Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Shoots and Scores (3 page)

#57: STEVE HEINZE

Steve Heinze deserves his place in the annals of hockey as the man behind what is perhaps the most clever jersey number selection in NHL history. He originally wore #45 as a rookie for the Boston Bruins and then #23 in his next eight seasons. But when he became a member of the Columbus Blue Jackets in 2000, he just couldn't resist having a little fun and chose a number that made him the only NHL player to have the name of a condiment emblazoned on his back…Heinze 57.

#68: JAROMIR JAGR

A native of what is now the Czech Republic, Pittsburgh Penguin Jaromir Jagr chose his jersey number in honor of the Prague Spring rebellion of 1968, which led to significant political reform and liberalization in his home country (then called Czechoslovakia). Appropriately, when Jagr was drafted in 1990, it marked the first time a Czech player attended the NHL Entry Draft without having to defect.

#66: MARIO LEMIEUX

Mario Lemieux's agent Bob Berno suggested #66 as a playful inversion of the famous 99. Lemieux first wore 66 in the Quebec Junior League as a member of the Laval Voisins and kept it for the rest of his illustrious career. The Penguins retired the number, and out of respect, it hasn't been worn by a NHL player since Lemieux retired in 2006.

#11: GILBERT PERREAULT

In 1970 the Buffalo Sabres and Vancouver Canucks joined the NHL as expansion clubs. To help them get off to a good start, the league granted them the first two spots in the draft. Which team selected first was determined by the spin of a roulette wheel. If the ball landed on a number between 1 and 8, the Canucks would get first pick; if it landed on a number between 9 and 16, the Sabres would select first. The ball landed on 11, and the Sabre's chose Gilbert Perreault, the cream of the junior hockey crop that year. In celebration of this lucky spin, Buffalo GM Punch Imlach gave Perreault jersey #11.

#49: JOE JUNEAU

All through his junior days, Joe Juneau wore #9, but the Boston Bruins drafted him in 1988 and they'd already retired the number—it was worn by Bruin great Johnny Bucyk. Undeterred, Juneau had the chutzpah to ask Bucyk if he could bring #9 out of retirement. Bucyk agreed…if Juneau was willing to hand over his six-figure signing bonus. Juneau opted for a less-expensive solution. He chose 49 instead, a tribute to two Bruin legends: Bobby Orr (#4) and Johnny Bucyk and his coveted #9.

Hockey's longest running and often most-heated argument concerns the site of the game's origins.

O
ne of the liveliest hockey battles—as energetic as the scrappiest of scraps for the puck in any NHL rink corner—is waged by the game's historians. The contentious subject of debate is where and when the primitive forms of this wonderful game actually originated.

LET THERE BE ICE

Combine ice—a frozen pond or river—and narrow, steel blades attached to one's feet, and you will find that quick movement over the slippery surface becomes possible. Throw in sticks and something to hit while moving on the ice—a ball, a wooden disc, frozen horse manure—and a game is born. While there are reports of stones being kicked or hit back and forth with sticks after the Norman invasion of Britain in the 11th century, and while Chinese and Russian folklore document stick-and-ball games on ice 500 years ago, the earliest form of what really became ice hockey was most likely played in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. And probably in the town of Windsor…

EARLY HURLEY BURLY

That Windsor would be among hockey's earliest sites shouldn't come as much surprise. It can get very cold there! But also, Windsor was one of Canada's first towns, settled in 1684, and the location of the country's first college. Anglican Church members working in the New World as executives of steamship, lumber, and fur trading companies did not want to send their children all the way back to England for a decent education, so instead they imported British professors to form King's College School. And the professors brought their games with them: Cricket, rounders (the forerunner of baseball), and Irish hurley (a form of field hockey) were field games that were modified for the snow and ice of the Canadian winter. Mention of “ice hurley” around 1800 is the first written reference to a stick-and-ball game on a frozen surface.

COLONEL HOCKEY

One story claims that a Colonel Hockey (a common English name at the time) had British troops based at Windsor play the game for winter exercise and Hockey's game became, simply, hockey. A ball struck in hurley was said to be “pucked,” and the first wooden disc used in the game became known as, simply, the “puck.”

OTHER CLAIMS TO THE GAME

For many decades the original site for hockey was thought to be Kingston, Ontario, because the first written report of the game was published there in 1855. Soldiers at the British Garrison, wearing primitive skates clamped to their shoes and used field hockey sticks and a lacrosse ball to play on a large area of Kingston harbor cleared of snow. In 1903, a Kingston newspaper brashly declared the town “the birthplace of hockey.”

In 1941, an elderly Montreal resident recounted stories from his father about a primitive game of hockey in that city in 1837. In the 1870s, a group of students at McGill University in Montreal invented a game played on ice using a combination of rules from field hockey, lacrosse, and rugby. A definitive seven paragraphs in the 1877
Montreal Gazette
recorded the first set of printed rules for hockey as devised by these clever students.

WHOOPIN' IT UP IN WINDSOR

Although extensive research has provided evidence of the game in Nova Scotia from 1800 on, historians have been unable to agree on a precise locale and date. The area had long winters, abundant ice, many students and soldiers with plenty of time on their hands, and keen sporting spirits in quest of diversion from the cold, cold season.

The much-quoted author Thomas Chandler Haliburton was born in Windsor and attended King's College. He had arts and law degrees and became a distinguished judge and writer, often called “the father of American humor.” A paragraph in an article Haliburton wrote for a British magazine in 1844 about his days as a student at King's College has caught the eye of many a hockey historian: “The boys let out racin', yellin', hollerin', and whoopin' like mad with pleasure, and the playground, and the game at bass in the fields, or hurley on the long pond on the ice, or campin'
out at night at Chester Lakes to fish….” Haliburton had graduated from King's in 1810 and his mention of “hurley,” the early name for hockey, indicates the game was played before that year. Newspaper stories were discovered that discussed hurley on Long Pond at Windsor before 1816.

FROM IRONWOOD TO SHERWOOD

Windsor was enjoyed as a resort by wealthy residents of Halifax, some of whom owned luxurious estates in the town. They would come to fish, hunt, and race horses (on the track and on ice), and to attend cultural events at the college. Thus, word of the most exciting game on ice was spread across the province and soldiers based in the Halifax-Dartmouth area also started to play. As the game grew, a loose set of rules was established—a sort of “sporting code” rather than a written rule book—to govern how the game was conducted.

The Mi'kmaq natives of Nova Scotia, who had a field and ice game of their own, supplied the first “pucks”: slices of black cherrywood with tight, dark bark, making it easier to find in the snow. They also carved strong one-piece hockey sticks from ironwood trees with roots still attached: the root used for the blade, the stem carved into the handle.

THE FIRST ROAD TRIP

When the army moved west to Montreal and Kingston, the game went with them. An 1846 entry in a diary belonging to the father of a Kingston historian reads, “Most of the boys were quite at home on skates. They could cut the figure-eight but ‘shinny' was their delight.” The word “shinny” had come from the Scotch stick-and-ball field game of shinty, and is used today to describe a loosely structured game of pickup hockey. A British army officer wrote in his diary in 1843, “Began to skate this year, improved quickly and had great fun at hockey on ice.” Supporters of Kingston as the game's birthplace used these lines to back their contentions.

BULLIES PROVIDE ORDER

One major development in hockey's growth from a “mad-scramble” sport, with as many players as the size of the available ice surface
would hold, to a more organized game was the publication of the famous “
Gazette
rules.” Those seven paragraphs, printed in the Montreal newspaper on February 27, 1877, supplied a basis for the game that exists to this day, defining offsides, fouls against opponents, and how plays were to resume after the ball or puck went off the ice. A faceoff in those rules was called a “bully.” The rules slowly expanded over the years, the number of players on the ice for one team being reduced from 15 to seven.

SHALL WE TAKE THIS INSIDE?

By 1880, several cities in Canada had indoor arenas, built first for pleasure skating with no hockey allowed. Gradually the game moved indoors, the lacrosse ball bouncing out of play so often that some enterprising soul sliced it to produce a flat piece of rubber that would slide on the ice. As shooting skills improved, various pieces of primitive equipment were introduced to protect shins. Goalies wore padding, and skates evolved from the blades that were strapped to the boots to “skate boots” with blades permanently attached. But going all the way back to the chilly outdoor days, there is no doubt hockey is a
very
competitive sport—both on the ice and in the minds of many professional and amateur historians.

* * * * *

DOUBLE VISION!

During a 1978 playoff game, New York Rangers goalie John Davidson was hit in the mask with a slap shot. Announcers Jim Gordon and Bill Chadwick noted that Davidson must have “double vision” after such a blow. Members of the American rock band Foreigner happened to be watching the game and thought “double vision” would be a good name for a song. The subsequent song became the title track of their next album. The hockey-game-inspired
Double Vision
went on to sell 14 million copies.

Who knew that a game as Canadian as hockey would play such a big role in the life of an iconic American cartoonist.

Y
OU'RE A GOOD HOCKEY PLAYER, CHARLIE SCHULZ

Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz always had a special place in his heart for ice hockey. Growing up in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the 1930s, Schulz enjoyed ice-skating and playing hockey on a backyard rink his father made in winters by flooding their property with a garden hose. Schulz, who hosted pickup games with the neighborhood kids, developed a reputation as a scrappy and aggressive player, despite his slight build. He was creative too; with the help of his mom, he devised a set of goalie pads using gunnysacks and rolled-up old newspapers.

HOCKEY NIGHT IN CALIFORNIA

Even after Schulz moved to northern California in 1958—an area not usually associated with ice hockey—he remained involved in his favorite boyhood sport, playing in pickup leagues and incorporating the game into some of his cartoons. Then in 1969 he opened the Redwood Empire Ice Arena, dubbed “the coolest place” in his new hometown of Santa Rosa, California. Six years later, the arena became the home of Snoopy's Senior Hockey Tournament, a weeklong competition hosting amateur teams from around the world. Schulz himself played—or was a ref in—the tournament nearly every year until his death in 2000.

In 1981, to honor his efforts organizing the senior tournaments, Schulz was awarded the Lester Patrick Trophy, given by the NHL and USA Hockey for outstanding service to the sport of hockey in the United States. (Other winners include such luminaries as Gordie Howe, Mark Messier, and the entire 1980 U.S. Olympic Team.)

Bonus:
In the early 1970s, Schulz also became involved with a professional team: he designed “Sparky the Seal,” a promotional logo used by the now-defunct NHL team, the California Golden Seals.

Paul Henderson scored the goal “heard around the world.” Mike Eruzione's and Sidney Crosby's rate up there, too.

T
o Canadian hockey fans, even the generations born since it happened, Paul Henderson's 1972 goal remains among the greatest ever scored. It came 34 seconds from the end of game eight in the fabled Summit Series and gave Team Canada the slimmest possible edge over the national team of the old Soviet Union at the first meeting between the Soviets and top professional players from the National Hockey League.

Many U.S. fans, however, would rate Henderson's shot second best. To them, the greatest goal ever was scored by Mike Eruzione to give the young, underdog U.S. Olympic team a 4–3 victory over the Soviets in the key game of the Americans' gold medal win in the 1980 Games at Lake Placid, New York.

But when it comes to great shots, few would disagree that the overtime goal by Sidney Crosby to win Canada the gold medal (over Team USA) in the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver is the most spectacular in recent memory.

YEAH, ACCORDING TO WHOM?