The Spanish Flu Pandemic lasted three years (1918-1920). It infected approximately 500 million people, roughly a third of the world’s population, and killed somewhere between 17 to 50 million people. One estimate says 100 million deaths. Because it happened at the end of World War I, a lot of governments censored news about influenza fatalities – they didn’t want the enemy to know how many people had died. Spain was a neutral country, so newspapers were free to report flu deaths there. That’s why it became known as “The Spanish Flu.”
But let’s talk about hockey and the Stanley Cup Championship of 1919.
Back in 1919, the Stanley Cup was a best-of-five games between the National Hockey League (NHL) champions from the east coast and the Pacific Coast Hockey Association (PCHA) champions from the west coast. The 1919 NHL champions were the Montreal Canadiens, who defeated the Ottawa Senators four games to one in a best-of-seven NHL championship. In the PCHA championship, the Seattle Metropolitans played two games against the Vancouver Millionaires (later known as the Vancouver Maroons). Each team won a game, but the Metropolitans scored more total goals, so they became the PCHA champions and advanced to the Stanley Cup.
The teams who played in the 1919 Stanley Cup were the Montreal Canadiens and the Seattle Metropolitans. They had faced each other two years before in the 1917 championship. Seattle beat Montreal three games to one that year, becoming the first American (non-Canadian) team to get their name etched on the Stanley Cup. 1919 was Montreal’s chance to get even.
All of the games were played in Seattle. Nobody wanted to spend several days traveling on trains back and forth. But the leagues had different rules, so games 1, 3, and 5 would follow PCHA rules and games 2 and 4 would be NHL rules. Don’t ask me what the different rules were.
Seattle won game one, 7-0. Montreal won game two, 4-2. Seattle won game three, 7-2. Game four (NHL rules) was a 0-0 tie, and the teams agreed that game 5 would be NHL rules, too. But the teams also decided that if future games were a tie, they’d play overtime. Montreal won the fifth game 4-3 in overtime. The championship was now tied at two games apiece. The next game, scheduled for April 1, would decide the championship.
Several Montreal players were infected by the Spanish Flu and were either hospitalized or were too sick to play (one of them would die from the flu). The Montreal coach was also ill. Montreal didn’t have enough players to play the final game.
The coach from the Montreal Canadiens decided there was no choice but to forfeit the game and lose the final game. The other coach, from the Seattle Metropolitans, said he didn’t think it was sporting to win a championship because of the Spanish Flu. There was no final game and no Stanley Cup champion in 1919. The Stanley Cup has all the winning teams engraved on it. For 1919, it says “Montreal Canadiens/Seattle Metropolitans/Series Not Completed.”
And that, in my opinion, is the definition of sportsmanship: You have the option to win the cup, but it’s not fair to win because the other team is sick.