NLL Insider

That’s the brief headline you’ll see at the beginning of this week’s vintage lacrosse clip, featuring a 1931 game between Toronto and Montreal. 

“The first match between Toronto and Montreal causes sensation - already threatens popularity of the comparatively mild excitement in All of Wrestling.”

Being the history junkie that I am, this clip blows my mind. Absolutely insane, and thanks to Gary Mark at www.lacrosseinsidethegame.com for posting this clip, we can enjoy some lacrosse action that’s really from back in the day.

Check out the crease, which extends to the wall behind the cage so no runners could make a play to a teammate cutting straight down from the top. Check out the ref, all decked out in a necktie. Check out the checks, especially the one toward the end of the clip that leaves one of the poor fellas a bit dazed before he gathers his senses and retaliates. It’s a TOTAL bummer that the clip ends where it ends, because you just know the fists were flyin’.

There isn’t much out there in terms of specific history for this clip or game, but I was able to track down some Canadian box lacrosse history for 1931 in Donald M. Fisher’s book, Lacrosse: A History of the Game, so if you wanna read that, click on the “Read More” tag.

If ya don’t, that’s cool too. You’ll still enjoy the clip.

Fisher writes in his book that in the late 1920s, NHL team owners wanted to find a way to utilize their empty hockey arenas in the summer months. So they courted box lacrosse and in 1931, the International Lacrosse League was formed with the Montreal Canadiens, Montreal Maroons, Toronto Maple Leafs and Cornwall Colts.

The 1931 season was 24 games long and the Maple Leafs finished in first place, but the Canadiens won the three-game title series. That was as far as the league went as owners pulled the plug because of poor attendance.

That doesn’t mean the game went unappreciated.

“When the rubber projectile was passed swiftly from end to end of the rink and bulged the nets behind the padded goalkeepers and the lights flashed dramatically and instantaneously on the electric scoreboard, I felt that by some meteorlogical miracle I had been transported back from July to January,” wrote Robert Reade of the Cornwall Freeholder in 1931.

Before the league was disbanded, however, the owners tested the American market with a game between the Maple Leafs and the Canadiens at New York’s Madison Square Garden on May 10, 1932. The New York Times reported that nearly 8,000 attended the game and watched in shock and horror. The Baltimore Sun didn’t take a liking to the game.

It’s “a throwback to action marking the stone age when one of the most popular sports was the bouncing of bludgeons and large boulders off the oblong skulls of your opponents,” the newspaper wrote. It combines “Dempsey-Firpo boxing, hockey, mayhem, homicide and intent to kill.”

More details of Fisher’s work can be obtained here at Google Books, starting on page 157.

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