Sports

Many star athletes have studied on McGill’s campuses. Montreal Canadiens goalie Ken Dryden (LLB1973) earned a law degree during the middle of his six-Stanley-Cup winning streak of the 1970s. Current medical student Laurent Duvernay-Tardif is the highest-paid Canadian player in the NFL. And McGillians have done Canada proud in the Olympic Games. Beginning with Percival Molson (BA1901) in 1904, 121 McGillians have competed in the Olympics – including seven students who stood on the podium before crossing the convocation stage: freestyle skier Jennifer Heil (BCom2013), swimmer George Hodgson (BEng1912) and women’s hockey players Mélodie Daoust (BEd2017), Charline Labonté (BEd2012, MA2015), Kim St-Pierre (BEd, 2005) and Catherine Ward (BCom2009). McGill’s most decorated Olympian is track and field star, and medical student, Phil Edwards (MDCM1936), who was the first Canadian male to win medals – five bronze in total –  in three different Olympiads: Amsterdam (1928), Los Angeles (1932) and Berlin (1936).

But McGillians don’t just excel at sports, they invent them, too.

The very first modern football game was played in Cambridge, Massachusetts on May 13, 1874, between McGill University and a squad from Harvard. Harvard may have won that first game, but the football tradition remains strong at McGill’s Molson Stadium, which is home to both the McGill Redmen and seven-time Grey Cup champs the Montreal Alouettes.

While working at a Massachusetts YMCA in 1891, former director of physical training James Naismith (BA1887) needed a new “athletic distraction” for rowdy kids trapped indoors by the harsh winter. To prevent injury, Naismith suspended his goal—a peach basket with the bottom removed—10 feet in the air. Naismith’s basketball was first played at McGill two years later.

And, of course, there’s hockey. Civil engineer James Creighton (BCL1880) organized the first game of organized indoor hockey on March 3, 1875, at the Victoria Skating Rink in downtown Montreal; many of the players who took part were McGill students. The world’s first official hockey team, the McGill Hockey Club, made its debut two years later and some of the players—Richard F. Smith (BSc1883) and W. F. Robertson (BSc1880)—helped refine the rules, including

the introduction of a rubber puck, carved out of a lacrosse ball. In 1911, Frank Patrick (BA1908) and his brother Lester (he dropped out of McGill to play professionally) created the Pacific Coast Hockey Association, which featured such hockey-firsts as artificial ice penalty shots, numbered jerseys, “on-the-fly” line changes, assists and the blue line. They sold their league to the NHL in 1926.