Hockey
HockeyThe 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 gradually whenever problems cropped up and as rougher play made certain types of injuries more common. The creation in 1893 of a status symbol, the Stanley Cup--then awarded to Canada's best amateur hockey team--gave some credibility to the sport.
Ice hockey is a low-scoring game in which the team that hits the most pucks into its opponent's goal wins. The goals are located at each end of the hockey rink, an enclosed rectangular ice surface with rounded corners. The standard size of the rink is 180�by 60�, though there may be slight variations. It is surrounded by sideboards and endboards that stand about three or four feet above the surface of the ice. Some of the roughest hockey action occurs when players are slammed into the boards. To protect the spectators, rinks usually have glass extending from the top of these boards. The glass also keeps the skaters, as well as the pucks, within the playing area.
Each goal has a cage framed by two posts four feet...
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