Ice Hockey

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ICE HOCKEY

As for most sports, the origins of ice hockey have long been the subject of debate. Some contend the game was borne of the transposition of imported, and already existing, sports such as hurley or field hockey onto the frozen lakes and ponds of North America during the early 1800s. Others suggest this was preceded by a form of the game played by the indigenous populations of Canada and the northern United States. Then again, some argue, pointing to paintings from seventeenth-century Europe, that even these versions of ice hockey had their antecedents.

Regardless of the contentious nature of its inception, however, ice hockey, as it is now known undoubtedly evolved in the Dominion of Canada. Indeed, ice hockey's governing body, the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF), has officially recognized the Victoria Skating Rink in Montreal, Canada, as the birthplace of the organized version of the game. Moreover, no other country is more closely associated with the sport, in either historical or contemporary terms. And it is in Canada that the game was formalized, rationalized, and later professionalized.

As the IIHF has suggested, the earliest recorded game of organized ice hockey took place in Montreal's Victoria Skating Rink on 3 March 1875. With skates and sticks, the nine-man sides took to an ice surface of 80 by 204 feet, scoring goals not with the then customary rubber ball, but a flat circular piece of wood—the precursor of the modern puck. Eight years later, the city would also play host to hockey's first championship series when teams from Montreal and Quebec City gathered at the 1883 Montreal Winter Carnival. From there, the game would grow steadily, owing much to the sponsorship of Canadian governor general Sir Frederick Arthur Stanley, who was instrumental in developing hockey in Ontario, and who would donate the Stanley Cup to be awarded annually to the amateur champions of Canada—the trophy today remains ice hockey's most prestigious prize.

Much of this early growth was also fostered by touring exhibition squads, with a number of Canadian teams touring the United States in the 1890s and early part of the 1900s. The era also saw the beginnings of professionalism, when, by the middle of the 1890s, it was widely rumored that members of these teams were accepting payments to play. At the time, the game was considered to be strictly amateur—a gentleman's sport—and the supposed payment of players became the subject of controversy and debate across Canada. However, while the leagues they played in were still officially deemed to be "amateur," it was becoming increasingly clear that players were receiving regular payments at the time. It was hardly a surprise, therefore, when the sport's first officially professional league, the International Hockey League, was established only a few years later, in 1904. Throughout the first decade of the 1900s, Canada had to face the growing reality of professionalism. And, by the 1908 to 1909 season, professionalism had taken over the highest levels of Canadian hockey.

Initially, professionalism saw the advent of a series of competing regional leagues, dominated by the National Hockey Association (which, in 1917, would become the National Hockey League, or NHL) in the East, and the Pacific Coast Hockey League and Western Canada Hockey League in the West. However, from 1904 to the 1920s, a number of leagues and teams came and went—with many in the West, in particular, floundering—and, by 1926, the NHL all but stood alone as the dominant professional ice hockey league in North America. Yet even the NHL itself would struggle through much of the 1930s, with the Great Depression fiscally wounding several clubs, and the out-break of the war in 1939 further depleting rosters. And, while the league continued to play throughout the duration of hostilities, the NHL would eventually be left with only six teams by the end of the 1940s.

Though interest in hockey would grow across the continent during the next decade, and while the newly consolidated NHL became relatively well established during this time, the 1950s were nonetheless marked by plunging attendance. Much of this was owed to the advent of television, which saw many fans choosing to stay at home in favor of alternative forms of entertainment. Yet while a number of teams came close to folding (in particular, Boston and Chicago), the league survived, and later thrived into the 1960s, a decade marked by the league's expansion into Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Minnesota, Oakland, Los Angeles, and St. Louis. Expansion was so successful, that in 1970, the league added two more teams, the Buffalo Sabres and the Vancouver Canucks.

The prosperity of the sport in the 1960s and 1970s saw ice hockey, and the NHL, more specifically, become an attractive option for financial investment. Entrepreneurs seeking to profit from hockey's success soon courted expansion franchises. In 1972, one group of investors, disgruntled at the slow pace at which the league was willing to grant these franchises, formed the rival World Hockey Association (WHA), signing NHL players (most notably, Chicago Blackhawks star Bobby Hull) to large contracts with the new league. The battle between the NHL and WHA would be a feature of professional ice hockey throughout the 1970s. However, arguably because more established NHL fans saw it as an inferior or secondary league, the WHA began to struggle, and, by decade's end, the leagues would merge. In decades since, the NHL has continued to expand, and while its viewership may be proportionately low in comparison to football or basketball, ice hockey has become one of America's preeminent professional sports.

Ice hockey's appeal at the collegiate level, however, is perhaps a more regionalized affair in the United States. Teams from either the Midwest or Northeast have dominated the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) national tournament (now known as the "Frozen Four") since its inception in 1948—with the University of Michigan's record nine titles topping the list. The sport's roots in U.S. colleges date back at least as far as the first documented college hockey game in 1896 between Johns Hopkins and Yale Universities. In the time since, and even though the college game is perhaps more prominent in the Midwest and the Northeast, NCAA Division One ice hockey has grown to encompass six conferences spanning much of the United States: the Eastern College Athletic Conference, the Hockey East Association, the Central Collegiate Hockey Association, College Hockey America, the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference, and the Western Collegiate Hockey Association.

Traditionally, though the vast majority of players in the NHL are acquired from Canada's professional "major junior" leagues, a number of top Americans playing in the NHL come from the collegiate ranks, including Chris Chelios (who played at the University of Wisconsin), Brian Leetch (Boston College), and Chris Drury (who won an NCAA Championship with Boston University in 1995). Further, U.S. Olympic hockey teams have historically been largely composed of either current or former collegiate players. Undoubtedly, the most famous moment in U.S. hockey is the 1980 "Miracle on Ice," when a U.S. team made up almost entirely of collegians beat the highly favored (and, for all intents and purposes, fully professional) Soviet team enroute to the gold medal.

Interestingly, despite its purported overall dominance of the sport, the Salt Lake Games was Canada's first Olympic gold in ice hockey since 1952. Indeed, while Canadian teams may have ruled the early years of Olympic ice hockey (beginning with its introduction as a demonstration sport at the 1920 Antwerp Summer Games), since the mid-1950s the Olympics have been dominated by the Soviet Union: between 1956 in Cortina d'Ampezzo and 1992 in Albertville, the Soviets never failed to win a medal. Rationalizing their lack of Olympic success, many Canadians put the Soviet's accomplishments down to the fact that Canada's best players were in the professional NHL. Such arguments were, however, called into question during the now-famous 1972 "Summit Series," when the Soviets only narrowly lost to a Canadian team overflowing with NHL All-Stars. In many ways, the Summit Series helped to regalvanize the centrality of hockey to Canadian nationalism, with Paul Henderson's series-winning goal ranking as one of the most memorable, and oft-immortalized, moments in Canadian history.

Some have speculated that Canada's declining superiority in the sport of ice hockey, particularly at what has traditionally been perceived as the highest level of amateur competition, was a contributing factor in the NHL allowing its best players to represent their various countries at the Olympics for the first time in Nagano, Japan, in 1998 (which necessitated the NHL to suspend its regular season for three weeks). Notably, despite sending a team laden with NHL All-Stars, the Canadians failed even to win a medal at Nagano. Though being cause for concern for many Canadians, their failure to capture a medal was recognition of the growing internationalization of the sport of ice hockey. Indeed, although the NHL has expanded to thirty teams throughout North America, only six are based in Canada (the cause of much ire for many Canadian nationalists). Moreover, the league's composition is increasingly international: once almost exclusively the domain of Canadians, the NHL now also boasts players from not only the United States, but also more distant places such as Russia, Sweden, Finland, and the Czech Republic. And, with the NHL's U.S. television rights now owned by ESPN and ABC, subsidiaries of the Disney global media conglomerate, it would seem that that such internationalization of the game is set to continue in coming decades.

See also: Field Hockey, Olympics, Professionalization of Sport