Now You Know Big Book of Sports. Doug Lennox

      

       NOW YOU KNOW

       NOW YOU KNOW

      Doug Lennox

      DUNDURN PRESS

      TORONTO

      Copyright © Magnetawan Communications Inc. and Dundurn Press Limited, 2009

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

      Project Editor: Michael Carroll

      Contributing Editor: Shaun Smith

      Copy Editor: Jennifer McKnight

      Design: Erin Mallory

      Printer: Trancontinental

       Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Lennox, Doug

      Now you know big book of sports / by Doug Lennox.

      ISBN 978-1-55488-454-4

      1. Sports--Miscellanea. 2. Olympics--Miscellanea. I. Title.

      GV707.L46 2009 796 C2009-902997-9

      1 2 3 4 5 13 12 11 10 09

      We acknowledge the support of The Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

      Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

       J. Kirk Howard, President

      Printed and bound in Canada.

      Printed on recycled paper.

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       contents

Preface •

Hockey •

Soccer •

       Football •

       Rugby •

       Baseball •

       Basketball •

       Lacrosse •

       Curling •

       Olympics •

       Tennis •

       Golf •

       Bowling •

       Running •

       Cycling •

       Skiing and Snowboarding •

       Auto Racing •

       Boxing and Wrestling •

       Winners and Champions •

       Question and Feature List •

preface

      The vast collection of human activity called sports provides a fascinating portrait of humanity at both its best and worst. Courage, endurance, skill, tenacity, invention, cowardice, greed, pain, luck, weakness, and strength — these are just some of the qualities of human endeavour that run through the history of athleticism. They are the subject of this book.

      Through questions, answers, lists, statistics, charts, and sidebars, I have tried here to assemble as detailed a collection of the most unusual, puzzling, revealing, and downright fascinating facts about sports as possible.

      Who gained a winning edge with drugs, who disgraced themselves with rage, who defied the odds, and who won the love of the world? Who died on the ski slopes, who cheated at golf, who fought to win another day? What’s inside a bowling ball? Where was rugby born? Why do the Japanese buy hole-in-one insurance? Where is the world’s oldest curling pond? Who owns the all-time record for the most career stage wins in the Tour de France? (It’s probably not who you think it is.)

      All and more is here. From the power of F1 to the finesse of fencing. From the statistics of baseball to the brutality of boxing. From the speed of ice hockey to the strategy of football. A special section on the Olympics — Summer and Winter — offering material on every current official Olympic sport (plus a few extras) rounds out the collection just in time for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games.

      Let the games begin!

hockey

       Where and when did hockey originate?

      The location and the approximate date of ice hockey’s origins, as with many sports, are much-debated and conjectured issues. Stick-and-ball games have deep roots and various types can be traced back to ancient Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome. Hockey appears to have evolved from a number of older sporting endeavours that employed some sort of stick (usually short and curved) and a ball: Irish hurling or hurley, Scottish shinty, English field hockey and bandy (the latter becoming popular in Scandinavia and Russia), Canadian/ American shinny, and American ice polo. North American First Nations also likely influenced the development of stick games on ice and were probably inspired in turn by European games. Gughawat, or Indian shinny, and baggataway, or lacrosse, were certainly played by First Nations people when the first Europeans arrived on the scene. Both games utilized short, curved sticks, numerous competitors per team, and fierce competition (practically an all-out battle) for possession of a ball.

       What is the origin of the word hockey ?

      The