The Great Ones : Long Before Gretzky’s Kings, There Were the Hollywood Wolves

For the first time in more than 20 years of existence, the Kings appear good enough to make a serious run at the Stanley Cup.

It might surprise their fans, though, to know that the Kings are not the first local hockey team to challenge for a national championship. In fact, Los Angeles once actually boasted a national champion, and the entire championship series was played before the hometown fans.

The season was 1943-44. The team was known as the Hollywood Wolves, and they defeated the Boston Olympics, the Bruins’ top farm team, in six games for the championship of the Amateur Hockey Assn. of the United States.

Although the word amateur now conjures up an image of beer leaguers playing at midnight, in those years senior amateur hockey was far from that. Until the mid-1950s, it was a major attraction all over North America.

The system was much like top amateur sports in Europe, with players actually or ostensibly holding other jobs but being relatively well paid and given substantial time off to pursue their avocations. The leagues were often promoted as if they were professional, and Canada’s Allan Cup, representing that country’s senior championship, ranked just below the Stanley Cup in prestige.

With only six teams in the NHL and another 10 or so in the minor American Hockey League, star players from junior leagues often spent several years playing senior hockey before turning professional. Jean Beliveau, playing in Quebec City, was making so much money as an “amateur” that for a time he could not afford to move into the NHL.

The Eastern Amateur Hockey League, stretching from Boston to Washington, was the top senior league in the United States. It served as a developmental league for many of the American NHL teams.

Although Boston’s Olympics usually dominated, the league enjoyed immense popularity until a variety of postwar changes in the structure of hockey resulted in its eventual demise.

Although organized semipro hockey had been played in Los Angeles since 1925, the Southern California Hockey League was only in its second season. It grew out of the popular college hockey league that flourished in Los Angeles in the 1930s.

The cross-town rivalry between USC, with players recruited largely from Western Canada, and Loyola, whose players came primarily from Minnesota, was intense, but one by one the schools abandoned the sport. When USC finally gave up hockey after the 1941-42 season, the Trojan players and alumni formed the Hollywood Wolves, with former USC assistant Tom Murray as coach.

The league played Sunday afternoon doubleheaders at the relatively new Pan Pacific Auditorium at Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue. The Henderson brothers, Phil and Cliff, who owned the arena and had been involved in the promotion of college hockey, sponsored the new team.

There were three other charter teams in the league, the Los Angeles Monarchs, the San Diego Skyhawks and Minter Field.

The Monarchs were “owned” by a local trucking company and operated by the popular John Polich, a former Loyola star. His team featured players who were primarily from the local colleges other than USC.

The Skylarks consisted of a rollicking but talented group of characters who had emigrated to San Diego from Eveleth, Minn., en masse a few years before. They had been euphemistically known as the San Diego Rowing Club in their earlier years.

Minter Field, an air base near Bakersfield, provided the fourth team, but despite the “loan” of players from other clubs, the air base was not competitive, and did not win a game all season.

Before the start of the 1943-44 season, the Hendersons bought the Monarchs for $500, and with the demise of the Minter Field team, formed the Pasadena Panthers, whose only connection with Pasadena was that the Hendersons also owned a public skating rink there.

Although the revamped league was actually almost a Henderson house league, the public did not seem to mind, and the brand of hockey caught on. During the 1943-44 season, capacity crowds of close to 7,000 were common at the Pan Pacific.

The Wolves of 1943-44 were in a class by themselves, though. Although the team still consisted primarily of former Trojans, several key players were added and the team sailed through the 18-game regular season with only three defeats.

The offensive spark of the team was provided by former Trojan center Harry Black. The father of major league pitcher Bud Black, he weighed only 150 pounds but might have been the cleverest puck carrier to have played in Los Angeles until Wayne Gretzky. That year, he led the league in scoring for most of the season, averaging slightly more than two points a game.

Flanking Black were two other USC alumni, Hank Cahan and Sig Berlie, both able goal scorers.

Centering the second line was the Trojans’ most famous hockey alumnus, Bennie Novicki. Big, fast, and rough, Novicki’s personal battles in the collegiate league with Monarch Coach John Polich were well known, and he had been among the top scorers both in college and later in league play for five years.

The other former Trojan of note was Jack Carney, a mobile young defenseman who not only played steadily on the blue line but could move the puck when required.

Goalie Ray Biss was from Loyola, and was notable not only because of his fall-on-the-puck style, but because he played wearing a baseball cap.

The most important addition to the Wolves’ defense, however, was NHL Hall of Fame blue-liner Ivan (Ching) Johnson. At 45, the former Ranger star had long since retired, but had recently moved to Los Angeles, where his wife had taken a government war job. The story is that he simply showed up unrecognized at a Wolves practice one day and asked for a tryout.

Johnson packed about 230 pounds on his stocky frame and was as tough as they come. He must have enjoyed playing for the Wolves or else he knew something no one else knew, because he always seemed to be smiling as he gleefully crashed into opposing forwards.

With Johnson supplying the muscle, Carney the mobility, and Biss barring the door, the Wolves gave up fewer than three goals a game in running off with the regular-season title.

In those days they let all four teams play off for the Henderson Cup.

It was not as easy as it should have been for the Wolves. They blew out the fourth-place Pasadena team in the first game, but the second one featured a wild third period during which each team scored four times. The Wolves ended up with one more goal than the Panthers, sweeping the series.

Meanwhile, the Monarchs, who could not win even half of their games during the regular season, got inspired play from player-coach Polich and upset the rowdy San Diego team to reach the final round.

Then, in another best-of-three series, the Wolves won the first two games, but both were the kind of one-goal victories that would characterize playoff meetings between the two local teams in years to come. Although the Wolves scarcely needed reinforcements, they picked up Lloyd Roubell, a veteran former professional from the American League who had been playing for Pasadena.

He scored three goals in the two games, two in the opener, including the winner in a 3-2 victory, and one of the two as the Monarchs were eliminated, 2-1.

When hockey first appeared in Los Angeles in 1925, the promoters had immediately challenged the Easterners to send a team out to play for the national championship. That challenge was mercifully ignored, but 18 years later, a bona fide series was arranged.

When the Boston Olympics arrived in Los Angeles for the showdown, their record was 40-3. The team featured future NHL stars Allan Stanley and Fern Flaman on defense, as well as a host of future minor league professionals, several of whom would eventually make cameo appearances in the big league. The Olympics did not expect serious opposition.

Instead, it was a great series, and it was standing room only for each game.

The Wolves surprised the travel-weary Olympics in the opener by checking fiercely and won, 3-2. Roubell scored the winning goal with slightly more than five minutes left in the third period. Both Olympic goals were scored when the Wolves were two men short.

In the second game, Boston played to form, winning easily. The score was only 4-3, but Hollywood did not score until the Olympics had a three-goal lead. The smart money said that the locals were outclassed by the more experienced Easterners who now had their game together.

That game, however, proved to be Boston’s best effort of the series. The Olympics won the next one as well, 4-3, but were fortunate at that. A power-play goal in the second period put them two goals ahead, but the Wolves rallied. Novicki finally scored with 40 seconds remaining, setting up a wild finish in front of the Boston net in which goalie Maurice Courteau was spectacular.

From that point on, it was all Hollywood as the Wolves’ defense took over. Black and Carney each scored twice as Hollywood tied the series with a 6-4 victory in Game 4.

And in the next game, after the Olympics had taken a 2-1 lead, Berlie and Cahan scored near the end of the second period to put the Wolves in front, and Carney scored the crushing fourth goal midway through the third period. The stunned Olympics stood and watched as the Wolves and their jubilant fans celebrated a 4-2 victory.

World War II demands for manpower weakened the team the next year, although the league continued to operate successfully. Only Berlie, Novicki, and Biss remained with the Wolves, though, and by the end of the war, they were gone as well.

The postwar Wolves, Monarchs and Skyhawks became part of the Pacific Coast Hockey League that stretched to Vancouver, and flourished until 1950, eventually becoming a full-fledged but short-lived professional league.

Hollywood, no longer a Trojan alumni team, never won another league championship. John Polich’s Monarchs absorbed some of the returning former collegians, among them Harry Black, and won the league championship in 1947. They then took on the Olympics in Boston for the national title, but were defeated in a five-game series that was barely noted by the local media.

So, regardless of the Kings’ success, the Wolves have been an important part of the history of hockey in Los Angeles. They accomplished something that no other Los Angeles hockey team has been able to do in more than 60 years.

Willie Runquist, who grew up in Los Angeles and played amateur hockey here, is a retired professor of psychology living in Union Bay, British Columbia, Canada.