While the aspiring varsity athletes among you may know a bit about the history of the Queen’s athletic program, chances are most of you are unaware of its rich athletic traditions. So here are 10 goodies we’d like to share…
1. The Queen’s program has a 145-year history replete with thrilling victories and crushing losses, but its roots are humble. In 1860 Col. Angus Cameron convinced the Board of Trustees to set up a small gym in Summerhill, which was then the University’s main building. Track and field competitions—including the Scottish caber toss—were held annually from the early 1870s until the early 1900s.
2. Queen’s athletes are known as Golden Gaels, but this wasn’t always the case. Until 1947, teams were known as The Tricolour, for our red, blue and gold uniforms.
In 1947 the football team changed their uniforms to gold jerseys and helmets with red pants, which prompted Kingston Whig-Standard reporter Cliff Bowering to describe the team as “The Golden Gaels of Queen’s University.” The nickname caught on and within a few years the team was widely known as the Golden Gaels.
3. The men’s hockey team played for the Stanley Cup in 1899 and 1906. While our team’s name did not make it on to that coveted trophy, it does grace the Grey Cup.
Queen’s trounced the Edmonton Eskimos 13-1 in 1922 to win their first Grey Cup, which was immediately followed by two more championship wins—in 1923 when Queen’s slaughtered the Regina Roughriders by a score of 54-0, and in 1924 when Queen’s beat the Toronto Balmy Beach Beachers 11-3 for the cup.
4. Our mascot, Boo Hoo the Bear, is now a guy or girl in a big fuzzy bear suit, but the original Boo Hoo was a living, breathing bear cub purchased by students in 1922.
He was succeeded by four more bears over the years until the early ‘50s when Boo Hoo V ed away. But it would be some 25 to 30 years before Boo Hoo resurfaced, this time as a big, cartoon-like plush suit.
5. The oldest athletic rivalry involving Queen’s dates back to 1886, when Queen’s students played the first game of hockey between two Ontario universities with cadets from the Royal Military College.
They played with a square puck with rounded corners two-and-a-half inches thick; they used goal posts without nets; and there were no lines on the rink. Each team had seven men on the ice and no substitutions were allowed.
The game is commemorated by an historic two-game series played by Queen’s and RMC each winter for the Carr-Harris Cup, named after the family who contributed to the hockey programs at both Queen’s and RMC from 1897 onward.
6. In 1984 of Queen’s Engineering Society (EngSoc) and Golden Words abducted the McGill Engineering Society mascot.
The three-foot high plush wombat was offered to EngSoc in a collect phone call from a male in Montreal, but the offer came with a price tag: nine cases of Molson’s. EngSoc made the trade, with plans to return the wombat at the Kill McGill game. Then they cut off one of the wombat’s ears and sent it to McGill as a warning.
7. You’ve likely heard of the rivalry between Queen’s, U of T, McGill and Western, but you probably didn’t know that in 1984 the four teams almost formed a football league that excluded all other university teams.
But once Queen’s made a public announcement of its intent to break from the OU-OWAA, our three rivals decided they were going to stay with the league after all, conveniently leaving Queen’s with only a few days to apply to get back into the league.
In an interview published in the Sept. 21, 1984 issue of the Journal, U of T President John Connell laughed and said, “The joke is on Queen’s.”
8. Richardson Field sustained between $4,500 and $5,000 damage in 1990 after some 4,000 fans stormed the field following a homecoming game tie against Bishop’s University. It was reported that fans were throwing mud and ‘sport humping’ each other on the field.
Coaches and the istration were not impressed.
9. Whatever you’ve heard about the Grease Pole, you probably only know a fraction of the story.
For years Queen’s fans had rushed the field and rammed down the Varsity’s goal post following games in Toronto. So when U of T got smart and erected a metal pole, Queen’s engineers got smarter. At a 1955 game a group of Queen’s engineering students cut the pole, bringing the Grease Pole to Kingston—by way of Winnipeg.
The Grease Pole has come to symbolize the strength and cohesiveness of each year of engineers through the collective effort to retrieve a tam from the top of the greased pole, and their ability to keep the pole from being stolen back by U of T engineering students—unfortunately, U of T students retrieved the pole in 2000, and since then another pole has been used for the annual event.
10. It’s unlikely that you’ve heard of Alfie Pierce (1874-1951), so I’ll introduce you to one of the most important figures in Queen’s athletics history. He’s renowned for his spirit, as he paraded many a time in front of the stands and across the football field, but Alfie was much more to so many.
The son of a runaway American slave who fled to Canada and settled in Kingston, Alfie was a gifted athlete who frequented the playing fields at Queen’s. He played football and baseball, and was a star player on the Eastern Ontario lacrosse circuit into his 40s.
When Alfie was 15, football captain Guy Curtis—in what was then considered a magnanimous gesture—named him “team mascot,” and over the next 62 years Alfie served as trainer, assistant coach, unofficial security guard and as a key er of Queen’s athletics. When he died, Alfie’s body lay in state in the gym for two hours as students and alumni filed past paying their last respects.
A Golden Gaels athletics award—given to the first year athlete who has contributed the most to Queen’s sports—bears his name, as does Alfie’s Pub underneath the JDUC, and legend has it that Alfie’s ghost haunts the JDUC to this day.
—with files from the Journal and the Queen’s Encyclopedia, qnc.queensu.ca/Enclyclopedia/index.html
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