During the month of May, the newsroom will be featuring a series of ice hockey articles celebrating Ice Hockey Philately presented by the American Philatelic Society and The Royal Philatelic Society of Canada in the May issue of The American Philatelist. Check back weekly for new articles.
I am a thematic collector of ice hockey. I collect ice hockey stamps and ice hockey FDCs. I collect ice hockey cancels. I collect ice hockey meters. If it shows a hockey puck, I collect it. If it shows a goalie’s mask, I collect it. If it shows a hockey stick, I collect it. If it shows ice hockey skates, I collect it. If it commemorates ice hockey at the Olympics it goes in my collection. If it commemorates the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF), it goes in my collection. If it commemorates an ice hockey team it goes in my collection. If it shows a building that is used for ice hockey, I will collect it. If it commemorates ice hockey in any way, it goes in my collection.
However, if you were thumbing through my albums, every now and then you will spot a stamp and need to ask “Why is this stamp in here?” Take as an example this Canadian stamp depicting Lester Pearson (Scott 591). If you were a National Hockey League (NHL) cognoscenti you would be able to say why he is in my collection, but the average philatelist would be sore pressed to do the same. Lester Pearson is best known as a former Prime Minister of Canada and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. (Lester Pearson was commemorated on another Canadian stamp (Scott 1825c) for the Canada Post Millennium Collection in the “Humanitarians and Peacekeepers” category.) The hockey cognoscenti would also know that the NHL at one time gave out the Lester Pearson Award to the most outstanding player in the regular season as judged by the members of the NHL Players' Association. The award was started in 1971 and in 2010 was renamed the Ted Lindsay Award, in honor of Ted Lindsay who had a significant role in establishing the NHL Players’ Association. Lester Pearson, however, had other ties to ice hockey. In 1923, while a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University in England, he and other Canadian players were on the Oxford University Ice Hockey Club that won the very first Spengler Cup. The Spengler Cup is an invitational ice hockey tournament run every year between Christmas and New Year’s in Davos, Switzerland. The tournament was started by Dr. Carl Spengler in 1923 as a way of combating the ostracism of German-speaking teams. The tournament still goes on today.
So, it’s clear that Lester Pearson has a definite reason for being in my collection of ice hockey stamps. But what about this gentleman, Daniel Roland Michener (Figure 2)? This stamp from Canada, Scott 1447, was issued in 1992 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Order of Canada. Roland Michener was the first recipient of the award. Michener was also Governor General of Canada from 1967 until 1974. As the story goes, Michener discontinued the practice of having women curtsy before the Governor General because Maryon Pearson, the wife of his dear friend, Lester Pearson, refused to do so. Regardless of the truth of this story, the fact remains that Roland Michener’s place in a hockey collection is mainly due to his association with Lester Pearson. Michener was a fellow teammate on that 1923 Spengler Cup-winning Oxford University Ice Hockey Club.
Two-sport athletes are far and few between. Some athletes are on a stamp for one sport, but they also participated in other sports. In Canada we have the example of Fanny Rosenfeld, shown on Scott 1610 (Figure 3), issued to honor Canadian Olympic gold medal winners. She won her gold medal in the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics in the 4 × 100-meter relay and a silver medal in the 100-meter dash. The 100m dash proved to be controversial. The end was a photo finish between Fanny and the U.S. runner, Betty Robinson. The judges could not all agree on the winner and there was no photo-finish picture to look at. In the end the medal went to Robinson. Canada filed a protest but lost. As for the hockey connection, in the 1920s Fanny played hockey on her company’s ice hockey team and on the Toronto Patterson Pats. In 1924, Rosenfeld help found the Ladies Ontario Hockey Association (LOHA), serving as its president from 1934 until 1939. After arthritis put an end to her athletic activities, she became a sports columnist for The Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper.
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Figure 1. Lester Pearson, Canada Scott 591.
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Figure 2. Roland Michener, Canada Scott 1447
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Figure 3. Fanny Rosenfeld, Canada Scott 1610
The next two-sport athlete has been honored on the stamps of several countries, from Antigua & Barbuda, Equatorial Guinea (Scott 7764), Montserrat (Scott 846), Nicaragua (Scott 900, Figure 4) and his home country, Russia (7705g, Figure 5). Many consider Lev Yashin the greatest soccer goalkeeper ever. He won a gold medal in the 1956 Olympic games in Melbourne, Australia. In 2002 the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) selected him as the goalkeeper on their list of the World Cup Dream Team. He played for the Dynamo Moscow team in the Soviet Top League, champions in 1954, 1955, 1957, 1959 and 1963 and runners-up in 1950, 1956, 1958, 1962, 1967 and 1970. But Lev Yashin also played ice hockey as a goalie, winning the Soviet Cup in March 1953, making him an unlikely addition to my ice hockey collection. After 1953 Yashin quit ice hockey to concentrate on soccer.
There is yet another two-sport Russian athlete depicted on stamps: Vsevolod Bobrov. Bobrov was the captain of Soviet football and hockey teams and awarded the Order of Lenin. He played for CDKA (Sports Club of the Central House of the Red Army) in the USSR championships from 1947 to 1957 and for the Air Force of the Moscow Military District from 1950 to 1953, serving as a player and coach during the first two seasons of the latter. He played 130 matches and scored 254 goals. At the World Championships, European Championships and Olympic Games, he played 25 games and scored 34 goals. Vsevolod Bobrov was captain of the national hockey team which won gold at the 1956 Olympics. Bobrov was commemorated as part of the "Sports Legends of Russia" stamp series in 2013 leading up to the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics (Scott 7493b, Figure 6). Bobrov had a stamp issued highlighting his soccer playing (Scott 7890).
Another two-sport athlete is Ion Țiriac. the current president of the Romanian Tennis Federation and past president of the Romanian Olympic and Sports Committee from 1998 to 2004. His biggest accomplishment was winning the men's doubles in the 1970 French Open with fellow countryman Ilie Năstase. In 1975 he was the first man to play against a woman, Abigail Maynard, in a sanctioned tennis tournament. The first time Romania participated in an Olympic ice hockey tournament was during the 1964 Innsbruck games. The Romanian team, including Ion Tiriac, finished 12th out of 16 teams. In 2015 Romania honored him with a stamp (Scott 5724) showing him playing tennis, not hockey (Figure 7).
My favorite stamp showing a person whom you would never associate with hockey has nothing to do with athletics at all. As a matter of fact, you would be much more likely to associate him with Peanuts’ Snoopy, who imagined elaborate dog fights with the Red Baron in the skies over France. Snoopy flew the Sopwith Camel single-seat fighter plane of WWI fame, which was built by Thomas Sopwith, founder of the Sopwith Aviation Company. Sopwith, however, was also a hockey player and won gold as a goaltender on the British team at the very first European Championship in 1910. In 1993 the country of Micronesia put Sopwith on a stamp (Scott 178d) from a set honoring Pioneers of Flight (Figure 8).
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Figure 4. Lev Yashin, Nicaragua Scott 900
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Figure 5. Lev Yashin, Russia Scott 7705g
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Figure 6. Vsevolod Bobrov, Russia Scott 7493b
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Figure 7. Ion Țiriac, Romania Scott 5724
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Figure 8. Thomas Sopwith, Micronesia Scott 178d
Several countries have issued stamps showing ice hockey arenas. Bosnia & Herzegovina issued a stamp (Scott 238) that showed the Zetra, an ice-skating arena built for the 1984 Winter Olympics. The stadium was used for ice hockey, figure skating and speed skating. It was almost destroyed in 1992 during the Bosnian war, but was rebuilt in 1997 and renamed the Olympic Hall Juan Antonio Samaranch. In 2018, Russia issued a stamp (Scott 7903b, Figure 9) showing the Platinum Arena located in Khabarovsk, Russia, home to the Amur Khabarovsk ice hockey team of the Kontinental Hockey League and former home of the Golden Amur hockey team of the Asia League Ice Hockey. Sweden issued a stamp (Scott 1730) for The Globe, an indoor arena located in Stockholm that is primarily used for ice hockey, and is the former home arena of AIK, Djurgårdens IF, and Hammarby IF. These are all examples of stamps that have a definite relation to ice hockey, but we can find even more obscure connections. In 2001 the United States Postal Service issued a sheet of stamp showing Baseball’s Legendary Playing Fields (Scott 3510-3519). The sheet contained two examples each of 10 famous baseball parks. Among these stamps we had Wrigley Field and Fenway Park (Figure 10). The ice hockey connection? Both of these stadiums hosted an NHL Winter Classic game.
Of course, if you are a true fanatical thematic stamp collector you do not restrict yourself to stamps. As I said before, I collect anything that looks like a stamp or has been processed or provided by a post office and references ice hockey. Along those lines, there is another two-sport athlete who was honored not by a stamp but by a special cancel, Jaroslav Drobný. In honor of the 2002 French Open, or the Roland-Garros as the French call it, Drobný was featured on several cancels (Figure 11). Drobný was a member of the Czechoslovak national ice hockey team and played in the 1947 World Ice Hockey Championships in Prague and the 1948 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz, Switzerland. In the 1947 tournament he scored a hat trick and Czechoslovakia won its first World Championship title. In the ice hockey off season, Drobný played tennis and represented Czechoslovakia at the highest levels, including the Davis Cup, Wimbledon and the French Open. In 1949, while at a tennis tournament in Gstadd, Switzerland, he defected to the west. He was able to gain asylum in Egypt and won the French Open twice (1951 and 1952) while playing for Egypt.
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Figure 9. Platinum Arena located in Khabarovsk, Russia. Russia Scott 7903b
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Figure 10. Wrigley Field and Fenway Park, in Baseball’s Legendary Playing Fields, U.S. Scott 3510-3519.
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Figure 11a. Jaroslav Drobný featured on a French cancel.
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Figure 11b. Jaroslav Drobný featured on a French cancel.
For all topical collectors, consider taking a closer look at which stamps you collect. If you collect football stamps, do you have the stamp showing Gerald Ford? If you collect baseball stamps, do you have a stamp of Michael Jordan? It pays to look outside the box now and then. Who knows? You might start a new collection.
The article "How did this stamp get in here?" is the first of several publications that make up the web-only aspect of the American Philatelic Society and The Royal Philatelic Society of Canada's historic joint issues celebrating ice hockey. The American Philatelist and The Canadian Philatelist joint issues are now available to read online.