Larry Power, renown statistics keeper of Ontario lacrosse

(his website is www.bible-of-lacrosse.com)sent me two articles recently.

One, from the Aug. 15, 1931 edition of Maclean's magazine written be noted journalist and sports star Ted Reeve , called "Box Lacrosse."

The other is a document titled "Paddy Brennan -The Inventor of Box Lacrosse."

Brennan, a field lacrosse player in Montreal in the early 1900s turned to refereeing after his playing career ended. His apparent motivation to do something about lacrosse resulted in the slowing, often complete stopping, of the field game when the ball rolled out of bounds. The nearest player to the ball would often just walk to regain possession if no opponent pursued him.

Brennan wrote, "There is no place to hide in hockey, so there's always action."

In the early 1920s the innovative Brennan put on a new form of lacrosse in the Mount Royal Arena, then home of the Montreal Canadiens. It went nowhere and was completely ignored by the governing body of lacrosse in Canada, the CALA. Its successor, the Canadian Lacrosse Association, also continues to ignore attempts to improve the game.

I have some empathy for Paddy Brennan. In 1974, when I was teaching at PCVS, the school's box lacrosse team sponsored a lacrosse game on skates. I wrote the rules and the game was played in the Memorial Centre with the Lakers and the Junior PCOs playing each other lacrosse while on skates.

An inquisitive crowd of approximately 1,000 was on hand to watch; enough to make the team a little money but like Paddy's game was completely ignored by the lacrosse suits.

Fortunately Brennan was more persistent. By 1930 he had convinced some of the NHL hockey types his game was an alternative to dark hockey arenas in the summers.

In the summer of 1931 the Professional Box Lacrosse league was formed. One of the players in the new league was Reeve.

Born in 1902, Reeve won a Grey Cup with the Toronto Balmy Beach football team in 1927, a Mann Cup in 1929 with the Oshawa Generals'field lacrosse team. He was a part of history, likely never to be repeated, in 1930 -- he won a Grey Cup with Balmy Beach and a Mann Cup with the Brampton Excelsiors, both in the same year.

Canada's athlete of the half-century (1900-1950) Lionel Conacher said of Reeve, "(he) had all the requisites of a great athlete, except a body strong enough to carry out all the things his mind wanted."

Reeve turned to writing, penning a weekly column in the Toronto Telegram. After its demise in 1971, the Toronto Sun. Reeve's stories regaled of characters he created like Moaner McGruffey, Alice Snippersnapper and Nutsy Fagan, with traits copied from athletes he knew.

The Maclean's article in 1931 was one of his early pieces and made no mention he was playing in the league.

The opening paragraph read, "The summer whirling off the sports spindle has been notable for introducing the new and novel into America's oldest game. Lacrosse has been brought indoors, a roof over the home as it were: The teams have been shaved down to seven men aside and the going speeded up to a mixture of hockey, jai-aili and catch-as-catch-can wrestling."

Reeve, like many other historians, gives no credit to Paddy Brennan as the founder of the game but traces the roots of box lacrosse to a game called court lacrosse from Australia. The Australians, long in the field game, took lacrosse inside to basketball courts; they obviously had no hockey rinks, and created a game played in the confines of a gymnasium.

An awareness of this game and the pressing need to have a summer alternative for hockey arenas is the accepted beginning of box lacrosse.

Reeve's article refers to the then-field game, as a "game played (by) stalwart teams of almost every town in Ontario and Quebec (with players using) long, flat sticks that must have been something like ironing boards to handle, (who) would be amazed at the present squash-court contests that serve up this aerial hockey game."

The professional box league lasted only that season but the threat of the new game gaining popularity under new management forced the complete revamping of lacrosse by the CLA.

In the fall of 1931, lacrosse in Canada switched completely from the field to the box variety. All trophies, including the Mann Cup, became box lacrosse trophies. Field lacrosse never really resurfaced in Canada until 1967. That year, as part of Canada's Centennial celebrations, the CLA hosted a four-team tournament, with Canada represented by the Peterborough Lakers. That event morphed in the world field lacrosse championships in 1974.

Here in Peterborough the first box lacrosse game was played in the summer of 1932 in the Brock Street Arena.

Cec Purdue, who initially called the new box game "the bobtail version of lacrosse," wrote of that particular game, "No sporting event in recent years had the fans so much by the ears as the gruelling, virile, strength-testing lung-gasping struggle last night."

If our attempt at lacrosse on ice had sports journalists like Reeve and Perdue reporting on it, Peterborough, could very well be known as the birthplace of the game we would have dubbed "Lax-on-Ice."

The city would join other famous cities like Hoboken, N. J., birthplace of baseball; Springfield, Mass., birthplace of basketball; Allegheny, Pa., birthplace of pro-football and Kingston, Ont., or Halifax, depending on what historian you listen to, as the birthplace of hockey.

Now our city's only remaining hope to join that elite list may be with lawnmower racing, introduced at this year's Ex!

Don Barrie is a retired schoolteacher, former scout for the NHL's Buffalo Sabres and a member of the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame and the Peterborough and District Sports Hall of Fame.

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DON BARRIE

Barrie's Beat