In 1912 Walter Knox, the great professional track and field star, was selected to be Canada's Olympic Head Coach.  In that age of over-the-top amateurism, it was a curious choice.  

The Canadian Olympic committee held their athletes to the very highest standards of amateurism in the world, to the point where they were encouraged to see athletics as a "hobby" to be done in one's spare time while preparing for a "real" career.  To bring in a dreaded professional, someone who had succumbed to the corrupting influence of money, had to have been a difficult decision.

Five strong candidates applied for the job.  Three experienced coaches in Dr. Barton of U of T, Professor Williams, who had coached Canadian athletes overseas already and Tom Flanagan, a busy track promoter and coach in Toronto, had applied for the job, as well as a high profile athlete and fledgling coach in Bobby Kerr, Olympic gold medallist in the 200 at the London Olympics.  Any one of them would have been a reasonable pick.

But the committee chose Walter Knox.  Walter had been declared a professional in 1907 two days after winning five events at the Canadian Track and Field championships.  It seems coaching a college team for four months was serious enough to have your amateur card rescinded for life.  They didn't even know about his five years of hustling and con games out in the wild west that would have really ruined his amateur credentials.

The committee surely were aware of the rumours that Knox was a professional sports hustler, the skuttlebutt around the athletics world was full of them.  But no proof was ever presented to officials so they used his coaching as a reason to oust him from the pure amateur ranks.

So why was Knox their choice five years later?  

Simply put, he knew more about technique and the science of sport than the other four combined.  Those four, and all the other amateurs, were a part of the culture that sport is something that you just went out and did.  Practice and the study of sport was time wasted from moving on with your life and career.  In many respects athletics was a come-as-you-are party with the minimum of preparation.

Not so for Knox and the professionals.  His livelihood depended on his ability to win races.  He had learned that fitness and practice were vital to survival.  Knox trained every day, he honed his technique, he studied the technical advances other athletes made, he was a student of sport.  As a youth Walter had retrieved shot puts for the great George Gray, world champion shot putter for an amazing 17 years.  Gray was the first shot putter to rely on technique rather than brawn, and freely shared his learnings with anyone interested.  Walter was a good student.  He applied Gray's analytical approach to every event and mastered them all.

So when the Olympic committee was choosing a head coach they decided to go with skill and knowledge over experience and reputation.  It should have been a good choice.

The 1912 Olympics turned out to be a personnel fiasco for the Canadian team.  Knox tried to apply his professional work ethic to the amateurs, who revolted.  The team contained several very opinionated athletes so there were ample ring-leaders for the revolt.  The two managers were AWOL for the most part.  Most importantly, the team had a flashpoint in "Army" Howard, a very obstinate black sprinter who always seemed to be a source of commotion.  It was turmoil from start to finish.  

In spite of all the ruckus, the track team did manage to win five medals.  Walter had them well prepared physically and  many of them were performing better than ever thanks to Walter's technical coaching.

With the appointment of Knox as Head Coach, the amateur athletic world was admitting their limitations as a sports culture.  The pros were smarter and better prepared, they knew.  But they didn't let that knowledge deter them from their ideological pursuit of pure amateurism though.  It would be decades before the "train every day" culture would be accepted into the amateur athletic world.     

To live the life Walter Knox did, he had to be a maverick.  Tough, shrewd, brazen and arrogant.  His life as a hustler is evidence of of that.

But even after writing his biography, I've just gained a new comprehension of what it took to be that maverick in a little book that I just finished reading.  It describes the lesser known side of his life, his life as a miner in northern Ontario.

Walter and his brother Jack were able to retire comfortably in their later years because they owned a gold mine.  Jack prospected for ten years with financial backing from Walter, before he staked that fortuitous claim in the North Shining Tree Lake district north of Sudbury, the place he found loose gold nuggets on the ground.

This little book, Free Gold, by Arnold Hoffman, written in 1947, describes the story of the mining boom between 1906 and 1945 across the two long faults bridging Ontario and Quebec that made fortunes for many men, but also wore many more out, leaving them broken and penniless. 

Walter and Jack's mine was at the far western fringe of that fault line.

What struck me was the hardship, both physically and emotionally, that the prospectors endured.  

Prospectors routinely trudged 15 miles a day on snowshoes in minus 40 degree weather, for days on end, carrying just enough food to survive.  One bad decision and you were done.  Most prospectors went in pairs or small groups for mutual support. Jack, though, was a loner, never mentioning a partner other than Walter, who was busy making money hustling runners to support him.  Jack earned the hard way every single thing he eventually enjoyed.

Jack would have agreed with Jack Munroe, one of the great success stories in the camps, when he said, "The world belongs to the energetic!"  

But the story really hit home with Walter's personality when it talked about what you did after you staked your rich claim.  That's where the hustler thrived.

When word got out that you struck it rich, the world came to you, offers to partner, schemes to snatch up neighbouring claims and the inevitable offers to buy your claim.  For many a poor miner the offer of $50,000 or $300,000 was irresistible.  As Hoffman says, "We took the cash... the people who came along later, when we had made things easy, they were the buzzards who made the big money".

It was all a gamble for these humble men.  Who knows what you were really sitting on.  It was going to take a big investment just to find out, an investment you couldn't cover.  Most prospectors had to take on investors, partners with money, just to get some cores drilled and assays done.  And there were con men and shysters everywhere knocking on your door.  The worst were the big money men out of the States, the financiers who knew how to make money. They were hesitant to dip their toes into this free-for-all, but when they did, they took over.

Hoffman describes the situation:  "The multiparity of camps, the 'wild' methods of finance, and the fierce independence of the Canadians seemed too much for the American companies, accustomed as they were to dominating their respective bailiwicks."

Walter and Jack were shrewd enough and tough enough to negotiate their path through these pitfalls.  They were the quintessential mavericks.  They took on no silent partners, they dug the ground themselves and learned the mining business as they went.  They dug 25 feet down into the granite rock with pickaxes and a crew of men, using the easy surface gold to finance their operation as they investigated what they actually owned.  The vein got thicker the deeper they went.

Again Hoffman speaks right to the situation the Knox brothers faced.  "It takes a silver mine to make a gold mine."  Silver was easy to scrape out of the ground, gold requires prolonged surface and underground development.  The Knox's may have owned a rich gold mine, but they couldn't afford to get the gold out of the ground. 

The Knox brothers invested 10 long years of their lives getting a handle on the value of their holdings.  All the while the seven neighbouring mines in this gold deposit constantly harassed them, badgering them to sell out or partner up to consolidate and benefit from the economies of scale. One big mine is more profitable than two little ones.

The boys took 10 years to make their move, and when they did they did it right.  They sold two thirds of their mine to a New York investment company who promptly made the capital infusion needed to exploit the deeper gold.  Walter and Jack by then knew the value of the mine.  They were in a strong bargaining position.  They were also smart enough to keep a third interest for themselves and had themselves named company executives.  

These were two men with sixth grade educations.  Their intelligence was more shrewd business sense than academic training.  After growing up in the rural horse-trading working man's world, they were now veterans of the gold fields and had seen where other greenhorns had ended up.  It must have taken some fortitude to see their project through to the end, to grind through 10 years of hardship with huge financial offers dangling in front of them.

Walter Knox was a fascinating man, a man who was hard to get to know.  This little book I read gave me a rare insight into his maverick world, a world he thrived in.

I found my copy at a used book store in Toronto.  

Arnold Hoffman, 1947.  Free Gold.  Rinehart Press, Toronto.   

In 1909 the stiffest rules for amateur sports ever forged were set by the Amateur Athletic Union of Canada.  No amateur athlete could compete for money, compete against professionals, use an alias, wager on his sport or even coach for money.  Athletes were forced to play for the love of the game and remain poor.

Those same rules, for the most part, were in force for 70 years.  As the Olympic Games rose to the pre-eminent position in the sports world, to be the goal every athlete aspired to, their staunch defence of pure amateurism drove the culture that kept these rules in place.

It wasn't until the death of American Avery Brundage, president of the International Olympic Committee, in 1975 that serious chinks began to appear in this wall of ideology.   Brundage was a hard-line defender of pure amateurism, and with his death, more accommodating voices began to be heard.

I experienced this paradigm shift personally.  I was a top level swimmer at the University of Toronto starting in 1979.  It was interesting to we athletes when, in 1980, it was announced that amateur athletes could now create trust funds for money earned in sport.  It was very limited though, $1-3000 or so could be set aside in trust and not touched until retiring from sport.  We had very limited opportunities to earn that money - there was no prize money and advertising opportunities were all directed towards the pro hockey players and such. I don't recall anyone talking about setting up a trust fund then.

But what's interesting is what happened next.  In 1980 all amateurs were struggling to get with only meagre government grants, carding, for the very top athletes.  Then by 1990, with little change to the rules, there were "amateurs" who seemed to be doing very well, Ben Johnson for example.  Amateurs were getting a little ad money, appearance fees were popping up in track especially and corporate sponsorships were becoming available, for the very best high profile athletes.  What happened?

It seems to me that the rules didn't change, they just weren't enforced any more.  The culture and priorities at the governing body level had changed, and athletes were beginning to enjoy the fruits of their labour financially (the .001% of athletes at the very top anyway).  It was all very passive.


Twenty-five years later prize money and appearance fees, corporate sponsorship and advertising opportunities are the norm for the very top swimmers.  It's still the barest fraction of what the pros can make, but the "amateurs" are no longer the amateurs Avery Brundage believed in.


And at the Olympics?  "Dream Team" professionals, mega-millionaires like Magic Johnson and Sidney Crosby are welcomed into the "amateur" Games.  It all happened very fast with little debate.

Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of debate.  






 

Last month a class action lawsuit was started against the Canadian Hockey League (CHL), the league for junior players.  It is alleged these high school boys are being forced to play for less than the minimum wage.

The CHL players are paid $50-120 a week for up to 65 hour weeks while "the league’s teams are 'unjustly enriched' with 'hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues annually' based on the services provided by their young players," the suit says.  This is a battle that is 135 years old in Canada.

In 1881, with the formation of the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association (MAAA), the battle was enjoined over the role of money in Canadian sport.  The new MAAA outlawed the growing  trend in hockey, baseball, rugby and football of hiring mercenary "ringers" to help bring championships to a town.  The MAAA and soon the Canadian AAA decreed that money "corrupts" sport.  Their stern rules denied participation by any "professional" athlete, for life, no appeals.

This policy led to two sports worlds in Canada:  the high road and the low road.  

The "high road" of the amateur world eliminated money as a factor in athletics. 
Any player that had played for money, played against players who had played for money, who had used an alias, who had wagered on himself or even had coached for money was soon disbarred from all amateur sports. The AAA of Canada, after 1900, was spending most of it's revenues on investigations of professionalism by their member athletes.  Players were held to very high standards of amateurism, the highest standards in the world.

Meanwhile, the low road was still flourishing.  Outside the Montreal-Toronto corridor where the AAA of C dominated, the traditional workingman's culture of matched racing and tavern sports still survived.  Here sport was business, like everything else in life.  Wagering on the outcome of a matched race between two worthy contestants or a hockey game between rival teams was a popular form of entertainment in rural areas.  Rival town teams naturally sought out mercenary hockey and rugby players to help avenge a loss to a rival town's team.  Money was an integral part of sport.

These rural athletes saw nothing wrong with making money through their physical prowess.  If they played for free the only people who would profit would be the gamblers in the crowd and the promoters.  Why not take your piece of the pie?  You were creating the spectacle.  These professional athletes took all the money they could and often relied on under-handed tactics to get it (using aliases, fixing games, sabotaging their opponents, threatening or bribing their opponents).  The AAAs saw their draconian amateur rules as the only response to this corrupt behaviour.

The high road AAAs routinely professionalized athletes by taking their amateur cards away.  Walter Knox was one of them.  If those athletes still wanted to partake in sports the only game in town was the low road of matched races for high stakes and the pay-for-play rural teams (which evolved into the professional hockey, baseball, football and later, basketball leagues we are so familiar with today).  The Amateur associations actually drove people into those professional circles.

So how does this all relate to the class action lawsuit by the junior hockey players today.  Well, today's professional sports follow the "middle" road for the most part. Revenues generated are shared somewhat equally by the players and the owner/promoters.  It was a long struggle to reach that middle road.  For decades the promoters cried poverty to grossly underpay the players they depended on to create the revenue stream.  All pro leagues now have negotiated agreements, collective bargaining agreements, to ensure a fair sharing the wealth.  

But not the junior hockey players.

Some junior hockey teams truly struggle to stay in the black.  But others are hugely profitable.  The players are treated like amateurs, like high schoolers playing for the love of the game, not the revenue generators they are and are going to be once they make the NHL.  

This classic battle between capital (the owner/promoters) and labour (the players) is no different than any other labour unrest, except it is being staged by under-age workers.  You can rail ideologically against the filthy rich NHL players or the corrupt owners just as you can against the mine owners and the miners, or the postal workers and the government.  Its still the same familiar confrontation.

It's all about tweaking the "middle road".    

     Between 1881 and 1909 there was a battle in the sports world in Canada.  The traditional workingman's sports, defined by gambling, matched competitions and raucous boosterism, were being methodically marginalized and eradicated by the elites of society.   To the elites, sport was seen as a tool to civilize society, to teach sportsmanship and teamwork.  The win-at-all-costs attitude that bred cheating and gambling was something the elites felt was bad for society, and they set out to suppress it. 
     The elites (the wealthy land owners, industrialists, politicians and professionals who took leadership roles in society) created Amateur Athletic Associations, conservative organizations of representatives from many diverse sports, who held their same vision of sport.  Hence, an AAA represented the hockey players, the track athletes, the swimmers and the rowers.  In return for their support the AAAs offered standardized facilities, the first record-keeping, regular competitions and sports leagues and the banning of money in all it's forms from sport - payment, wagering, prize money -  all in an effort to eradicate the cheating, drunkenness and mercenary nature of Canadian sport.  They were creating, by force, a new culture of sport in Canada.
     By 1900 cock-fighting and dog-fighting were driven completely underground. Matched racing in track, rowing and other sports were successfully controlled in the Toronto-Montreal corridor where the AAAs ruled.  If you still wanted to find a good matched race to bet on you had to travel to the margins of society.
     Orillia, Walter Knox's home town, apparently, was on the margins of society. Located just 120 kilometers north of Toronto, it was far enough away that the elites and their Amateur Associations did not hold sway there.  There is no record of an Orillia AAA before WWI.
     Orillia was a sports mad town.  Just 4,000 people lived there,  but it proudly called itself "The Town of Champions".  Jake Gaudaur was the world professional sculling champion.  His little brother Charlie was a Canadian wrestling champion.  Of course Walter Knox was Canadian amateur pole vault champion, and so was his brother Jack just four years earlier.  Robert Curran, teaming with John Gray of nearby Coldwater, was twice North American double sculls champion.  Gray's two older brothers, George and Ab, were both Canadian shot put champions, George being world champion for a remarkable 17 years.  Harry Gill was the North American all-around champion in track and filed.  Orillia's lacrosse team was good enough to go on tour across Australia one year, we had a provincial champion curling team and our hockey teams were competitive with the best.
     Some of these great athletes, like Curran and Gray, were amateurs.  Others, like Gaudaur and Knox, decidedly were not.  Up on the frontier (Orillia was the last stop before the rock of the Canadian shield, where settlement was sparse) the traditional approach to sport still flourished - matched competitions for huge stakes, with rampant gambling by the throngs of spectators who showed up for the big match.  
     It is interesting that Orillia, so close to conservative and wealthy Toronto, never developed an amateur association.  When Walter Knox and Harry Gill wanted to go to the Canadian Track and Field Championships in 1900, there was no group to issue them amateur cards in Orillia for track, so they registered under the auspices of the Orillia Lacrosse Club.  Later Walter had to join the Toronto Central YMCA to get an amateur card.  
     Orillia was no backwater town.  It was known as the most progressive industrial town north of Toronto then, booming with the lumber industry and diversifying into many related industries.  The YMCA, a strict adherent to the amateur ethic, was the dominant sports organization in the town then, and likely, because of its dominance, disguised any need for the conservative rulers of the town to establish an Amateur Athletic Association over-seen by the AAA of Canada.
     This all made for a diverse and fascinating situation for sports enthusiasts in our town.  There were upright amateur teams who competed on a provincial level in hockey, curling, baseball and lacrosse, but there were also the wild extravaganzas of professional matched races here too, most notably Jake Gaudaur's world championship sculling match out on Lake Couchiching in 1892.  Orillians came out en masse to wager on the hometown hero. 
     Walter Knox, a sports mercenary if ever there was one, grew up in this culture.  It was expected that there would be cash prizes for events at the local meets of his youth, and to prove one's manhood you always had to put your money on the table.  It must have been very foreign for Walter to step into the amateur world in 1900 at his first Provincial Championships in Toronto.
       

After five years of researching and writing my biography of Walter Knox, I’ve become interested in a number of fields of study.  I want to use this new blog to post my thoughts on these topics and share historical anecdotes.
Foremost is the history of sport in Canada, especially the divisive role money played in the development of sport here.  But also, I’ll be commenting on the fascinating evolution of sport itself.  In Orillia, my home town in Ontario, the YMCA was the centre of the sports world up to World War II.  Since my first book outlined the history of the Y in Orillia, I’ll have insights to share locally.  In the larger arena, I’ll be commenting on Olympic history.  My research on Walter Knox led me to some interesting and little known sides of Olympic politics and competition.  He was an Olympic coach three times, and recorded inside details of that world.
 
Walter Knox was also a miner, caught up in the gold mining boom in northern Ontario 100 years ago.  I've found the stories around those wild days in the bush really engrossing.  Right now I'm reading a gem of a little book written in 1947 on the history of mining in Canada, Free Gold, by a man who was there and who met many of the major players involved.  That frontier world, the bigger-than-life personalities, the incredible hardship, the bonanzas – I’ll give you a taste of that side of Canada’s history.  And knowing Walter, it’s not surprising he found that life exhilarating.
 
Finally, the physical education program in the Ontario school system has a very interesting history that I discovered in my research.  Walter was  a big player in both the philosophical development and the execution of that program.  In 1920 there were no physical education classes as we know them in the curriculum and no organized team sports.  Ten years later there were inter-school competitions in a range of sports and gym classes were becoming a common part of the curriculum.  That development had a huge impact on the YMCA too. 
 
There are other topics too - women in sport, the Scottish Highland Games, the elites’ drive to civilize Canadian society – I'm sure I’ll get around them as well.  And of course, current events that relate to these historical topics will draw my attention.
 
I think history is important.  Understanding how events evolved and the forces that drove them long ago, gives up insight as to how our world is working today.  Nothing happens in a vacuum.  History gives us a more objective vantage point to recognize the forces that drive our world.
 
So, I hope everyone will check in here periodically for a little food for thought.