What is Hockey?
Hockey has been played for longer than any of us has been alive,
but we can't tell you exactly when it was invented, or by whom,
because no one really knows for sure.
We do have some idea of how it got started,
however, and we can describe the ways the game
has grown and changed over the years.
Once a relatively obscure recreation for people
who lived in the north country, hockey is now played all
over the world and has become one of the most popular winter sports.
Frankly, we don't know what we'd do without it,
and millions of other people feel the same way.
The Origins of the Game
Most historians place the roots of hockey in the chilly climes of northern
Europe, specifically Great Britain and France,
where field hockey was a popular summer sport more than
500 years ago.
When the ponds and lakes froze in winter,
it was not unusual for the athletes who fancied that sport to play a
version of it on ice.
An ice game known as kolven was popular in Holland in the 17th
century, and later on the game really took hold in England. In his book,
Fischler's Illustrated History of Hockey, veteran hockey journalist and
broadcaster Stan Fischler writes about a rudimentary version of the
sport becoming popular in the English marshland community of
Bury Fen in the 1820s.
The game, he explains, was called bandy, and the local players used
to scramble around the town's frozen meadowlands, swatting a
wooden or cork ball, known as a kit or cat, with wooden sticks made
from the branches of local willow trees. Articles in London newspapers
around that time mention increasing interest in the sport,
which many observers believe got its name from the French word
hoquet, which means "shepherd's crook" or "bent stick." A number of
writers thought this game should be forbidden because it was so
disruptive to people out for a leisurely winter skate.
Hockey Comes to North America
Not surprisingly, the earliest North American games were played in
Canada. British soldiers stationed in Halifax, Nova Scotia,
were reported to have organized contests on frozen ponds in and
around that city in the 1870s, and about that same time in Montreal
students from McGill University began facing off against each other
in a downtown ice rink. The continent's first hockey league was said
to have been launched in Kingston, Ontario, in 1885, and it included
four teams.
Hockey became so popular that games were soon being played on a
regular basis between clubs from Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. The
English Governor General of Canada, Lord Stanley of Preston, was so
impressed that in 1892 he bought a silver bowl with an interior gold
finish and decreed that it be given each year to the best amateur team in
Canada.
That trophy, of course, has come to be known as the Stanley
Cup and is awarded today to the franchise that wins the National Hockey
League playoffs.
Lord Stanley of Preston
When hockey was first played in Canada, the teams had nine men per
side.But by the time the Stanley Cup was introduced, it was a seven-man
game.The change came about accidentally in the late 1880s after a club
playing in the Montreal Winter Carnival showed up two men short, and
its opponent agreed to drop the same number of players on its team to
even the match.
In time, players began to prefer the smaller squad, and it wasn't long
before that number became the standard for the sport. Each team featured
one goaltender, three forwards, two defense men, and a rover, who had
the option of moving up ice on the attack or falling back to defend his
goal.
The Rise of Professional Hockey
Hockey was a strictly amateur affair until 1904, when the first
professional league was created - oddly enough in the United States.
Known as the International Pro Hockey League, it was based in the
iron-mining region of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. That folded in 1907,
but then an even bigger league emerged three years later, the National
Hockey Association (NHA). And shortly after that came the Pacific Coast
League (PCL). In 1914, a transcontinental championship series was
arranged between the two, with the winner getting the coveted cup of
Lord Stanley. World War I threw the entire hockey establishment into
disarray, and the men running the NHA decided to suspend operations.
The 1st Stanley Cup championsThe Montreal Amateur
Athletic Association
But after the war, the hockey powers that be decided to start a whole
new organization that would be known as the National Hockey League
(NHL). At its inception, the NHL boasted five franchises- the Montreal
Canadiens, the Montreal Wanderers, the Ottawa
Senators, the Quebec Bulldogs, and the Toronto Arenas. The league's
first game was held Dec. 19, 1917. The clubs played a 22-game schedule
and, picking up on a rule change instituted by the old NHA, dropped
the rover and employed only six players on a side. Toronto finished that
first season on top, and in March 1918 met the Pacific Coast League
champion Vancouver Millionaires for the Stanley Cup. Toronto won,
three games to two. Eventually the PCL folded, and at the start of the
1926 season, the NHL, which at that point had ten teams,
divided into two divisions and took control of the Stanley Cup.
What They Wore - and Didn't Wear - In Years Past
It's remarkable how little equipment the hockey players of the past wore
and how rudimentary the gear they did have truly was. In the beginning,
skates consisted of blades that were attached to shoes, and sticks were
made from tree branches. The first goalie shin and knee pads had
originally been designed for cricket. The quality of the gear progressed
over the years, with true hockey skates being made and players wearing
protective gloves. Shin guards eventually came into being, but many
times they didn't do much to soften the blow of
a puck or stick, and players were known to stuff newspaper or magazines
behind them for extra protection. For many years the blades on sticks
were completely straight, but New York Rangers star Andy Bathgate
began experimenting with a curve in the late 1950s. During a
European During a European tour of Ranger and Black hawk players,
Bathgate showed his innovation to Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita, and they
began playing with one themselves. And it wasn't long before most NHL
players had done the same thing.