Scheme to replace NHL with upstart league fizzled in 1920s

Legendary hockey reporter Stan Fischler writes a weekly scrapbook for NHL.com. Fischler, known as "The Hockey Maven," shares his humor and insight with readers each Wednesday. This week Fischler reveals how in its early stages the NHL was challenged by a new upstart professional hockey league.

In the early 1920s, the NHL was a four-team circuit struggling for recognition while susceptible to competition from wealthy sportsmen. One of them was Roy Schooley, a Pittsburgh-based mogul who owned a successful amateur team in the Steel City called the Yellow Jackets.

A native of Welland, Ontario, Schooley also managed Duquesne Gardens, a former Pittsburgh trolley car barn that was converted into a hockey arena. It was home to the Pittsburgh Yellow Jackets, winners of two straight amateur championships. Interestingly, in 1925, the Jackets would become the only team with an amateur rating to go as a unit to the NHL.

But before that rare event would take place, Schooley had big plans to scuttle the NHL and replace it with a professional league of his own. To do so, he hired Toronto-based Lionel Conacher, a gifted young defenseman and multisport hero, to be his frontman. (In 1950, Conacher was named Canada's athlete of the half-century.)

I discovered this story upon finding a dusty, 50-year-old volume in the back of a closet. It's called "The Hockey Book," by Wilfred Victor "Bill" Roche, who covered the NHL for various Canadian newspapers from the mid-1920s to 1940. Roche interviewed Conacher about Schooley's scheme to replace the NHL with a new circuit.

"Schooley was no fool," Conacher recalled. "In addition to his Yellow Jackets, he also was well-regarded among American hockey men and helped organize the United States Amateur Hockey League. Now he wanted to change the amateur circuit to an all-American pro league and then both oppose and raid the NHL."

The time was ripe for such a move. All four NHL teams were based in Canada and none boasted what would be considered a full-sized arena like the one blueprinted for a new Madison Square Garden near Times Square in Manhattan. It would be an ice palace that needed a hockey team as a tenant.

Schooley's plan was to dispatch 24-year-old Conacher from Pittsburgh to New York, where he'd meet with legendary MSG sports promoter Tex Rickard and the Garden president, Col. John Hammond. Conacher's mission was to talk the Gorden bosses into putting a Schooley franchise in the proposed new arena.

Conacher: "Roy knew that the new Garden would feature an artificial ice plant. Plus, it would have 15,000 seats and be the biggest hockey arena on the continent. Schooley figured that if he could win over Rickard, his new league not only would be off and running, it might even sink the NHL.

"Plus, he had the cooperation of two key amateur club and arena operators in Cleveland and Boston. Each had a roster that was strong enough to form the core of a competitive pro club."

But Schooley overestimated the bright yet naive Conacher, a babe in the cutthroat world of sports negotiating. Even worse, Lionel was up against Rickard, the master wheeler-dealer. It was like swimming with a shark.

In "The Hockey Book," Conacher asserted that he was quite confident about meeting with the MSG bosses. But it didn't take long for the hockey star to realize he was as far out of his element as the planet Jupiter.

"Unknowingly," Lionel admitted to author Roche, "like a bumpkin, I was pumped for all the information I possessed about the plans and prospects of Schooley and his group. The interviews with Rickard and Hammond were very one-sided affairs because Tex had a way of knowing things without telling anything himself.

"He made me lay all my cards on the table. Then he said that Schooley's planned pro league didn't have enough to offer him. In retrospect, I believe that if I had more experience, I would have convinced them to buy into the new league. But I was a boy up against the men."

In 1925, Rickard and Hammond -- along with bootleg king Big Bill Dwyer -- purchased the NHL's then-striking Hamilton Tigers for $75,000. They changed the name to the New York Americans and called the new Garden home. As for the failed Schooley ploy, a critic described Conacher's sales pitch as "one of the worst boners of all major sports promotion."

However, had Conacher succeeded, the whole face of pro hockey in North America would have changed. As for the demoralized Schooley, he sold his Yellow Jackets, and the new ownership entered the NHL in 1925. The Yellow Jackets were renamed the Pittsburgh Pirates and led by none other than defenseman-captain and failed negotiator Lionel Conacher. Other future NHL stars included Hall of Fame goalie Roy "Shrimp" Worters and forward Baldy Cotton.

Reflecting on his failed expedition, Schooley advised Conacher, "In the future, don't go alone on the sidewalks of New York because someone will steal the jockstrap right off you!"