sr edler
gold is not reality
- Mar 20, 2010
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Often times when people evaluate or judge an athlete’s career they put a lot of weight on mileage or longevity. So when a player, for one reason or another, had his or hers career shortened, then that can leave an open space for either criticism to be levelled or the imagination to run wild. The latter popularly known as a ”What if” scenario.
In the earlier eras of organised hockey there could be a variety of different reasons for a player not running the full mile, so to speak. Injuries, of course, but also military duty, an adverse outlook on professional sports in general, or just work life or business ventures taking up too much time.
Early examples of this includes Hobey Baker, of Princeton University, who despised the pro game, quit hockey altogether in 1916 at an age of 24 and died two years later in 1918 in a flying accident related to his service in World War I. Or scoring marvel ”One-Eyed” Frank McGee of the Ottawa Silver Seven, who quit hockey in 1906 at an age of 23 to focus on his work life, presumably pressured to do so by his parents. Or Allan ”Scotty” Davidson, captain of the Toronto Blueshirts, who died in World War I aged 24 with just two pro seasons under his belt.
All above mentioned players, despite their short careers in hockey, were still deemed either esteemed or famous enough to warrant induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. But there were less famous, but still nonetheless intriguing, cases as well of players having their careers in hockey shortened or compromised around this time. One such case, or rather one such player, was Kingston, Ontario native Herbert Secord Clarke, who quit the game in 1910, at the mere age of 22, after just one successful pro season in the National Hockey Association.
Herb Clarke, a centre forward position wise, was born in September 1887 and was a product of James T. Sutherland’s famous hockey factory in Kingston, a hockey stronghold that also turned out such famous puck chasers as Marty Walsh, George Richardson and Allan ”Scotty” Davidson. He was also the son of the well known psychiatrist Charles Kirk Clarke, who was Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto.
The Clarke family had strong connections to hockey. Not only did Herb’s two older brothers Charlie (born 1881) and Harold (born 1885) also play hockey at the senior level, but their father Charles Sr. also managed the Kingston Beechgrove Frontenacs junior championship squad in the Ontario Hockey Association in 1904 when both Harold and Herb were playing on the team.
Dr. Charles Kirk Clarke and Herb’s two older brothers Charlie (left) and Harold (right)
When Harold and Herb later entered the University of Toronto, they naturally became members of the school’s hockey team, Herb at centre ice and Harold on defence. At this point in time, in 1905–06, their older brother Charlie had already spent time with the Kingston Frontenacs and Queen’s College senior hockey teams, as well as with the New York Athletic Club and New York Wanderers in the American Amateur Hockey League, predominantly as a winger.
All three Clarke brothers were sturdily built lads, and all well above average size wise. For all intents and purposes, Herb Clarke possessed most all desirable traits you could wish for in a hockey player: size, skating, stick-handling, goal scoring touch, and a brainy ability for combination plays. And goals seemed to follow wherever he moved. Lots of them.
In 1906–07 and 1907–08, while playing for the University of Toronto team in the Canadian Intercollegiate Athletic Union, Herb Clarke scooped in a total amount of 49 goals in just 10 games, almost averaging 5 goals per game while leading the young Toronto students to back-to-back CIAU championships in front of the McGill, Queen’s and Laval universities. Such an impression did he make on the home crowd in Toronto that many of the hockey supporters in the city not only considered him to be the best amateur forward in hockey, but also better than the best in the Ontario Professional Hockey League (which probably wasn’t wholly accurate since that league included one Mr. Edouard ”Newsy” Lalonde).[1]
Headline from a letter by a University of Toronto supporter, published in the January 21, 1908 issue of The Toronto Star, touting Clarke as the best amateur forward in the world
University of Toronto team in 1907–08. Herb Clarke is seated second from the right in the middle row while his brother Harold stands in the back row.
But the University of Toronto supporters still weren’t wrong in their broader assessment that Clarke was a top notch talent, because when he joined Cobalt for the 1908–09 season in the Timiskaming Hockey League up in the northeastern Ontario mining districts, only former Ottawa Silver Seven forward Harry Smith, 4 years his senior, could match his goal scoring clip. Both Smith (with the rivalling Haileybury team) and Clarke scored 27 goals in 8 games, with the closest trailing player tallying 15. Cobalt also barely edged out Haileybury for the league championship crown.
The Toronto papers accused Clarke and some of his fellow Toronto friends (Chad and Fred Toms, and Angus Campbell) of going pro when they joined Cobalt, but Clarke insisted that they were not paid for their hockey services and that all of them held down off-ice jobs, Clarke himself with the City of Cobalt Mine.
”I notice that Toronto papers are making quite a fuss about the boys coming up here, and are branding them as professionals. Now this isn’t accurate. While the hockey is a bit loose up in this country, and the towns are bound to win either with ”home brews” or importations, all our boys are in good positions in their own line, and here to stay, and we feel we ought to get out and win for the town if we can.”[2]
– The Toronto Star, January 9, 1909
Clarke’s account notwithstanding, the bridge to the amateur game was still burned, so when the Cobalt team joined the new professional National Hockey Association circuit for its inaugural 1910 season, Clarke promptly followed along, despite also being pursued by the Ottawa Hockey Club.[3]– The Toronto Star, January 9, 1909
In one of the first games of the 1910 season, on January 12 against the star-studded Renfrew team – just prior to the NHA absorbing both the Ottawa Hockey Club and Montreal Shamrocks from the CHA and restarting the season over – Herb Clarke put on a brilliant performance with 4 goals in a 11-9 win on Renfrew ice, and was hailed as the main difference maker between the two teams. The result not only showed that Clarke could hang with the big boys in the pro circuit, but it also came as a big general surprise as Renfrew had loaded up its roster with not only Frank and Lester Patrick but also with Fred ”Cyclone” Taylor.[4]
The Toronto Star, January 13, 1910
When the NHA schedule started over again on January 15, Clarke still managed to score 20 times over 12 NHA games, which left him tied for fifth place in the league’s goal scoring race, right alongside Harry Hyland of the Montreal Wanderers and one goal in front of fellow Kingstonian Marty Walsh of the Ottawa Hockey Club. At the end of the season Cobalt parked right in the middle of the league table, tied with Haileybury at fourth place, behind the Montreal Wanderers, Ottawa Hockey Club and Renfrew, but in front of both the Montreal Shamrocks and Montreal Canadiens.
A newspaper account prior to the 1910–11 season even claimed that Clarke hadn’t been given a square chance to show his true value with Cobalt in 1910, since he had been ”shifted about so often” in the lineup.[5] This referred to Clarke being used as a rover, a more defensive position than the centre, and even as a left winger, for much of the season.
When Cobalt left the NHA circuit after the 1910 season, Herb Clarke became a free lance asset on the open hockey market, and both Renfrew and the Ottawa Hockey Club tried to get hold of his services.[6] But Clarke, who was working up at Elk Lake in northeastern Ontario prior to the 1910–11 season, didn’t seem overly bothered by the big clubs chasing him and never put pen to paper. He was also rumoured to join New Liskeard in the revived Timiskaming Hockey League, for the 1910–11 campaign, to play with his older brother Charlie, but that didn’t materialise either.[7] Instead Clarke spent the 1910–11 hockey season officiating games in the OHA and OPHL.
The Berlin News Record, February 2, 1911
As late as in November 1912, in the Ottawa Citizen, a rumour claimed that Clarke might suit up with one of the Toronto pro teams (Blueshirts or Tecumsehs) for the upcoming 1912–13 NHA season, despite having been out of hockey for two years, but the former Varsity star still remained out of the puck chasing game.[8]
An explicit reason as to why Clarke didn’t prolong his hockey career past the age of 22 didn’t reveal itself in any of the rather short newspaper accounts reporting on his absence, but it’s probably not too wild of a guess to assume that it had something similar to do with what distanced ”One-Eyed” Frank McGee from the game some five years earlier, meaning work duties coupled with a fairly significant dose of parental aversion towards the pro game, as his father Charles Kirk Clarke was well known throughout Ontario as an advocate of clean amateur sport.[9]
Whatever the case truly may have been, the game of hockey still lost one of its brightest young stars when Herb Clarke decided to step away from the rinks.
Clarke had studied mining engineering at the University of Toronto and later worked with the Delaware & Hudson Railroad in Albany, New York. He died in Boston, Massachusetts on June 25, 1938, aged 50, and was buried at Albany, New York.
Sources:
[1] The Toronto Star, Jan. 21, 1908
[2] The Toronto Star, Jan. 9, 1909
[3] The Ottawa Citizen, Nov. 13, 1909
[4] The Toronto Star, Jan. 13, 1910
[5] The Calgary Herald, Dec. 7, 1910
[6] The North Bay Nugget, Dec. 14, 1910
[7] The Montreal Star, Dec. 15, 1910
[8] The Ottawa Citizen, Nov. 21, 1912
[9] The Toronto Star, Jan. 7, 1904
Posted on Behind the Boards (SIHR Blog)
