One of the sporting world’s greatest hustlers and promoters, Tommy Gorman spent a lifetime offering up entertainment for the paying public, generally satisfying his customers and almost invariably making a good bit of money at the same time. Born in Ottawa in 1886, Gorman was a member of Canada’s gold medal winning Olympic lacrosse team in 1908 and played professionally for a few years afterwards. His lacrosse money didn’t make ends meet, so Gorman took up journalism, eventually becoming ports editor of the Ottawa Citizen.

When the National Hockey Association’s other owners decided to drop Toronto’s Eddie Livingston, they created a new league. At the helm of the Ottawa Senators was Tommy Gorman, the journalist with an eye for hockey talent. As team manager, he built the NHL’s first dynasty, guiding the Senators to three Stanley Cup triumphs in the four years between 1920 and 1923.

Busy in the wintertime, Gorman found a way to fill the off-season, opening Connaught Park, a horseracing track that would prove to be his longest lasting link to the sports world. Selling his interest in the Senators after their final Stanley Cup win, he resurfaced as owner of the ill-fated Hamilton Tigers, transferring the team to New York after the NHL’s first labor dispute in 1925.

Turning a profit when he sold his interest to acclaimed underworld figure, Bill Dwyer, he stayed on as coach and manager with the New York Americans, the Big Apple’s first NHL team. Bouncing between pucks and ponies, Gorman moved up through the management ranks in the turf world, moving south to one of North America’s biggest tracks. While horse racing was prohibited in California at the time, it was perfectly legal in a Mexican border town.

Then as now, Tijuana was a hustler’s paradise, offering a wide variety of forbidden delights to cross-border visitors. The Agua Caliente track drew thousands of gringos and many of the continent’s top horses to their programs. The New York Americans dropped in, as did Phar Lap, the legendary Australian horse that died amid widespread rumors of foul play shortly after winning a $100,000 stakes race at Agua Caliente in 1932.

Rejoining the NHL’s movers and shakers, Gorman stepped in as a midseason replacement behind the Black Hawks bench in the 1932-33 season. The next year, he added the GM’s title and took Chicago all the way, winning the first of the three Stanley Cup titles the ‘Hawks have managed to win in their long history.

Itchy feet brought Gorman to Montreal the next season. It also brought the 1935 Stanley Cup as his name was inscribed as both coach and GM of the Montreal Maroons. Gorman stayed with the Maroons until the bitter end, only moving on when the team went belly-up in 1933, one of countless businesses to go under during the economic depression of the 1930s.

Changing his loyalties but not his base of hockey operations, Gorman joined Montreal’s other team in 1940-41 but only as GM since Dick Irvin had been brought in to coach. The two worked hand in glove and within a few years had brought the Habs back to respectability.

Toe Blake, one of very few players kept on as Gorman and Irvin put their imprint on the Canadiens, became the veteran presence on a line with a tough young center named Lach and a right winger who had a reputation for brittleness that he soon replaced with an unerring ability to light the lamp, Maurice Richard.
Gorman and Irvin laid the foundation for the Flying Frenchmen, hockey’s greatest dynasty, a team that would go on to spend the next four decades consistently finishing among the top teams in the NHL, year in and year out.

The Habs captured the silverware twice with Gorman wearing the GM’s hat, in his case a fedora, winning it all in both 1944 and 1946. The most popular attraction among visiting teams around the league, their spectacular play filled rinks around the NHL bringing the home teams back from the brink of financial ruin and avoiding the fates that befell the Senators, Tigers, Americans and Maroons.

Leaving the NHL after the 1946 title, replaced by Frank Selke, Gorman returned to Ottawa, buying both a local rink and the team that played in it. In 1949, Gorman’s Quebec Senior Hockey League Senators added the Allan Cup, emblematic of Canadian senior hockey supremacy, to his seven Stanley Cups.
Always on the lookout for something that would sell tickets, he became a major wrestling promoter and, after working out a deal with the New York Giants in 1951, brought minor league pro baseball to the Canadian capital.

Thomas Patrick Gorman died in 1961 at the age of 75. His Connaught Park racetrack did over $6 million worth of business that year. His posthumous enshrinement in the Hockey Hall of Fame came two years later. He was admitted to the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame in 1977.