was finally Calgary’s turn to play for the big prize; but the NHL champion Montréal Canadiens were too strong for the Tigers—legendary Hab Howie Morenz notched a hat trick in Game One of the final, and the Canadiens won the best-of-three series handily, sweeping Calgary by 6-1 and 3-0 scores.

Calgary soon learned that trying to maintain a ragtag team of superstars was an expensive proposition. And, like the League itself, the Tigers drowned in a sea of red ink in 1926. Calgary would not get another pro team until the World Hockey Association’s Cowboys would come to town nearly 50 years later.

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