|
|
That year Kendall and Gadbois founded the Club Athlétique Canadien (CAC), an organization incorporated on 22 Sept. 1908 that had mostly French-speaking shareholders. The club invested first in wrestling and then in hockey, baseball, lacrosse, and other sports. Under Kendall’s impetus it became the most powerful professional sports organization in the province, proof of his organizing abilities and business flair. For him, sports were first and foremost a business that had to show a profit. In 1910, when the club’s share capital increased from $25,000 to $100,000, it had some 116 shareholders. Kendall managed to combine French Canadian patriotic pride with his own financial interests, and he skilfully joined forces with the press. By 1909 he was busily promoting the construction of a gymnasium in the east end of Montreal. The building opened on 10 March 1911, and besides a modern gymnasium, it had billiard and pool tables, bowling alleys with automatic pinsetters, a handball court, showers, a sauna, and a massage room. A smoking room was added the following year, as well as a reading room with “all the major Canadian and American daily papers and the main sports magazines,” as La Presse noted. There were plans to add a swimming pool and to buy land for an automobile racetrack and a baseball and lacrosse field, but they were wrecked when the building was damaged by fire on 21 Jan. 1914. The CAC’s financial situation, already weakened by an unfortunate venture into the world of lacrosse, was badly affected. Probably as a result Kendall on 10 March 1916 created the Canadian Hockey Club Incorporated, a new company having the same aims and substantially the same directors as the former CAC, with Kendall as principal shareholder.
|
