Against All Odds

by P. J. Naworynski

  As the boy grew into a young man, Roy learned quickly that skill alone wasn’t going to get him to the NHL. In the physical sport of hockey, he had to show his scrappiness or the bigger guys would plow him down. At thirteen, Roy was only about five feet tall and 130 pounds. His defence partner in junior hockey, “Jack Rabbit,” was a Winnipeger who topped six feet and tipped the scales at more than 180 pounds. After one game where Roy was on the losing end of a scrap, Jack took him aside and set him straight. He told Roy: “Everybody likes to pick on the little guy. You gotta learn how to fight or you’re going to get your head knocked off. You gotta hit ’em hard first, grab ’em, pull ’em in close. Hit ’em square in the nose and draw the blood. You need to make an impression. They won’t want to try and take you on anymore. Just make sure the ref isn’t looking.”

  Jack and Roy shared the blue line as defence partners for the next five years. They played beside each other through the juvenile leagues, midget, and all the way up to Junior A, when they won the Memorial Cup with the Portage la Prairie Terriers. Roy never let his partner down, and he never backed away from a fight. In hockey and in life Roy learned the value of taking care of yourself and your teammates.

  At seventeen, Roy was too young to go to war when it broke out. But like so many of the boys across the nation, he was itching to do his bit and get into the action. He had been “playing soldier” in the army reserves, doing weekly drills for a couple of years, but when it was time to get into the tough stuff, the real stuff, Roy knew he didn’t want to be a feet-on-the-ground soldier. He wanted to be a pilot.

  Once they were all of age, he and three hockey buddies headed down to the recruitment office in Winnipeg to sign up. His friends were looking for jobs on the ground, but the army already had a lot of guys, and they weren’t taking anyone just then. The desk sergeant suggested they all take a look at the air force, but his hockey pals were imbued with a deep desire to keep their feet solidly planted on terra firma. They left Roy to sign up solo with the air force, while they headed back to their dairy farms.

  Noticing Roy’s high school diploma and high aptitude for math, the recruiters earmarked him as a navigator, but he pushed hard to be considered for pilot training. Roy excelled in his studies at the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan and made it three-quarters of the way through Elementary Flying Training School until one snowy day just outside Regina. In the room where the boys hung their flight gear was a sign that read, in heavy block letters, “There are old pilots and bold pilots. There are no old bold pilots.” Roy didn’t know who penned that sentiment but whoever it was, he was a very wise man.

  It wasn’t snowing as Roy raced down the runway on his final solo test flight piloting the DeHavilland 82C Tiger Moth. The night before, mother nature had dumped a few feet of fresh white powder, blanketing the countryside. But as Roy eased on the stick throttle and rudder pedals and climbed into the crisp morning sky of the prairies, there was nothing but clouds. The Tiger Moth was a rather graceful and delicate little biplane with a plastic coupe top that covered the two tandem seats: one for a flight instructor, the other for the pilot.

  About a hundred miles or so into his flight it started to snow, and boy did it snow. As inch after inch piled onto the canopy and wings of the tiny yellow biplane, Roy started thinking he had better find a spot to put her down and go grab a coffee. There was no way he was going to make it back to base in this snowstorm. By the time he pinpointed his spot and circled in for a landing, the unrelenting snow had covered the ground like a giant white mattress. With visibility next to nil, Roy put his buggy down hard, destroying one of the Tiger Moth’s wheels and part of its undercarriage in the process. The scrappy little terrier from Portage la Prairie walked away without a scratch.

  And with that, Roy’s dreams of becoming a pilot were over. The next day the head instructor drove down to pick him up and clipped his wings. He told Roy point-blank, “You’re not gonna make it as a pilot. You’re better suited as a navigator. That’s where we need you up there.”

  If he were to become a navigator, as Hubert Brooks had done, Roy was looking at many more months in the classroom. But Roy possessed all the math skills, the marks, and some of the training needed for a bomb aimer. With just a little more schooling, he could graduate as a pilot officer in no time. He would still get his commission and be riding in a bigger bus with a gun up front—and a huge responsibility to deliver the payload to the enemy.

  Forbes was finished with schooling and courses. He wanted in on the fight. He looked the head instructor square in the eye and said, “No, thanks. I’d rather be a bomb aimer quick as I can get. I want to get out there in the air in England. I want to get into action next month.”

  The dangers of a life in the air weren’t lost on Roy. But the glory and the glamour of sporting the RCAF blue were intoxicating. He and his crewmates were fully aware that they could go down and go down heavy at any time. In order to suit up and climb into the flying metal beasts night after night, they could not allow themselves to think that it might be them going down next. To do their jobs and to do them well, they needed to think they were going to live forever. With fear as a constant companion, they were young, confident, full of bravado, and willing to stare down the odds and risk it all in a nasty war. Although he was shot down over France, Roy was one of the lucky ones in Bomber Command who beat the numbers and made it home. He continued flying on operational duties right up to October 1945.

  When Forbes got back from the war, he considered picking up his hockey career and giving it a go. He still loved the game, and he still had the wheels to attract offers to play on senior hockey teams and make a few bucks. But with a young family and mouths to feed, Roy opted for the security of a military life, and he set his sights on building on his career in the RCAF by studying meteorology. He continued to play hockey for the local team on the base, but that was just for fun.

  On the evening of November 14, 1947, Roy stepped onto the ice in Trenton for a friendly match against another RCAF team. In his mind this game was no different from any of the others he’d played on the base. He was totally oblivious to the drama circling around the world of hockey and politics. His head was focused on his career path and finishing up his courses. He had no idea who Sandy Watson and Frank Boucher were, or that they were watching him play hockey that night. All he knew was that he was playing centre for a change, just to mix things up a little. He played a decent game, but they lost to the guys who had come in from Ottawa.

  The next morning Roy was called in for a meeting with his commanding officer. Standing at attention, he was told, “You’re going to Ottawa in an air force plane tomorrow morning.” Roy answered, “Why? What am I going to do?” His boss replied, “You’re going to try out for the Olympic hockey team.” Caught off guard, Roy laughed and said, “No, I don’t want to do that. I want to stay here and finish my course.”

  But Roy’s bosses were having none of that. They impressed upon him the significance of this team to the highest echelons of the RCAF brass. The chief of the air staff, the air marshal, and the defence minister were all behind this endeavour. If they wanted him to take a break from his courses to go play hockey, he had better get his butt down there and play. Refusing to go would be just plain stupid. For a guy interested in building a career in the air force, bowing out from this invitation to try out for the RCAF Flyers was career suicide.

  That night Roy’s military buddies on the base decided to throw him a big send-off party. Like Roy, a healthy number of the men at Trenton had been in the air force overseas during the war, and they knew how to fire up a good party. The alcohol was flowing until the wee hours of the morning, and Roy allowed himself to get stinking drunk. With barely a wink of sleep he grabbed his pre-dawn transport flight and showed up just in time for the 5:00 a.m. skate still reeking of booze. He performed miserably and was certain they would be shipping him back to Trenton that afternoon with his tail between his legs. He had blown his chance.

&nb
sp; As Roy skated off the ice past Buck Boucher, Buck pulled him aside and said he wanted to have a word. Buck told him he was giving Roy a second chance. He had heard about the party, and he wasn’t sending him back to Trenton just yet. He knew what Roy was capable of, and he wanted to see him play sober. Elated that he had been spared from elimination, Roy grabbed a few hours of sleep in the Beaver Barracks and hit the ice that afternoon with guns blazing. Despite his initial resistance, he now realized the importance of this team and the gift he had been given in being chosen to try out. He wasn’t about to waste this golden opportunity to be a part of something special, and he was determined to show that he was infused with the mettle to gain a place on the Olympic team.

  With November coming to a close, air force headquarters formally announced Buck Boucher’s tentative selection of thirteen of the seventeen members of Canada’s Olympic hockey team. The list included Hubert Brooks, Patsy Guzzo, Red Gravelle, Roy Forbes, Irving Taylor, Andy Gilpin, and Ottawa defenceman Louis Lecompte. Spots for a goalie and two additional players were still open and waiting to be filled. Early in the new year the full complement of seventeen players, plus Frank Boucher as coach, Sandy Watson as manager, and George McFaul as trainer, would be bound for Europe to attend “the Games of Renewal” in St. Moritz. But if anyone thought a place on the team that day meant he could start packing his bags, he was quick to find out otherwise. In his statement to the press, Buck made it clear there were still no guarantees: “This is strictly a tentative selection, and if before the team sails, other players prove to be better than the ones named today, they will be taken to the Olympics.” At the time, no one could have predicted how prophetic Buck’s comment would turn out to be.

  Gary Forbes

  OLYMPIC NIGHT

  04

  On the evening of Saturday, December 13, 1947, Ottawa was well into the grip of winter. Temperatures that night hovered around a bone-chilling minus twenty degrees Celsius. The night sky was crisp and sharp, and a full set of stars was on display. But the evening chill did nothing to dampen the spirits of the throng of people lining up under the lights at the corner of Argyle and O’Connor Streets in downtown Ottawa.

  For that night was a momentous evening for sports fans, patriots, and politicians in the nation’s capital. That night was Olympic Night at the Ottawa Auditorium. Over the past week newspapers had touted the extravaganza as a “must see” event. Brochures, placards, ads, and a glossy, colour-printed twenty-one-page program championed the spectacle as an event “not to be missed.” Olympic Night presented hockey fans with an opportunity to come and catch their first glimpse of Canada’s Olympic hockey ambassadors, the RCAF Flyers, in action as they played their first official exhibition game against the McGill Redmen. In just three weeks the Flyers would be heading off to Europe. These were the men Buck Boucher, Frank Boucher, and Sandy Watson had hand-picked to carry Canada’s Olympic hockey banner all the way to St. Moritz. Their opponents, the McGill Redmen, were leaders in the senior intercollegiate league. Recently the U.S. Olympic hockey team had played the Redmen and soundly beaten them. The prevailing thinking among the RCAF brass was that this exhibition match would showcase their team to their supporters and benefactors while providing their boys with a hot match to test themselves.

  Spectators at Olympic Night would also be treated to two special features during the intermissions. Teenage figure skating sensation and gold medal hopeful Barbara Ann Scott was going to perform an exhibition of the routine she would be taking to the Olympics in between the first and second periods of the game. During the second intermission, her coach, Sheldon Galbraith, would present an additional figure skating demonstration. It was engineered to be a huge night, and the public relations machine churned up the media and well-wishers into a frenzy.

  Nearly seven thousand spectators poured into the Ottawa Auditorium and filled the magnificent ice rink to the rafters. Each of the patrons had coughed up between $1.00 and $1.50 for coveted seats to witness the match. As a former Olympian himself, Tommy Gorman was a proud supporter of the Flyers. He had donated his rink for all their practices, and tonight he was also donating the proceeds of the event to help fund the Flyers’ travel costs and operating expenses overseas.

  Everyone who was anyone in Ottawa was there. His Excellency the Governor General and Lady Alexander, along with their family and aides, were in attendance. Sir Alexander Clutterbuck, the British high commissioner to Canada, was there with his wife, Lady Clutterbuck. Kurt Forcart, the Swiss chargé d’affaires representing the hosts of the 1948 Olympics, was there. Thirteen cabinet members, including Defence Minister Brooke Claxton and Health and Welfare Minister Paul Martin Sr., were there. The chiefs of staff of the three armed services were there, along with a gallery of war heroes, including ace fighter pilots Air Marshal “Billy” Bishop and Wing Commander “Johnny” Johnson. Between the two of them, Bishop and Johnson had shot down 110 enemy aircraft in the two world wars. Former Olympic greats from previous Games were there. Top brass from the Canadian Olympic Association, the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association, and the Canadian Figure Skating Association were there. The mayors of Ottawa and Hull were there. Even the internationally acclaimed RCAF Central Band was there to provide musical accompaniment and entertainment for the evening. As an added bonus the assistant bandmaster had composed an original march titled “On to Victory,” which the band would play in dedication to inspire the Flyers and Barbara Ann Scott on their way to greatness. It was an over-the-top display of national pride and chest thumping. Now all the Flyers had to do was beat McGill!

  The one man missing from this celebratory evening was Buck Boucher. Because of his paid job as head coach of the Ottawa Senators, Buck was unavailable to man the bench and coach the Flyers on Olympic Night. His obligations with the Senators were taking him on the road for a two-day trip to play against Boston and New York. His son, Frank, would take over the coaching reins for the night. But prior to leaving, Buck had a word with the press, telling them he felt the team was in fine shape and was reaching its peak form. He had every confidence in them.

  Perhaps Buck was thinking about the Senators when he made those statements. From the puck drop the Flyers were totally outplayed and back on their heels. Wave after wave of McGill attackers buzzed the Flyers netminder, firing shots almost at will at Corporal Joe Tunney in between the posts. Meanwhile, the Flyers’ sieve-like defence seemed incapable of setting up plays of their own, or of stopping the formidable McGill assault. After eighteen minutes of humiliation, McGill cracked the seal on the Flyers net, opened up their scoring streak, and never looked back.

  The unrelenting McGill offensive continued throughout the second period. McGill dominated the ice and played rugged, aggressive hockey with solid displays of bodychecking and plenty of speed to spare. The Flyers, in contrast, looked weak, flat, disorganized, and unable to penetrate the solid wall of McGill’s defence. When the buzzer sounded, signalling the end of the second period, the score had jumped to 5–0 in favour of McGill. But the score could have been much higher. It was only Joe Tunney’s exemplary skills in net that held McGill’s tally to five goals over the first two periods.

  Ralf Brooks

  While Sheldon Galbraith entertained the crowd with his figure skating display during the second intermission, Governor General Viscount Alexander made a trip down to the Flyers dressing room to pay the boys a visit. He asked Frank Boucher point-blank, “What’s the matter with my team?” Boucher answered, “Sir, if I knew, I’d fix it.”

  The highlight of Olympic Night was Barbara Ann Scott’s impeccable figure skating performance. The crowd sat enthralled and in awe of the petite champion’s sublime routine and display of skill. For those in attendance there was at least some consolation that in little Miss Scott, Canada clearly had one good chance of capturing a gold medal in Switzerland.

  When the Flyers took to the ice for the third period, the ominous cloud hanging over them loomed even darker. McGill continued to pour on the power. T
hey deftly backchecked any and all of the Flyers rushes and advances and kept their goalie supremely protected. For anyone watching the match, it was blatantly clear that McGill was the better-conditioned team and exhibited a cohesiveness and unity that was lacking in the Flyers lineup.

  By the time the final buzzer sounded, the McGill Redmen had creamed the Olympic hopefuls 7–0 in a completely one-sided match. Humiliated, the men of the RCAF Flyers were left to skate off the ice with heads hanging low before the nearly seven thousand fans, including a litany of government dignitaries, military brass, and representatives of foreign allies. There was no question that McGill had been infinitely better that evening. Heads were certainly going to roll. And many in the press, the public, and the locker room questioned whether an air force team should be going to St. Moritz at all. Coach Frank Boucher later said, “I do not know who organized that exhibition game, but we weren’t ready. We hadn’t jelled as a team yet.”

  The day after the game the media reaction was swift and ravaging. Ottawa Citizen columnist Jack Koffman wrote: “The roof fell in on Canada’s hockey representatives Saturday night and the gloom is thick in official circles. That seven-goal pasting at the hands of McGill Redmen has everyone worried. The airmen are bound to improve in the short time available for practice and exhibition games before sailing for the Olympic games. There is every indication though that they aren’t going to improve sufficiently to give the Czechs, among others at the Olympiad, a real scare. The Flyers’ performance was extremely disappointing and the job facing young Frank Boucher as coach is a momentous one.”