Did Frank Patrick coin ‘superstar’?

Did Frank Patrick coin the word “superstar” to describe Cyclone Taylor (pictured on his 1910 Imperial Tobacco card)?

In The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, Jane Leavy, writes on p. 103-04: “Grantland Rice elevated [Ruth] to the rank of a ‘superstar in an age of stars’ in 1919, four years after the superlative was coined by hockey innovators Frank and Lester Patrick for their superstar wingman [sic], Cyclone Taylor.” Her source is not obvious, but it doesn’t really matter, because Frank Patrick definitely did not come up with the word, although he may have claimed that he did.

Was Frank the first to use the word in a sports context? Again, no. Was he the first to apply it to a hockey player? Now things get murkier. We do know that both Frank and his brother Lester had strong feelings about the word.

Exhibit 1: Andy Lytle wrote in the The Toronto Star of Nov. 22, 1939 about how Lester Patrick rebuked Jack Adams for suggesting Syl Apps was greater than Howie Morenz. Lester insisted Cyclone Taylor was better than both. Lytle, in turn, rated Mickey MacKay higher and felt MacKay and Dick Irvin “were more efficient workmen. Certainly they were superior team men. Taylor was supremely the individualist. Well, they were all great players and splendid characters no doubt, these super-stars of yesterday. They were so superbly equipped, moreover, that Frank Patrick coined the words ‘super-star’ to properly define them and to elevate them above the common or garden variety.”

Exhibit 2: Dick Beddoes interviewed Frank in his hospital bed for a column that appeared in The Vancouver Sun on Feb. 22, 1958. Frank told him: “I don’t mean to sound like an old-timer, but hockey needs the super-stars of yesterday.” Beddoes added: “‘Super-stars’ is Frank Patrick’s phrase. He coined it to fit Howie Morenz and Cyclone Taylor.” (In the same story Frank called Maurice Richard “nothing but a super-star.”)

Exhibits 3, 4, and 5: Beddoes wrote again on the subject on Feb. 5, 1960: “Sometimes he talks about the ‘super-stars’ of yesterday. ‘Super-stars’ is Frank’s phrase, and he coined it first to fit Howie Morenz and Cyclone Taylor and Si Griffis …” When Frank died a few months later, his Canadian Press obituary also claimed (based on the Beddoes column) that “It was Frank Patrick who coined the phrase ‘super stars’ which he applied first to fit Howie Morenz and Cyclone Taylor.”

For good measure, Beddoes told the story one more time on June 30, 1960: “‘Super-stars’ was Frank’s phrase. He coined it first to fit Cyclone Taylor and Frank Nighbor and Mickey MacKay and others who swept the Vancouver Millionaires to a Stanley Cup triumph in 1915.”

So according to Lytle and Beddoes, Frank invented the word to represent some combination of Cyclone Taylor, Mickey MacKay, Dick Irvin, Howie Morenz, and/or Frank Nighbor, but Taylor was the common denominator, and it was meant to apply especially to the 1915 Millionaires.

Additionally, in the Montreal Gazette of May 13, 1978, Dink Carroll credited Lester Patrick with selling hockey in the United States as “the fastest game in the world.” He added: “That was in the late 1920s and it was a couple of decades later that he started talking about the game’s ‘superstars.’ Before that the word stars was used to designate outstanding players but once he raised it to superstars, other sports like football, baseball, and basketball fell into line.”

However, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first use of “superstar” (or super-star), meaning “an exceptionally outstanding performer in the theatre, music, sport, or some other public sphere,” is from 1913, referring to an actor. The dictionary’s first citation referring to an athlete is from 1922, but I can push it back a bit further using newspapers.com. The earliest references are all baseball-related.

• Lewiston Daily Sun, July 17, 1915, about Grover C. Alexander: “Here’s to him, the star of the other seasons and super-super-star of this season.”

• Boston Globe, Oct. 7, 1915, about Ty Cobb: “The super-star stuff expected from Cobb in 1907 and 1908 had the same effect upon the Georgia Ghost.”

• Grantland Rice in a column appearing in the New Britain Herald, Feb. 17, 1916: “These three men are Jack Coombs, Rube Marquard and Larry Cheney. With Athletics, Giants and Cubs the trio figured in super-star roles.”

• St. Louis Star and Times, March 12, 1918: “Only one guess is needed to pick the ballplayer who will fill Ty Cobb’s shoes as a super-star. That placer is George Harold Sisler …”

• Frank Patrick himself referred to Cobb as a superstar in the Saskatoon Daily Star of Sept. 1, 1922: “Take the case of Ty Cobb, for nearly 20 years a super-star of the game.”

When was “superstar” applied to hockey? It first shows up in the Regina Leader Post of March 24, 1923, which said that thanks to Frank Patrick, Vancouver hockey fans were being treated to “two wonderful series among three clubs of super-stars.” But no individual was named.

In fact, the earliest reference I can find to a specific hockey superstar is about Lester Patrick! From The Vancouver Sun, Aug. 26, 1923, in a Bill Steedman column about Lester talking up golf: “He was, as everyone knows, a super-star at hockey.”

The first sign of Frank Patrick calling someone a superstar is in the same paper on Nov. 23 of the same year. He assessed the Saskatoon Crescents, led by Newsy Lalonde: “In Lalonde, [Harry] Cameron, and Bill Cook, to say nothing of Ainsworth, who I am inclined to think is a super-star in the immediate making, Saskatoon possesses a trio of hockey strategists that any club manager would be proud to sign.”

Ainsworth?

Apparently so little was this goalie known in the west that they couldn’t get his name right. His first initial was given variously as M. and H. After several more days of calling him Ainsworth, the newspapers finally figured out his true identity: George Hainsworth. Frank Patrick was right. Hainsworth was a future Hockey Hall of Famer, who in 1928-29 would set the all-time NHL record for shutouts and goals against average with the Montreal Canadiens. He won the Vezina Trophy three years in a row and two Stanley Cups.

So George Hainsworth was Frank Patrick’s first superstar, not Cyclone Taylor. And there were others.

A headline in the Calgary Herald of Jan. 26, 1924 said: “Patrick believes Keats is most unselfish super-star in hockey company today.” He was talking about Duke Keats, a top player with Edmonton of the WCHL. However, Frank didn’t actually call Keats a superstar in the story. Instead, he had another nickname for him: “I consider Keats a most colourful hockey player of the Ty Cobb type.” (“Ty Cobb of Hockey” was also applied to Eddie Shore, Art Ross, and … Cyclone Taylor.)

Next, in the Calgary Herald of Oct. 30, 1925, Frank used “superstar” to describe a member of the Victoria Cougars: “I consider Jack Walker one of the great players the game has produced. He is a super-star, a compound word often heard in relation to hockey, a word that to my mind, is often misplaced through overuse.”

Frank’s comment is remarkable, because the term had not actually been used much in hockey to that point, at least in the newspapers. He explained why he felt Walker deserved the title: “Any man crafty enough to invent the hook-check … is entitled to first place in the ranks of the hockey super-stars.”

That leaves the matter of when Cyclone Taylor was first referred to as a superstar. It came only after he retired from hockey, in The Vancouver Sun of Dec. 1, 1923. An obituary for Tommy Phillips said Phillips “carried as many scars from strenuous games as Cyclone Taylor, [Si] Griffis, the Patricks or any others of that famous group of super-stars.”

In the Victoria Daily Times of April 3, 1924, Frank said his 1915 Millionaires were the strongest team he’d ever seen: “This particular Vancouver team included three superstars in Frank Nighbor, Mickey Mackay, and ‘Cyclone’ Taylor,” the paper reported, although Frank wasn’t directly quoted.

In the Saskatoon Phoenix of Feb. 20, 1925, Lester Patrick selected an all-star team of the previous 20 years and said Russell Bowie “couldn’t be left off the line-up. He was a super-star at all times, always in the limelight.” A revised version of his list appeared in many newspapers in February 1927. He maintained Bowie “was a super-star at all times” and added that “Hockey has developed very few super-stars who could skate with the one and only ‘Cyclone’ Taylor.”

By the following year, Lester had given a lot more thought to the term “superstar.” Alfred L. Schoenfeld wrote a whole column in the Brooklyn Eagle of Feb. 7, 1928 (pictured below), about how Lester now separated players into three categories: ordinary professionals, stars, and superstars. He was inspired by Nietzsche’s concept of the Superman!

The difference between a star and a superstar, Lester said, was the way they thought about the game. By this definition, he felt Jack Laviolette was not a superstar, but Didier Pitre was. So was Newsy Lalonde. Presumably Cyclone Taylor was too, although all Lester said was that Taylor was faster than Laviolette.

As for Frank Patrick calling Cyclone Taylor a superstar? I’m still looking for a direct quote before 1939.

Updated on Jan. 29, 2025 to add the quote from Jane Leavy’s book. Updated on April 1, 2025 to add the Dink Carroll quote.