Professional Hockey in Philadelphia

Philadelphia is a passionate sports city, and its deep roots in professional football, baseball, and basketball are well known and long established. When it comes to Philadelphia and professional ice hockey, the story is a little more complex. The conventional wisdom holds that the city was a barren hockey wasteland until the arrival of the National Hockey League’s (NHL) Philadelphia Flyers in 1967. The meteoric rise of the Flyers from expansion lightweights to Stanley Cup champions in a mere seven years transformed this hockey wasteland into a hockey hotbed, with fan support on the level of the other three major sports.Alan Bass argues convincingly in Professional Ice Hockey in Philadelphia that the true story of the relationship between the city and the sport is far more complex and long reaching than this conventional wisdom believes. Reaching as far back as the turn of the twentieth century, Bass details Philadelphia’s various forays and flirtations with the sport, uncovering some occasional successes and hints of promise but mostly failures, some on a historically epic scale.From the outset, the author makes an interesting choice with the organization of the book. Instead of a chronological, decade by decade approach, he instead focuses each chapter of the book on each Philadelphia professional hockey franchise in order of their founding, starting with the Quaker City Hockey Club of 1900–1901 and ending with the minor league Philadelphia Phantoms of 1996–2009. Bass concedes that this organizational approach does create some chronological overlaps between the chapters, but it also allows for each of the city’s various major and minor league franchises to stand alone and tell their own unique stories. I fully agree; Bass has clearly undertaken considerable research, and his exhaustive mining of the available primary sources on Philadelphia’s different professional hockey franchises produces a rich and cohesive tale, full of interesting and colorful characters from all eras of Philadelphia’s hockey history.All of the chapters have their own strengths and bring life to the numerous black and white photos, newspaper headlines, and memorabilia found throughout the book. Chapter 3, for example, highlights the short-lived Philadelphia Quakers, the city’s first attempt at an NHL franchise in 1930. Despite the initial promise and the ample hype generated by its owner, a larger than life retired professional boxer, the Quakers that hit the ice were an unmitigated disaster. They took three games to score their first goal and nearly a month to notch their first win. The always-demanding fans of Philadelphia quickly lost interest, especially when the more successful minor league Philadelphia Arrows (chapter 2) were playing in the same arena but with lower ticket prices. When the 1930–31 season mercifully concluded, the Quakers had won four games, tied four games, and lost a staggering 34—a winning percentage of .131 that would remain an inglorious NHL record until the 1970s.Did this failed experiment swear the city off professional hockey until the arrival of the Flyers in 1967? Again, the full story is more complicated and fully developed by the author’s franchise by franchise organizational approach. After the failed Quakers, there were some successful and well-supported minor league hockey franchises in Philadelphia—especially the Ramblers (chapter 5) of the 1930s and 1940s—but also some massive obstacles that prevented the city from becoming a true major league hockey city. By far, the biggest impediment was infrastructure. From the 1920s until the opening of the Philadelphia Spectrum in 1967, the city had one facility with an ice plant—the tiny and ramshackle Philadelphia Arena at 45th and Market Streets in Philadelphia. As Bass makes clear, as long as the minor league Arena remained Philadelphia’s sole hockey facility, it would never become a true major league hockey city.It is no coincidence, then, that when a new ownership group lobbied the NHL to make the Flyers (chapter 8) one of the six new league franchises granted by the league’s 1967 expansion, the construction of a new arena was a key part of their successful pitch. Even with a new arena, however, the success of the Flyers was still far from guaranteed, especially in a city where no professional hockey franchise had lasted longer than ten years. At this point in the book, Bass modestly acknowledges that the franchise’s history has been well documented by other sources, but he also sells himself short. His chapter on the Flyers, which focuses just on their founding and early adventures as a brand-new NHL franchise, still uncovers new insights and information from interviews with the franchise’s founders, including late Chairman Ed Snider (1933–2016).The on-ice success of the Flyers clearly transformed a city that was indifferent to hockey into a city consumed by the sport. The book accelerates into high gear during the 1970s, when a second major league franchise—the Philadelphia Blazers (chapter 9)—and the minor league Firebirds (chapter 10) were added to the city’s hockey landscape. Today, the Blazers are merely a hazy footnote in the city’s hockey history, but Bass’s chapter on this franchise is alone worth the price of admission. For all the correct steps that the Flyers took in building a viable and competitive NHL franchise, the Blazers did just the opposite as they began play in the NHL rival World Hockey Association. From awful financial decisions, such as making their star player the highest paid athlete in the world (even more than Brazilian soccer superstar Pelé), to building its home rink at the antiquated Philadelphia Civic Center, to a disastrous opening night held on Friday the 13th, the story of the Blazers at times borders on farce. It should be required reading for any entrepreneur taking on the risk of running a professional sports franchise.If there is an ever so slight shortcoming with the book, it is that it doesn’t touch upon the larger cultural impact of the growth of sport in the Philadelphia region. As Bass documents in the early chapters of the book, children as far back as the 1930s were playing hockey-like games in the streets of Philadelphia. They, however, weren’t imitating their favorite pro hockey players and dreaming of NHL stardom, whereas today’s street and ice hockey players are. When the first Philadelphia Flyers team hit the ice in 1967, all its players were Canadian-born. Today, roughly 25 percent of NHL players are from the United States, and not just from the traditional hockey hotbeds of New York, New England, and the upper Midwest. Fifty years after the birth of the Flyers, the Philadelphia region is saturated with rinks and opportunities to play organized ice hockey, and players from the Philadelphia region are achieving stardom in the NHL. This observation, however, is just a minor quibble and does not detract from the numerous strengths of the book. Professional Hockey in Philadelphia is a fantastically researched, tightly organized, and highly entertaining look at the history of ice hockey in the City of Brotherly Love.