Hockey

It was late one night in early 1948 when Murray Dowey got a phone call he never expected.

Dowey was a 22-year-old goaltender playing senior hockey in Toronto, a talent good enough to once be offered the chance to be the practice goaltender for the Toronto Maple Leafs.

He didn't know much about the Olympics and sure didn't know what to think when the voice on the other end of the phone asked him if he wanted to play hockey for Canada at the 1948 Games, which were only weeks away in St. Moritz, Switzerland.

"I had no idea what the Olympics were because our hockey was the NHL and the Olympics weren't as popular as now," said Dowey, now 83. "I got the call, went to Ottawa, they put me in a uniform and the next day we went to New York and from there on the Queen Elizabeth to Southampton, where we landed. We ate well and some guys drank pretty well, too. It was kind of strange. I didn't know anyone and they didn't know me."

The team Dowey had joined in a snap was known at the RCAF Flyers, a ragtag collection of players organized by air force squadron leader Sandy Watson, who had jumped at the chance to put together a team of servicemen who could represent Canada.

It was the first Winter Olympics since 1936 and Canada was having trouble coming up with a team that could meet the strict amateur requirements of the International Ice Hockey Federation. But Watson believed there was enough talent among RCAF servicemen to represent Canada proudly.

Watson's first edition of the team, culled in 1947 from roughly 70 recruits from across the country, hadn't fared so well in exhibition games against senior hockey and college squads. So as the Olympics approached, the dream of icing a team full of active serviceman gave way to adding the best amateur players available.

"The team was selected from all over but had a lot of players going in and out," said Andy Gilpin, 88, a winger from Montreal who had been stationed with the air force in Whitehorse before he joined the team. "We lost an exhibition game 7-0 to McGill and after that they said we'd better get a little better team, so they added some ex-air force players from the Ottawa senior league."

The recruiting didn't end there. In the weeks leading up to those Olympics, the search for players continued until only about a half-dozen members of the original team were left.

And yet this ragtag group assembled on the fly, with a roster that was juggled right up until the time they boarded the ship for Europe, captured one of only two Olympic gold medals Canada would win over the next 50 years.

"We weren't the best hockey team in the world, but we were a good senior team," Dowey said. "And the more we stayed together and did what [head coach] Frank Boucher said, the better we played."

Dowey came to Watson's attention shortly after he recruited two other players from the Toronto senior league, Walter Halder and George Mara, two NHL-calibre additions who proved to be the team's best players.

"Those two had been offered contracts by the New York Rangers but they turned them down because they wanted no-trade contracts," said Pete Leichnitz, 82, a centre who wound up giving up his Olympic ice time to the new recruits. "They arrived a week or two before we left. The goalie we had, Dick Ball, failed a medical. They were frantic looking for a goalie. Mara and Halder said, ‘Go after Dowey, he's the second-best goalie in Toronto. And the first is [Leafs starter] Turk Broda.'."

The challenges for the RCAF Flyers didn't end with the frantic manner in which the team had been assembled.

In Europe, the Canadians experienced a completely different brand of hockey than they'd been used to at home.

"The games were all played outside," Gilpin said. "And there were games where we had to clear the ice every 10 minutes it was snowing so hard."

Even more challenging were the foreign rules the Canadians encountered, such as one that penalized goaltenders for playing the puck - sending them off the ice to serve penalties. And another that banned body checking outside on the opposition's side of the ice.

"There weren't any Canadian officials," Dowey said. "They were all European and we got the idea they knew someone and were having a good two weeks at the Olympics."

Playing a tight checking style and backstopped by Dowey's play in goal, the Canadians played a series of exhibition games in Europe and began to jell. When the Games began, the Canadians took flight, with Dowey leading the way with five shutouts and a goals-against average of 0.62.

"We went over under a real cloud," recalled 87-year-old Roy Forbes, who played defence for Canada. "There wasn't a paper in the country that gave us a chance of winning a medal, never mind a gold medal, so it didn't help your self-esteem."

"No one knew what European teams would be like because it was after the war. When we got over there and won a couple of exhibition games, playing some teams with a lot of Canadians, I thought we wouldn't do too badly. I don't think we went over there thinking we'd get gold medals, but we built confidence and came back with them."