The Ottawa Senators won't be hoisting the Stanley Cup this year, but the nation's capital is a crucial step closer to building a giant tribute to the world's most storied sports trophy.
An ambitious plan to construct a "colossal" monument celebrating the Cup's Ottawa origins -- possibly as tall as 20 metres -- has gained a ringing endorsement from a National Capital Commission historical advisory panel and the federal agency's top official for national memorials.
"It's such a fantastic way to celebrate our hockey history," said Sylvie Tilden, the NCC's senior manager of commemorations, public art and representation.
"Who in Canada can't connect, in some fashion, to hockey?" she added. "We have, in a very unofficial sort of way, started to think about sites."
An NCC advisory group of historians gave "a very positive response" to the idea, said Tilden, summarizing the expert committee's reaction as: "Wow, this is a real good one."
That puts the super-sized Cup dream -- first proposed last year by Ottawa author and hockey historian Paul Kitchen in a Citizen op-ed article -- on a fast track to reality.
The NCC is the government's principal agent for erecting monuments in the capital and controls vast tracts of real estate around Parliament Hill and throughout downtown.
That includes land near the former hotel site where, in March 1892, it was announced that governor general Lord Stanley of Preston would donate a silver bowl symbolizing Canadian amateur hockey supremacy.
Kitchen's campaign to create the Cup monument -- which last year gained a symbolic nod of approval from the city's municipal government -- has also attracted high-profile support from ex-NHLer and former Hockey Canada president Murray Costello (now a vice-president of the International Ice Hockey Federation), the Senators' founding owner, Bruce Firestone, and current Senators vice-president Jeff Kyle.
Those three have joined a Kitchen-chaired committee aimed at raising funds and formal government approvals for the project.
In recent weeks, the National Hockey League itself sent the group a letter of endorsement following a presentation on the proposed monument at league headquarters in New York.
Hockey Canada, the sport's main administrative body in this country, has also given the project its blessing.
"It has got to be a work of breathtaking scale and beauty," insists Kitchen, who believes the monument should depict both Lord Stanley and the original bowl he commissioned for the "dominion" hockey championship nearly 120 years ago.
"Everybody just seems to be so enthusiastic," said Kitchen, whose committee has also issued an invitation to downtown businesses to propose potential monument sites.
If fundraising, a formal site-selection process and a national design competition run smoothly in the coming months, the monument could be in place by the end of 2012, Kitchen said.
One NCC-controlled site already discussed publicly as a potential location for the monument is a strip of land along the Rideau Canal next to Lansdowne Park. The Ottawa Silver Seven successfully defended the Cup in 1904 on an ice rink in the Aberdeen Pavilion.
The proximity of that and other potential sites to the Rideau Canal, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has additional merit because of the waterway's notable role in one of the most famous (though possibly apocryphal) stories in Stanley Cup lore: the alleged booting of the trophy into the canal by a member of one of Ottawa's early championship teams.
The swirl-sided original Cup -- a copy of which still sits atop the modern trophy -- was famously crafted for $48.67 by a British silversmith, G.R. Collis & Co. and shipped to Canada in time for its inaugural presentation in 1893 to the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association.
In April 2006, a historical marker commemorating the Cup's creation was placed outside a downtown London jewelry shop occupying the former Collis site where the trophy was made.
However, the roots of the iconic object -- the original bowl now kept in a heavily secured vault at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto -- can undoubtedly be traced to Ottawa, where Lord Stanley's sons and daughter learned to play hockey and the viceregal representative himself enjoyed watching the fast-paced winter sport.
During a sports banquet held on March 18, 1892, at the city's long-gone Russell House Hotel -- now a plaza next to the National War Memorial -- a message read from Lord Stanley signalled the birth of the national game's ultimate artifact.
"I have for some time past been thinking that it would be a good thing if there were a challenge cup which should be held from year to year by the champion hockey team in the Dominion," Lord Stanley stated. "There does not appear to be any such outward and visible sign of championship at present, and, considering the general interest which the matches now elicit, and the importance of having the game played fairly and under rules generally recognized, I am willing to give a cup which shall be held from year to year by the winning team."
Kitchen, a retired librarian and former president of the Society for International Hockey Research, has authored the definitive book about Ottawa's early hockey history and championed other commemorative projects in the city, including the erection of a historical marker at an old rink site -- along Ottawa's Gladstone Avenue -- where the Silver Seven once won the Cup in hockey's pre-NHL days.
The original 18.5-cm-high Cup has long since been transformed into a metre-tall, multi-tiered professional prize, awarded annually to the NHL champion and recognized instantly by hockey fans around the world.
It has been 17 years since a Canadian club (the 1992-93 Montreal Canadiens) last won Lord Stanley's fruit bowl, by far the longest stretch of time between victories by a team from the trophy's home nation in its 118-year history.
And, with the Senators' early exit from this year's NHL playoffs, courtesy of defending Cup champs Sidney Crosby and his Pittsburgh Penguins, just the underdog Canadiens and the Vancouver Canucks -- a solid contender for that city's first modern-era Cup win -- are left to challenge for the 2010 title.
original article
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