1931, Oct 5th: "Gladstones Surprise Rough Riders To Win, 13-6"

Not THOSE Rough Riders. 

This partial article from the Ottawa Citizen summarizes one of three junior games played that day. It was the first weekend of action for the league as a whole, as it launched that year. 

I'll have summaries of the other two games played that day in separate posts. 

A portion of this article was used in a post on this blog a couple of years back in which I attempted to nail down the guy who threw the first-ever forward pass for an Ottawa team. Since this was the league's first year of operation, this Art Crain dude is likely the first to do it at the junior level.

There were two other games played that day, including St. Patrick's College vs Rangers, which started at the same time as the Gladstone / Ottawas match. Crain still seems likely to be the man, as his passing prowess appears to have taken place during the first quarter. We'll likely never know for sure, but a strong argument can be made for him.

The 1939 Gladstones: Your First Interprovincial Junior Football Champions

There's a new page above called (for the moment) "Rough Rider Seasons (1907 - 1925). Most of the teams featured here have their results, coaching history, awards, etc. all included on the same page but there is so much content with the Rough Riders that it has to be separated. Of course, I plan to include seasons prior 1907 and right up to the sad end in 1996 but that is the chunk of time that I have carved out as of this writing.

Needing a break from that, I went back to a Junior City League (1931+) page I'd started but had yet to complete. In building it, for most years, I'd started by finding and posting the announcement of which teams would be participating in the coming season. I had managed to do this from the period between 1931 and 1938 and had stopped there, so last night I decided forge ahead a little more and in doing so found what I believe to be a little-known accomplishment by a local club.

The city league only had three teams in 1939. Each would play the other two twice each. Gladstone, defending champs from 1938 and coached by former Rough Rider Arnie Morrison, sealed up the three-team division on October 21st with a game left to play. They would defeat an Air Force team the following weekend in an  exhibition game, win their final regular season the week after that, then wait to hear about playing a Quebec champion in an Eastern junior football playoff semi-final.

That champion would turn out to be Montreal's Westmount team. Westmount had defeated Gladstone in the 1938 playoffs in Montreal but Gladstone got the better of them this time around at Lansdowne. 

That led to an Eastern junior football championship contest against the Hamilton Italo-Canadians which Gladstone also won. I know very little about the HIC but it seems they'd won a Toronto/Hamilton junior league, similar to how Ottawa won their own city league. 

Here's our hero now.

Gladstone subsequently (almost immediately, in fact) received a challenged from a team from Sarnia, winners of the Ontario Rugby Football Union, but that match never came to pass. The Gladstone/Hamilton game took place on December 2nd so it was already late in the year to organize additional games, then the two organizations could not come to an agreement on who would cover certain expenses. Also, the Interprovincial Rugby Union already recognized only Gladstone as junior champions so Ottawa ultimately had nothing to gain from playing another game.

That IRFU recognition was a new accomplishment for a team from the area.  

So the Sooners were not the first Ottawa team to reach the top of the junior level. A true national championship may not have been feasible for Gladstone but Arnie Morrison's squad achieved the highest level of success of the time, better than all that preceded them locally.

The Forward Pass Is Introduced

The portions of a game summary posted earlier today, between the Ottawa Rangers and the Quebec Aquatic Club ("Swimmers") and making reference to the excitement caused by the forward pass, made me question when the first legal forward pass was used by a player representing the capital.

Not surprisingly, it's not an easy question to answer. It may, in fact, be impossible to answer, or depend heavily on your criteria.

The forward pass was well in use by the time that playoff game between Rangers and Swimmers took place in 1931. So we can start by moving backwards from there.

The 1931 Rough Riders opened the season in Montreal on October 11th. They got walloped something fierce, 32-06. But they did attempt a forward pass during that contest. 

Wait...Ogilvie? 

That's awesome. About 18 months ago, I came across Ogilvie's name (as "Ogilvy") while tracking down a game summary for the 1927 senior high school championship. The statement that Ogilvie had entered the "Gallery of the Gods" of the Glebe sporting element tickled me to no end but damned if he may not, in fact, hold the distinction of throwing the first ever professional football forward pass in the city's history.

It's important to quantify that he did so as a professional. The Rough Riders played a game the week before in which a few passes were thrown, but that was an exhibition game. Three junior games were also played that day as the Junior City League began its season and at least one of those games included forward passing. 

Gladstone beat the Ottawa Seconds as the "curtain-raiser" to the Rough Riders game. 

Damn, this Crain dude was a natural! 

Two games would be played on St. Patrick's field that day, the first of which featured the host St. Patrick's team against a club known as the Rangers (not to be confused with the intermediate squad of the same name). The recaps of the action in that contest, won by St. Pat's 08-06, make no mention of the forward pass.

Meanwhile, in Brockville, the intermediate Rangers were welcoming that town's new entry into the QRFU with a 15-01 beating. 

Tommy is hall of fame inductee Andy Tommy Sr. Arnie Morrison played with the Rough Riders for several years and later coached the Carleton Ravens. Morrison-to-Tommy is one hell of a historical connection.

But was it the first? For one thing, it's not clear that the pass above was a forward one, being that Tommy went around right wing. It may have been a lateral. When the pass was a forward one, the summary usually made that distinction.

There's another significant factor at play. Most local teams started using the forward pass in 1931 but junior high school programs began using it in 1929 (one article claimed they started using it in 1927 but I've seen no evidence of that). So to be completely accurate, it was probably a player at the junior high school level who uncorked the first one. 

Unfortunately, the recap of the first junior high school game of the season doesn't see fit to specify who threw it.

In a game about two weeks later in the season, a Lisgar pass attempt was made by one R.A. "Beaner" Sheppard to a teammate named Zelikovitz. Zelikovitz might be Ottawa Sports Hall of Fame inductee Joe Zelikovitz. I'm a little unsure about that as Lisgar's Athletic Hall of Fame states that Joe started playing there in 1930.

Either way, it's difficult to know if Sheppard handled all the throwing duties for the Lisgar team (in fact, it seems doubtful) but if so, it could be that the first forward pass thrown by an Ottawa player almost a century ago was a by a dude nicknamed "Beaner". 👍

1928: "The Most Sensational Upset Of All Time in Junior Rugby In The City"

If you are particularly observant, you will have noticed a page in the banner above that appeared a few weeks ago and has changed names numerous times since. At this time, it bears the name "Junior QRFU (1918 - 1928)" and it will continue to change as I add seasons at the back end. 

The "Defunct Teams" page includes (at least for now) some details about a team from the Rideau Aquatic Club then often referred to as simply the Rideaus. While that team was undeniably the most successful of its little league, it didn't seem quite fair to ignore all the others. So instead of focusing on the Rideaus only, I started a page specific to the league in which they all participated.

The Rideaus were not a charter member of the league, entering it only in its second season in 1919. The league became affiliated with the Quebec Rugby Football Union the following year.

In short order, Rideaus became dominant to the point that some found it detrimental. While they constantly won the local title with ease, they fared very poorly against outside competition. Some speculated that this was due to a lack of a proper challenge in its own league.

Then in 1927, a team from Ottawa College joined the circuit and in 1928, they shocked the junior rugby football world (well, at least the local one) by defeating the Rideaus, breaking the "Paddlers'" 29-game local winning streak in the process!

The game is recapped below, as is the other game played in the four-team league that day, a matchup of the Ottawa South Roamers and Gladstone. 

As exciting as the win may have been as it happened, it would turn out to have little impact. Rideaus won the rematch 18-00 a few weeks later, and every other match on their schedule for that matter, to collect a 5-1 record. Ottawa College would stumble in overtime to the Ottawa South team in the last week of the season to be knocked off the top spot in the league at 4-2. 

And so this was the sixth straight city championship for the Rideaus and they would get skunked against the Montreal AAA team in the QRFU playoffs for the fourth year in a row, too. The City Junior League was pretty much business as usual in 1928, except for that one game which rattled the cage for a while.