Adam Detroy, age11,of Portland, Me., for his question:
HOW DID HOCKEY GET STARTED:
One of the world’s fastest, most exciting sports is played by two six man teams on an ice covered rink. It’s called hockey, or ice hockey. A rubber disk called a puck is slammed back and forth by the skate wearing players whose long, wooden sticks. Each side tries to score points by hitting the puck into a small net enclosure called thegoal cage.
Hockey players send the puck across the ice rink traveling faster than 100 miles per hour. A goalkeeper on each side often must make diving slides in his efforts to block a possible score as the puck is driven toward the goal cage he is protecting.
Hockey has become Canada's national sport. The exciting sport has also become extremely popular in many other countries, especially the United States, Sweden, Russia and Czechoslovakia. Millions of fans in these countries attend professional contests or watch them on television.
Hockey is also an extremely popular amateur sport in Canada and the United States.
The world's first hockey games were played in Canada. British soldiers in Kingston, Ontario, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, developed the game in about 1855. The idea came from the older sport of field hockey where players used curved sticks to hit rubber balls. In Canada, the sport was put on ice.
In the 1870s, a group of students from McGill University in Montreal drew up the first formal ice hockey rules. The rules substituted a puck for the earlier rubber ball and said that each team would have nine players.
McGill's rules were widely distributed during the 1880s and hockey teams were established in many parts of Canada. By 1893 the game had become so popular that the governor general, Lord Stanley, donated a silver bowl to be awarded annually to Canada's championship hockey team.
Hockey was probably played for the first time in the United States in about 1895 at Yale University and John Hopkins University.
The first professional hockey team was organized at Houghton, Michigan, in 1903, with almost all of the players being Canadians.
Six man teams were introduced in 1904. The Hockey Hall of Fame was opened in Toronto in 1961. Honored here are former players, referees and other persons who helped develop and promote the sport. By the late 1960s and the 1970s, professional hockey had expanded to cities throughout the United States and Canada.