Tommy Gorman

Team photo of the New York ice hockey team on April 12, 1926 in Toronto. Gorman is in the front row, second from the left

Thomas Patrick "Tommy" Gorman (born June 9, 1886 in Ottawa , Ontario ; † May 15, 1961 ibid) was a Canadian athlete and functionary. He co-founded the National Hockey League (NHL), led four teams to victory in the Stanley Cup seven times and won the gold medal in lacrosse at the 1908 Summer Olympics .

Life

Gorman was born in Ontario and started playing sports early. At the Summer Olympics in London in 1908 , a lacrosse competition was held in which two teams took part. The Canadian Gorman's team competed against the team from Great Britain and won the only game 14:10. After the Olympics, he played as a professional for a few years. After his career, Gorman joined the Ottawa Citizen newspaper and worked there until 1921.

In the 1916/17 season, the Ottawa Senators ice hockey team was missing players and Gorman was tasked with putting together a competitive team. He was eventually hired as an official of the Senators and as such played a role in the founding of the National Hockey League a year later , when the leaders of the Montréal Canadiens , Montreal Wanderers , Ottawa Senators and Quebec Bulldogs merged to form one on November 22, 1917 to found his own league because of disagreements within the National Hockey Association . He also took over the sporting direction of the Ottawa Senators in 1917 and won the Stanley Cup with them in 1920, 1921 and 1923 . In 1925 he passed his post to Frank Ahearn and became the manager and coach of the New York Americans , bringing professional ice hockey to New York City .

He left the New York Club in 1929 to become the manager of a horse racing track in Mexico. In 1932 Gorman negotiated that the Australian racehorse Phar Lap , which to this day is considered the best Australian racehorse of all time, ran on the track. It won the award and died shortly afterwards under unexplained circumstances. After the owner of the racetrack sold it that same year, Gorman turned his back on horse racing.

During the 1932–33 season, he was hired to coach the Chicago Black Hawks and led the team from last place the year Gorman took them to their first Stanley Cup win a year later. Ten days after the triumph, he resigned and went to Montreal, where he helped the Montreal Maroons to win the Stanley Cup in 1935. This makes him the only coach to date who has won the Stanley Cup twice in a row with different teams. He coached the Maroons until the club disbanded in 1938. In 1940 he was coach of the Montréal Canadiens, with whom he won the Stanley Cup in 1944 and 1946.

Gorman later took over a racecourse again, which he ran until he died of cancer at the age of 74. He was the last living founder of the NHL and was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1963, in 1966 he was inducted into the Ottawa Sports Hall of Fame and in 1977 the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame .

Web links

• Tommy Gorman in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )
• Tommy Gorman in the database of the Hockey Hall of Fame (English)