“A Lively Interest on the
Prairies”: Wetern Canada, the
Mass Media, and a “World of
Sport,” 1870–1939
Stacy L. Lorenz
DIVISION OF PHYSICAL EDUCATION
AUGUSTANA UNIVERSITY COLLEGE
Before the birth of television and the spread of professional sports franchises across the
continent, many people in North America did not have the opportunity to watch highlevel sporting performances regularly, if at all. Nevertheless, even in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, the mass media brought powerful representations of sporting events to people who were unable to witness them firsthand. Canadian sport fans
generally could not see heavyweight title fights or the World Series, for instance, but they
could still experience distant boxing matches and baseball games through newspapers,
telegraph reenactments, and radio. As a result, involvement in sport was no longer limited
to local athletes, clubs, and events. In conjunction with the telegraph and wire services,
daily newspapers and radio constructed a community of interest around sport in Canada
and the United States. This community of interest consisted of people who discussed,
cared about, and paid attention to the same players, teams, leagues, and events, no matter
where they lived. A unified “world of sport” was created by the mass media—one that
embraced both amateur and professional sport, and included leagues, games, teams, athletes, events, statistics, stories, myths, and heroes.1 This world of sport also occupied a
prominent position in the emerging popular cultures of both Canada and the United
States in the early twentieth century.
The existence of an integrated, wide-ranging world of sport is a modern phenomenon.2 This world of sport can be thought of as a shared pool of information about sport—
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 1995 Northern Great Plains History Conference in
Brandon, Manitoba, and at the 1996 North American Society for Sport History Conference at Auburn
University. I would like to thank David Whitson, David Mills, and Doug Owram for their comments on
previous drafts of this work. I would also like to thank Kimberly Lorenz for her assistance with some of
the newspaper research upon which this article is based.
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“information” meaning not only news and factual data, but the entire range of ideas,
attitudes, symbols, and knowledge that constitutes the common experience of sport. In
other words, the world of sport is an information system that links people together in a
transnational community of interest3 With the rise of mass circulation newspapers, the
telegraph, and radio, people across North America gained access to a shared body of information about sport. Media experiences of major sporting events involved Canadians in a
world of sport that extended across provincial and national boundaries. As this world of
sport emerged, a broad-based community of interest focused on sport formed. This community of interest included people who followed the same athletes and events, despite
living in different places. By carrying information about sport throughout North America,
the daily press, the telegraph, and radio worked together to forge a transnational world of
sport in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The emergence of this world of sport coincided with other important changes in
Canadian society and culture. Sporting news was not the only information available to
people across the country. As improved communications and other technological
achievements rapidly dissolved preindustrial conceptions of time and distance, people
increasingly imagined themselves as belonging to larger and larger communities. 4
Railways, wire services, telephones, mass-market periodicals, automobiles, radios, department stores, and national advertising campaigns brought Canadians together in new ways.
These developments helped to create an emerging “national” Canadian popular culture by
the 1920s—a national popular culture that embraced a wide range of American entertainment products, including professional sport. During the interwar period, American movies, magazines, and radio programs found large audiences in Canada. Professional sport,
like other aspects of the entertainment industry, invited fan and consumer identifications
across national borders. As a result, the world of sport that originated at this time contributed to both a budding Canadian national popular culture and a burgeoning continental
popular culture.
This article explores the relationship among sport, the mass media, and popular culture by examining how people on the Canadian Prairies experienced this developing world
of sport between 1870 and 1939.5 In some ways, the settlers who migrated to the Canadian West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were already part of a larger
world of sport when they arrived in the region. Like other settler groups moving into
“frontier” areas elsewhere in North America, the people who came to Western Canada
brought with them a range of cultural traditions and institutions—including sport and
other leisure practices.6 As Morris Mott has written about early settlers in Manitoba, “the
pioneers were only slightly less anxious to reproduce their best sporting traditions than
they were to reproduce their best political, economic, legal, educational and religious ones.”7
New arrivals to the Canadian plains during this time period carried with them prior
connections to other sporting cultures. As a result, local sporting cultures in communities
across the prairies initially developed out of the “local” traditions of other places. In addition, the development of local sport in the prairie West occurred simultaneously with the
rise of a transregional world of sport in North America. In a sense, then, local, community
sporting cultures in Western Canada were established by people who already possessed a
certain knowledge of the world of sport—or, at least, by people who developed attach-
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ments to an emerging world of sport at the same time as they became part of local
sport. As a result, involvement in the larger world of sport was not simply added to local
sporting culture, in a layered fashion.8 In addition, more broadly based cultural identities
did not replace local meanings for sport. Instead, because local sport in the Canadian West
developed alongside and in the context of a broader sport culture, these wider cultural
identifications intersected and overlapped local meanings and identities.9 On the Canadian prairie—where even “local” traditions were often transplanted from other regions or
other countries—the mass media also allowed emigrants to maintain connections to aspects of the world of sport which had been familiar to them before their arrival in Western
Canada. More importantly, the daily press, the telegraph, and radio radically reshaped
these older connections, and opened up new possibilities for involvement in a national
and international culture of sport. This study will investigate the new identities and experiences associated with an expanding world of sport in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This article focuses on the process by which daily newspapers, the telegraph, and
radio connected prairie Canadians to a continent-wide community of interest centred on
sport between 1870 and 1939. It analyzes how the mass media constructed a shared sport
information system throughout North America during this time period. In order to explore the character of this world of sport more thoroughly, the article gives special attention to the ways in which people in Western Canada experienced major league baseball in
the 1920s, and assesses the relationship between an emerging world of sport and an emerging
Canadian national popular culture in the interwar years. Key questions include:
• What kind of sporting “information” was available to people in the prairie West
prior to World War II?
• What role did sport play in the development of a Canadian national popular
culture in this time period?
By examining media coverage of sport in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
this study aims to shed new light on the cultural history of sport in Canada. Although
Canadian intellectuals have generally resisted the idea of viewing sport as a form of culture, the hierarchical distinctions that earlier cultural critics had made between high culture and popular culture have been breaking down over the past two decades.10 As a result,
more scholars are beginning to recognize the social significance of mass culture, commercialized leisure, and sport. At the same time, growing interest in social and cultural history
has caused sport to figure more prominently in the work of historians.11 In addition, the
field of Canadian sport history has been reshaped in recent years as growing numbers of
historians successfully connect the history of Canadian sport with wider changes in society
and social relations.12 However, despite the prominence of sport in Canadian life, historians have not made an effort to put together a comprehensive analysis of sport in Canadian
culture.13 Similarly, there have been few attempts at examining the role of the media in
Canadian sport and popular culture.14 This paper seeks to rectify this situation, at least in
part, by scrutinizing the role of daily newspapers, telegraphy, wire services, and radio
broadcasts in the creation of a far-reaching world of sport between 1870 and 1939.
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The emergence of the mass press—particularly urban daily newspapers—during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was instrumental in creating local, national, and international audiences for sport.15 Early newspapers in British North America had been
directed at the small, literate elite in each colony, and most were directly affiliated with one
of the major political parties. These party journals were generally published weekly or biweekly.16 However, between 1840 and 1900, the Canadian newspaper industry was revolutionized by the emergence of the urban daily press. Simultaneously, this developing
daily press devoted more and more attention to sport. The first successful Canadian dailies
were published in Montreal in the early 1840s. By the end of the 1850s, the leading
Ontario papers and the most prominent anglophone journals in Montreal were all dailies.
By the mid-1870s, publishers in Atlantic Canada and francophone Quebec had followed
suit. As a result, Rowell’s American Newspaper Directory of 1873 listed 48 daily newspapers
throughout Canada, the majority of them published in Ontario.17 The daily press arrived
in Western Canada in 1874 when two Winnipeg papers—the Manitoba Free Press and,
briefly, the Nor’wester—switched over to daily publication. 18 Farther west, a daily edition
of the Calgary Herald was launched in 1885, and the daily Calgary Tribune began publication in 1886.19 By 1901, there were 112 dailies published in Canada, eight of them on the
prairies.20 Meanwhile, the total circulation of the daily editions of newspapers in Canada
climbed from 113,000 in 1876 to 575,000 in 1900.21
As in Britain and the United States, the rapid growth of the daily newspaper in Canada
was fuelled mainly by the emergence of the popular press.22 These new “people’s journals”
challenged the pre-eminence of the parry press, mainly by appealing “to the needs, interests and reading-level of the new urban masses.”23 In Canada, the most successful popular
dailies were the Montreal Star (first published 1869) and La Presse (1884); the Toronto
Telegram (1876), the World (1880), the News (1881), and the Star (1892); the Ottawa
Journal (1885); and the Hamilton Herald (1889).24 The people’s journals developed several innovative news-gathering techniques, including the use of railroads, telegraphs, and
special reporters to collect information. In comparison to traditional party journals, popular dailies not only gave more attention to crime, disaster, scandal, and war, but also “to
pleasures and everyday enthusiasms situated in the realms of leisure, family life, and local
culture.”25 In particular, “publishers increased their readership by making newspapers more
sensational and by adding women’s, sports, and entertainment features.”26 This shift in
emphasis in favor of local happenings and urban amusements led to more newspaper
coverage of sport.27
The expansion of sport reporting in Canadian dailies also was linked closely to the
growing significance of commercial advertising in the newspaper business. The new people’s
journals were more profit-oriented than their established competitors, and carrying more
sport news proved to be one of the most effective ways for the upstart popular press to
attract readers and advertising dollars.28 As a result, the total amount of space devoted to
sport in the pages of Canadian papers expanded dramatically in the second half of the
nineteenth century.29 As John B. Thompson points out, “Newspapers became a crucial
mechanism in facilitating the sale of other goods and services, and their capacity to secure
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advertising revenue was directly linked to the size and profile of their readership.”30 Along
with reports on politics, business, and labor, sport coverage was an effective means of
reaching the male wage earners and businessmen who constituted the core market for
daily newspapers.31 In addition, the sports pages were
proving to be good not only for building circulation, but also for opening up
connections to new sources of advertising revenues from businesses interested
in speaking primarily to male consumers. These businesses included beer, alcohol, and tobacco-product producers in addition to sporting goods companies,
sports promoters, rail and tram companies, and hotel operators.32
Publishers sold not just newspapers to readers, but readers to advertisers. Sport coverage
helped them to achieve success in both of these areas.
As the growth of the people’s journals eroded the readership and advertising revenue
of the traditional party newspapers, many party papers responded by seeking an alternative route to popularity. Paul Rutherford labels this route “quality journalism”—“going
‘up-market’ to win a sophisticated readership by supplying a more extensive fare of up-todate news, high-toned comment, and a wealth of special features.”33 However, as newspapers everywhere tried to attract more and more readers, they adopted the industry’s most
successful innovations, whatever their source. Even “quality” papers like the Toronto Globe
and Montreal Gazette tried to reach a mass audience by imitating the most effective changes
introduced by the new people’s journals.34 By 1900, many of the distinctions separating
the popular press from the quality press had broken down, and this trend continued in the
first decades of the twentieth century. Competition “had forced newspapers to find readers among all classes of the community,” and, as a result, the daily paper “was fast becoming a standardized product.”35 By the end of the nineteenth century, most newspapers
aimed to reach a wide audience by providing a similar blend of news, entertainment,
features, and opinion.
Daily newspapers emerged in the prairie West during this period of extensive change
in the Canadian newspaper business. However, because Western Canada had such a small
and scattered population, the region’s daily papers developed several decades later than
those in Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic Canada. Before the first decade of the twentieth
century, Winnipeg and Calgary were the only prairie centers with enough people in the
city and surrounding area to sustain a daily newspaper for more than a few months. The
remainder of the North-West was served by a number of weekly journals.36 However, the
western settlement boom which began around 1900 and continued to about 1912 completely transformed the face of the prairie West. Between 1900 and 1916, the population
of the three prairie provinces climbed from 420,000 to 1,700,000. Not only did this
period represent the biggest wave of rural settlement in Canada’s history, it was also a time
of remarkable urban growth.37
By 1916, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, and Saskatoon had emerged as the
dominant cities in the prairie West. In the words of Paul Voisey,
This phenomenon—the rise of the large prairie city—was the most spectacular
development of the 1900-1916 period. The urban population of the prairies
increased from 103 000 to 606 000, primarily on the strength of explosive
growth in five centres. Calgary leaped from 4 400 to 56 500; Edmonton from
5 500 to 53 800; and Saskatoon from 113 to 21 000. Regina skyrocketed from
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2 200 to 30 200 in 1911, and then declined to 26 100 over the next five years.
No city, however, paralleled the rise of Winnipeg-St. Boniface. Already a substantial city of 45 000 in 1901, it catapulted to 187 200 over the next fifteen
years.38
These rapidly growing cities sparked a corresponding expansion of the daily press. In
Winnipeg, a number of other dailies challenged the Manitoba Free Press in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the Sun, the Times, the Telegram, and the
Tribune, while the Calgary Herald shared that city’s market at various times with the Tribune, the News Telegram and the Albertan.3 9 Edmonton, Regina, Saskatoon, Lethbridge,
and Medicine Hat all gained their first successful daily newspapers between 1900 and
1910. In these years, the Edmonton Bulletin (1903), Edmonton Journal (1903), Regina
Standard (1904), Regina Leader (1905), Saskatoon Phoenix (1906), Lethbridge Herald
(1907), and Medicine Hat News (1910) entered the daily newspaper market.40 Although
all Western Canadian dailies were based in cities, many had substantial circulations in the
surrounding countryside, as well.41 Like other mass circulation newspapers in Canada at
the turn of the century, prairie dailies used a combination of quality and popular journalism to target a broad range of readers. And one of the most important ingredients in this
blend was sport coverage.
Media coverage of sport in Canada received a major boost with the development of
the popular press. Both the new people’s journals and the transformed quality newspapers
gave more attention to the events of daily life—to people and society, culture and entertainment, community life and leisure, and sport and recreation. 42 This growing emphasis
on popular pastimes and local culture produced a substantial increase in press coverage of
sport. As a result, by the end of the nineteenth century, most of Canada’s leading dailies
had established separate sports departments and greatly expanded their coverage. Detailed
summaries of sporting events appeared in the paper almost every day, and reporters were
hired specifically to cover local athletes and competitions.43 Rather than scattering reports
at random throughout the newspaper, editors and publishers began grouping all sporting
news together on the same page.44 By 1895, for example, such widely read papers as the
Montreal Star, Montreal Gazette, Toronto Globe, Toronto World, Manitoba Free Press, and
Winnipeg Tribune brought people in their cities a page of sport information (the “sports
page”) on a daily basis.45 By 1910, newer dailies in Saskatchewan and Alberta, including
the Regina Leader, Saskatoon Phoenix, Calgary Herald, and Edmonton Bulletin, also set
aside a distinctive page for sport coverage.46 Moreover, in their Saturday editions, some
prairie papers—such as the Manitoba Free Press, the Winnipeg Tribune, and the Regina
Leader—included a more comprehensive sports section that ranged from two to eight
pages, filled with stories, photos, and illustrations.47 Thus, like other newspapers across
North America, the major urban dailies of the Canadian Prairie were carrying a substantial amount of information about sport by the early twentieth century.
The advent of telegraphic communications also contributed to the creation of a world of
sport by permitting the rapid dissemination of news, including information about sporting events, across the continent—and around the globe. The telegraph was the first ele-
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ment of the electronic media to have a significant impact on sport. Cities in the eastern
part of Canada were linked by telegraph to each other and to major cities in the United
States in the late 1840s and early 1850s. The undersea cable connecting Canada to Europe
across the North Atlantic was in place by 1866. Prairie settlements had been added to the
telegraph network by the end of the 1880s.48 The first applications of the telegraph to
sport were relatively simple, but extremely influential. Initially, “game highlights and results were simply taken to local telegraph offices to be transmitted by Morse code to
interested parties in other locations.”49 For example, in 1877, London’s new baseball field
was equipped with a telegraph wire so baseball scores from around Canada and the United
States could be announced to the spectators.50 Soon, the press was also relying on the
telegraph for information about games and events in other cities. Newspapers quickly
“became some of the biggest customers of the telegraph companies, and the... information in their pages became both fuller and timelier.”51 With the development of telegraphy, Canadian newspapers had much greater access to news from other parts of Canada
and the United States, as well as Great Britain and the rest of Europe.
Because results were now available to more people in a shorter period of time, telegraphy broadened considerably the power and scope of the sport information system. “With
the invention and use of the telegraph, the informational distances between different places
began to erode,” writes Joshua Meyrowitz. Faraway places were brought “closer together
informationally. Physical distance as a social barrier began to be bypassed through the
shortening of communication ‘distance.’” 52 Similarly, the development of national and
international wire services was crucial to the formulation of a world of sport. Wire services
like the Associated Press and Canadian Press enabled people in all parts of North America
to share a common base of information, and gave the news an immediacy that was impossible before.53 Journalists could now draw upon a fresh supply of news from outside the
city practically every day. In addition, even more information about national and foreign
events became available when news agencies began hiring their own reporters. This allowed them to supply more comprehensive dispatches to their clients.54 Thus, the wire
services permitted Prairie newspapers to furnish their readers with immediate and detailed
sport results from other parts of Canada, the United States, and Great Britain. As a result,
sport reporting in Western Canada took on a more significant national and international
character.
The impact of telegraphy on sport also had another dimension which narrowed the
information gap between places even further. The telegraph opened up the possibility of a
completely new experience of sport when someone had the idea of bringing telegraphers
right to the arena or ballpark in order to create simultaneous coverage of games. In hockey,
for instance,
the practice of stationing telegraph operators at rinkside or up in the press box
with a sportswriter or a couple of knowledgeable hockey fans had become widespread by the late 1890s. At the receiving end, decoded game accounts were
either read aloud to assembled fans, or transcripts were posted on bulletin boards.
Hotel, theatre, and newspaper owners quickly came to realize the financial and
public relations value of telegraphed accounts and made facilities of varying
types available for fans to gather and “hear” the game.55
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The play-by-play telegram report was also used to transmit news of baseball games and
championship boxing matches. For example, when John L. Sullivan and James J. Corbett
battled for the heavyweight boxing title in New Orleans on 7 September 1892, people
across Canada gathered in front of newspaper and telegraph offices to follow the fight as it
happened. “In Victoria, where very few doubted that Sullivan would add another to his
list of victories, excitement ran high,” reported the Colonist. “Outside the Delmonico
hotel, where each round was bulletined, the street was black with moving humanity, and a
special squad of police was kept particularly busy trying clearing a limited passageway.” 56
With the development of the telegraph and news agencies, people in Western Canada
became more involved in a wider world of sport, which was experienced through the
media. By the 1880s and 1890s media coverage of major events and star athletes formed
a burgeoning sport information system accessible throughout Canada. The racing career
of Toronto oarsman Ned Hanlan, for instance, was one facet of the world of sport which
could be followed closely by Canadians from coast to coast. Hanlan’s domination of professional rowing in the late 1870s and early 1880s made him Canada’s first national sporting hero, and a household name throughout the English-speaking world.57 Settlers on the
Canadian plains may not have been among the thousands of spectators gathered along the
race course as Hanlan competed, but they could still follow the world champion’s career in
the pages of Winnipeg newspapers. In fact, recent arrivals in the North-West felt such a
strong connection to the Canadian rower’s accomplishments that a Hanlan triumph in
London in 1880 produced this Manitoba Free Press headline: “‘Our Boy’ Again.”58 This
was also a powerful indication that nascent feelings of national pride and identity had
been carried into—and were continuing to develop in—the Canadian West.
During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Prairie newspapers covered many
other athletes and events from outside the region. On 2 July 1880, for example, readers of
the Manitoba Free Press were provided with an account of the “fifth annual eight oared
race over a four mile course between the crews from Harvard and Yale Colleges.”59 Someone in the Winnipeg area on 8 November 1880 could read about a rowing race on the
Thames “between E.C. Laycock, of Sydney, New South Wales, and J.H. Riley, of Saratoga,”
and an English walking contest in which a man named Rowell covered a distance of 566
miles, beating a previous record by one mile.60
By 1895, coverage of national and international sporting events had become far more
regular and comprehensive. A typical day’s sport coverage from the Manitoba Free Press
demonstrates this trend. On 8 July 1895, the Free Press’s sports pages included reports on
a Winnipeg cricket match, several local horse races, an upcoming regatta in Hamilton, a
rifle-shooting competition in Ottawa, a bicycle race in London, Ontario, two lacrosse
games in Montreal, a canoe race near New York City, horse races at several U.S. tracks, and
a regatta in London, England. In addition, the newspaper listed the previous day’s National League baseball scores.61 This type of sport reporting plainly reveals Prairie Canadians’ participation in a far-reaching sporting universe during the late nineteenth century.
Western Canadian involvement in an emerging world of sport is also vividly illustrated by media coverage of the 1892 Sullivan-Corbett championship fight. As the first
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heavyweight title bout fought under the Queensberry rules, this match marked boxing’s
emergence as mainstream commercial entertainment.62 With a prize of $50,000 at stake,
the “Boston Strong Boy” and “Gentleman Jim” Corbett met on 7 September 1892 “before
ten thousand fans, many of them in formal evening wear, in a grandly lit New Orleans
arena.”63 Several days before the fight, the New York Herald declared that “the odium
which rested upon the prize ring and the majority of its exponents a decade or two ago...
have in a measure been removed, until now the events on hand are of national and international importance.”64 People in Western Canada certainly would have agreed with the
New York paper’s assessment. In Winnipeg, for instance, interest in the Sullivan-Corbett
fight was so high that people gathered in a local arena to follow the event “live” via telegraph. As the Winnipeg Tribune recounted,
A direct wire from the ring-side will bring reports of the fight to-night to the
Granite rink, which has been seated and well lighted for the occasion. Full
details of the preliminaries will be announced, and each round given in detail as
the fistic encounter goes on.65
The quicker, younger, and better trained Corbett beat the defending champion in 21
rounds, and the next day newspapers across the prairies carried descriptions of the fight
and its aftermath. The Winnipeg Tribune carried so much fight coverage—six and a half
columns of stories, summaries, and pictures-that it filled one page of the paper and
spilled over onto the next.66 Similarly, the Manitoba Free Press devoted an entire page—
almost six columns—to the event.67 Sullivan and Corbett’s pre-fight routines, the behavior
and composition of the crowd, what happened in each round, an analysis of each boxer’s
tactics, the post-fight scene in both dressing rooms, brief biographies of the combatants—
the two newspapers reported on all of these aspects of the match. Meanwhile, the smaller
Regina Leader and Edmonton Bulletin each provided an overview of the fight on their
front pages.68 In addition, because the Canadian media was working from telegraph and
wire service reports, many of the articles appearing in newspapers in one city were identical to those printed in other cities.69 Finally, an editorial published in the Winnipeg Tribune the day after the match also provides a revealing glimpse into the world of sport:
Now that the Sullivan-Corbett fight is over, the North American continent will
resume its wonted occupations; the presidential campaign will again attract
interest, and newspapers will cease describing Sullivan’s shoes and reporting the
syllables which fall from his lips.
The figures would be instructive if some statistician were to calculate how
many men and boys in the cities and towns of North America were assembled
at 10 o’clock last night listening to the bulletins received from a prize ring
hundreds or thousands of miles away, where two men were engaged in the
beautiful work of pounding each other’s bodies, and how many newspaper
columns will be filled to-day with descriptions of this inspiring spectacle....70
As people in the Prairie West followed the events surrounding this boxing match, they
sensed a connection to a larger community of interest. The Sullivan-Corbett fight clearly
demonstrates that an international sport information system had emerged by the 1890s.
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Newspaper coverage of sport in Canada and the United States continued to expand during the first decades of the twentieth century.71 Advertising revenue was becoming even
more important to the newspaper industry, and, as a result, sport reporting continued to
play a key role in building and selling audiences.72 By the 1920s, sport coverage was vital
to mass circulation newspapers across North America. Benjamin G. Rader claims that
“nothing before or since—not even the cool waves of television—created quite the same
hot romance between sport and the public as the newspapers did during the 1920s.”73
Like their American counterparts, Canadian dailies generally contained a regular sports
section which brought readers reports of local, national, and international events. 74 Moreover, because the press was paying more attention to the world of sport beyond the city,
sport coverage was becoming more similar in newspapers in all parts of Canada. In the
words of Gruneau and Whitson, “Because many newspapers were becoming more heavily
reliant on wire services, there was a growing standardization of sports reporting; coverage
became focused primarily on ‘nationally important’ leagues, teams, and events.”75 Three
news agencies supplied information to Canadian newspapers: the American Associated
Press and United Press, and the national Canadian Press wire service. These news agencies
blurred the distinctions between papers in different regions by providing a shared body of
information about the biggest names and events in sport to dailies across the country. U.S.
sport news, in particular, found its way to Canadian readers, since most of the international news in Canadian newspapers was based on dispatches from the Associated Press or
United Press.76
As early as 1910, sport headlines in Prairie newspapers reflected this expanding sport
universe. The Calgary Herald usually titled its sports page, “In the World of Sports,” while
the Edmonton Bulletin grouped its sport coverage under a banner which read, “All the
Latest News and Gossip of the World of Sport.” Similarly, the Saskatoon Phoenix some77
times labelled its sport news, “In the Field of Sport at Home and Abroad.” Carl Betke’s
assessment of the Edmonton Bulletin’s sport coverage in the early twentieth century paints
a vivid picture of a far-ranging world of sport:
It would be difficult to exaggerate the opportunity for newspaper readers to
immerse themselves in the fantasy of far-away games. One could read regularly,
occasionally on the front pages of newspapers, about Scottish and English league
soccer, English and Australian cricket, eastern Canadian professional hockey
and lacrosse, round by round details of American and Australian boxing matches,
professional bowling in the United States, American and eastern Canadian college football, English and other horse racing, American golfing, [and] Davis
Cup tennis. In between accounts of American professional baseball trades
and salary disputes, Toronto hockey club scandals, [and] English marksmanship championships, American prison baseball and Russian bids on Kentucky
stallions titillated the local imagination: sometimes this all filled five sports
pages, completely overshadowing-r providing the real urban framework for—
local events.78
In the years after World War I, sport coverage in Canadian newspapers took on an
even more North American and international dimension. Local sport coverage was supple-
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mented increasingly by reports from outside news agencies and correspondents stationed
in other cities. In particular, events perceived to be of national or international significance-such as heavyweight championship fights, major horse races, the Olympic Games,
and the World Series—were attracting more and more media attention by the mid-1920s.79
For example, Prairie dailies provided extensive coverage of the 1927 Jack Dempsey-Gene
Tunney rematch—a heavyweight title fight that was probably the single biggest sporting
event of the decade.80 The Edmonton Journal even printed a pair of special, four-page
“Fight Extra” editions on the evening of the bout, immediately following Tunney’s victory.81 Likewise, the 1924 Olympic Games, held in Paris, and the 1928 Olympic Games,
held in Amsterdam, were featured prominently in the sports pages of Western Canadian
newspapers.82 In addition, a number of female teams and athletes began to receive substantial media coverage in the 1920s and 1930s.83 For instance, Canada’s highly successful
women’s track and field team at the 1928 Olympics—the “Matchless Six” of Fanny “Bobbie”
Rosenfeld, Myrtle Cook, Ethel Smith, Jane Bell, Ethel Catherwood, and Jean Thompson—attracted attention in newspapers nationwide, including those on the prairies. Canadian dailies devoted considerable coverage to the women’s 100 meters, for example—
a race in which Bobbie Rosenfeld won the silver medal, Ethel Smith captured the
bronze medal, and Myrtle Cook was disqualified for committing two false starts.84
Finally, Ethel Catherwood’s gold medal (and world record) in the high jump and, on the
same day, the Canadian team’s first-place finish (and world record) in the 4 x 100 meter
relay put the country’s female Olympians on the front page of the sports section throughout the prairie West.85
Despite the increased attention paid to female athletes in the interwar period, men’s
professional teams and their players—as well as a number of elite male amateur athletes—
continued to dominate coverage of the world of sport.86 During the 1920s and 1930s, the
North American mass press was manufacturing national and international sport heroes
like never before. Journalists paid more attention “to individual players, their skills, styles,
and personalities,” and they began to write about the best players “in a mythic style of
language that spoke to popular desires for larger-than-life events and personalities.”87 As a
result, star athletes like Babe Ruth, Christy Mathewson, Jack Dempsey, Red Grange, Bobby
Jones, Bill Tilden, Jesse Owens, and Joe Louis came to be seen as “role models” for young
boys, and as “heroes” for people of all ages.88 Moreover, Canadian newspapers continued
to emphasize American teams and athletes. As Bruce Kidd writes,
A study of the best-known athletes of the interwar period, as measured by headline frequency in the [Toronto] Globe and the Winnipeg Free Press, found that
eight of ten in 1924-5 and seven of ten in 1935-6 were American. Babe Ruth
scored highly in both decades. Of the other 19 athletes identified, only boxer
Jim McLarnin was Canadian.89
Thus, in the 1920s and 1930s, newspaper coverage of major events and star athletes reached
new heights, forming a sport information system that embraced readers all over North
America. Through their sports pages and sports sections, prairie dailies provided Western
Canadians with access to this broad-based sporting universe.
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During the interwar period, radio also began to contribute significantly to the construction of a world of sport in North America. Canada’s first radio transmitter licence was
issued in 1919, and over the next two decades radio expanded rapidly across the dominion.90 In 1923, there were 9,954 receiving licences in Canada. By 1929, Canadians owned
297,398 receiving licences, and there were 85 broadcast stations operating in the country.
Similarly, the annual production of radios rose from 48,000 in 1925 to 150,000 in 1929.91
In 1931, approximately one third of Canadian households owned a radio. By 1940, three
quarters of Canadian homes possessed a radio receiver of some kind.92 These radio sets
were tuned in to programs that originated in a variety of locations, ranging from a broadcaster just down the street to a station hundreds of miles away.
Canadian broadcasters faced strong competition from the United States and Mexico
in this period, particularly in the 1920s. Canadian stations were low-powered compared
to American and Mexican stations, which could often beam their programming across the
continent. In addition, the lack of agreement between the three countries on the allocation of radio wave lengths meant that Canadian stations were often overwhelmed by powerful foreign stations at or near the same frequency. As a result, many Canadians—particularly in rural areas—received Canadian signals with great difficulty, or not at all. While
“every radio receiver in Canada could pick up an American station, only three in five
Canadian radios could receive a Canadian station.”93 According to one journalist, “Ninetenths of the radio fans in the Dominion hear three or four times as many United States
stations as Canadian.”94 Even in the cities, most Canadians seem to have listened to American broadcasts, especially in the evenings.
In the early years of radio, the bulk of the sport broadcasting received by Canadians
therefore came from U.S. stations. Radio’s commercial potential was first demonstrated in
1921 when the Jack Dempsey-Georges Carpentier heavyweight championship fight was
broadcast to audiences across North America. Like their counterparts in the print media,
radio manufacturers and broadcasters soon turned to sport programming to stimulate
sales of radio sets. And when station owners began to recognize the potential profitability
of radio advertising, they continued to use sport to build audiences to sell to advertisers.
By the late 1920s “U.S. radio was well established as an advertiser-driven commercial
system with a major proportion of programming devoted to sports and light entertain95
ment.” With the rise of national commercial radio broadcasting in the United States, the
conditions were in place for radio to assume a prominent role in the spread of sport
information across the continent.
Initially, the ways in which people experienced radio broadcasts were similar to the
ways in which they experienced telegraph reenactments. Participation in early sport broadcasting was usually a group activity, similar to the extremely popular telegraph reconstructions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, instead of listening to
local announcers recreating athletic contests from telegraph wires, people now came together to hear live radio feeds, often enhanced by loudspeakers for large crowds.96 In this
way, radio was incorporated smoothly into the well-established practice of reconstructing
faraway events for local audiences. Like telegraph reenactments, early radio broadcasts
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were generally what Bruce Evensen describes as “civic spectacles”—public events in which
large groups of people “gathered at communal listening outposts” to engage in a shared
experience.97 For instance, Evensen describes how boxing broadcasts brought radio listeners together in this fashion during the mid-1920s:
When Jack Dempsey fought Gene Tunney for the heavyweight championship
of the world on the evening of September 23, 1926, the event was witnessed by
more people than any other spectacle in the history of the Americas. Beyond
the record-setting 130,000 spectators gathered at Philadelphia’s Sesquicentennial Stadium lay an estimated thirty-nine-million listeners across a thirty-onestation nationwide radio network. They gathered communally in city centers,
storefronts, parks, athletic clubs, in drug stores, radio shops, hotels, theaters, on
street corners and porches, and before open windows and newspaper offices,
wherever speakers could be heard broadcasting one of the great stories of the
American jazz age.98
This type of communal experience began to diminish, however, as more listeners acquired
their own radio sets, enabling them to follow major sporting events from their own homes.
For example, although huge crowds gathered once again in public spaces to follow the
second Dempsey-Tunney fight in September 1927, Evensen notes that “many went home
to listen privately... Communal witnessing of the fight now competed with spectatorship
in the privacy of one’s home.”99 As a result, the world of sport was no longer experienced
by radio audiences in the same way as with earlier public gatherings involving hundreds—
even thousands—of fans and followers of sport.
Early radio coverage of sport focused mainly on the biggest events, rather than on
local, regularly scheduled contests. In fact, “many owners of professional sports teams were
initially suspicious of radio, believing that people would simply stay home and listen to
games rather than attend games live.”100 Nevertheless, major happenings like the World
Series, championship boxing matches, and the Rose Bowl quickly became staples of radio
programming. Broadcasts of World Series games, for example, attracted millions of North
American listeners by the mid-1920s. In 1926, a 23-station network was established in the
United States to carry the World Series. By 1929, a network of nearly 100 stations broadcast the World Series across the continent.101 Boxing broadcasts also proved extremely
popular among radio audiences. In 1923, approximately two million fans tuned in to the
broadcast of the Luis Firpo-Jess Willard heavyweight fight. Four years later, the more than
104,000 people who attended the second Jack Dempsey-Gene Tunney match at Chicago’s
Soldier Field were joined at ringside by the “50 million Americans [who] were estimated
to have been reached by the seventy-three stations of the NBC radio hookup.” 102 In 1938,
as many as two thirds of the American people—and probably a similar proportion of
people in Canada—heard Joe Louis knock out Germany’s Max Schmeling in the first
round. “Probably no other event in radio history... enjoyed such a large audience,” writes
Rader. 1 0 3
By the 1930s, sport programming was carried regularly by Canadian radio stations, as
well. In 1932, the Radio Broadcasting Act created a government-owned Canadian Radio
Broadcasting Commission (CRBC) to regulate radio broadcasting and provide radio service to all Canadians. The Act also allowed for the continued existence of privately owned
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stations. However, the CRBC was “severely hampered from the beginning by faulty organization and lack of funds,” and, as a result, “it was unable to build all the stations needed
to create a national network.”104 In 1936, the CRBC was reorganized into the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Although a completely government-owned broadcasting system never came into being, the CBC achieved considerable success in assembling a
Canada-wide network of CBC-operated stations and privately owned affiliates.105 The
CBC network also covered major national and international sporting events. The following summary of sport broadcasts in the CBC’s Annual Report for 1937-38 indicates that
this emerging national radio network helped to extend the reach of the world of sport into
all parts of the country:
The CBC was able to make available to its listeners throughout Canada most of
the principal sporting events of the period, in Canada, the United States, and
England. These included running commentaries on the Ryder Cup Matches
(BBC), American Yacht Races (NBC), the principal rugby games, including
the Big Four Championship game, the Farr-Braddock Fight (special CBC commentary), the NHL Hockey Games (Imperial Oil Company), the StricklandDelaney Fight (BBC), the Dominion Ski Championships, the Governor
General’s Curling Match, the World Baseball Series (NBC), the Davis Cup
Matches (BBC), the Bisley Shoot (BBC), the Canadian Tennis Tournament,
the Dominion Lacrosse Finals, the International Dog Sled Derby from Quebec
City, [and] the Grand National Steeplechase (BBC).106
Although Canadians were avid followers of baseball and boxing, in particular, these
sports could not match the remarkable popularity that hockey broadcasts had achieved in
Canada by the end of the 1930s. Regular Canadian radio coverage of hockey started in
1923 with broadcasts of local amateur games on CFCA, the Toronto Star’s radio station.
In 1931, Toronto Maple Leafs owner Conn Smythe, MacLaren Advertising, and General
Motors worked out a deal that paved the way for regular Saturday night broadcasts of
Maple Leaf games. In January 1933, coast-to-coast hockey broadcasts began in Canada
when General Motors put together a loose nervvork of 20 stations across the country to
carry its Saturday night NHL broadcasts. As a result, NHL hockey “became one of the
first radio programs to address a national Canadian audience.”107
In order to consolidate this national radio audience, General Motors bought the broadcast rights for the Montreal Canadiens and the Montreal Maroons in the summer of 1933.
The acquisition of rights to the games of the NHLs three Canadian-based clubs “set the
stage for truly national hockey broadcasts, with Montreal games broadcast in English and
French in Quebec and Toronto games aired across the rest of the country.”108 In 1934,
these General Motors broadcasts were reaching more than a million Canadians. By the
end of the 1930s, Hockey Night in Canada—now sponsored by Imperial Oil and carried
on the CBC network—had a national audience of two million listeners. Foster Hewitt’s
Saturday night broadcasts from Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto turned millions of Canadians into followers of NHL hockey—and, especially, into fans of the Toronto Maple
Leafs.109 In addition, NHL play-off broadcasts attracted even larger audiences: up to three
quarters of the country’s radio listeners. In 1934, for example, an estimated 72 per cent of
the approximately one million radio sets in Canada tuned into the MacLaren hockey
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networks coverage of the Stanley Cup semi-finals.110 Don Twaits, a former advertising
manager with Imperial Oil, summarized the impact of these radio broadcasts in a 1984
interview:
For years Hockey Night in Canada was really the only national broadcasting in
Canada.... It was one of the few network shows that carried right across Canada
and into the far reaches of the North. It was a unique sport broadcasting program. Nothing ever like it in North America, in those terms-no other kind of
audience. After that it was not unusual for surveys to tell you they had 65 per
cent of everybody in the country listening to NHL playoffs.111
These nationwide hockey broadcasts were milestone events in the development of both a
world of sport and a Canadian national popular culture. As Gruneau and Whitson note,
“Never had so many Canadians in all corners of the country regularly engaged in the same
cultural experience at the same time.”112
One can glean a better understanding of the workings of this world of sport by analyzing
Western Canadian involvement in major league baseball between 1920 and 1929. A close
examination of the world of baseball provides considerable insight into the sport information system that enveloped Canada by the 1920s and 1930s. During the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, baseball was emerging as the biggest, most widespread, and
most avidly followed professional sport in North America. 113 It was the first modern team
sport to attract attention across the continent.114 How did people in Western Canada
experience big league baseball in the 1920s? What kind of baseball “information” was
available at a time when the region had no major league teams and television did not bring
games into people’s homes?
Like sport fans in other parts of the country, Western Canadians became involved in
big league baseball primarily through media reports of events and personalities in the
United States.115 In the early twentieth century, Canadian newspapers provided extensive
coverage of major league games, teams, and players. Throughout the summer—and even
in the winter—the wire services brought Canadian readers regular reports of big league
competition south of the border. In the words of Don Morrow, Canadian fans
became riveted on the game when the first news of major league baseball was
leaked in one small corner of the sports page in the dead of winter, and reports
gradually included rumours of trades, player injuries, [and] pennant hopes, and
grew into larger articles on training camps in the southern United States; and
then full pages were devoted to major league coverage.116
During the 1920s newspapers in Western Canada covered every day of the baseball season. Prairie readers could therefore follow major league baseball in a number of ways.
First, from April to October, newspapers generally carried brief descriptions of the previous day’s games and the linescores from each contest. Current National and American
League standings were another staple of the daily sports pages.117 In addition, Prairie
papers frequently printed longer feature stories which focused on particular players, managers, or teams. Similarly, syndicated columns written by American sportswriters often
appeared in the Western Canadian press during the baseball season. 118 Coverage even
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continued when the action on the field had stopped, as newspapers published stories
about contract disputes and off-season activities.119
With all of this information available on a daily basis, people on the Canadian Prairies
had no trouble following the world of baseball. Through the press, people in Winnipeg,
Saskatoon, and Calgary, for instance, kept track of games played in American cities like
Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Boston, New York,
Brooklyn, Washington, and St. Louis. At the same time, the attention that the Western
Canadian press gave to Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, and Christy Mathewson suggests that
major league ballplayers were becoming larger-than-life figures on both sides of the border.120 For example, when Mathewson died in 1925 after a prolonged battle with tuberculosis, the pitcher’s heroic stature was reflected in Prairie newspapers. The Manitoba Free
Press carried a tribute to “Matty” by sportswriter Grantland Rice, which read, in part,
He was a great pitcher, a great competitor and a great soul.... He was one of
those rare characters who appeal to the millions through a magnetic personality
attached to clean honesty and undying loyalty to a cause. He gripped the imagination of a country that held a hundred million people, and held this grip with
a firmer hold than any man of his day or time.121
Thus, Christy Mathewson, like many other legendary baseball players who followed him,
emerges as a national hero in both Canada and the United States.
The tremendous popularity of major league baseball’s annual World Series was another indication of the range of the world of sport. “This is the first day of the worlds
series—a sort of an unofficial holiday for wealthy employees and for office boys with sickly
grandmothers; and for a goodly proportion of those classes of citizenry in between,” wrote
Toronto Star sports editor W.A. Hewitt in October 1928.122 In the early twentieth century, major league baseball’s World Series was an annual Canadian cultural ritual. John
Herd Thompson and Allen Seager write, “By the mid-twenties baseball’s World Series had
become Canada’s greatest ‘national’ sporting event.”123 Although large distances separated
Western Canadian fans from the action on the field, there were several ways in which they
became participants in the World Series.
First, people on the Canadian Prairie could read about baseball’s showcase event in
their local newspapers. In the 1920s, the Western Canadian media provided detailed coverage of the games themselves, the players involved, and other events surrounding the
series. On the eve of the 1929 World Series, for instance, Winnipeg’s leading newspaper
assured its readers that, “Arrangements have been completed for a thorough coverage of
the series in the Free Press, by the best sportswriters of the United Press and the Associated
Press. Not a detail will be missed.”124 The World Series mattered to enough people that it
usually made the front page of Prairie dailies. 125 In fact, every mass circulation newspaper
in Canada carried wire service reports of World Series contests. 126 Most Prairie papers
published the box scores from each game, and some went a step further and printed
batter-by-batter—or even pitch-by-pitch—accounts. 127 Syndicated columns written by
American reporters, former players, and current stars appeared in Western Canadian publications as well.128 Occasionally, the World Series crept onto the editorial page. For instance, on the eve of the 1926 series, the Calgary Herald devoted ten column inches of its
editorial page to an analysis of the competing teams. The World Series “is regarded as one
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of the classics in sportdom,” stated the Herald, “and while Canadians of the west are far
removed from the scene, still a lively interest is exhibited on the prairies in this greatest of
all features in the season’s baseball programme.”129
Before television was invented, the best way for Western Canadians to “watch” the
World Series was to participate in the immediate reconstruction of games from a running
account provided by telegraph reports. In the early twentieth century, it was common for
sport enthusiasts across Canada to gather in front of newspaper offices during the World
Series to receive regular updates on the game in progress. Large crowds watched games
charted on illuminated model diamonds, while an announcer with a megaphone described
the action from the telegraph wire. For instance, in his memoirs, W.A. Hewitt described
how, for several years in the early 1900s, Toronto fans gathered at Shea’s Theatre, the Star
Theatre, and Massey Music Hall for World Series contests:
The arrangement was that a telegrapher right at the ball game wired his playby-play accounts to us, and they were received on a ticker in the Toronto theatre. An announcer dramatized the action. He gave the batter’s name and whether
the pitch was a ball or strike. On the board the lights showed the runners on the
base paths. Other lights indicated where a ball was hit and whether the hitter
was safe or out. The combination of board, lights and announcer was so effective that capacity crowds rooted with all the volume and enthusiasm of fans at
the actual game.130
A 1925 Winnipeg Tribune article also captures some of the flavor of this experience:
The plays as depicted on the Tribune board were flashed to the fans just as they
were made on the Forbes Field diamond at Pittsburgh. Walter Johnson’s speed
ball burned over the plate, Pirate batters were whiffed and sent back to the
bench, runners were caught between the sacks, and the biggest thrill-producer
of all, home runs, were clearly shown on the Tribune board.131
In this way, fans did not have to wait for their daily newspaper to follow the games: they
could share immediately in the drama transpiring on the playing field.
Telegraph reenactments of World Series games were extremely popular on the
Canadian Prairie during the 1920s. In 1926, the Manitoba Free Press estimated that
close to 5,000 fans jammed Carlton Street in Winnipeg to see the newspaper’s magnetic player board flash play-by-play action of the opening game of the World Series.
“The game in New York ended at 3:18, which is 2:18 Winnipeg time. The final play
was flashed across the Free Press board at exactly 2:19, just one minute after the
conclusion of the game at New York,” reported the paper.132 In Calgary that same
fall, it was reported that “a large crowd of sport fans filled First street west in front of
the Herald building, and police officers were required to keep an opening through to
permit traffic to keep moving.” 133 Businesses in some Prairie cities even employed
World Series telegraph reports as a marketing tool. For example, in 1929, the mining
securities firm of Stobie-Forlong-Matthews Ltd. tried to use World Series bulletins
to lure people into its offices in Winnipeg and Calgary. ‘A running story of each
game in the World Series will be received over our own private wires and given in our
Board Room,” read the company’s newspaper advertisement. “We cordially invite
your attendance.”134
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A crowd gathers outside the Journal building in Edmonton, Alberta during the 1933 World Series.
The newspaper’s “Electro Magnetic” scoreboard is reconstructing Game Four of the series between
the New York Giants and the Washington Senators. Courtesy City of Edmonton Archives
During the 1920s, Western Canadians also began listening to radio broadcasts of the
World Series. They relied on broadcasters based in both Canada and the United States for
coverage of the games. In some cities, local stations broadcast play-by-play reconstructions
of games from telegraph reports. This was the case one year in Calgary, for example, as the
Heratis radio station, CFAC, carried a re-creation of World Series matches by local announcers.135 However, because most radio receivers in Canada could pick up American
stations, it was becoming increasingly common for Canadians to listen in to live U.S.
broadcasts of World Series games. In farms, towns, and cities across Western Canada,
people listened to on-the-spot broadcasts of the World Series. “Even during the busy
harvest season, the World Series of baseball lured many from their work,” writes Paul
Voisey in his study of a farm community in southern Alberta. 136 In addition, newspapers
sometimes alerted their readers to the fact that major American radio networks were broad-
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casting World Series games.137 Finally, the radio program schedules carried by most papers
indicate that people on the Canadian Prairies could pick up games carried by stations as
far away as Chicago, San Francisco, Oklahoma City, Houston, Atlanta, Boston, New York
City, New Orleans, and Miami.138 This demonstrates that people in Western Canada were
tuning in to play-by-play broadcasts of World Series games from radio stations all over the
United States.
Major league baseball was just one aspect of the unified world of sport which had developed in Canada and the United States by the 1920s and 1930s. And while people in
Western Canada were becoming part of this larger sporting universe, they were also developing new attachments to the increasingly “national” Canadian popular culture that emerged
in the interwar years. In fact, many of the forces that created a world of sport also helped to
build a national popular culture in Canada. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, profound changes in transportation and communications made it much easier
for Canadians to think of themselves as members of a national community. Local communities acquired stronger and more frequent ties to society at large, and cultural practices
and symbols took on much wider dimensions as they received national media attention
and exposure. Spurred by the growth of the mass press and the development of department stores, advertising agencies, and national advertisers, new “national” popular cultures were arising in both Canada and the United States in the early twentieth century.
Mass-market magazines, national brand-name consumer goods, and continentally distributed entertainment products became key components of these developing popular
cultures.139 Moreover, because Canadians were fervent consumers of American cultural
commodities, the national Canadian popular culture that was beginning to take shape had
a marked American flavor. As Gruneau and Whitson point out, “many of the images,
styles, and messages associated with U.S. advertising and the mass consumption of ‘nationally branded U.S. products simply blended into Canada’s own emerging national
popular culture.”140
Although Canadian culture had always been influenced by the United States, Canada’s
affinity for American popular culture intensified dramatically between the wars. During
the 1920s, Canada faced a constant barrage of American magazines, radio programs, and
motion pictures. By 1929, Canadians imported eight periodicals from the United States
for every one printed in Canada.141 Similarly, the comedy, drama, and live variety shows
broadcast on American radio stations attracted large Canadian audiences. By the end of
the decade, it was estimated that 80 per cent of the programs listened to by Canadians
were American in origin. Some of this American programming was actually being aired on
Canadian-based radio stations; in fact, three of Canada’s flagship stations—CKAC
(Montreal), CFRB (Toronto), and CKGW (Toronto)—became affiliates of American radio networks in 1929.142 Likewise, the United States gained a stranglehold on the Canadian movie market in the 1920s. Canada was regarded as Hollywood’s “domestic” box
office, and almost all of the movies Canadians watched were made in the United States.143
By bringing people across the continent together in a shared information system, the
world of sport also intensified the links between the emerging Canadian and American
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national popular cultures in the interwar years. Major league baseball, for example, was
part of the U.S. entertainment industry that crossed the border. Big league baseball’s teams,
players, heroes, and major events originated almost entirely in the United States. Thus,
like American movies, magazines, and radio programs, major league baseball was one of
the cultural forces that pulled Canada closer to the United States in the 1920s and 1930s.
In this way, baseball contributed to the intrusion of American symbols, heroes, stories,
and ideas into Canadian life. As one writer pointed out in The Canadian Forum in 1927,
when Canadian children “bowed down to Babe Ruth,” they demonstrated that Canada
had been conquered by the “American Empire.144
Professional hockey, on the other hand, was cherished as something uniquely Canadian-despite the fact that the expansion of the NHL into the profitable American market in 1925 began the league’s transformation into a U.S.-dominated business.145 At the
same time, the “Canadian” character of Hockey Night in Canada broadcasts was somewhat
questionable because the program equated “Canadian hockey” almost exclusively with
“NHL hockey”—and, in particular, the league’s Toronto franchise. CBC radio was essentially the “Maple Leaf network” in English-speaking Canada. As a result, other versions of
hockey-such as top-flight community-based men’s amateur and semi-professional hockey,
women’s teams, and hockey in other regions-were actively marginalized, while what
Kidd calls the “metropolitan monoculture” of Hockey Night in Canada dominated the
airwaves.146 Still, as Gruneau and Whitson point out, Saturday night broadcasts of Hockey
Night in Canada helped “to create for hockey, and in particular NHL hockey, a deeply
rooted, almost iconic place in Canadian culture.” As a result of nationwide radio coverage,
“stories and characters from NHL games emerged as the stuff of Canadian folklore: Red
Horner ‘knocking people into the cheap seats,’ Eddie Shore’s injury of Ace Bailey, the
tragic death of Howie Morenz.”147 Even Kidd concedes that, “During the bleak days of
the Depression and the Second World War, [Hockey Night in Canada] gave many people
their strongest sense of pan-Canadian identity.”148 In sum, the world of professional sport
contributed to the development of a continental sporting culture while, at the same time,
helping to create national cultural meanings for sport in Canada.
By the end of the 1930s, then, the mass media had constructed a comprehensive sport
information system throughout Canada and the United States. People in different regions
may not have been able to watch the same sporting events in person, but, through newspapers, telegraphy, and radio, they actively participated in a common world of sport. For
many people across Canada, for instance, listening to Hockey Night in Canada broadcasts was a Saturday night family ritual. Similarly, baseball’s World Series was an
important “Canadian” event, and the object of considerable national interest and
conversation.149 As a result, the emergence of a world of sport and a Canadian national popular culture helped to unite people in Canada in new communities of
interest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—one centered on the experience of sport, the other on the experience of being “Canadian.” The mass media had
opened up new possibilities for the expression of community and collective identity.150
Thus, through shared media experiences, people in the prairie West were attached to an
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imagined community of fans who followed high-level national and international competition, and to an imagined national community of Canadians.151
These larger communities of interest were also intertwined. Hockey, in particular,
played a prominent role in Canadian life. No other cultural practice could match Hockey
Night in Canada broadcasts, for instance, as a vehicle for bringing large numbers Canadians together on a regular basis. As a result, hockey contributed significantly to the development of an awareness of a larger Canadian community in the first half of the twentieth
century. The sport helped to create a sense of being Canadian. In the words of Bruce Kidd,
NHL teams have brought untold pleasure to millions of Canadians. Apart from
politics, NHL hockey has no equal as pan-Canadian theatre. The trials and
achievements of the favourite players, the impassioned dramas of the annual
Stanley Cup playoffs, and the richly textured symbolisms of the great rivalries
provide many of us with an endless source of cultural narratives to ponder and
share. For many, episodes from the histories of favourite teams contextualize
the passages in our lives and link fathers and sons, teachers and students, longstanding residents and newcomers.152
Knowledge of teams from various cities, recognizing who the best NHL hockey players
were, having opinions on how the season would turn out, knowing something about the
progress of a prominent player’s career—all these had become widely recognized elements
of Canadian popular culture by the 1920s and 1930s. As people in all parts of the country
read about hockey in the newspaper, gathered outside telegraph offices for updates of
NHL games, and listened to the same hockey broadcasts on the radio, they developed a
feeling of having something in common as Canadians. “This sense of commonality has
fixed itself in the Canadian collective memory to the point where it has helped to build a
national popular culture,” write Gruneau and Whitson.153
By forging a unified world of sport in North America, the mass media also undercut
the importance of locale and region in shaping people’s experiences. Joshua Meyrowitz has
called attention to the fact that the development of the mass media
has decreased the significance of physical presence in the experience of people
and events. One can now be an audience to a social performance without being
physically present; one can communicate “directly” with others without meeting in the same place. As a result, the physical structures that once divided our
society into many distinct spatial settings for interaction have been greatly reduced in social significance.
“More and more, people are living in a national (or international) information-system rather
than in a local town or city,” he adds.154 In similar ways, the mass media fundamentally
transformed people’s perception of sport. The daily newspaper, the telegraph, and radio gave a
common experience to far more people than ever could assemble at a single stadium, ballpark,
or arena. When information was able to flow across great distances and spill over regional and
national boundaries, where people were had much less to do with what they knew and experienced. The media created new group identities by altering who shared information with
whom.155 A community of interest tied together by sport arose in Canada and the United
States. This world of sport reached beyond local spheres and spanned national borders; it
included people in Edmonton and Toronto, Winnipeg and Los Angeles, Regina and Chicago.
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Similarly, the emergence of a wider sport universe helped to alter people’s perceptions
of the world around them by encouraging them to see their public world from a national
or international perspective. Sport reporting defined its frame of reference beyond the
local level by including items like international rowing regattas and American baseball in
its regular survey of events. As a result, sport coverage “conveyed a sense of participation in
national and international communities of interest.”156 People everywhere in North America
began to share a common experience of sport. A hockey game in Boston mattered to
someone in Calgary; a Babe Ruth home run was noted in Saskatoon as well as in New
York. By elevating athletes and events to national prominence, newspapers and radio “helped
to push major-league sports to the forefront of a popular culture that was increasingly
national in its orientation.”157 As a result, sport transcended local meanings and identities,
and drew Canadians into a national—even continental—popular culture.
By focusing on the experiences of the people of the Canadian Prairies, this article has
explored the role of the media in creating a “world of sport” and a Canadian national
popular culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The daily press built
the foundation for the world of sport on the Canadian Prairies by providing people with
sport news on a regular basis. Specialized sport departments and national and international wire services made new kinds of sport information available to larger and larger
audiences. Telegraph reconstructions gave people a sense of being involved in events as
they occurred. And commercial radio broadcasting elevated the public visibility of leagues
and athletes to a new level by carrying “live” broadcasts of games to listeners throughout
the continent. The end result of these interrelated developments was a far-reaching sport
information system that linked people together in an imagined community of interest.
This sport information system was also part of a Canadian national popular culture that
emerged at about the same time-a national popular culture which, like the world of
sport, shared a number of important elements with the developing American popular
culture.
This change in how sport was experienced significantly recast the collective identifications associated with sport. Like the “Communications Revolution” to which it was
linked, this world of sport was “a new way of thinking about the world.”158 The development of the daily press, the telegraph, and radio led to a much more widespread dissemination of sporting news. Geographic barriers broke down; people in all parts of North
America essentially had access to the same sport information system. By shattering the
connections between places of residence and common experiences, the mass media radically altered the cultural identities attached to sport. Local sport happenings were still
important, but they now had to be considered in the context of the “nationally important”
events which formed the cornerstone of the new sporting universe. In turn, this broadbased sport information system contributed to the building of both a national, Canadian
popular culture and a shared, North American popular culture. And people on the Canadian Prairies could participate in an integrated world of sport that consisted of leagues,
teams, athletes, and events in cities across the continent.
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1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
AND
SPORT, 1870-1939
I am indebted to David Whitson for suggesting to me the application of the phrase “world of sport”
in this particular context. In popular usage, “world of sport” is a general expression which refers to a
vast range of activities, events, and personalities connected with sport—most prominently, perhaps,
the long-running television program “Wide World of Sports.” The phrase is common in everyday
conversation and writing about sport. In this paper, I employ the term “world of sport” in a more
specific way to denote various, far-reaching manifestations of sport in popular culture. My usage of
the term is very similar to that of David Whitson and Donald Macintosh, who explore briefly the
“world of sport” which developed out of continentaI media coverage of “big league” professional
sport in North America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, See David Whitson
and Donald Macintosh, “Becoming a World-Class City: Hallmark Events and Sport Franchises in
the Growth Strategies of Western Canadian Cities,” Sociology of Sport Journal 10, no. 3 (1993):
224-25.
In a slightly different application of the phrase “world of sport,” Richard Gruneau and David Whitson
discuss the emergence of “a unified world of sport” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They use the expression “world of sport” to describe, first, the development of standardized
forms of modern sporting competition and, second, the erosion of a clear distinction between
professional and amateur sports. See Richard Gruneau and David Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada:
Sport, Identities, and Cultural Politics (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1993), 61-63, 83-84.
I have borrowed the term “information system” from Joshua Meyrowitz’s No Sense of Place: The
Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. However, I use “information system” in a slightly
different context than Meyrowitz, and I have applied the term in a more general way. In his study of
the social and behavioral impact of the electronic media, Meyrowitz adopts the expression “information system” to refer to “social situations”—the social environments or contexts (not merely the
physical locations) in which certain types of behavior are expected and exhibited. He defines information systems as “set patterns of access to information about others,” and talks about information
“in the sense of social information, that which we know about the behavior and actions of ourselves
and others.” This notion of situations as information systems enables Meyrowitz to extend his
analysis of social behavior beyond place-bound settings, and to assess interactions which occur
through the media. As Meyrowitz explains, “The concept of information-systems suggests that
physical settings and media ‘settings’ are part of a continuum rather than a dichotomy. Places and
media both foster set patterns of interaction among people, set patterns of social information flow.”
My primary concern in this paper is with the “media settings” and “information flow” surrounding
sport. Again, I am indebted to David Whitson for suggesting to me this application of Meyrowitz’s
work. See Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), especially 35-38, 332-35; Whitson and Macintosh,
“Becoming a World-Class City,” 225-26.
My terminology here is influenced by Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983).
In this paper, “Canadian Prairies” refers to the region encompassed by present-day Manitoba,
Saskatchewan, and Alberta.
Protestant English-speaking settlers—primarily from Ontario, but also from Great Britain and the
United States—constituted the dominant culture on the Canadian prairies in this period. Their
goal was to implant “British” culture in the North-West—to foster a sense of “Britishness” on the
Canadian plains. See Morris Mott, “The British Protestant Pioneers and the Establishment of Manly
Sports in Manitoba, 1870-1886,” Journal of Sport History 7, no. 3 (1980): 25-36; Patrick A. Dunae,
Gentlemen Emigrants: From the British Public Schools to the Canadian Frontier (Vancouver: Douglas
&1 McIntyre, 1981); Donald G. Wetherell and Irene Kmet, Useful Pleasures Shaping of leisure
in Alberta 1896-1945 (Regina: Alberta Culture and Multiculturalism/Canadian Plains Research
Center, 1990), especially xv-xxiv, 3-13, 125-28, 131, 160-61. For an examination of sport, games,
and leisure among the native peoples and fur traders in the region prior to the late nineteenth
century, see Morris Mott, “Games and Contests of the First ‘Manitobans’,” in Sports in Canada:
Summer 2000
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Historical Readings, ed. Morris Mott (Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman, 1989), 18-27; Michael Payne,
“The Sports, Games, Recreations, and Pastimes of the Fur Traders: Leisure at York Factory,” in
Sports in Canada: Historical Readings, ed. Morris Mott, (Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman, 1989), 5077.
7. Mott, “British Protestant Pioneers,” 25.
8. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer who helped me to clarify my ideas on this issue by
encouraging me to sharpen my argument about the connections between local experiences of sport
and the emerging “world of sport.”
9. A more comprehensive exploration of the role of sport in local communities is beyond the scope of
this article. On sport in prairie communities, see, for instance, Mott, “The British Protestant Pioneers,” 25-36; Morris Mott, “Flawed Games, Splendid Ceremonies: The Hockey Matches of the
Winnipeg Vics, 1890-1903,” Prairie Forum 10, no. 1 (1985): 169-87; Morris Mott, “One Town’s
Team: Souris and Its Lacrosse Club, 1887-1906,” Manitoba History 1 (1980): 10-16; Morris Mott,
“One Solution to the Urban Crisis: Manly Sports and Winnipeggers, 1900-1914,” Urban History
Review 12, no. 2 (1983): 57-70; Wetherell and Kmet, Useful Pleasures, 123-61; Carl Betke, “Sports
Promotion in the Western Canadian City: The Example of Early Edmonton,” Urban History Review 12, no. 2 (1983): 47-56; Carl Betke, “The Social Significance of Sport in the City: Edmonton
in the 1920s,” in A.R. McCormack and Ian MacPherson, eds., Cities in the West: Papers of the
Western Canadian Urban History Conference-University of Winnipeg, October 1974 (Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1975), 211-35; William M. McLennan, Sport in Early Calgary (Calgary:
Forr Brisebois Publishing, 1983); Brant E. Ducey, The Rajah of Renfrew: The Life and Times of John
E. Ducey Edmonton’s “Mr. Baseball” (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1998); Paul Voisey,
Vulcan: The Making of a Prairie Community (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988).
10. For a useful introduction to various approaches to the study of culture, see Gruneau and Whitson,
Hockey Night in Canada, especially 1-30; J.M. Bumsted, “Toward an Understanding of Popular
Culture,” Alberta 2, no. 1 (1989): 1-15; John Clarke, “Pessimism Versus Populism: The Problematic Politics of Popular Culture,” in For Fun and Profit: The Transformation of Leisure Into Consumption, ed. Richard Butsch (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 2844; John Storey, An
Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1993); M. Ann Hall et al., Sport in Canadian Society (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991), 2647.
11. For review articles examining recent work in the field of sport history, see Patricia A. Vertinsky,
“Gender Relations, Women’s History and Sport History: A Decade of Changing Enquiry, 19831993,” Journal of Sport History 21, no. 1 (1994): 1-24; Roberta J. Park, “A Decade of the Body:
Researching and Writing About the History of Health, Fitness, Exercise and Sport, 1983-1993,”
Journal of Sport History 21, no. 1 (1994): 59-82; Larry R. Gerlach, “Not Quite Ready for Prime
Time: Baseball History, 1983-1993,” Journal of Sport History 21, no. 2 (1994): 103-37; Steven A.
Riess, “From Pitch to Putt: Sport and Class in Anglo-American Sport,” Journal of Sport History 21,
no. 2 (1994): 138-84; Jeffrey T. Sammons, “‘Race’ and Sport: A Critical, Historical Examination,”
Journal of Sport History 21, no. 3 (1994): 203-78; John Hoberman, “Toward a Theory of Olympic
Internationalism,” Journal of Sport History 22, no. 1 (1995): 1-37; Catriona M. Parratt, “About
Turns: Reflecting on Sport History in the 1990s,” Sport History Review 29, no. 1 (1998): 4-17.
12. A number of valuable historical studies of Canadian sport have been published in recent years. See,
for example, Mott, “The British Protestant Pioneers,” 25-36; Gerald Redmond, The Sporting Scots
of Nineteenth-Century Canada (East Brunswick, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1982); Helen
Lenskyj, Out of Bounds: Women, Sport and Sexuality (Toronto: The Women’s Press, 1986); Alan
Metcalfe, Canada Learns to Play: The Emergence of Organized Sport, 1807-1914 (Toronto: McClelland
and Stewart, 1987); Don Morrow, “The Knights of the Snowshoe: A Study of the Evolution of
Sport in Nineteenth Century Montreal,” Journal of Sport History 15, no. 1 (1988): 540; Michael
Smith, “Graceful Athleticism or Robust Womanhood: The Sporting Culture of Women in Victorian Nova Scotia, 1870-1914,” Journal of Canadian Studies 23, nos. 1-2 (1988): 120-37; Cohn D.
Howell, “Baseball, Class and Community in the Maritime Provinces, 1870-1910,” Histoire
218
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SPORT, 1870-1939
sociale—Social History 22, no. 44 (1989): 265-86; Colin D. Howell, Northern Sandlots: A Social
History of Maritime Baseball (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995); David Mills, “The Blue
Line and the Bottom Line: Entrepreneurs and the Business of Hockey in Canada, 1927-90,” in
Paul Staudohar and J.A. Mangan, ed.s., The Business of Professional Sports (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1991), 139-61; Nancy B. Bouchier, “‘The 24th of May Is the Queen’s Birthday’:
Civic Holidays and the Rise of Amateurism in Nineteenth-Century Canadian Towns,” International Journal of the History of Sport 10, no. 2 (1993): 159-92; Nancy B. Bouchier, “Idealized Middle
Class Sport for a Young Nation: Lacrosse in Nineteenth-Century Ontario Towns, 1871-1891,”
Journal of Canadian Studies 29, no. 2 (1994): 89-110; Douglas A. Brown, “Thoroughbred HorseRacing Receives an Imperialist Nod: The Parliamentary Debate on Legalizing Gambling in Canada,
1910,” International Journal of the History of Sport 11, no. 2 (1994): 252-69; Patricia A. Vertinsky,
The Eternally Wounded Woman: Women, Doctors, and Exercise in the Late Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); William Humber, Diamond- of the North: A Concise History
of Baseball in Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1995); Stacy L. Lorenz, “‘Bowing Down
to Babe Ruth: Major League Baseball and Canadian Popular Culture, 1920-1929,” Canadian
Journal of History of Sport 23, no. 1 (1995): 22-39; K.B. Wamsley, “Cultural Signification and
National Ideologies: Rifle-Shooting in Late Nineteenth-Century Canada,” Social History 20, no. 1
(1995): 63-72; Kevin B. Wamsley and Michael K. Heine, “Sabbath Legislation and State Formation in 19th Century Canada,” Avante 1, no. 2 (1995): 44-57; Bruce Kidd, The Struggle for Canadian Sport (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); Robin John Anderson, “‘On the Edge of
the Baseball Map’ with the 1908 Vancouver Beavers,” Canadian Historical Review 77, no. 4 (1996):
538-74. See also Don Morrow, “Canadian Sport History: A Critical Essay,” Journal of Sport History
10, no. 1 (1983): 67-79; Sports in Canada: Historical Readings, ed. Morris Mott (Toronto: Copp
Clark Pitman, 1989); Don Morrow et al., A Concise History of Sport in Canada (Toronto: Oxford
University Press, 1989); K.B. Wamsley, ed., Method and Methodology in Sport and Cultural History
(Dubuque: Brown & Benchmark, 1995).
13. On the reluctance of Canadian academics to study sport and its role in Canadian culture, see
Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, 3-7, 11-14, 23-27. Gruneau and Whitson’s
outstanding analysis of hockey and Canadian culture is a notable exception to the rule. Their book
breaks new ground in the study of Canadian sport and popular culture. For examples of historical
work on sport and Canadian popular culture, see Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada,
especially 31-106; Howell, Northern Sandlots, especially 146-70, 196-31; Kidd, Struggle for Canadian Sport, especially 184-231, 254-61; Lorenz, “Bowing Down to Babe Ruth,” 22-39; John J.
MacAloon, “Popular Cultures of Olympic Sport in Canada and the United States,” in The Beaver
Bites Back? American Popular Culture in Canada, ed. David H. Flaherty and Frank E. Manning
(Montreal and Kingston: Queen’s University Press, 1993), 126-51; Robert Knight Barney, Whose
National Pastime? Baseball in Canadian Popular Culture,” in Flaherty and Manning, The Beaver
Bites Back?, 152-62; Robert Stebbins, “Ambivalence at the Fifty-Five-Yard Line: Transformation
and Resistance in Canadian Football,” in Flaherty and Manning, The Beaver Bites Back?, 163-74.
14. The most helpful discussions of the connections between media, sport. and culture in Canada can
be found in Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, especially Chapter 4, “Media, Audiences, and the NHL Monopoly,” 79-106. Most studies of the Canadian sports media have focused
on television, rather than newspapers or radio. See, for example, Garry J. Smith and Cynthia
Blackburn, Sport in the Mass Media (Ottawa: Canadian Association for Health, Physical Education
and Recreation, 1978); Susan Marie Nattrass, “Sport and Television in Canada: 1952 to 1982”
(Ph.D. diss., University of Alberta, 1988); Hart Cantelon and Richard Gruneau, “The Production
of Sport for Television,” in Jean Harvey and Hart Cantelon, eds., Not Just A Game (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1988); Richard Gruneau, “Making Spectacle: A Case Study in Television
Sports Production,” in Media, Sports, and Society, ed. Lawrence A. Wenner (Newbury Park: Sage,
1989), 134-54; Paul Rutherford, When Television Was Young: Primetime Canada 1952-1967 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1990), especially “Hockey and the Male Ethos,” 241-55; Margaret
MacNeill, “Networks: Producing Olympic Ice Hockey for a National Television Audience,” Sociology of Sport Journal 13, no. 2 (1996): 103-24.
Summer 2000
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15. On the development of the modern mass press in Canada, see P.F.W. Rutherford, “The People’s
Press: The Emergence of the New Journalism in Canada, 1869-99,” Canadian Historical Review
56, no. 2 (1975): 169-91; Paul Rutherford, The Making of the Canadian Media (Toronto: McGrawHill Ryerson, 1978); Paul Rutherford, A Victorian Authority: The Daily Press in Late Nineteenth-Century
Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982); Mary Vipond, The Mass Media in Canada
(Toronto: James Lorimer, 1989); Minko Sotiron, From Politics to Profit: The Commercialization of
Canadian Dairy Newspapers, 189~1920 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997).
16. On the nature of the press in British North America, see Rutherford, Making of the Canadian
Media, 1-37, Vipond, Mass Media in Canada, 1-11, W.H. Kesterton, A History of Journalism in
Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1967), 1-26.
17. Rutherford, Making of the Canadian Media, 9, 49; Kesterton, History of Journalism in Canada, 54.
18. D.M. Loveridge, A Historical Directory of Manitoba Newspapers, 1859-1978 (Winnipeg: University
of Manitoba Press, 1981), 121, 123; Manitoba Free Press, 6 Jul. 1874, 2.
19. Gloria M. Strathern, Alberta Newspapers 1880-1982: An Historical Directory (Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 1988), 28-29, 461.
20. Rutherford, Victorian Authority, 45.
21. Ibid., 67, 75. The average daily circulation of the urban newspaper increased from approximately
1,500 copies in the early 1870s to about 5,000 copies in the late 1890s. The standard size of newspapers also grew in this period, from four pages to eight or more, especially on Saturday. See Rutherford, “The People’s Press,” 171.
22. On the development of daily newspapers in Great Britain and the United States, see Alan J. Lee, The
Origins of the Popular Press in England 1855-1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1976); Frank Luther
Mott, American Journalism: A History, 1690-1960, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1962); Michael
Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books,
1978); Dan Schiller, Objectivity and the News: The Public and the Rise of Commercial Journalism
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981); Gerald J. Baldasty, The Commercialization of
the News in the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992).
23. Vipond, Mass Media in Canada, 11.
24. Rutherford, Making of the Canadian Media, 49; Rutherford, “People’s Press,” 173-74; Sotiron,
From Politics to Profit, 77-79. The Canadian popular press developed somewhat later than its American
counterpart. On the impact of such factors as printing technology, paper manufacturing capacity,
industrial growth, urbanization, and literacy on the development of the press in Canada, see Ruth
erford, Victorian Authority 9-35, 40-42; Rutherford, “The People’s Press,” 170-72, 189-90; Rutherford, Making of the Canadian Media, 7-8, 48; Vipond, Mass Media in Canada, 4-11, 18-19.
25. Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, 82.
26. Sotiron, From Politics to Profit, 10. For a more detailed discussion of the characteristics separating
the new class of popular papers from the traditional party journals, see Rutherford, “The People’s
Press,” especially 173-81; Rutherford, Victorian Authority, especially 51-57, 68-69; Rutherford,
Making of the Canadian Media, 15, 18-21, 49; Vipond, Mass Media in Canada, 11-15; Sotiron,
From Politics to Profit, 10-22, 28-29, 119-121, 57.
27. On coverage of sport in newspapers, magazines, and specialty journals in the United States
during the nineteenth century, see Robert W. McChesney, “Media Made Sport: A History of
Sports Coverage in the United States,” in Wenner, Media, Sports, and Society, 50-54; Elliott
J. Gorn and Warren Goldstein, A Brief History of American Sports (New York: Hill and Wang,
1993), 53, 67-68, 108, 114-19; Jack W. Berryman, “The Tenuous Attempts of Americans to
‘Catch Up With John Bull’: Specialty Magazines and Sporting Journalism, 1800-1835,”
Canadian Journal of History of Sport and Physical Education 10 (May 1979): 40-61; William
J. Baker, Sports in the Western World (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982), 109; Benjamin G. Rader, In Its Own Image: How Television Has Transformed Sports (New York: The
Free Press, 1984), 18-20.
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28. By 1900, advertising revenue made up about two-thirds of the total income of Canadian newspapers, and after World War I, advertising usually accounted for 75 to 85 per cent of a daily paper’s
total revenues. See Vipond, Mass Media in Canada, 15-18; Rutherford, Victorian Authority, 97-99;
Sotiron, From Politics to Profit, 62, 157.
29. See, for instance, Paul Rutherford’s content analysis of various newspapers in Toronto and Montreal
during this time period. At mid-century, colonial newspapers contained virtually no sports coverage. However, when editors and publishers started to recognize that more sports news could mean
higher circulation figures, coverage of sport began to increase. For instance, in 1871, the Montreal
Gazette devoted 4.0% of its information to sports coverage, and the Montreal Star-Canada’s first
successful foray into popular journalism—allotted 4.8% of its contents to sport. By 1896, sports
information constituted 9.9% of the news coverage in the Montreal Gazette and 10.4% in the
Montreal Herald. Similarly, French Canada’s most successful people’s journal, La Presse, dedicated
10.3% of its contents to sport and recreation. See Rutherford, Victorian Authority, 39, 44-53, 70.
30. John B. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 178. See also Sotiron, From Politics to Profit, 67, 52-49,
157.
31. Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, 82.
32. Ibid., 83.
33. Rutherford, Victorian Authority, 57.
34. See Rutherford, “The People’s Press,” 189; Vipond, Mass Media in Canada, 14-15; Rutherford,
Victorian Authority, 71-77, 126-28, 132-39, 149-55; Rutherford, Making of the Canadian Media,
50; Sotiron, From Politics to Profit, 14-22.
35. Rutherford, Victorian Authority, 77; Rutherford, Making of the Canadian Media, 53. See also Rutherford, “The People’s Press,” 190-91; Vipond, Mass Media in Canada, 15.
36. The most important weekly papers in the North-West during this time period were the Saskatchewan
Herald, published in Battleford (established in 1878), Edmonton Bulletin (1880), Regina Leader
(1883), Lethbridge News (1885), and Medicine Hat Times (1885). See Christine MacDonald, Historical Directory of Saskatchewan Newspapers, 1878-1983 (Regina and Saskatoon: Saskatchewan
Archives Board, 1984), 3, 61; Strathern, Alberta Newspapers, 80, 161, 172.
37. Paul Voisey, “The Urbanization of the Canadian Prairies, 1871-1916,” Histoire sociale—Social History 8, no. 15 (1975): 83-84. On urban development in the Prairie West, see ibid., 77-101; Alan
F.J. Artibise, “The Urban West: The Evolution of Prairie Towns and Cities to 1930,” Prairie Forum
4, no. 2 (1979): 237-62; Max Foran, “The CPR and the Urban West, 1881-1930,” in Readings in
Canadian History: Post-Confederation, 2d ed., ed. R. Douglas Francis and Donald B. Smith (Toronto:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1986), 273-89; Alan F.J. Artibise, “Boosterism and the Development
of Prairie Cities, 1871-1913,” The Prairie West: Historical Readings, 2d ed., R. Douglas Francis and
Howard Palmer (Edmonton: Pica Press, 1992), 515-43.
38. Voisey, “The Urbanization of the Canadian Prairies,” 84.
39. Loveridge, Historical Directory of Manitoba Newspapers, 124, 126, 131, 134-35; Strathern, Alberta
Newspapers, 26-34, 461; Rutherford, Victorian Authority, 61, 66, 71, 88, 239-40; Sotiron, From
Politics to Profit, 83-84, 95-97.
40. Strathern, Alberta Newspapers, 80-81, 162, 173, 461; MacDonald, Historical Directory of Saskatchewan
Newspapers, 61, 65-66, 71.
41. Rutherford, Victorian Authority, 76.
42. See ibid., 69-71, 138-39.
43. Rutherford, “The People’s Press,” 178.
44. Rutherford, Victorian Authority, 74, 138-40, 151; Rutherford, Making of the Canadian Media, 6061; Sotiron, From Politics to Profit, 17.
45. See, for example, Montreal Star, 4 Jul. 1895, 3; 15 Jul. 1895.3; Montreal Gazette, 3 Jul. 1895, 5; 8
Jul. 1895, 5; Toronto Globe, 24 Jun. 1895, 6; 13 Aug. 1895, 6; Toronto World, 20 May 1895, 3; 21
Summer 2000
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46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
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May 1895, 3; Manitoba Free Press, 3 Jul. 1895, 5; 19 Jul. 1895, 5; Winnipeg Tribune, 24 Jun. 1895,
4; 10 Sep. 1895, 4. Those newspapers which had not yet developed a separate sports page usually
printed a special column or two of sport-related material instead. See, for example, Toronto News, 9
Apr. 1895, 3; 10 Jun. 1895, 3, 6; Victoria Colonist, 27 Jun. 1895, 5; 29 Jun. 1895, 8; Saint John
Sun, 25 Jul. 1895, 5; 30 Jul. 1895, 5.
See, for example, Regina Leader, 22 Jun. 1910, 3; 15 Jul. 1910, 3; Saskatoon Phoenix, 2 Jul. 1910, 9;
29 Jul. 1910, 5; Calgary Herald, 5 Jul. 1910, 3; 11 Aug. 1910, 10; Edmonton Bulletin, 8 Jul. 1910,
7; 28 Jul. 1910, 7.
See, for example Regina Leader, 6 Aug. 1910, “Sports Section,” 1-3; Manitoba Free Press, 9 Jul.
1910, “Sporting Section,” 1-8; 30 Jul. 1910, “Sporting Section,” 1-4; Winnipeg Tribune, 2 Jul.
1910, 11-14.
Vipond, Mass Media in Canada, 5; Rutherford, Making of the Canadian Media, 8; Rutherford,
Victorian Authority, 41; Wetherell and Kmet, Useful Pleasures, 20.
Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, 84.
William Humber, Cheering for the Home Team: The Story of Baseball in Canada (Erin, Ont.: Boston
Mills Press, 1983), 42.
Vipond, Mass Media in Canada, 5.
Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place, 116.
On the growth of Canada’s wire services, see Rutherford, Victorian Authority, 113, 132-34, 141;
Kesterton, History of Journalism in Canada, 158-61; Rutherford, Making of the Canadian Media,
54-55; Sotiron, From Politics to Profit, 99-102.
Rutherford, Victorian Authority, 141.
Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, 84.
Victoria Colonist, 8 Sep. 1892, 8. See also Wetherell and Kmet, Useful Pleasures, 139.
See S.F. Wise and Douglas Fisher, Canada’s Sporting Heroes (Don Mills: General Publishing Company, 1974), 104-05; Frank Cosentino, “Ned Hanlan—Canada’s Premier Oarsman: A Case Study
in Nineteenth Century Professionalism,” Ontario History 66, no. 4 (1974): 241-50; Don Morrow
et al., A Concise History of Sport in Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989), 31-40; Metcalfe,
Canada Learns to Play, 172-80.
Manitoba Free Press, 15 Nov. 1880, 4. See also Manitoba Free Press, 15 Nov. 1880, 4; 16 Nov. 1880,
4; 18 Nov. 1880, 1.
Manitoba Free Press, 2 Jul. 1880, 4.
Manitoba Free Press, 8 Nov. 1880, 4.
Manitoba Free Press, 8 Jul. 1895, 3, 5.
By the 1890s the urban underworlds hold on prizefighting had been broken, and boxing was
coming to be seen as a more respectable sport. On nineteenth century boxing, see Elliott J. Gorn,
The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986);
Jeffrey T. Sammons, Beyond the Ring; The Role of Boxing in American Society (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1988); Michael T. Isenberg, John L. Sullivan and His America (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1988).
Corn and Goldstein, Brief History of American Sports, 124.
New York Herald quoted in Gorn, Manly Art, 243.
Winnipeg Tribune, 7 Sep. 1892, 5.
Winnipeg Tribune, 8 Sep. 1892, 4-5. The Tribune also carried a number of follow-up articles in the
days after the match. See Winnipeg Tribune, 9 Sep., 1892, 1; 10 Sep. 1892, 5.
Manitoba Free Press, 8 Sep. 1892, 5.
Regina Leader, 8 Sep. 1892, 1; Edmonton Bulletin, 8 Sep. 1892, 1. Both of these papers were
published twice a week during this period.
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69. Compare, for example, Montreal Star, 8 Sep. 1892, 4; Manitoba Free Press, 8 Sep. 1892, 5; Montreal
Gazette, 8 Sep. 1892, 8; Toronto Telegram, 8 Sep. 1892, 4.
70. Winnipeg Tribune, 8 Sep. 1892, 2. See also Regina Leader, 12 Sep. 1892, 4.
71. One survey of American sports coverage “showed that the average newspaper devoted 0.04% of its
editorial coverage to sport in 1880 and 4.0% in 1900, [and] by the 1920s the proportion of editorial space ranged from 12% to 20% for virtually every newspaper.” See McChesney, “Media Made
Sport,” 57.
72. An American survey conducted in the 1930s found that 80% of all male newspaper readers read
some portion of the sports section on a frequent basis. In addition, a 1940s survey of American
circulation managers indicated their belief that 25% of all newspapers were sold on the basis of their
sports pages. See ibid., 56.
73. Benjamin G. Rader, American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Spectators (Englewood
Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1983), 199.
74. See Morrow et al., Concise History of Sport in Canada, 101; Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in
Canada, 83-85, 95-96; McChesney, “Media Made Sport,” 54-59; Rader, American Sports, 199200.
75. Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, 96.
76. John Herd Thompson and Allen Seager, Canada 1922-1939; Decades of Discord (Toronto:
McClelland and Stewart, 1985), 185; George Bain, “Of Baron Reuter and the Blue Jays,” Report on
Business Magazine 3, no. 6 (1986): 29-31; Paul Rutherford, “Made in America: The Problem of
Mass Culture in Canada,” in Flaherty and Manning, The Beaver Bites Back?, 263.
77. See Calgary Herald, 16 Jul. 1910, 9; 13 Aug. 1910, 12; Edmonton Bulletin, 6 Jul. 1910, 7; 29 Jul.
1910, 9; Saskatoon Phoenix, 28 Jul. 1910, 5; 29 Jul. 1910, 5.
78. Betke, “Sports Promotion in the Western Canadian City,” 55. Betke’s analysis here is based mainly
on a sample of newspapers from 1913.
79. Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, 95; McChesney, “Media Made Sport,” 54.
80. See, for example, Manitoba Free Press, 22 Sep. 1927, 1, 20-21; 23 Sep. 1927, 1-2, 19, 21; 24 Sep.
1927, 1, 26-28; Edmonton Journal, 22 Sep. 1927, 1, 19; 23 Sep. 1927, 1, 15, 22; 24 Sep. 1927,
30-31; Edmonton Bulletin, 22 Sep. 1927, 10; 23 Sep. 1927, 1, 10-13; 24 Sep. 1927, 16-17. See
also Bruce J. Evensen, When Dempsey Fought Tunney: Heroes, Hokum, and Storytelling in the Jazz Age
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996).
81. Edmonton Journal, 22 Sep. 1927, “Fight Extra,” 1-4; 23 Sep. 1927, 1, 15.
82. See, for example, Manitoba Free Press, 18 Jul. 1924, 18; 19 Jul. 1924, 22-23; 21 Jul. 1924, 14; 22
Jul. 1924, 15; 30 Jul. 1928, 15; 31 Jul. 1928, 17; 2 Aug. 1928, 17; Calgary Herald, 28 Jul. 1928, 6;
30 Jul. 1928, 1; 31 Jul. 1928, 1, 6; 1 Aug. 1928, 1, 6; 2 Aug. 1928, 6; Edmonton Journal, 30 Jul.
1928, 1-2; 31 Jul. 1928, 1, 14-15; 1 Aug. 1928, 1, 9, 17.
83. Local coverage of women’s sport also grew significantly during the interwar period, as a number of
Canadian newspapers enlisted female sports columnists—usually former athletes—to report on
women’s sporting activities. These included Phyllis Grifftths (Toronto Telegram, 1928-42), Alexandrine Gibb (Toronto Star, 1929-40), Myrtle Cook (Montreal Star, 1929-68), Fanny “Bobbie”
Rosenfeld (Montreal Herald, 1932-33, Toronto Globe and Mail, 1937-59), Gladys Gigg Ross (Capital
News, North Bay, dates unknown), Lillian “Jimmy” Coo (Winnipeg Free Press, 1937-42, 194647), Patricia Page Hollingsworth (Edmonton Journal, 1935-40), Anne Stott (Vancouver Sun, 193941), and Ruth Wilson (Vancouver Sun, 1943-45). Gibb’s column in the Toronto Star, for instance,
was titled, “In the No Man’s Land of Sport: News and Views of Women’s Sporting Activities.” See
M. Ann Hall, “Creators of the Lost and Perfect Game? Gender, History, and Canadian Sport,” in
Sport and Gender in Canada, ed. Philip White and Kevin Young (Don Mills: Oxford University
Press, 1999), 15-16, 18, 20; Kidd, Struggle for Canadian Sport, 97, 101. Useful studies of women’s
sport in the first half of the twentieth century include Kidd, “‘Girls’ Sports Run by Girls,“’ chap. 3
in Struggle for Canadian Sport, 94-145; Helen Lenskyj, “Common Sense and Physiology: North
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American Medical Views on Women and Sport, 1890-1930,” Canadian Journal of History of Sport
21, no. 1 (1990): 49-64; Helen Lenskyj, “Femininity First: Sport and Physical Education for Ontario
Girls, 1890-1930,” in Mott, Sports in Canada: Historical Readings 187-200; Susan K. Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport (New York: The Free Press,
1994).
84. See, for example, Manitoba Free Press, 1 Aug. 1928, 25; Calgary Herald, 31 Jul. 1928, 1, 6, 9; 1 Aug.
1928, 1, 7; 2 Aug. 1928, 6; Edmonton Journal, 1 Aug. 1928, 17. However, the outstanding sprint
results posted by Rosenfeld and Smith were overshadowed by the stunning success of Percy Williams, who won both the men’s 100 meters and 200 meters at these Olympic Games.
85. See, for example, Calgary Herald, 6 Aug. 1928, 1, 6; 7 Aug. 1928, 6; Manitoba Free Press, 6 Aug.
1928, 14; 8 Aug. 1928, 6; Edmonton Journal, 7 Aug. 1928, 1, 10. See also Ron Hotchkiss, “‘The
Matchless Six’: Canadian Women at the Olympics, 1928,” The Beaver 73, no. 5 (1993): 23-42. For
an interesting examination of American newspaper coverage of female athletes at the next Olympic
Games, see David B. Welky, “Viking Girls, Mermaids, and Little Brown Men: U.S. Journalism and
the 1932 Olympics,” Journal of Sport History 24, no. 1 (1997): 24-49.
86. See Varda Burstyn, The Rites of Men: Manhood, Politics, and the Culture of Sport (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1999), especially chap. 4, “Delivering the Male: Sport Culture, the Mass Media,
and the Masculinity Market,” 103-31.
87. Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, 85. See also Gorn and Goldstein, Brief History of
American Sports, 188-97; Rader, American Sports, 199.
88. See “Sports Heroes and American Culture, 1890-1940,” chap. 11 in Major Problems in American
Sport History: Documents and Essays, ed. Steven A. Riess (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1997), 309-37; Evensen, When Dempsey Fought Tunney; Mark Dyreson, “The Emergence of Consumer Culture and the Transformation of Physical Culture: American Sport in the 1920s.” Journal
of Sport History 16, no. 3 (1983): 261-81; Benjamin G. Rader, “Compensatory Sports Heroes:
Ruth, Grange, and Dempsey,” Journal of Popular Culture 16, no. 1 (1983): 11-22; Warren I. Susman,
Culture As History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York:
Pantheon, 1984), 141-49, 271-85.
89. Kidd, Struggle for Canadian Sport, 230.
90. On the early development of radio in Canada, see Mary Vipond, Listening In: The First Decade of
Canadian Broadcasting, 1922-1932 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992);
Michael Nolan, “An Infant Industry: Canadian Private Radio, 1919-36,” Canadian Historical Review 70, no. 4 (1989): 496518; Bill McNeil and Morris Wolfe, The Birth of Radio in Canada:
Signing On (Toronto: Doubleday, 1982); Wetherell and Kmet, Useful Pleasures, 281-308.
91. Robert Bothwell, Ian Drummond, and John English, Canada, 1900-1945 (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1987), 284.
92. Rutherford, Making of the Canadian Media, 80; Vipond, Mass Media in Canada, 39; Kidd, Struggle
for Canadian Sport, 223.
93. Wetherell and Kmet, Useful Pleasures, 290.
94. Thompson and Seager, Canada 1922-1939, 181-82.
95. Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, 95-96.
96. See, for example, Edmonton Journal, 22 Sep. 1927, 1, 19; 23 Sep. 1927, 1, 15.
97. Evensen, When Dempsey Fought Tunney, ix, xv-xvii, 123.
98. Ibid., ix. See also ibid., 84-92.
99. Ibid., 109-10.
100. Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, 97.
101. David Q. Voigt, “Out With the Crowds: Counting, Courting and Controlling Ball Park Fans,” in
Baseball History 2: An Annual of Original Baseball Research, ed. Peter Levine (Westport: Meckler,
1989), 112; Rader, American Sports, 198.
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102. Gorn and Goldstein, Brief History of American Sports, 195. See also McChesney, “Media Made
Sport,” 59.
103. Rader, In Its Own Image, 24-25.
104. Vipond, Mass Media in Canada, 41.
105. See ibid., 41-43.
106. Annual Report of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for the Fiscal Year Ended March 31, 1938
(Ottawa: The King’s Printer, 1938), 11.
107. Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, 100. See also Kidd, Struggle for Canadian Sport,
222-23, 254-55; Scott Young, The Boys of Saturday Night: Inside Hockey Night in Canada (Toronto:
Macmillan, 1990), 38-63.
108. Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, 101.
109. Kidd, Struggle for Canadian Sport, 223, 254-59; Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada,
101.
110. Kidd, Struggle for Canadian Sport, 223.
111. Nattrass, “Sport and Television in Canada,” 30.
112. Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, 101.
113. On baseball’s popularity as both a participatory and a spectator sport in cities, towns, and rural areas
across Canada, see Don Morrow, “Baseball,” chap. 6 in Morrow et al., Concise History of Sport in
Canada, 121-28; Metcalfe, Canada Learns to Play, 85-95; Howell, Northern Sandlots; Humber,
Diamonds of the North; Anderson, “On the Edge of the Baseball Map,” 538-74; Betke, “Sports
Promotion in the Western Canadian City,” 54.
114. In the first decades of the twentieth century, baseball was the sport that received the most coverage
in the Canadian press. See MetcaIfe, Canada Learns to Play, 85; Evelyn Janice Waters, “A Content
Analysis of the Sport Section in Selected Canadian Newspapers: 1926 to 1935” (M.A. thesis, University of Western Ontario, 1981), cited in Robert Knight Barney, “Diamond Rituals: Baseball in
Canadian Culture,” in Levine, Baseball History, 2, 10.
115.For a more detailed examination of this subject from a national perspective, see Lorenz, “Bowing
Down to Babe Ruth,” 22-39.
116. Morrow, “Baseball,” 131.
117. See, for example, Manitoba Free Press, 2 Aug. 1921, 14; Edmonton Bulletin, 6 Jul. 1923, 5; Calgary
Herald, 7 Sep. 1923, 16; Winnipeg Tribune, 11 Aug. 1927, 7.
118. See, for example, Manitoba Free Press, 20 Sep. 1921, 10; Calgary Herald, 3 Sep. 1923, 24-25;
Winnipeg Tribune, 31 Aug. 1925, 15; 13 Aug. 1927, 14-15; 20 Aug. 1927, 8.
119. See, for example, Calgary Herald, 12 Oct. 1926, 18; Saskatoon Phoenix, 21 Oct. 1925, 17; Winnipeg
Tribune, 8 Oct. 1927, 2-3.
120. See, for example, Manitoba Free Press, 24 Aug. 1921, 8; Winnipeg Tribune, 26 Sep. 1925, 15.
121. Manitoba Free Press, 9 Oct. 1925, 16. See also Winnipeg Tribune, 8 Oct. 1925, 15; Toronto Globe,
10 Oct. 1925, 4.
122. Toronto Star, 4 Oct. 1928, 12.
123. Thompson and Seager, Canada 1922-1939, 187.
124. Manitoba Free Press, 7 Oct. 1929, 1.
125. See, for example, Edmonton Journal, 5 Oct. 1921, 1; Manitoba Free Press, 9 Oct. 1925, 1; Winnipeg
Tribune, 6 Oct. 1927, 1; Calgary Herald, 9 Oct. 1929, 1. At the very least, the series received top
billing in the sports pages. See, for example, Regina Leader, 13 Oct. 1923, 20; Saskatoon Phoenix,
13 Oct. 1925, 11.
126. See, for example, Halifax Herald, 12 Oct. 1920, 1; Montreal Star, 10 Oct. 1925, 1; Toronto Star, 4
Oct. 1928, 13-14; Vancouver Sun, 10 Oct. 1921, 1; Vancouver Province, 10 Oct. 1923, 1, 16.
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127. See, for example, Edmonton Journal, 5 Oct. 1921, 1, 22; Regina Leader, 11 Oct. 1923, 11; Saskatoon Phoenix, 14 Oct. 1925, 13; Winnipeg Tribune, 6 Oct. 1927, 1; Calgary Herald, 9 Oct. 1929,
1.
128. See, for example, Edmonton Journal, 5 Oct. 1921, 23; Winnipeg Tribune, 6 Oct. 1927, 16; Manitoba
Free Press, 8 Oct. 1929, 10.
129. Calgary Herald, 1 Oct. 1926, 16; Thompson and Seager, Canada 1922-1939, 187.
130. W.A. Hewitt, Down the Stretch: Recollections of a Pioneer Sportsman and Journalist (Toronto: The
Ryerson Press, 1958), 135. See also Thompson and Seager, Canada 1922-1939, 187.
131. Winnipeg Tribune, 8 Oct. 1925, 15.
132. Manitoba Free Press, 4 Oct. 1926, 18. In addition, “It was only a few minutes later that the Free Press
Extra was on the street giving a detailed story of the game.”
133. Calgary Herald, 8 Oct. 1926, 22. See also Manitoba Free Press, 7 Oct. 1929, 1; Calgary Herald, 10
Oct. 1929, 1.
134. Manitoba Free Press, 7 Oct. 1929, 8. See also Manitoba Free Press, 8 Oct. 1929, 11; 11 Oct. 1929,
12; Calgary Herald, 9 Oct. 1929, 6; 11 Oct. 1929, 8.
135. Calgary Herald, 30 Sep. 1926, 16; 8 Oct. 1926, 22.
136. Voisey, Vulcan: The Making of a Prairie Community, 25.
137. See, for example, Manitoba Free Press, 8 Oct. 1929, 24.
138. See, for example, Calgary Herald, 10 Oct. 1929, 5. According to Thompson and Seager, “at northern RCMP detachments the Mounties got their daily bulletins over KDKA Pittsburgh.” See Thompson and Seager, Canada 1922-1939, 182.
139. Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, 79-80, 94-95, 251-52, 274; Sotiron, From Politics to Profit, 3, 58-61, 68, 75; Kidd, Struggle for Canadian Sport, 224-25; Dyreson, “The Emergence of Consumer Culture and the Transformation of Physical Culture,” 271-79.
140. Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, 95. For an excellent survey of Canadian cultural
affairs during the interwar period, see Thompson and Seager, Canada 1922-1939, especially chap.
8, “The Conundrum of Culture,” 158-92.
141. J.M. Bumsted, The Peoples Of Canada: A Post-Confederation History (Toronto: Oxford University
Press, 1992), 224.
142. Thompson and Seager, Canada 1922-1939, 182; Rutherford, “Made in Canada,” 266; Vipond,
Listening In, 74-77, 82, 96-97.
143. See Thompson and Seager, Canada 1922-1939, 175-80; Wetherell and Kmet, Useful Pleasures,
269-73, 278; Pierre Berton, Hollywood’s Canada: The Americanization of Our National Image
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975).
144. Robert Ayre, “The American Empire,” The Canadian Forum 7, no. 76 (1927), 105.
145. See Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey, Night in Canada, 86-103; Kidd, Struggle for Canadian Sport,
184-231, 267; Thompson and Seager, Canada 1922-1939, 187-90; Morrow et al., Concise History
of Sport in Canada, 190-98; Leslie Roberts, “Americanizing Canadian Sport,” The Canadian Magazine (Nov. 1931): 8, 41.
146. Kidd, Struggle for Canadian Sport, 258. For a thoughtful, critical assessment of the role of NHL
hockey—particularly national CBC radio broadcasts of NHL games—in Canadian social, cultural,
and sporting life during this period, see ibid., 226-29, 254-70.
147. Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, 101.
148. Kidd, Struggle for Canadian Sport, 259.
149. Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, 214-16.
150. For a discussion of the electronic media’s ability to construct new group identities based on information access rather than physical location, see Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place, 53-55, 131-49.
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151. See Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, 200-01, 214-21; Meyrowitz, No Sense of
Place, 144-46.
152. Kidd, Struggle for Canadian Sport, 227.
153. Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, 214. See also Kidd, Struggle for Canadian Sport,
259, 265-66.
154. Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place, vii, 146.
155. Ibid., viii, 55.
156. Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, 83.
157. Ibid., 96.
158. Susman, Culture As History, xx-xxi, 257.
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