On Jul 29, 2012, at 8:17 PM, [email protected] wrote: > Of course, hockey - I mean "ice hockey" - is huge here. When I was a kid it > was cold enough that we played organized hockey at outdoor rink with natural > ice. I don't think I played in an arena with artificial ice until my third > season for a playoff game. > > When we weren't playing organized hockey we played "pickup" games or shinny > (as "scrub" is to baseball) on backyard rinks. > > I didn't even know there was field hockey or grass hockey until I was about > ten years old. I seem to recall during an Olympic Games (likely Mexico in > '68) hearing them talk of "hockey", and my father explaining that in much of > the world "hockey" (no modifier) was on grass and "ice hockey" was what we > played.
I decided to look up hockey in wikipedia and see which is older and was surprised by the range of games called hockey. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey Some years back I learned snorkeling in my attempt to play underwater hockey: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_hockey > > We feel that any game where a backhand shot is illegal, where there's no > bodychecking and where there are no fist fights couldn't possibly be hockey > as we know it. Besides, there were no guys named Jean-Guy, Jacques or Henri. > Whatever they were playing on that big green field wasn't anything we were > familiar with! > > Mind you this was a time when there were exactly two American players in the > entire National Hockey League; all the rest were Canadian. It would be > another fifteen years before the first Europeans came here to play in the > premier professional league in the world. And when the first Russians came > here they had to defect, just like ballet dancers. > > With ice hockey so popular outside our borders these days, it's easy to > forget that up to a couple of decades ago it really was a largely North > American thing. > > Cheers, > frank > > > > "What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof." -- > Christopher Hitchens > > --- Original Message --- > > From: Anthony Farr <[email protected]> > Sent: July 29, 2012 7/29/12 > To: "Pentax-Discuss Mail List" <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: OT: London Olympics 2012 > > On 30 July 2012 11:21, Daniel J. Matyola <[email protected]> wrote: >> You're probably right that field hockey is a much bigger sport in the >> third world and girl's prep schools. I was thinking mostly of North >> America, Europe and Russia. > > Well obviously a nation needs to be reasonably affluent to support a > sport that is alien to its its climate, which requires artificial > rinks with powerful refrigeration to overcome relatively high ambient > temperatures even in winter. But you call many of these nations > "third world" at the risk of being labeled a cultural imperialist. > > Hockey is massive in the Asian sub-continent, and is strongly > entrenched in Western Europe. Naturally, ice hockey is more strongly > followed in Northern and Eastern Europe and North America, where the > culture of snow and ice sports is strongest, and barely represented in > Central Africa, Equatorial America and South East Asia where there is > practically no culture of winter at all. But the people who follow > these sports are equal citizens of the world, and are due absolutely > no more or less consideration or respect because of their homelands' > place in the world or the hue of their flesh. Shame on anyone who > would think otherwise. > > regards, Anthony > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
