07/29/2026
A reminder that even visually impaired one can still be an incredible athlete.
An inspiring historical reminder.
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🚨 The most unbreakable record in Stanley Cup history is 14 goals in a single game. It has stood for more than 120 years. The man who set it was blind in one eye. And when the Great War came, he found a way to pass an army eye exam and go overseas. He never came home. 🚨
Frank McGee was hockey's first superstar.
He came from one of Ottawa's most prominent families, and by the early 1900s he was the dazzling centre of the legendary Ottawa Silver Seven, the team that ruled the Stanley Cup era before the NHL existed. Fast, fearless and lethal around the net, McGee filled rinks and terrified defencemen.
And he did all of it with one working eye.
Years earlier, playing in a charity hockey match, McGee had been struck by a puck or stick and lost the sight in one eye. For almost any other player, that would have been the end. Depth perception is everything in hockey. McGee simply adjusted, returned to the ice, and became the deadliest scorer of his era with half the vision of every man trying to stop him. 🍁
Then came the night of January 16, 1905, and the game that made him immortal.
A challenger team from Dawson City, Yukon, had travelled for nearly a month by dogsled, boat and train to play the Silver Seven for the Stanley Cup. In the second game of the series, Frank McGee scored fourteen goals. Fourteen. In one Stanley Cup game. At one point, he scored eight goals in a span of about nine minutes, a pace that sounds like a misprint but is not.
That record has now stood for more than a century. Gretzky never approached it. No one has matched it. It remains one of the most untouchable records in hockey history.
McGee retired young, already a legend. Then, in 1914, war came, and one of hockey's greatest stars decided his country mattered more than the game.
There was an obvious problem. A man blind in one eye was unlikely to pass the army's medical requirements for overseas service.
He did.
According to a story long repeated by his family and in hockey lore, when asked to cover one eye and read the chart, McGee covered his blind eye. When told to switch, he switched hands instead of eyes and read the chart again with the same good eye. Whether that is exactly how it happened is impossible to know, but he passed the medical and was accepted for service.
Lieutenant Frank McGee went to the Western Front with the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He was wounded in 1916, recovered, and returned to active service with his battalion.
On September 16, 1916, during the Battle of the Somme near Courcelette, Frank McGee was killed in action. He was 33 years old. His body was never identified. Today, he is commemorated on the Vimy Memorial in France, which honours more than 11,000 Canadians of the First World War with no known grave.
In 1945, he was a member of the inaugural Hockey Hall of Fame class.
Fourteen goals with one eye. A story that has become part of Canadian hockey lore. A Stanley Cup hero whose final resting place is unknown. If ever a player embodied the spirit of hockey's earliest heroes, it was Frank McGee. 🇨🇦
Had you ever heard of One-Eyed Frank McGee? Drop a 🍁 in the comments and share this post so hockey's greatest record keeps its greatest story. 👇
