Historically Speaking: The Invention of Ice Hockey

Canada gave us the modern form of a sport that has been played for centuries around the world

The Wall Street Journal, February 11, 2019

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

Canadians like to say—and print on mugs and T-shirts—that “Canada is Hockey.” No fewer than five Canadian cities and towns claim to be the birthplace of ice hockey, including Windsor, Nova Scotia, which has an entire museum dedicated to the sport. Canada’s annual Hockey Day, which falls on February 9 this year, features a TV marathon of hockey games. Such is the country’s love for the game that last year’s broadcast was watched by more than 1 in 4 Canadians.

But as with many of humanity’s great advances, no single country or person can take the credit for inventing ice hockey. Stick-and-ball games are as old as civilization itself. The ancient Egyptians were playing a form of field hockey as early as the 21st century B.C., if a mural on a tomb at Beni Hasan, a Middle Kingdom burial site about 120 miles south of Cairo, is anything to go by. The ancient Greeks also played a version of the game, as did the early Christian Ethiopians, the Mesoamerican Teotihuacanos in the Valley of Mexico, and the Daur tribes of Inner Mongolia. And the Scottish and Irish versions of field hockey, known as shinty and hurling respectively, have strong similarities with the modern game.

Taking a ball and stick onto the ice was therefore a fairly obvious innovation, at least in places with snowy winters. The figures may be tiny, but three villagers playing an ice hockey-type game can be seen in the background of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1565 painting “Hunters in the Snow.” There is no such pictorial evidence to show when the Mi’kmaq Indians of Nova Scotia first started hitting a ball on ice, but linguistic clues suggest that their hockey tradition existed before the arrival of European traders in the 16th century. The two cultures then proceeded to influence each other, with the Mi’kmaqs becoming the foremost maker of hockey sticks in the 19th century.

The earliest known use of the word hockey appears in a book, “Juvenile Sports and Pastimes,” written by Richard Johnson in London in 1776. Recently, Charles Darwin became an unlikely contributor to ice hockey history after researchers found a letter in which he reminisced about playing the game as a boy in the 1820s: “I used to be very fond of playing Hocky [sic] on the ice in skates.” On January 8, 1864, the future King Edward VII played ice hockey at Windsor Castle while awaiting the birth of his first child.

As for Canada, apart from really liking the game, what has been its real contribution to ice hockey? The answer is that it created the game we know today, from the official rulebook to the size and shape of the rink to the establishment of the Stanley Cup championship in 1894. The first indoor ice hockey game was played in Montreal in 1875, thereby solving the perennial problem of pucks getting lost. (The rink was natural ice, with Canada’s cold winter supplying the refrigeration.) The game involved two teams of nine players, each with a set position—three more than teams field today—a wooden puck, and a list of rules for fouls and scoring.

In addition to being the first properly organized game, the Montreal match also initiated ice hockey’s other famous tradition: brawling on the ice. In this case, the fighting erupted between the players, spectators and skaters who wanted the ice rink back for free skating. Go Canada!

WSJ Historically Speaking: Undying Defeat: The Power of Failed Uprisings

From the Warsaw Ghetto to the Alamo, doomed rebels live on in culture

John Wayne said that he saw the Alamo as ‘a metaphor for America’. PHOTO: ALAMY

Earlier this month, Israel commemorated the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943. The annual Remembrance Day of the Holocaust and Heroism, as it is called, reminds Israelis of the moral duty to fight to the last.

The Warsaw ghetto battle is one of many doomed uprisings across history that have cast their influence far beyond their failures, providing inspiration to a nation’s politics and culture.

Nearly 500,000 Polish Jews once lived in the ghetto. By January 1943, the Nazis had marked the surviving 55,000 for deportation. The Jewish Fighting Organization had just one machine gun and fewer than a hundred revolvers for a thousand or so sick and starving volunteer soldiers. The Jews started by blowing up some tanks and fought on until May 16. The Germans executed 7,000 survivors and deported the rest.

For many Jews, the rebellion offered a narrative of resistance, an alternative to the grim story of the fortress of Masada, where nearly 1,000 besieged fighters chose suicide over slavery during the First Jewish-Roman War (A.D. 66–73).
The story of the Warsaw ghetto uprising has also entered the wider culture. The title of Leon Uris’s 1961 novel “Mila 18” comes from the street address of the headquarters of the Jewish resistance in their hopeless fight. Four decades later, Roman Polanski made the uprising a crucial part of his 2002 Oscar-winning film, “The Pianist,” whose musician hero aids the effort.

Other doomed uprisings have also been preserved in art. The 48-hour Paris Uprising of 1832, fought by 3,000 insurrectionists against 30,000 regular troops, gained immortality through Victor Hugo, who made the revolt a major plot point in “Les Misérables” (1862). The novel was a hit on its debut and ever after—and gave its world-wide readership a set of martyrs to emulate.

Even a young country like the U.S. has its share of national myths, of desperate last stands serving as touchstones for American identity. One has been the Battle of the Alamo in 1836 during the War of Texas Independence. “Remember the Alamo” became the Texan war cry only weeks after roughly 200 ill-equipped rebels, among them the frontiersman Davy Crockett, were killed defending the Alamo mission in San Antonio against some 2,000 Mexican troops.

The Alamo’s imagery of patriotic sacrifice became popular in novels and paintings but really took off during the film era, beginning in 1915 with the D.W. Griffith production, “Martyrs of the Alamo.” Walt Disney got in on the act with his 1950s TV miniseries, “ Davy Crockett : King of the Wild Frontier.” John Wayne’s 1960 “The Alamo,” starring Wayne as Crockett, immortalized the character for a generation.

Wayne said that he saw the Alamo as “a metaphor of America” and its will for freedom. Others did too, even in very different contexts. During the Vietnam War, President Lyndon Johnson, whose hometown wasn’t far from San Antonio, once told the National Security Council why he believed U.S. troops needed to be fighting in Southeast Asia: “Hell,” he said, “Vietnam is just like the Alamo.”