Ice Hokey
Utila Island, Honduras
Ice hockey is a contact team sport played on ice, usually in a rink, in which two teams of skaters use their sticks to shoot a vulcanized rubber puck into their opponent’s net to score points. The sport is known to be fast-paced and physical, with teams usually consisting of six players each: one goaltender, and five players who skate up and down the ice trying to take the puck and score a goal against the opposing team.
Contact sports are sports that emphasize or require physical contact between players. Some sports, such as mixed martial arts, are scored on impacting an opponent, while others, including rugby football, require tackling of players. These sports are often known as full-contact, as the sport cannot be undertaken without contact. Other sports have contact, but such events are illegal under the rules of the game or are accidental and do not form part of the sport.
Ice hockey is most popular in Canada, central and eastern Europe, the Nordic countries, Russia and the United States. Ice hockey is the official national winter sport of Canada alongside Canada, ice hockey is the most popular winter sport in Belarus, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Latvia, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden, and Switzerland. North America’s National Hockey League (NHL) is the highest level for men’s ice hockey and the strongest professional ice hockey league in the world. The Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) is the highest league in Russia and much of Eastern Europe. The International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) is the formal governing body for international ice hockey, with the IIHF managing international tournaments and maintaining the IIHF World Ranking. Worldwide, there are ice hockey federations in 76 countries.[2]
In Canada, the United States, Nordic countries, and some other European countries the sport is known simply as hockey; the name “ice hockey” is used in places where “hockey” more often refers to field hockey, such as countries in South America, Asia, Africa, Australasia, and some European countries including the UK and Ireland.
Ice hockey is believed to have evolved from simple stick and ball games played in the 18th and 19th century United Kingdom and elsewhere. These games were brought to North America and several similar winter games using informal rules were developed, such as “shinny” and “ice polo”. The contemporary sport of ice hockey was developed in Canada, most notably in Montreal, where the first indoor hockey game was played on March 3, 1875. Some characteristics of that game, such as the length of the ice rink and the use of a puck, have been retained to this day. Amateur ice hockey leagues began in the 1880s, and professional ice hockey originated around 1900. The Stanley Cup, emblematic of ice hockey club supremacy, was first awarded in 1893 to recognize the Canadian amateur champion and later became the championship trophy of the NHL. In the early 1900s, the Canadian rules were adopted by the Ligue Internationale de Hockey sur Glace, the precursor of the IIHF and the sport was played for the first time in the Olympics in the 1920 Summer Olympics.
In international competitions, the national teams of six countries (the “Big Six”) predominate: Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, Russia, Sweden and the United States. Of the 69 medals awarded all-time in men’s competition at the Olympics, only six medals were not awarded to one of those countries (or two of their precursors, the Soviet Union for Russia, and Czechoslovakia for the Czech Republic). In the annual Ice Hockey World Championships, 177 of 201 medals have been awarded to the six nations. Teams outside the “Big Six” have won only five medals in either competition since 1953. The World Cup of Hockey is organized by the National Hockey League and the National Hockey League Players’ Association (NHLPA), unlike the annual World Ice Hockey Championships and quadrennial Olympic tournament, both run by the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF). World Cup games are played under NHL rules and not those of the IIHF, and the tournament occurs prior to the NHL pre-season, allowing for all the NHL’s players to be available, unlike the World Championships, which overlaps with the NHL’s Stanley Cup playoffs. All 12 Women’s Olympic and 36 IIHF World Women’s Championships medals have been awarded to one of these six countries, and every gold medal in both competitions has been won by either the Canadian national team or the United States national team.
Name
The name “hockey” has no clear origin. Its first known mention is from the 1773 book Juvenile Sports and Pastimes, to Which Are Prefixed, Memoirs of the Author: Including a New Mode of Infant Education, by Richard Johnson (Pseud. Master Michel Angelo), whose chapter XI was titled “New Improvements on the Game of Hockey. The belief that hockey was mentioned in a 1363 proclamation by King Edward III of England is based on modern translations of the proclamation, which was originally in Latin and explicitly forbade the games “Pilam Manualem, Pedivam, & Bacularem: & ad Canibucam & Gallorum Pugnam”. The English historian and biographer John Strype did not use the word “hockey” when he translated the proclamation in 1720.
The 1573 Statute of Galway banned a sport called “‘hokie’—the hurling of a little ball with sticks or staves”. A form of this word was thus being used in the 16th century, though much removed from its current usage.
According to the Austin Hockey Association, the word “puck” derives from the Scots Gaelic puc or the Irish poc (to poke, punch or deliver a blow). “…The blow given by a hurler to the ball with his caman or hurley is always called a puck.
Precursors
Stick-and-ball games date back to pre-Christian times. In Europe, these games included the Irish game of hurling, the closely related Scottish game of shinty and versions of field hockey (including “bandy ball”, played in England). IJscolf, a game resembling colf on an ice-covered surface, was popular in the Low Countries between the Middle Ages and the Dutch Golden Age. It was played with a wooden curved bat (called a colf or kolf), a wooden or leather ball and two poles (or nearby landmarks), with the objective to hit the chosen point using the least number of strokes. A similar game (knattleikr) had been played for a thousand years or more by the Norse, as documented in the Icelandic sagas. In England, evidence of games of “hockey on ice” (the name replaced “bandy ball”), played with a “bung” (a plug of cork or oak used as a stopper on a barrel) date back to the 1700s. William Pierre Le Cocq stated, in a 1799 letter written in Chesham, England:
I must now describe to you the game of Hockey; we have each a stick turning up at the end. We get a bung. There are two sides one of them knocks one way and the other side the other way. If any one of the sides makes the bung reach that end of the churchyard it is victorious.
A 1797 engraving unearthed by Swedish sport historians Carl Gidén and Patrick Houda shows a person on skates with a stick and bung on the River Thames, probably in December 1796.
British soldiers and immigrants to Canada and the United States brought their stick-and-ball games with them and played them on the ice and snow of winter. In 1825, John Franklin wrote “The game of hockey played on the ice was the morning sport” on Great Bear Lake during one of his Arctic expeditions. A mid-1830s watercolour portrays New Brunswick lieutenant governor Archibald Campbell and his family with British soldiers on skates playing a stick-on-ice sport. Captain R.G.A. Levinge, a British Army officer in New Brunswick during Campbell’s time, wrote about “hockey on ice” on Chippewa Creek (a tributary of the Niagara River) in 1839. In 1843 another British Army officer in Kingston, Ontario wrote, “Began to skate this year, improved quickly and had great fun at hockey on the ice.”
An 1859 Boston Evening Gazette article referred to an early game of hockey on ice in Halifax that year.[13] An 1835 painting by John O’Toole depicts skaters with sticks and bung on a frozen stream in the American state of West Virginia, at that time still part of Virginia.
In the same era, the Mi’kmaq, a First Nations people of the Canadian Maritimes, also had a stick-and-ball game. Canadian oral histories describe a traditional stick-and-ball game played by the Mi’kmaq, and Silas Tertius Rand (in his 1894 Legends of the Micmacs) describes a Mi’kmaq ball game known as tooadijik. Rand also describes a game played (probably after European contact) with hurleys, known as wolchamaadijik. Sticks made by the Mi’kmaq were used by the British for their games.
Thomas Chandler Haliburton, in The Attaches: Second Series (published in 1844) imagined a dialogue, between two of the novel’s characters, which mentions playing “hurly on the long pond on the ice”. This has been interpreted by some historians from Windsor, Nova Scotia as reminiscence of the days when the author was a student at King’s College School in that town in 1810 and earlier. Based on Haliburton’s quote, claims were made that modern hockey was invented in Windsor, Nova Scotia, by King’s College students and perhaps named after an individual (“Colonel Hockey’s game”). Others claim that the origins of hockey come from games played in the area of Dartmouth and Halifax in Nova Scotia. However, several references have been found to hurling and shinty being played on the ice long before the earliest references from both Windsor and Dartmouth/Halifax, and the word “hockey” was used to designate a stick-and-ball game at least as far back as 1773, as it was mentioned in the book Juvenile Sports and Pastimes, to Which Are Prefixed, Memoirs of the Author: Including a New Mode of Infant Education by Richard Johnson (Pseud. Master Michel Angelo), whose chapter XI was titled “New Improvements on the Game of Hockey”.
From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_hockey)
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