MARKHAM, Ont. — Many of the world’s best female hockey players are in the midst of a four-day tournament that started Wednesday to determine the winner of the Clarkson Cup.
And there’s a pretty good chance you don’t know what the Clarkson Cup is.
We’ll let 2010 Olympic gold medallist, Natalie Spooner, explain. She’s a member of the defending champion Toronto Furies.
“The Clarkson Cup is our Stanley Cup. It’s the Canadian Women’s Hockey League, and this is what we play for in the playoffs,” Spooner says. “You know how exciting it is to watch the Stanley Cup final every year, it’s kinda the best time of the year. This is our best time of the year.”
Spooner, 24, and the Furies dropped a 3-0 decision to the Boston Blades on Wednesday, so Toronto faces a must-win situation Thursday in a best-of-three semifinal series. The Calgary Inferno and Montreal Stars are on the other side of the bracket, with the winner of each semi meeting in Saturday’s final at the Markham Centennial Centre.
Talk to these players about the Cup, and though it’s only been awarded six times, it has quite the history. Like the Stanley Cup, it’s housed in the Hockey Hall of Fame, but it’s been stolen. It’s been lost — for at least a little bit. And players are tight-lipped about what it’s been through.
“The Cup makes the rounds,” Spooner says, grinning. “It makes its way out. I would say the cup has a lot of fun. I had a few drinks from the cup. You know, water. Chocolate milk. All the healthy options. Umm, yeah.”
A lot of people wanted to drink from the Cup when it was at the bar last year. So, the Cup went missing for a bit. “We thought we might have lost it,” Spooner says. “But we found it.”
At all-star weekend earlier this year, the Clarkson Cup was on display, and the Furies players stole it and brought it back to their hotel room. “We were still owners of the Cup, right?” Spooner says. “We were allowed to steal it. It wasn’t stealing. It was just taking.”
The goal for the night was to hide the Cup from CWHL commissioner, Brenda Andress. At one point the players lied and said it was in bed with two-time Olympic gold medallist, Sami Jo Small, a goalie for the Furies. “It was actually at the bar,” Furies defenceman and Olympic gold medallist Tessa Bonhomme says, laughing. “Brenda just had no idea. She said, ‘There’s only one of them. If you lose it, you girls are in so much trouble!’”
Bonhomme isn’t telling any other stories. “Those are—you don’t share those,” she says, smiling. “It’s not really PG. We’ll leave it at that.”
The other thing about the CWHL’s big prize is that nobody — even those who’ve won it — is too sure what it looks like. The emblems on that trophy are as hazy as the stories from the bar.
“I know there’s a mermaid on the front of it,” says Boston forward and two-time Olympic silver medallist, Hilary Knight. She and the Blades won the Cup two seasons ago. “Well, we call it a mermaid. I don’t know exactly what it is.”
Spooner says “there’s really cool pictures on it,” but she’s not so sure about the mermaid. “There’s flowers,” she says. “I’m pretty sure there’s flowers for every province or something. I was sitting with it, looking at it. It’s very nice — it’s actually beautiful. The work in it, I would say it’s more beautiful than the Stanley Cup.”
Bonhomme remembers pouring over the details of the Cup when Toronto won it last year. “I looked up all the emblems and stuff,” she says. “To be quite honest, I don’t fully remember. Adrienne Clarkson [the former Governor General of Canada, who it’s named after], her symbol is imprinted on it. There’s a Latin symbol on it as well. We were Googling it at Real Sports [a bar in Toronto].”
The players who’ve won it might not be too sure exactly what it looks like, we may never know all the stories that come with it, but there’s no question about the importance of this trophy.
“Coming off the Olympics [in Sochi], I didn’t really think anything better could happen,” says Spooner. “But being able to play with my Toronto teammates and us winning, it was incredible. I remember us scoring and everyone coming off the bench to celebrate. I could hardly breathe, because everyone was on top of us.”
Bonhomme echoes that. “Being able to hold it and hoist it, it was a truly unique feeling. I didn’t think anything would come close to winning that gold medal in Vancouver in 2010, but to be honest, last year in that dog pile, it almost surpassed it.”
That, right there, is the Clarkson Cup.