Hockey: The Fastest Sport

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The fastest of all team sports, ice hockey has been described as a combination of "blood, sweat, and beauty." Stiffer penalties have not discouraged the players from using their basic equipment of sticks and skates as weapons, and this brutality has diminished the abstract beauty of the sport. Even though the game consists of a lot of fighting it is still the greatest sport ever made.



Even without the violence, ice hockey is a rugged game that demands strong conditioned athletes. More than any other team sport, ice hockey is a game of motion: even when the action is whistled to a stop, the momentum keeps flowing. The basic plays of the game are repeated, but the players are never able to skate in quite the same patterns and the sequences of their moves keep changing.



The sport of ice hockey came from the games played on makeshift ice skates in Northern Europe during the Middle Ages, similar to field hockey, it involves hitting an object with sticks between two goalposts. Probably the first ice hockey players were North American Indians who used field tools that were curved at the lower end. The French word for the similarly shaped shepherd's crook, hoquet, was attached by French explorers who watched the Indians' ball-and-stick games.



Although the original game called for nine men on each side, the number of team players involved could vary from one community to another. Soon a committee met in Montreal to establish regulations for seven-man teams. The positions agreed upon were goalkeeper, two defensemen, three forwards, and a rover who alternated between offense and defense. The National Hockey Association, formed in 1909, eliminated the rover, which meant that east-west championship games alternated between the six- and seven-man styles for a time. Until the mid-1920s teams were sometimes forced to play with fewer than three skaters on the ice because of penalties. The rules and equipment were improvised gradu...