The Glass Slipper

Australian ice hockey at the Olympics

Australian ice hockey followers have long cherished the hope that we would one day be able to send a team to compete at the Winter Olympics. Biggest bar to the fulfilment of those hopes has, of course, been the tremendous cost of such a venture. In recent years, individual skaters have represented Australia at the Games, but these all paid their own way. A team of skiers also carried the Australian colours at the last Olympics under the same conditions.

The impossibility of getting a worthwhile hockey team together on a pay-your-own way basis is obvious, so the finance has to be raised if we are to see the Australian flag flying over the ice hockey arenas at Cortina in 1956. It is a big job, but long range plans have been adopted and it should not be impossible... The exact amount needed to send a team away is a little difficult to assess, but £4,000 would start to get somewhere near the mark. It could be a lot more.

...when you remember that players like Dave Cunningham, Noel Derrick, Rus Jones, Johnny Nicholas, Vic Ekberg, Dave Campbell, Geoff Henke, Basil Hansen and a host of others among our Victorians alone will still be comparatively young in 1956, it is obvious we have the makings of a good side. It would only be wishful thinking to suggest our team would be a mighty success. Canadians, Americans and teams like Czechoslovakia and Sweden would naturally be far too good for them, but what a wealth of experience our fellows would gain and it is only by competing in these tournaments that we can hope to raise our standards to anything approaching overseas.

—Russell Carson, national secretary, Australian Ice Hockey Federation.

Canada vs Australia at Practice Squaw Valley, 1960. Team Canada, the Kitchener-Waterloo Dutchmen, finished with the Silver. Their line-up included Bobby Rosseau, who first played for the Habs this year, Cliff Pennington who went on to play 101 games for the Habs and Bruins, and Harry Sinden, long-time general manager, coach, and president for the Boston Bruins.

WALT DISNEY AND HIS TEAM awake to a raging Sierra Nevada blizzard. The week before had been perfect. Whiteout conditions present difficulties for the VIII Winter Olympics ceremony and plans for the first-ever coast-to-coast television coverage scheduled to begin at 10 am. Ten inches of snow is falling. CBS host Walter Cronkite looks like he is broadcasting from the Arctic wastelands. High school musicians stand frozen to their instruments during dress rehearsal, not dressed for a blizzard, and unable to see the conductor through the snow. Pigeon wranglers shake their heads, unlikely to release their birds.

The vice-president of the United States is driving in from Reno. His helicopter is grounded. Snow on the road worsens the treacherous drive up the mountain. It stops people dead in their tracks and hinders the network crews and announcers from reaching their locations. No one knows if the vice-president will make it on time to open the Games. Someone has to decide what to do.

Walt Disney, Chairman of the Pageantry Committee, is unfazed. The alternative to the outdoor ceremony is a smaller indoor ceremony. The TV crews favour that, but not the choral director. It will squeeze out many young musicians who worked hard to get here. We will go on, Disney tells them, and hope the weather will clear. Visibility is almost zero while the athletes gather to march out onto the arena an hour later than scheduled. The weather clears. The snow stops. The sun shines as if scripted.

For two hours, the creator of the Magic Kingdom punctuates the first made-for-TV opening gala with music and booming sounds. He draws on 3680 high school students, 1322 musicians and a 2358 voice choir, the United States Marine Band, thousands of balloons, and 2000 white pigeons taking flight as cannons fire the flags of each nation into the air. A spectacular daytime fireworks display caps the speeches, the Olympic oath, and the lighting of the Olympic flame. Five minutes after it all ends, the snow resumes falling and continues for most of the day and night. The next day is bright and sunny, and it stays that way for the rest of the Games. Many writers later refer to the miraculous break in the weather as "The Miracle of Squaw Valley".

Flag-bearer Vic Ekberg leads the first Australian ice hockey Olympians. Although two Czechs immigrated many years earlier, most are homegrown. The squad is all Australian; no players imported from overseas.

Ekberg began hockey at St Moritz St Kilda in the summer of 1949. He developed his game for three-and-a-half seasons then sailed for England. Vic earned a spot on the roster of the Streatham Royals in the Intermediate League London under the prominent Canadian coach, Red Stapleford. He said he learnt more in that one season overseas than he would have in a lifetime at home.

Plenty of homegrown players populated the top hockey teams in Victoria those days. Rus Jones, Dave Cunningham, Noel Derrick. But Ekberg's experience in the Australian player development system was the emergent pattern rather than the odd occurrence. Seventy years later, local players still cannot get the training and development they need at home. They have to live on the other side of the globe. They pay the social and financial cost of not developing with their national team line-mates, in- and off-season. Not only in national leagues but also competition with equal or higher ranked nations in their region. The system leaks some of its best talents along with the support and resources their families would otherwise provide local leagues and ice rinks.

The invitation to the California Games came with financial help from the USA, 5 but they were not the only North Americans helping. The first winter Olympian and the first Olympic hockey team in Australia also required a little Imagineering, especially from three Canadian-born Australians—Jim Kendall, Doc Carson and Bud McEachern. They began before the national authority for ice hockey and speed skating. John Goodall in Melbourne. Leslie Reid in Sydney, calling on the experience of ex-pat North Americans, Doc Murphy and Jim Kendall.

When Kendall, the ex-Montreal University player, retired in 1925, he was already coaching a new generation of ice hockey players who were also ice racers. The Australian game was all about speed, unlike almost anywhere else in the world at that time. An offside rule and minimal checking kept things moving. Kendall had contributed 25 years to local ice hockey when he began coaching the new Sydney University ice hockey team in 1937.

In June 1929, the NSW Olympic Council granted the state ice hockey association affiliation, acknowledging sportsmen like Kendall, who "cultivated ice hockey, speed and figure skating to send competitors to the next Games".

The Australians did not make the third winter Olympics at Lake Placid in New York in 1932. Two of Kendall's protégés, Jim Brown and Ken Kennedy, were winning the quarter-mile and half-mile championships. Brown broke British ice racing records and played in the world's largest amateur hockey league.

Kennedy followed suit—the first Australian winter games Olympian at Garmisch in Bavaria, Germany. He competed in the 500m, 1500m and 5000m speed skating events. The fastest British Empire representative at the Games, he remained in England as a professional skater in a team that included Australian world professional figures champions Enders and Cambridge and British figures Olympian Hope Braine, who had plans to become an Australian citizen. The Australian Olympic Federation sanctioned Kennedy, but supervision and support were minimal.

A few years later, in June 1939, the national association proposed an ice hockey team for the 1940 Games. They opened a fund to raise the required £1500 through state associations. Organisers cancelled the Games in 1940 and 44 due to the World War. When Kennedy returned in April 1946, the national association announced it was considering an Australian team for the 1948 Winter Olympics at St Moritz in Switzerland. New South Wales withdrew a month later because of the cost, and the Victorians continued on alone. Kennedy, the new national president, supported them.

The Australian Olympic Federation admitted the Victorian ice hockey association in 1950. The state association re-established an Olympic Fund in 1954. International coach Bud McEachern arrived permanently from Norway, where he took their national team to their first World Championship and Olympics. Two decades in the making, everything was in place. The Victorians lodged their request to compete at the 1956 Winter Games in Italy, offering to pay their way. The AOF did not reply. Unable to attend, the Vics criticised the AOF's disinterest. Most players were at their best in their mid-twenties, if not a little earlier.

A member of the squad, Geoff Henke, played ice hockey with the VIHA Raiders. At least half his club were talented newcomers from Europe. This sad antipathy set him on the path that eventually ended the neglect of winter sports in Australia, at least in the skiing and skating events. 3

Speed skater Colin Hickey once revealed he did not even receive clothing from the Australian Olympic Federation, except for a black armband and tie for the 1952 Olympics, to mark the death of King George VI. Australian officials had "no control over me," he said. "All they'd do was tell me what times I had to do".

Ice hockey here suffered a body blow as a direct result of that lost opportunity in 1956. Most of the proposed team made the 1960 Games, with one New South Welshman, at a personal cost of about £600 each (about $16,000). But they were all four years older, and Henke was not among them. The average age of the 1960 squad was thirty, and a minority of only seven of the seventeen players were in their twenties.

Ice hockey was the most spectacular of all events at these Games. The USA won, undoubtedly adding to the sport's popularity by upsetting both Canada and the defending champions from Russia. The victory came to be known as the Forgotten Miracle after the more famous 1980 gold medal known as the Miracle On Ice. Filmmakers Tommy Haines and Andrew Sherburne made a documentary on its 50th anniversary.

Fewer participants than usual made it possible for Australia to join in the Games. Some teams in Group A did not compete, among them Switzerland, Norway, German Democratic Republic and Poland. In the Preliminary Round, teams played two games against others in their pool.

Australia was unfortunate to open against Czechoslovakia (CSSR) and then play the home team (USA). Coach McEachern rotated two defensive pairs with three lines of forwards and two utility players who could play both ends. Two teams survived each of the three pools to play in the championship tournament. The three losers of the preliminary round, including Australia, played the consolation tournament.

Czechoslovakia defeated Australia 18-1 (7-1, 3-0, 8-0) and finished fourth. Rob Reid in net played the entire sixty minutes making 64 total saves, facing over twice the average shots on goal (17 saves in the 1st, 21 in the 2nd and 26 in the 3rd). The CSSR goalies Nadrchal and Dvoracek combined for 14 total saves, facing about half the average shots on goal.

Cunningham scored Australia's only goal in the first, assisted by Jones and Ekberg. Wellman took a two-minute penalty in the third, and Kasper for Czechoslovakia took three 2-minute penalties, including one for spearing Steve (Zdenek) Tikal in the shoulder. Tikal played against his brother Frantisek, a defenseman for the Czechs for seventeen years, who later helped capture the Bronze medal in 1964. The IIHF Hall of Fame inducted Frantisek in 2004.

Steve had defected to Australia twelve years earlier, and the brothers from opposing nations faced each other in Olympic hockey for the first time. Speared in the shoulder as he skated down the left wing, Steve Tikal hit the ice hard. His Olympic campaign ended after a collision with his brother left him unable to compete with a separated shoulder. The Czech secret police tried to keep them apart, but they reunited under cover of darkness.

"That Czech game was pretty brutal," recalled Basil Hansen. "We had two Czech players in our team. The other was Ivan Vesely, and both died several years ago. They were naturalised Australians. It was a big deal as far as the Czechs were concerned because they were classed as traitors to their country, and they wanted to kill". 5

In the second game, the USA defeated Australia 12-1 (6-0, 3-0, 3-1). Reid in net saved eight shots but allowed six goals in the first period. Noel McLoughlin saved 16 and allowed 3 in the second, then saved nine shots and let in three more goals in the third. The total shots on goal were USA 33 - 9, a much better defensive performance, and against the team that ran out victors at home.

McLoughlin had never seen a face mask, but he made sure he got one after standing exposed in front of the net against the US. It was a miracle, he said fifty years later, that he did not wear a puck in the face. He could not believe the speed at which the Americans were shooting. 5 Rus Jones scored from Dave Cunningham in the third. Captain Benny Acton was penalised for two minutes in the first period, and Ivo Vesely took two in the second period.

The team that won the gold included Tommy The Bomber (Tom Williams), launching an 8-season career with the Bruins, and keeper Jack McCartan who was on trial with the New York Rangers. Herb Brooks, the future coach of the 1980 US "Miracle on Ice" team, was cut a week before the Games began.

In the consolation tournament, Finland and Japan twice defeated Australia 14-1 and 19-2, 13-2 and 11-3, respectively. Australia finished last with 8 goals and 58 goals against them. Ivo Vesely smashed his head into the crossbar when scoring his team's only goal against Finland and was carried unconscious from the rink. 4

Overall, Australia finished 9th and last, scoring ten goals and conceding eighty-seven from their six games. David Cunningham scored six points (4 + 2) from six games, and Rus Jones scored five points (2 + 3).

"We got over there, and within a few days, we were supposed to be playing hockey," said Bas Hansen in 2010. "We didn't have any time to acclimatise, and the valley was 5000 feet [1500 metres] above sea level, which we weren't used to. The air was a bit rarefied, the ice was a lot faster than what we were used to, and we were all amateurs in the true sense. We found that most of the other teams were not what you would call true amateurs, they were either army or air force, and they played hockey seven days a week".

Australia did not return to the new B-pool in 1961.

The story of the players who danced on ice with hockey royalty in 1960 is from the same fairytale as the Squaw Valley bid itself. Both were true Cinderella stories, and the most unlikely characters waved the wand. Perhaps that sounds like pure fantasy, but the same tale has emerged too often, over too many centuries, in too many languages and mediums and cultural traditions for it to be meaningless. It somehow connects with universal truths.

Alexander Cushing started the Squaw Valley bid as a publicity stunt. His bid shocked the world when it beat out some of the famed ski resorts of Europe in the vote by the International Olympic Committee in 1955. The Australians did not beat-out opponents to win even a single game on the ice. But they did participate and scored Olympic goals, despite the shocking antipathy of their Olympic federation.

"We were very, very amateur. We weren't going over there to win anything. We went over there to learn," said Rus Jones 50 years after the event. "It's going to be difficult for an Australian team to get there again". 5 What if the sport here was all the richer for it precisely because it was not about winning? What if it had set something in motion?

With one chairlift, two tow-ropes and a fifty-room lodge, Squaw Valley was far from prepared to host an international sporting event back then. When IOC President Avery Brundage heard about the bid, he told Cushing, "The USOC has obviously taken leave of their senses," and you are "setting the Olympic movement back 25 years". In four years, Squaw Valley stood transformed into a stunning example of American ingenuity, perseverance and dedication. It dazzled the world.

Similarly, Australia was unprepared to compete at the world-class level, but they did and returned for another go at the elimination round of the 1964 Games. The team did not dazzle the world with its performance there either. The magic required to get there was enough. Pumpkin carriages do not grow on trees.

The message of the fairytale is "that a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable. [It] is an intrinsic part of human existence. But, if one does not shy away, and steadfastly meets unexpected and often unjust hardships, one masters all obstacles and at the end emerges victorious". 8

Disney Imagineer John Hench heavily influenced the look of these Games. He studied snow sculpting techniques at the Winter carnivals of Dartmouth College and Quebec, then designed thirty five-metre tall "snow" statues for the Avenue of the Athletes and other places. Walt resurrected the ancient Greek custom of commemorating Olympic champions with marble sculptures.

Disney made sure of its Hollywood touches with the first live entertainment for athletes every evening, Bing Crosby, Roy Rogers, Red Skelton, Danny Kaye and Jack Benny. Actress Marlene Dietrich posed for pictures with the German hockey team. Jayne Mansfield, the official press hostess, looked after the media.

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences delivered films for the athletes to watch nightly in the Olympia Theater. Silicon Valley supplied cutting edge IBM automated systems, and IBM itself sent 26 technicians to operate them without charge. It made the scoring of events the fastest in Olympic history. For the first time, competitors knew the results of their efforts in progress.

The Disney Games received rave reviews. The once-sceptical IOC chairman called them the "greatest games ever staged". Army Archerd in Variety called the opening ceremony "the greatest show on Earth," and a reporter for the Los Angeles Times gushed, "it is my conviction that you'll never see anything of that kind so well done in your lifetime". The Russians wanted to know the chemicals used to control the weather during the opening ceremony.

The VIII Winter Olympics cast a long shadow, influencing the look and feel of the event up to the present day. Many wondered how Disney managed to make things work out so perfectly. Was it divine intervention? If it was a miracle, claimed their press materials, it was a well-planned miracle. Walt himself said, "It's just that if you live right, things happen the way they're supposed to".





Some are critical of the Cinderella story for presenting a heroine who needs a prince to escape her unhappiness—the Cinderella Complex. Cinderella is beautiful, hardworking and independent, a woman who is run down by women in her society. But is she incapable of changing her situation by her actions? Does she need help from an outside force?

"Cinderella believed in dreams, alright," conceded Walt Disney. "But she also believed in doing something about them. When Prince Charming didn't come along, she went over to the palace and got him". And her fairy godmother left her little that did not change back to rags when the magic reached its use-by date. Just enough to make a dream come true.

Unfortunately, for decades following Australia's first ice hockey Olympians, most people with power and influence in the sport did pot geraniums and watch the sun set. The historical evidence and criticism is overwhelming. Writing this history, we are left to wonder if they were even aware their ambition had collapsed. In any other country, the story of the Australians who danced on ice with hockey's elite at the VIII Winter Olympics would be a magical legacy, a glass slipper.

Notes and bibliography:


[1] Sydney Morning Herald, 13 Jun 1929 p16; 25 Oct 1935 p17; 18 Mar 1938 p 17; 27 Jun 1939 p15; 18 Apr 1946 p9; 23 May 1946 p9

[2] The Walt Disney Family Museum, "New Heights: Walt and the Winter Olympics" by Michael Crawford, 2012

[3] Wikipedia entry for Geoff Henke, online

[4] Canberra Times, 24 Feb 1960 p 24 Australian Ice Hockey Side Trounced

[5] Sydney Morning Herald, 21 Feb 2010. The rink outsiders who made the big time, by Chloe Saltau

[6] Ice Hockey Guide, VIHA, Goodall Cup Issue, Sep 1954, Edited by Russ Carson

[7] VIII Olympic Winter Games, 1960, Final Report, California Olympic Commission

[8] The Uses of Enchantment: the Meaning and Importance of Fairy tales. Bruno Bettelheim, 1976