Did Lester Patrick trade for Sonja Henie?

In 1991, two sports columnists made the remarkable claim that Lester Patrick once traded five players on the New York Rangers for figure skater Sonja Henie.

Sonja Henie, date unknown.

The source of the story was Leo Ornest, an extremely interesting if not especially well remembered guy in the sports world. Ornest was by turns a sportswriter and broadcaster, vice-president of the World Hockey Association, president and owner of the triple-A Portland Beavers baseball club, and vice-president of the Calgary Flames. He was also a protege of Lester’s.

In the Toronto Star of May 14, Jim Proudfoot quoted Ornest as follows:

Craig [Patrick] can make a million deals, but he’ll never match the old man’s best one. He traded five players for Sonja Henie. Just before World War II, Lester had three winning teams in the Rangers’ farm system so he owned plenty of players other clubs needed. But he preferred to hang on to them. The Detroit Red Wings made a proposal and he turned it down. But the owners came to him with an idea. The Wirtz family, who owned the Detroit and Chicago franchises, had Sonja Henie under exclusive contract for ice shows. Madison Square Garden wanted her, but couldn’t get her. So the order came down. Lester had to give Detroit five players and Sonja Henie would play the Garden three weeks a year for the next three years.

Two days later Michael Farber repeated the story in the Montreal Gazette, although he didn’t mention Ornest and implied that he heard it from Craig Patrick: “His grandfather once dealt five players to Detroit to get rights for Sonja Henie to skate in Madison Square Garden ice shows.”

The first (and seemingly only other) time this story appeared was in Alf Cottrell’s column in the Vancouver Province of March 4, 1954, wherein Eddie Wares suggested he was one of the players involved in the trade! Actually, he indicated he was the only player sent to Detroit.

Wares was playing for New York Rangers’ farm club in Philly in 1937. Detroit’s Jack Adams was on the prowl for players. He wanted Wares, but Lester Patrick, Rangers’ coach, turned Adams’ offer down.

The noted promoter, Jim Norris, then owned large pieces of both the Detroit and Chicago clubs. He also persuaded glamorous Sonja Henie to turn professional. Her big debut as a professional was to be in Chicago.

In a high deal Rangers’ and Madison Square Garden prexy, Gen. John Reed Kilpatrick, got Norris to let Henie debut in the Gardens on the consideration that Detroit got Wares.

“So it isn’t in the book that way,” relates Wares, “but I was traded for Sonja Henie.”

Parts of this story are not hard to check out. Wares, who had only played two games for the Rangers, was indeed traded to Detroit, but on Jan. 17, 1938, rather than 1937. It was actually a two-way loan. In exchange, Detroit sent former University of Michigan star John Sherf to Philadelphia along with $12,500. Lester Patrick had the option of buying Wares back, but didn’t do so. Wares spent the rest of his NHL career with Detroit and Chicago. Sherf’s NHL career, meanwhile, lasted 19 games, all with Detroit.

Henie did perform five nights at Madison Square Garden in January 1938, making the timing of the Wares trade interesting. However, Henie actually made her pro debut at MSG nearly two years earlier, on March 29, 1936 — although there was some confusion about this, because she appeared at the New York Skating Club’s charity pageant at the Garden six days earlier. Apparently she was still regarded as an amateur at the time.

Eddie Wares, 1938 or later.

Regardless, if Wares was involved in some sort of strange trade for Henie, it wasn’t connected to her pro debut. And if there was a trade connected to her pro debut, it didn’t involve Eddie Wares.

Did New York and Detroit exchange any players in 1935-36? They did not. The Rangers were part of five deals, including one that brought Eddie Wares to New York from the Montreal Maroons for the rights to George Brown. Two others involved Chicago (Earl Seibert for Art Coulter and Glenn Brydson for Howie Morenz) but none involved Detroit.

So is there anything to the story at all? Who knows. If so, it’s not something the team would have been eager to advertise. Then again, someone could have just been pulling Wares’ leg.

In Stan Fischler’s oral history, We Are the Rangers, the team’s former business manager, Tom Lockhart, discussed the arrangements for Henie’s first appearance at MSG, but said nothing about the team trading players to make it happen. If there was any truth to it, he would have known and probably would have mentioned it. So I’ll declare the tale most likely fiction.

Lockhart had another interesting anecdote, though. He said Henie’s debut came during a Rovers game that Henie’s fans sat through despite being wholly uninterested:

A terrific game was going on but for 30 odd minutes you could’ve heard a pin drop. Nobody made a sound whether the guys scored or not. Nothing. At the end of the period the teams went back to their dressing rooms completely disgusted. They had played fantastically but nobody reacted. Then Sonja came out and the roof fell in. Everyone in the stands was Swedish, you see.

An account in the New York Daily News the following day supports Lockhart’s memory, although it was the Rangers’ other farm club, the Ramblers, who participated in the game:

Sonja Henie made her official professional debut before 11,000 spectators at the Garden last night. As an added feature, the Philadelphia Ramblers and the Amateur League All-Stars staged an exhibition hockey game resulting in a 4-3 overtime victory for the Ramblers. The game itself was almost without interest, but Sonja’s two appearances between periods apparently satisfied the enthusiastic onlookers …

Two postscripts: in the early 1950s, at the tail end of his career, Eddie Wares was player-coach for Nelson, BC of the Western International Hockey League, the same place where Lester had lived with his family from 1907-11.

And in Los Angeles’ Westwood neighbourhood, an outdoor rink opened in 1938 called the Tropical Ice Gardens. It was later renamed the Sonja Henie Ice Palace. During the 1946-47 season, it was home to the Los Angeles Ramblers of the WIHL, which Nelson played in, along with Spokane, a former PCHA city.