“Nothing More Than the Usual Injury”: Debating Hockey Violence During the Manslaughter Trials of Allan Loney (1905) and Charles Masson (1907)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This historical case study of violence in Canadian hockey examines media coverage of two manslaughter trials: the 1905 trial of Allan Loney and the 1907 trial of Charles Masson. Both players stood accused of killing opposing players by striking them in the head with their hockey sticks. In each case, the offending player was acquitted in the courts, mainly because such violence was deemed intrinsic to the sport. Injuries that resulted from violent acts were downplayed or ignored; even death from a deliberate stick attack could be rationalized as an unfortunate accident. Newspaper accounts of the deaths, trials, and subsequent acquittals offer valuable insight into the cultural narratives surrounding hockey violence and notions of masculinity in early twentieth‐century Canada. These cases generated considerable debate around the issue of what constituted “clean” and “rough” hockey. The game reports, trial coverage, and public opinion examined in this case study suggest that stick‐swinging incidents and aggressive play have been regarded as ordinary and “proper” aspects of “strenuous hockey” for more than a century. The historical examination of such cases is important because the justifications for violence that were articulated in the context of the deaths continue to be voiced in contemporary discussions of hockey violence. As long as fighting and aggression remain markers of masculinity – and hockey continues to be seen as a training ground for manhood – it will be difficult to remove such forms of violence from the sport.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".