History of the A's

Athletics Retrospective - Roy Morton

THROUGH THE SPORTS GATE

by JACK GATECLIFF

The St. Catharines Standard

Wednesday May 18, 1955

For a man with such a tremendous sports background as Roy (Pung) Morton, the new coach of the St. Catharines Athletics has a surprisingly short memory. He can’t, for instance, remember his best scoring season while a member of the Canadian champion Athletics. He has difficulty recalling the number of Mann Cup rosters he graced and is at a loss as to how he acquired the nickname “Pung”.

However, there is one date he can remember . . . October 7, 1938. The Athletics had dethroned the three-time champion Orillia Terriers, had brushed aside a not too serious challenge from Cornwall and were sitting in a dressing room in Maple Leaf Gardens waiting for the buzzer to call them out for the pre-game warm-up prior to the opening of the Mann Cup finals against New Westminster Adanacs.

Art Brown, quiet-spoken coach of the Athletics, made no attempt at a “pep-talk”. He merely called for silence and told the Athletics to treat this game like any other. “Just play the way you know how and there isn’t a team in the country that can touch you,” he said.

The Athletics took their coach by his word. Before a crowd of 8,000 in Maple Leaf Gardens they just “played as they knew how,” whipped the Adanacs and went on to win the Mann Cup in three straight games.

The player who pointed them to victory was Roy Morton. Morton scored nine goals, a mark which has never been matched in Mann Cup play. You just don’t forget incidents like that.

Two others at that game won’t forget Morton’s marksmanship in a hurry. The New Westminster goalie Ed Johnston was quoted as saying, “In all my lacrosse life I’ve never seen a player throw the ball like that Morton. Once it has left his stick, as far as I’m concerned, I just have to stand there and hope it hits me. If you can’t see the ball, how are you supposed to stop it?”

The second man to be quoted was Conn Smythe, manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs. “If Morton could assure me he could score goals like that in the NHL, I’d gladly pay him $20,000 a year.” Unfortunately Morton’s hockey ability was hampered by a lack of skating experience and as he says, “my limit was the Factory League.”

We looked up Morton’s record in the files for 1938 and found that he scored 107 goals, had 36 assists for 153 points in 36 league and playoff games. In goals alone, that averaged to practically three a game. The research also showed that Morton played with five Mann Cup champion teams during his 13 years of senior lacrosse with the Athletics. They were the double blue teams of 1938, 1940, 1941, 1944 and 1946. He was also with two other Ontario championship teams that lost to the west in 1939 and 1945.

Morton’s sports activity wasn’t confined to the lacrosse crease. He excelled at football and basketball and has a 12-handicap in golf. He still describes football as “the game I like best.” As a member of the St. Catharines junior Bulldogs following graduation from the St. Catharines Collegiate, Morton was a fast stepping halfback whose record in the junior O.R.F.U. brought him a contract offer from the Hamilton Tigers and the promise of a scholarship from Syracuse University.

At that time, Morton was learning a trade at McKinnon Industries and playing lacrosse with the Athletics. As a result he turned down both opportunities.

Was he sorry that he hadn’t taken advantage of either the university scholarship or possible Big Four stardom with the Tigers? “Definitely not,” stated Morton this week between blows on his whistle as he refereed the junior-senior exhibition game at Garden City Arena. “If I wanted to move out of town it would probably have been for lacrosse. I had several good offers from Mimico, Orillia and Hamilton as well as west coast teams. The money looked good at the time but I think I did the right thing by staying here.”

He is now an automotive engineer at McKinnons in a supervisory capacity with 18 years seniority.

Morton played with and against some of the greatest players in the history of box lacrosse. The Athletics 1938 – 41 era are generally considered the outstanding team since box lacrosse replaced the field game late in the 1920’s.

Asked to choose one player he considered as the best he played with, Morton flatly refused. “You couldn’t pick one of those players above another,” he said. “They all gave everything they had and from Whittaker out I don’t think you could pick a weak link.” The opposition had the same problem.

Strangely enough he named a lesser-known player, Don McCollum of the old Hamilton-Burlington Combines as the toughest player “to beat when going in on goal. I found them all tough but he just seemed to have my number,” said Morton.

Since he retired from playing in 1948, Morton has been refereeing and was rated as one of the best in Ontario. However, despite the financial loss entailed in shifting from officiating to coaching, he accepted the Athletic position as he felt “it was about time I did something for the game.”

Although he doesn’t promise a championship, Morton feels that the senior prospects in lacrosse are good. “I’ll be able to tell more after about 10 games have been played,” he said.

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