Hockey | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

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Hockey Summary

Hockey

North American hockey is a fast and violent game, played on ice, which began in Canada in the mid-nineteenth century. The six-member teams, wearing skates and heavy pads, use sticks with which to propel a flat rubber disk known as the puck. It is thought that hockey derives its name from the French word for a shepherd's crook, in reference to the shape of the sticks with their curved playing end. The origins of ice hockey are much debated, and have been sought in several other sports such as hurly, shinty, bandy, field hockey (played with a small, hard ball) or the Native American Mic Mac game; but there seems to be general agreement that the earliest match that can be identified with any certainty as hockey was played in 1855 on a frozen harbor by soldiers of the Royal Canadian Regiment in Kingston, Ontario. It remained an outdoor game for the next 20 years, played by nine-man teams, and—influenced by the rules of rugby—no forward passing.

Students at Montreal's McGill University played the first indoor game in 1875, and developed the first hockey league in 1877. In 1883, the McGill team won the first game to be termed a "world championship" and, ten years later, teams were competing for the Stanley Cup, donated by Canada's governor-general, Lord Stanley, in a national championship. By then, the game had spread across the border to Yale and Johns Hopkins universities in the United States, and to Europe.

In the spirit of most sport during the Victorian era, when competing for financial gain was considered ungentlemanly and socially unacceptable, hockey flowered as an amateur game. This changed in the first decade of the twentieth century, which saw the advent of professional hockey. The world's first professional team, the Portage Lakers of Houghton, Michigan, was American, albeit using imported Canadian players. It was organized in 1903 by J. L. Gibson, a dentist, who, in 1904, established the first professional circuit, the International Pro Hockey League. Other leagues soon sprang up in Canada: the Ontario Professional League, the Pacific Coast Hockey Association, and the National Hockey Association. By this time most teams were using only seven players a side, but the NHA, for reasons of economy, dropped yet another man from the ice, and six a side eventually became the standard team composition.

The most innovative of the leagues was the PCHA formed by the wealthy Patrick family. They led the way in building arenas for indoor hockey played on artificial ice. They also pioneered rules that allowed the goalie to move about, permitted forward passing, and credited with an "assist" those players setting up a goal-scorer. The league expanded to the American northwest and in 1917 the Seattle Metropolitans became the first U.S. team to win the Stanley Cup.

In 1917 the NHA gave way to the National Hockey League, which was to become the dominant professional league in the world. The NHL had teams in Toronto, Montreal, Hamilton and Ottawa, and after 1926, when it shrewdly bought out the Pacific Coast League and acquired all its players for $250,000, it had no rival. It began to admit American franchises, of which the first was the Boston Bruins in 1924, followed by short-lived teams such as the Pittsburgh Pirates, Philadelphia Quakers, St. Louis Eagles, and the New York (later Brooklyn) Americans. American teams that endured included three that entered in 1926: the New York Rangers, the Detroit Cougars (later the Falcons, later the Red Wings), and the Chicago Blackhawks. Canadian franchises that flourished for a time, only to disappear, included the Ottawa Senators (which had won four cups during the 1920s), Hamilton Tigers, Montreal Wanderers, Montreal Maroons, and Quebec Bulldogs.

When World War II ended, only six teams remained in the NHL but many consider the period between 1945 and 1967 to have been the golden age of hockey. It was certainly the era of elegant skaters and scorers such as Maurice "Rocket" Richard and Jean Beliveau of the Montreal Canadiens, Frank Mahovlich of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and Andy Bathgate of the Rangers; and of powerful forwards such as Johnny "The Beast" Bucyk of the Bruins, and Gordie Howe and "Terrible" Ted Lindsay of the Red Wings. There has never been a trio of goaltenders to match Chicago's Glen Hall, Montreal's Jacques Plante (inventor of the goalie mask), and Detroit's Terry Sawchuk. Rock-hard defensemen like Doug Harvey and Elmer "Moose" Vasko contended with players who had perfected the slap-shot which could propel the puck over 100 mph—shooters such as "The Golden Jet" Bobby Hull and Bernie "Boom Boom" Geoffrion.

The expansion of the NHL to six more American cities in 1968 and the appearance in 1971 of 12 more teams in the rival World Hockey Association diluted the quality of the sport. Players of exceptional talent, however, such as the magical Bobby Orr, could still shine. Orr revolutionized his position when he became the first defenseman to win the scoring trophy. The bidding wars for players that ensued during the 1970s drove up salaries and costs, thus causing many franchises to go under during the decade, and the frenzy stopped only in 1979 when the WHA folded and its four remaining teams were accepted into the NHL. One of the players who came in to the NHL from the WHA was Wayne Gretzky of the Edmonton Oilers, who went on to set innumerable scoring records in the 1980s and 1990s before retiring amid fanfare in 1999.

Up until the 1980s the overwhelming majority of professional players were Canadian, but developments in world hockey soon began to change that. An amateur team from the United States had caused an upset in the 1960 Winter Olympics when they returned with the gold medal, but that victory did not have nearly the impact of the 1980 "Miracle On Ice" when an under-dog American squad, amid Cold War tensions, defeated the seemingly unstoppable Soviets to reach the Olympic finals where they beat Finland for the gold. A number of players on this team went on to the NHL and their exampleencouraged many more young Americans to take up the game and do well at it. These new recruits to the big league were joined by a flood of highly skilled players from newly democratized countries in Eastern Europe seeking employment in North America.

A physical altercation develops between the Philadelphia Flyers and the Boston Bruins during the 1974 Stanley Cup Finals.

There was plenty of work for the newcomers. The NHL was committed to a relentless policy of expansion, targeted particularly in the American west and sun belts, with the expectation that, by 2001, there would be 30 teams in the league, 24 of them in the United States. The aim was to penetrate large media markets that would provide the kind of giant television contracts that American networks were handing to professional baseball, basketball, and football leagues. The NHL had not yet hit television paydirt by 1999 (largely because Americans still preferred watching televised bowling and stock car races to seeing hockey on the small screen), while spiraling costs had caused the demise of small-market clubs in Canada and stretched the resources of many franchises in America.

As the millennium approached, the fate of hockey looked uncertain. College hockey in the United States, and women's hockey throughout the world, seemed set for more success; in Russia, however, once mighty teams were in a state of poverty-stricken post-communist collapse. Canada seemed destined to breed great players, while being unable to afford to watch them play in person. In the United States, the question was whether the National Hockey League could afford to continue relying largely on gate revenues, with so little financial assistance from television. Faster than football, more violent than pro wrestling, at once graceful and crude, hockey had yet to completely win over the American sports fan.