When Flin Flon won the Memorial Cup

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/05/2017 (3067 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Memorial Cup was first put up for grabs in 1919 and winners of the Canadian junior hockey championship have almost always have come from urban centres.

Winnipeg-area teams have taken the title 10 times, with the last being the Winnipeg Braves in 1959. Manitoba also produced two teams that were from some of the smallest communities to ever capture the national junior hockey championship.

In 1942, the Portage la Prairie Terriers beat the Oshawa Generals three games to one in the national final played at the Winnipeg Amphitheatre. Portage had a population of slightly more than 7,200 people at the time. The team actually was called the Portage and District Terriers and several players qualified as hometown boys.

That group included leading scorer Joe Bell, his goalie brother Gordon, Jack O’Reilly, Bud Ritchie and Lin Bend from Poplar Point. Captain Jack McDonald was born in Swan River and Bobby Love came from Dauphin. Winnipeg contributed Bill Gooden, Bill Heindl and Wally Stefaniw. The Bell boys’ father, Addie Bell, was the coach.

On May 8, 1957, a team from a northern Manitoba mining community with a population of just over 10,000 completed one of the biggest upsets in Memorial Cup history when the Flin Flon Bombers beat the Ottawa Canadiens 3-2 in the deciding game of a best-of-seven series. Captain Ted Hampson scored the Cup-winning goal for the Bombers.

The Canadiens were a super junior team put together by the Montreal Canadiens. Coached by Sam Pollock, with Scotty Bowman as his assistant, the team included future NHLers Ralph Backstrom, Murray Balfour, Bobby Rousseau and Gilles Tremblay along with Claude (Vest Pocket) Richard. A future Montreal coach, Claude Ruel, was a top defenceman for the Canadiens and a knee injury kept Winnipeg’s Gerry Wilson out of action until game five.

The first three games were played in the Flin Flon Main Arena, which Pollock claimed was too small for a national final.

The final four games were in Regina, where Montreal sponsored the junior Pats. The Bombers won the first game 3-1, but Ottawa battled back with 4-3 and 5-2 victories. A 3-1 Bombers win tied the series and the underdogs won game five 3-2. The Canadiens forced a seventh game with a 4-2 victory.

The Bombers lineup included seven former Hapnot High School students who were labelled “rink rats” during their minor hockey days because they cleaned the ice and scrimmaged in the Main Arena late at night when they could.

Three defencemen, Duane Rupp, Ken Willey and George Konik, the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League’s most valuable player that season, were born in Flin Flon. The other rink rats were Hampson, Carl Forster, Ron Hutchinson and Mel Pearson.

Paddy Ginnell and Cliff Lennartz came from Dauphin and Rod Lee from the small southwestern Manitoba community of Waskada. North End Winnipeg product Barry Beatty played three years with the junior St. Boniface Canadiens before going north.

Goalie George Wood was born in Winnipeg. Mike Kardash and Harvey Fleming from Saskatchewan were the only regulars from outside of Manitoba. Orland Kurtenbach from Prince Albert and Jean Gauthier and Lynn Davis from the Lakehead were added for the East-West series.

Coach Bobby Kirk had played for the Elmwood Millionaires in the 1929 Memorial Cup final.

Memories of Sport appears every second week in the Canstar Community News weeklies. Kent Morgan can be contacted at 204-489-6641 or email: sportsmemories@canstarnews.com