Michael McKinley - author of Hockey: A People's History

The playoff beard is as regular a sight as the sun rising in the east or Toronto Maple Leaf fans crying in their beer come Stanley Cup playoff time. If you’re an NHLer without facial hair in mid-April, it means either you have bad beard genes, or that beards are banned at your golf club.

Since biblical times, beards have been a sign of virility, and then, in the middle ages, their lack was a sign of purity and innocence and holiness. Men in holy orders were forbidden to wear beards in order to distinguish their elevated state from laymen and soldiers and godless barbarians—a word which comes from the Latin root barba, which means beard. So, to have a beard meant that you were both virile, and a little further away from the divine. And so, capable of all sorts of nastiness.

To be sure, conveying an air of menace is doubtless part of the playoff beard phenomenon, but the prime mover is most likely superstition, for hockey is a profoundly superstitious sport.

Many hockey players have long believed that putting on their equipment a certain way, or performing ritual actions during the warm-up, has a direct bearing on their game. Wayne Gretzky didn't allow any sticks to cross over each other, or to touch other players’ sticks, while goalie Patrick Roy would juggle pucks between periods, then hide them to ward off bad luck.

In 1950-1951, the New York Rangers were on a losing streak, and a local restaurant owner devised a "magic potion" that players drank before games, and so began a winning streak.

In the 1970s, the Philadelphia Flyers believed that singer Kate Smith and her version of “God Bless America”—taped or live, in place of the national anthem – gave them an edge.

Toronto Maple Leaf defensive star “Red” Kelly, as coach of the 1975-76 Leafs, put crystal pyramids in the dressing room, and under the players bench, hoping that the energy given off by the pyramids’ points would propel the Leafs to Stanley Cup glory. After defeating Pittsburgh, Toronto took on their fierce rivals, the Philadelphia Flyers, who eventually won a tough seven game series-- with the help of Kate Smith.

It was the dynastic New York Islanders of the 1980s who get the credit for beginning the “we don’t shave until we’ve won the Jug” tradition. Bearded Islanders’ forward Clark Gillies and goalie Billy Smith are tagged as the prime movers behind the bearded run to Cup glory.

Indeed, archival photos of Stanley Cup teams going all the way back to a century earlier support that idea that until quite recently, it was pretty smooth-skin sailing into the Final. The Stanley Cup champions of a hundred years ago sport, at best, a walrus moustache or two, and it seems that hockey players were like medieval holy men when it came to beards--until the Isles caused shares in razor and shaving cream company stock to plummet annually from April to June.

There is my own theory, though, that the origin of the playoff beard belongs to the man who gave the world the Stanley Cup, or the “Dominion Challenge Trophy” as Freddie Stanley called it when his letter announcing his gift to the world was read at a sportsman’s banquet in Ottawa in 1892.

Lord Stanley of Preston, the gloriously bearded aristocrat, soldier, and politician, was posted to Canada as Governor-General (proxy head of state for the British regent) in 1888, and fell in love with hockey at first sight. His sons played on a team called the Rideau Rebels, after the Governor-General’s official residence, Rideau Hall, and his daughter Isobel played in the first recorded women’s match in 1891. Stanley saw his trophy as a way to unite a young, vast and sparsely populated country through love of hockey, and so it did. Today, hockey players from around the world hope that champagne will dribble from hockey’s Holy Grail down their playoff whiskers in June.

In the greatest irony of all, though, Lord Stanley returned to England in July 1893 upon the death of his brother, to become the 16th Earl of Derby. The Stanley Cup was first awarded a few months later, and so Stanley never saw a playoff game for his great trophy. He did, however, keep his beard throughout that historic first series. It just took hockey players nearly a century to take the hint.