February 28, 2010
In Canada, even death waits on hockey. During the gold medal game at the Vancouver Olympics, my sister-in-law was the duty nurse at a Toronto palliative care hospice. In the middle of the celebrations for Sidney Crosby’s winning goal, a woman who had years before disappeared into a stupor of dementia re-emerged momentarily, suddenly alert and smiling. She died later that night. My sister-in-law tells me that such moments of resurgent consciousness, brief flares before darkness, are not uncommon in the hospice. What thoughts and memories ran through the woman’s disintegrating neurons? Did she see, one last time, the steamy breath in the air above frozen ponds, the shouting of bruised boys in celebration?

Memories and numbers
Individual moments as intimate as that dying woman’s compose the mass ceremony we call hockey, the rabid fandom, the patriotic excuse for shutting down a city. A reported 16.6 million Canadians watched the gold medal game, making it the most viewed broadcast in the country’s history. Over 80 percent of Canadians watched some part. A graph released by the Edmonton water utility, EPCOR, showed that usage virtually ceased during the three periods of play, then spiked during the intermissions. If death waits on hockey in Canada, then so will other bodily functions.

The point of origin
The only people who care about establishing the exact spot where hockey was invented are regional boosters, amateur or professional adjuncts of provincial tourism departments. Identifying a first game or a first rink is impossible for two reasons: 1) The historical records of boys’ games are vague and imperfect. 2) The precise definition of what activities constitute hockey is open to a wide range of interpretations. The first mention of the game may be different from the first occurrence of the game, and the game called hockey may be different from what we currently understand by the term. Take this quotation from Thomas Haliburton’s The Attaché; or, Sam Slick in England, published in London in 1844: “You boys let out racin’, yelpin’, hollerin’ and whoopin’ like mad with pleasure, and the play-ground, and the game at bass in the fields, or hurley on the long pond on the ice, or campin’ out a-night at Chester lakes to fish.” Was “hurley on the long pond” the same as hockey? Or was it some rudimentary variant? Was it played with skates and goals? Or was it just a big to-do on ice? Sam Slick, Haliburton’s narrator, is explaining his Canadian roots to an English audience, so perhaps “hurley,” the Irish game played with long clubs, was just the closest analogue he could find to the game he remembered from his distant boyhood. More or less similar sports were called by many different names, even before 1844. In 1829, the Colonial Patriot in Pictou, Nova Scotia, reported on a game of “break-shins” on the local ice. In 1831, the Nova Scotian reported “wicket” being played on the Northwest Arm of Halifax Harbour, and the game was “ricket” elsewhere. But who knows how closely these contests resembled hockey?

Hockey as Native sport
Boys and girls knocking a ball around on ice existed before there was a name for what they were doing. In North America, versions of the game were played for centuries before Europeans arrived. In his monumental study, Games of the North American Indians, Stewart Culin identifies several variants of what he calls shinny, played all over the continent. “A single bat is ordinarily used… The rackets are invariably curved, and usually expanded at the striking end. In some instances they are painted or carved.” It was a game played by the Haida Nation from time immemorial, and to Pueblos of New Mexico it was considered, according to at least one anthropologist, “what baseball is to the Americans.” To Mi’kmaq communities of Nova Scotia, the game was Oochamkunutk. In winter, they played on ice with skates made from animal jawbones, as Garth Vaughn described in his history of hockey, The Puck Starts Here. They made sticks from alder branches and pucks from cherry wood, whose blackish, leatherlike bark stands out starkly against the ice. The first hockey sticks ever sold, the most popular with the best players for nearly a century, were called Mic-Mac sticks. It is also worth remembering that lacrosse, the “little brother of war,” was frequently played on ice in pre-Columbian North America. The game requires a smooth surface, and during winter a frozen pond is the smoothest, most easily available one in nature. If the Native game of shinny was hockey’s direct ancestor, lacrosse was its spiritual forefather. Descriptions of early lacrosse games eerily resemble those of today’s hockey games, as in John Long’s memoir of his travels in the West during the 1820s: “The Indians play with great good humour, and even when one of them happens, in the heat of the game, to strike another with his stick, it is not resented. But these accidents are cautiously avoided, as the violence with which they strike has been known to break an arm or a leg.”

The game and the land
Games, like words, are not individual creations. They emerge from the miasma of a million tiny interactions and mingled desires. Hockey arose from the experience of the North. If we were transported back to the land mass of Canada 600 years ago, the most important game played then would look recognizably similar to the modern one, and be played by similar means, for similar stakes, and in a similar spirit. Hockey’s deepest roots are Aboriginal. The clearest evidence for First Nations’ origination of hockey is that the game was brought from Canada to the countries of northern Europe and not the other way around. The Europeans had hurley. They had ice. They never had ice hockey until Canada brought it to them.

The skate
But hockey is not the same as the various Aboriginal games that involved hitting balls around with sticks, whether on the ice or not. What makes hockey hockey is the skate. And not just any skate. Hockey needed the Acme Club spring skate, invented by John Forbes of Halifax in 1865, to become the game we know, because it introduced speed. The self-fastening skate replaced stock skates, which had to be adjusted frequently, lost their edges quickly, and dragged. The beauty of the self-fastening skate was that the skater could forget about his or her feet, building speed without anxiety and turning with sharp suddenness.

Superhuman speed
Two features distinguish hockey from all other sports: its peculiar relationship to violence, and its pace, which is just beyond the organic capacities of human biology. Hockey’s speed is far more intense than that of other team sports; the game is akin to race car driving, in the way it requires a human fusion with technology. Skates create a speed of play beyond what our bodies have evolved to handle. Which is why no one can play the game for more than a few minutes at a time.