Hockey would not have the same appeal if it were played on ground or grass. Ice is what gives the "coolest game on Earth," as the NHL calls it, its distinguishing characteris-tics. For one thing, on any surface other than ice, it wouldn't be as fast. Although variations like roller hockey have appeared recently, they haven't reached the same level of popularity as ice hockey. Field
hockey has a wide following, but mostly among Commonwealth natIons.
Games on ice have existed for centuries. When the snow and cold weather enveloped towns and villages across the northern hemi-sphere, life didn't stop altogether. People created new amusements and sports, and ice became a favored playing field. Throughout his-tory, humankind has found something thrilling about running, skat-ing, and playing sports on a slippery surface. There are references to ice games in Europe from as early as the Middle Ages. Soon after the arrival of the modern skate in the nineteenth century, people found
that the next best thing to skating was shooting a ball or a puck across the ice with a stick. Thus hockey was born, and, since then, genera-tions of children have grown up playing this favorite sport on frozen lakes and ponds. Mter countless transformations and improvements, it has become the world's most popular winter team sport. So exactly when and where was hockey invented? There are many claims but no consensus. Because many regions in the world have nat-ural ice in the winter, it is not surprising that we hear different stories about where hockey began. At least one thing is certain: Canada is where hockey first evolved most fully and gained the most popularity,making that country the main supplier of NHL talent until today.
Hockey is now such a part of the Canadian psyche that when Marc Garneau became the first Canadian astronaut to fly in space, in 1984, he brought with him a hockey puck, of all things. Quebeckers claim hockey was first played at McGill University in Montreal, whereas Ontarians would rather believe it started in Kingston, Ontario. The city of Halifax in Nova Scotia also lays claim to the honor of invention. About the only undisputed fact is that the name hockey came from the French word hoquet, meaning "shepherd's crook." However, many historians also believe that the earliest form of the game appeared in the early nineteenth century, when eastern
Micmac Indians played a sport that combined elements of Native American lacrosse with the Irish sport of hurling. The game was played with hurley sticks and square wooden blocks.
Hockey as an organized team sport spread through Canada in the mid-1850s, and the first league was created by four clubs in Kingston. It didn't take long before rules were codified and tourna-ments were organized everywhere. In 1893, the now famous Stanley Cup-named after Frederick Arthur Stanley, Lord of Preston, six-teenth Earl of Derby, and Governor General of Canada-was in- troduced as an annual award for hockey excellence in Canada. The National Hockey League was founded in Montreal in 1917, and, starting that year, the trophy was awarded to the NHL playoff cham- pions. The first championship team was the Toronto Arenas. The arrival of artificial ice and indoor rinks in the early twentieth century made longer hockey seasons possible and helped spread the sport to warmer regions of the world. As many Canadians will tell you, this increased popularity was a double-edged sword. Canada had been
home to the NHL's best teams, but over the years teams such as the Quebec Nordiques and the Winnipeg Jets moved south of the border to more lucrative markets. This was hard to take for a na-tion that, according to a recent poll,l considers its series win against the Soviet Union in 1972 more important than its participation in the Second World War! The Minnesota North Stars have also joined this southern migration, moving to Dallas, although another Min-nesota team (the Wilds) has been recently resurrected. Yet artificial ice technologies have made possible teams like the Phoenix Coyotes and the Dallas Stars, whose host cities have average daytime temperatures of 66 and 55°F (19 and 13°C) in the middle of January. There are also benefits in terms of international competitions. Countries where ice is only found inside freezers now field teams at tournaments. Na-tions like Italy, Korea, and South Africa now have leagues of their own, and it may only be a matter of time before a warmer country wins an Olympic medal. From a physics point of view, ice is a fascinating subject because of its unique and somewhat bizarre properties. Surprisingly, ice is very much a contemporary topic of research among scientific circles. For example, the mechanism responsible for one of ice's most fundamen-tal features, its slipperiness, was only recently unraveled. The physics of ice is an active field of research that is important not only to hockey and winter sports but also to chemistry, engineering, geology, and oceanography. In our quest to understand ice, we will start with the simplest question of all. If you want to play hockey you need ice, so how do you make it?
0 comments: