The Season Begins
Mark Anthony Jarman captures the moment when a game, or a season of games, begins in Salvage King, Ya! (Anvil Press Publishers (Toronto:2003), at p.34):
I love skating in circles before each game because anything is still possible coasting ice in that breeze.
Opening night was Sylvio Mantha’s time in the spotlight. The Captain had studied at Berthier College, and then the University of Montreal Polytechnic, but he was best at hockey. He had always been a little bigger and a little stronger and a little more intimidating than his contemporaries on the ice. He had played with the Notre Dame de Grace Juniors, and then as an Intermediate with Verdun in the Mount Royal League. There had been some games with Imperial Tobacco and Northern Electric in the Montreal Industrial League, and then a brief blossoming with the Senior Nationales.
While he didn’t seek the spotlight, he still could play with swagger – as the Montreal Daily Star, (February 28, 1931, p.15, c.4) described:
Smooth Sylvio Mantha who seldom fails to set the Toronto fans cheering is regarded up there on a par with Clancy. When Mantha starts his twining rushes with hips swaying like a hula dancer at that well known Waikiki, the cheering section in the press box forgets its instructions to Connie Smythe and Art Duncan to warn the Leafs defence to put up their guards and padlock the porch in front of Chabot.
His role on the team was what was most important: to be the captain. That was because he was not only captain of the best team in Montreal, and the championship team of the National Hockey League, but he was a Montrealer who was captain of that team in his own home town.
Sylvio Mantha understood the significance of his position with the Canadiens the same way Mordecai Richler explained it in “The Legendary Habitants,†Frayne, Trent, ed.; All-Stars: An Anthology of Canada’s Best Sportswriting, Doubleday Canada Limited (Toronto:1996), at p.180; and repurposed as part of “The Fall of the Montreal Canadiens†in Richler’s Dispatches from the Sporting Life, Vintage Canada (Toronto:2003), particularly at p.254:
For years, years and years, les Canadiens were a team unlike any other in sports. Not only because they were the class of the league – for many years, so were the New York Yankees – but also because they were not made up of hired outsiders but largely Quebecois, boys who had grown up in Montreal or the outlying towns of the province. We could lend them our loyalty without qualification, because they had not only been hired to represent us on ice – it was their birthright. As boys, Beliveau and I had endured the same blizzards. Like me, Doug Harvey had played softball in an NDG park. Downtown had always meant the same thing to Henri Richard as it had to me.
Mantha had been the first Montrealer to become the Canadiens’ NHL Captain. Before he retired as a player, the Canadiens provided Mantha with an opportunity to act as player-coach ( 1935 – 1936). After his full retirement from playing, and another brief career as an NHL and AHL official, he then turned to coaching several amateur Montreal-based teams. Those teams tended to have trouble in league play, but Mantha had a different mission. His greatest efforts as a coach went into promoting the careers of French-Canadian prospects into the professional ranks:
Il etait fier d’etre Canadien francais et peu de joueurs ont fait autant pour chercher a promouvoir ses compatriots au hockey professionnel. (La presse, 8 aout 1974, p.B2, c.6)