It had been out there for years, the idea that major-junior hockey had outgrown Belleville, a city of 50,000ish that will celebrate its bicentenary next year. Yeah, if someone said that market is too small to sustain a team, loyalists (a historically appropriate term there) would point to the surrounding area and note that a team could draw on twice that many people.
And in Kingston and Ottawa, they’d tell you that the OHL needed a team in Belleville, though their case was more self-serving than history-defending, as the Frontenacs and the 67’s would get the second and third installments of the three-in-three Eastern Ontario road swings that teams in the league made.
But you knew the day would come. Next year all that will be left of the Belleville Bulls will be the banners in Yardmen Arena. By then the Bulls will have packed up and moved a few hours west to Hamilton, one piece in a shuffling of the deck that had Montreal’s American Hockey League affiliate shifting to St John’s, which was itself being vacated by the Winnipeg Jets’ AHL affiliate for a logistical consolidation in the Manitoba capital.
The Bulls will have joined the most famous team to have called Belleville home. Back in ’59 the Belleville McFarlands, the defending Allan Cup champions, won the world championship. Theirs was the toughest roadie in the game, beating the Soviet Union behind the Iron Curtain. It’s been 54 years since the McFarlands were a going concern, and these days the Macs are just a footnote on the road sign welcoming visitors to Belleville. The Bulls don’t seem likely to get similar consideration. If they’re to be remembered it won’t be without a hand-lettered prompt on the road into town.
That’s not to say that the Bulls never had anything to brag about over the years. In fact, they never accepted the fate that’s expected of minnows that swim with big fish. Since Dr. Robert Vaughan was granted the franchise in 1981, the Bulls made it to three Memorial Cups—in ’86, in ’99 as league champions and most recently in ’08 with a team that featured P.K. Subban and Shawn Matthias. By the time Subban’s brothers Jordan and Malcolm make their mark as pros, more than 40 Bulls alumni will have made it to the NHL.
Most teams in small markets find themselves overwhelmed by the powerhouse outfits—hard to imagine how Belleville could soldier on against London, Kitchener, Windsor and Ottawa among others. But the Bulls managed to ice often good teams and sometimes very good ones.
And the ice they played on was both a novelty and a curse.
Yardmen Arena was a novelty because of its Olympic-sized surface. Trust me, if the tracking technology that’s available today had been around seven years back, the data would have shown that P.K. Subban skated the equivalent of a marathon each home game, at least every third mile featuring some sort of wildly circuitous rush up the ice. And though he never really got to show it in the NHL because of various vices that he’d eventually overcome, Daniel Cleary flashed his amazing puck skills, cycling the puck all by himself, seemingly for whole shifts. The big sheet gave the Bulls the ultimate in home-ice advantage, especially against teams from the Western Conference that would only see it once a winter.
Ultimately, though, Yardmen was a curse, a reason why the team will be setting up shop in Hamilton next season. I thought it was a fun place to watch a game, even if I couldn’t secure one of the two seats that constituted press row. The virtually amenity-free arena was billed as a 3,257-seat facility. But with no seating at either end of the rink, hundreds of those seats left you awfully remote from action—especially if you’re talking about play on the other side and the other end of an Olympic sheet. When the team was going good—back in P.K. Subban’s day most recently—Bulls games could be a tough ticket and scouts would be standing game-long during the playoffs. That said, when the team was only OK and the best seats were already gone, fans could find it easy to stay at home and listen to city councilor Jack Miller do the radio play-by-play.
Dr. Vaughan eventually sold the Bulls to Gord Simmonds a bit more than a decade ago and he in turn has sold the franchise to Michael Andlauer, who will now try to make money in a city that hasn’t supported either major-junior or minor-pro hockey since Hamilton Red Wings games were broadcast on CHCH in glorious black-and-white. Good luck with that.
I hope the Bulls can give the fans a last good taste this spring. It’s a long, long shot that they’ll get out of the first round. I’d say that it’s an even longer long shot that Belleville will get another chance with an OHL franchise, but then I wrote exactly the same thing about North Bay back in 2002.