First Ice Hockey Game Played

| By J. Robert Parks |

People have been holding sporting competitions since ancient times. In fact, you can argue that playing and watching sports are part of what makes us human. Think of the Greeks and their Olympics, the Mayans and their courtyard ball game. But in more recent times, the nineteenth century was a golden age for the codifying of rules and establishing of organizations for many of today’s most popular sports. One of those is ice hockey, and this month marks the 150th anniversary of the first public ice hockey game. Librarians and teachers looking to help students learn about everything from the history of hockey to its rules to its greatest players and games will find resources galore in Gale In Context: U.S. History and Gale In Context: World History.

As with many sports, hockey’s early history is nebulous. Some historians credit its origin to a modification of lacrosse, which Indigenous people in Canada and the northern United States have been playing for almost a thousand years. Other historians believe that ice hockey was an adaptation of field hockey or the Irish sport of hurling (also called hurley). Even without those possible forebears, it’s not hard to imagine a group of kids inventing a similar game the first time they came across a smooth, frozen pond. So it’s a bit of a misnomer to say this is the 150th anniversary of ice hockey.

Nonetheless it was James Creighton, a Canadian from Nova Scotia, who organized that “first” game in 1875 at McGill University (then McGill College) in Montreal. He was helped by the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia, who provided the hockey sticks. The game was played with nine people to a side and a puck made of wood. Eight years later, Montreal hosted the first hockey championship series between teams from Quebec City and Montreal. By 1890, multiple teams had been formed in western Canada, and the 1890s featured Canadian exhibition squads touring the United States.

The National Hockey League (NHL) did not come into existence until 1917, by which time its most famous object, the Stanley Cup, was already 25 years old. Frederick Stanley, also known as Lord Stanley, was the Governor General of Canada in the 1890s, and his sons were passionate hockey fans. They apparently convinced him to provide the money to create the Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup, which debuted in 1892.

The NHL was initially made up of just four Canadian teams, and it added its first U.S. team, the Boston Bruins, in 1924. As other hockey leagues folded, the NHL endured, although not without difficulty during the 1930s and 1940s. By 1942, it had six teams—two in Canada (Montreal and Toronto) and four in the United States (Boston, New York, Detroit, and Chicago). That was the extent of major professional hockey in North America until 1967 when the league doubled to twelve teams, and it has added (and occasionally subtracted) teams ever since.

In Europe, hockey competitions within and between countries began as early as 1910. Ice hockey became a Winter Olympic sport in 1924 (strangely, it was first played at the 1920 Summer Olympics), and international hockey events have provided some of the sport’s most famous games. The Summit Series in 1972 between a group of Canadian professional players and the Soviet Union national team was particularly memorable, as the Canadians famously came from down three games to one to win the series, four to three.

The U.S. men’s victory over the Soviet Union at the 1980 Winter Olympics may be the most famous single game of all time, coming at the height of the Cold War. Despite being held in Lake Placid, New York, the game was shown on tape delay in the United States as no one believed that the American men, who were all amateurs, could defeat the Soviets’ national team, which was arguably the greatest hockey team ever assembled. But those of a certain age can still remember announcer Al Michaels’s call of the dramatic upset.

Over the years, hockey has provided countless stars and innovators. Its popularity has spread to warmer climes, and women have taken their place in both international and professional competitions. It may not be as globally popular as football (soccer, that is) or baseball, but its fans tend to be particularly passionate. The European Champions Hockey League wrapped up in mid-February, but the playoffs in both the NHL and European countries are starting soon. Whether my beloved Detroit Red Wings will make it into the playoffs this year for the first time since 2016 remains to be seen.