‘Our Victorias Victorious’: Media, Rivalry, and the 1896 Winnipeg-Montreal Stanley Cup Hockey Challenges

Abstract

This study analyzes media coverage of the two Stanley Cup hockey challenges played by the Winnipeg Victorias and the Montreal Victorias in February and December 1896. First presented in 1893, the Stanley Cup symbolized the national hockey championship of Canada. The essay argues that newspaper reports and telegraph reconstructions of early Stanley Cup hockey matches brought Canadians into both local and national communities of interest centred on sport, while helping to create a mediated Canadian ‘hockey world’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The 1896 Stanley Cup contests were likely the first two games in which the technology of telegraphy was applied to the sport of hockey in such a way that large crowds in distant cities could experience matches as they were being played. In addition, this study examines the regional and interurban rivalries that were expressed through Stanley Cup competition. Newspapers depicted Montreal and Winnipeg hockey teams as representatives of east-west conflict and difference, as well as embodiments of community identity and civic pride.