On June 23, 1884, Frederick Wellington Taylor was born in Ontario, Canada At least we’re pretty sure it was June 23; there’s a bit of uncertainty about the exact date.
His father sold farm equipment, but the family was relatively poor, so Frederick left school at 17 to work in a piano factory to help support his family.
Like many children in Canada, he learned to ice skate on local ponds at a very early age. He joined a team when he was 13 (the Listowel Mintos) and played with them for five years, during which he showed that he was the fastest skater on the squad, and acquired his nickname: Cyclone Taylor.
His team won the provincial championship in 1900, and Cyclone Taylor was the star player. That led to offers from other teams, including the Toronto Marlboros. He turned down all the offers, which enraged Bill Hewitt, the league secretary. It’s not clear why Hewitt was so angry, but he managed to ban Taylor from playing hockey with any of the league’s teams during the 1903-04 season.
Cyclone moved west to play for a team in Manitoba (Hewitt’s league only had jurisdiction in Ontario), which led to an offer to join a team in the first purely professional hockey league, the IHL. He accepted, received $400 plus expenses and moved to Houghton, Michigan in the US.
After a few years, Canadian hockey leagues allowed players to be paid, too, and Taylor signed with the Ottawa Senators. They increased the cash offer from $400 to $500 — that was for the whole season. But they had another perk: being in the capital city, they were able to offer players (at least the stars) civil service jobs year-round. So Cyclone Taylor became not only an Ottawa Senator player but a clerk in the Department of the Interior. He remained the star player on the team, if not the league — his only weakness was that he was so much faster than his teammates that he was often offsides.
Cyclone kept receiving offers, and in 1909 agreed to play for the Renfrew Creamery Kings for the astonishing sum of $5250, which made him the highest-paid athlete in Canada. Since the season was only 12 games long, he was also the highest-paid in the world per game he played. He played for a couple of other teams, including the Vancouver Millionaires, where he won the Stanley Cup twice.
For his entire hockey career, though, Cyclone Taylor kept his civil service job, and after he retired from sports became the Commissioner of Immigration for British Columbia. He received the Order of the British Empire in 1946, and retired from that, too, in 1950 — but he was only 66 and had a lot more to do. So he became the president of the Pacific Coast Hockey League, and dropped the puck at the first home game of the Vancouver Canucks — which back in the day had been the Vancouver Millionaires.
He lived to be 93, was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, the Vancouver Canucks’ most valuable player award is the Cyclone Taylor Trophy, and in the town where he was born — Listowel, Ontario — the junior league hockey team is called the Cyclones. He’s considered the first star player of the professional era of hockey.
