Now You Know Big Book of Sports. Doug Lennox

Quickies

       Did you know …

      that the first Czech-born player in the National Hockey League was one of the league’s greatest stars? Stan Mikita, born Stanislaus Gvoth in Sokolce, Czechoslovakia, in 1940, came to Canada at the age of eight and settled in St. Catharines, Ontario. During his long NHL career from 1958–59 to 1979–80 with the Chicago Black Hawks, he racked up 1,467 regular-season points with 541 goals and 926 assists.

       Which country won the first World Hockey Championship?

      The answer to this question is a bit complicated. Prior to 1920, European Hockey Championships were held without North American participation, with the first European competition being held in Les Avants, Switzerland, in 1910. Great Britain won that event. In 1920 North Americans competed in international hockey for the first time at the Summer Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium. Canada, the winner of the gold medal there, was also deemed the World Champion, as was the case in the first two Winter Olympics in 1924 and 1928. The first World Championship sanctioned outside the Olympics by the International Ice Hockey Federation took place in Chamonix, France, Berlin, and Vienna in 1930, with Canada as the gold medallist. Until 1972, the first time the World Championship and the Olympic hockey tournament were played separately in the same year, Olympic and World Championship medals were handed out for the same results. In the Olympic years of 1980, 1984, and 1988 there were no World Championships played. Beginning in 1992, the Olympic hockey competition and the World Championship were once more held as separate events in an Olympic year. So the answer to the question of who won the first World Championship would be Canada, whether one uses 1920 as the first year or 1930.

       Quickies

       Did you know …

      that the first Swedish-born player in the National Hockey League was right winger Gustav Forslund, who appeared for one season (1932–33) with the Ottawa Senators? Born in Umea, Sweden, and raised in Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay), Ontario, Forslund scored 13 points in the 48-game season.

       Who scored the first goal and assisted on the last goal of the 1972 Canada–Soviet Union Summit Series?

      The most important single tournament in the history of hockey was an eight-game series played in September 1972 between a team of Canada’s National Hockey League professionals and the Soviet Union’s national team. The event ushered in the modern era of international hockey, the breakdown of all professional-amateur barriers, and the emergence of the multicultural makeup of the NHL. The series evolved out of Canada’s withdrawal from international competition and the Soviets’ desire to play best against best, with four games in Canada (Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver) and four games in the Soviet Union (all in Moscow).

      Thirty seconds into the first match in Montreal, the Boston Bruins’ Phil Esposito scored the very first goal in the series, and Canadians sat back, figuring the tournament would be a cakewalk. However, the Soviets stormed back in the game and embarrassed Canada by whipping it 7–3. Things improved marginally in the second match in Toronto when Canada fought back and won 2–1. After that Canadian nerves began to fray when the Soviets tied Canada 4–4 in Winnipeg and clobbered their hosts 5–3 in Vancouver. The West Coast fans booed Team Canada as it skated off the ice when the game was finished, and an emotional Esposito pleaded for respect on national television. After two violent exhibition games in Sweden to adapt to the larger ice surface, Canada entered the Soviet Union in a desperate situation, especially after the team lost the fifth game 5–4 in Moscow. As it turned out, and as every Canadian now knows, Canada went on to win the next three games 3–2, 4–3, and 6–5. The winning goal in all three matches was scored by Paul Henderson. That final game was watched by more people in Canada — something like 16 million — than any other televised show before or since. Certainly, the country as a whole breathed a collective sigh of relief at the final tally: four wins for Canada, three losses, and one tie. As to who assisted Paul Henderson on that last score against the Soviets’ netminder Vladislav Tretiak, the goal heard across Canada if not the world, it was Phil Esposito, natch. Espo also ended up being the scoring leader for the series, with seven goals and six assists.

       How long have women been playing ice hockey?

      Women have been playing hockey for at least as long as men have. Certainly, as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, women’s amateur teams and leagues were sprouting up all over Canada, from the Maritimes to Dawson City, Yukon. During the Boer War, the first moneymaking women’s game was staged in Montreal in a bid to raise cash to aid the wives of Canadian soldiers fighting in the conflict in South Africa. The first documented women’s league began life in 1900 when teams from Montreal, Trois-Rivières, and Quebec City joined forces to compete against one another. In those days women had to wear long skirts that they bunched around their ankles and used tactically to block shots. Needless to say, the men of the era fulminated against this “unseemly” female behaviour, frequently suggesting that women weren’t strong enough for the rigours of the sport or complaining about the ever-possible danger that they might fall and expose themselves. Judging by newspaper accounts in the early part of the twentieth century, women hockey players could take care of themselves, and sometimes fights as vicious as those common in men’s matches broke out on the ice. American women, too, embraced the new sport enthusiastically, and there is a newspaper account as early as 1899 of a game on artificial ice between two teams in Philadelphia. Early women’s clubs had colourful names such as the Arena Icebergs, the Civil Service Snowflakes, the Dundurn Amazons, the Saskatchewan Prairie Lilies, and the Meadow Lake Golden Girls. Very occasionally, women would play men, and in 1900 a female squad from Brandon, Manitoba, beat a men’s club representing a town bank. The first Ontario championship was played in 1914, and soon after, teams were competing for the Ladies’ Ontario Hockey Association’s trophy.

       Quickies

       Did you know …

      that Phil Esposito, who displayed an aggressive, almost xenophobic dislike of Soviet players during the 1972 Canada–Soviet Union Summit Series, walked his daughter, Connie, down the aisle in 1996 as she married a Russian hockey player named Alexander Selinanov? At the time Selinanov was a member of the NHL’s Tampa Bay Lightning, which Esposito was president and general manager of.

       What was the most successful women’s hockey team ever?

      Although women’s hockey in North America has a long history dating back to the nineteenth century, one team before the modern era stands head and shoulders above all the others. The amateur Preston Rivulettes hailed from a small town in southern Ontario. Women’s hockey took a beating in the 1930s and many clubs folded during the Great Depression, but the Rivulettes thrived. Led by forwards Hilda Ranscombe and Marm Schmuck and goalie Nellie Ranscombe, the team notched 348 victories, three ties, and two losses in the decade. Along the way, the Rivs won the annual women’s championships in Ontario every year and in 1933 were the first to win the Lady championships in Ontario every year and Bessborough Trophy, presented annually to the Dominion Women’s Hockey Association national championship. The Rivulettes continued to have a lock on the Dominion trophy until the Second World War forced the club to disband in 1941. The team was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1963.

       Quickies

       Did you know …

      that Lord Stanley, Canada’s governor general from 1888 to 1893 and the man who donated hockey’s most prestigious championship trophy, got his entire family to play the game? His daughter, Isobel, played for a Government House hockey team that skirmished with a local female squad. It is said that even Lord Stanley’s wife took a twirl or two in a match.

       When was the first Women’s World Hockey Championship held?

      Informally begun in 1987 in Toronto as an invitational tournament,