Who was Foxy Smith?

On Jan. 4, 1913, the New Westminster Royals of the Pacific Coast Hockey Association were forced to start a rookie in net after their regular goaltender was advised to sit out due to injury.

It was Foxy Smith’s big chance. Unfortunately, it didn’t go well for him: he surrendered 10 goals and never played again. In fact, the Society for International Hockey Resarch database doesn’t show him playing anywhere before or after that lone rout. Yet a major league goaltender could hardly have come out of nowhere. It wasn’t as though he was conscripted from the crowd; he’d been a PCHA spare since the previous fall.

He was first mentioned in The Vancouver Sun of Nov. 19, 1912 as working out with Vancouver. Twice in December he was reported to be practicing with New Westminster. But it wasn’t until a doctor instructed all-star goalie Hugh Lehman not to play due to eye trouble that Smith was pressed into action for the third game of New Westminster’s so-far winless season.

The Royals actually led Vancouver 3-1 in the first period, but the score was tied 4-4 after one. Vancouver took a 9-5 lead in the second, and added one more goal in the third for a 10-5 final. Si Griffis had a hat trick for Vancouver. The newspapers didn’t fault Smith for his play, but did lament that he was no Hugh Lehman.

• Vancouver Daily World: “‘Foxy’ Smith, who substituted for the league’s star net guardian, played a very fine game in the last period when he had many opportunities of displaying his skill, but he was very plainly nervous in the first two periods, when enough goals slipped in to put the Vancouver aggregation on easy street. And it was not altogether due to Smith that the game was lost either; the entire Royal team seemed to lack confidence in the absence of their regular stonewall goalkeeper …”

• New Westminster News: “‘Foxy’ played his best game, in fact pulled off some grand saves at times, but he cannot hold a candle to Lehman. He showed a tendency to save the hot ones and allow the slow shot to slide past him, and these were tallied in the second period when the team was pulling off some classy combination plays … Two-thirds of the shots that leaked through on Saturday night, Lehman would have stopped had he been there.”

• Vancouver Province: “Foxy Smith put up an unexpectedly good game in the champions’ net, still he was not up to the Lehman standard by any means.”

There was some suggestion that Smith might start the following game as well, but Lehman was released from hospital and resumed his usual position in net. Smith was never heard of again.

Who was he? It doesn’t help that we don’t know his given name, nor that his last name was so common. Searches of digitized newspapers turn up a Charles Wilson, alias Foxy Smith, who was sent to prison in 1903 after trying to rob a train station in Galt, Ont. But there was no word whether he had any experience stopping pucks.

The SIHR database lists 23 goaltenders named Smith who played between 1900 and 1920. Among them, there is a promising candidate, first name unknown, who played for Grand Forks, BC in the Boundary league in 1911-12. This league was a virtual PCHA farm system, producing at least nine players including Mickey MacKay and Bernie Morris.

But while several newspapers from Boundary league towns have been digitized, none reveal anything more about the Grand Forks goaltender, whose name was spelled both Smith and Smyth. Nor does a search for “Foxy” turn up anything relevant. Furthermore, if the Grand Forks goalie was in fact called up to the PCHA, we might have expected the local newspaper to say something about it, but there is no sign of that either.

For the moment Foxy Smith’s life before and after his lone game with New Westminster remains a mystery.