The Story of Ice Hockey and its Irish Connection - part one of a Dr. Eoin Ryan Trilogy

 

Sportyman readers may remember from a few months back the superb guest piece from Dr. Eoin Ryan on handball: 

https://sportyman2020.blogspot.com/2020/06/guest-blog-dr-eoin-ryan-on-handball.html

That piece remains the most read article on Sportyman and I've received lots of great feedback on the topic of handball and the natural flair with which Eoin writes.

So I was delighted to receive another wonderful contribution from Eoin in recent days, this time on Ice Hockey. As you will see, Eoin draws on his own personal experiences and memories and then goes on to present a really fascinating piece of research on the game, bringing in lots of Irish connections along the way. On reading the full piece I told Eoin that, had I set about commissioning an article for Sportyman that I could not have wished for a more 'Sportyman' piece of writing. 

Eoin agreed to my dividing his article into a trilogy that I will post over the next few weeks. For this first part, Eoin starts off with some introductory points about the game and how he first got interested. For next week's posting, Eoin will address the question as to where Ice Hockey actually came from. And then for the final part of the trilogy he will address the intriguing question: 'So Is Ice Hockey Irish?'  

So sit back and enjoy this wonderful piece of sports writing.

And many thanks again to Eoin!

This year was certainly different! Lockdown had a lot of us abandoning our normal out-of-home activities for those which could be safely pursued from the comfort of the couch. And so during this time, I did something I had not done since I was a child- I watched ‘The Mighty Ducks’. For those of you not familiar, this is undoubtedly one of the greatest movies of our age, telling the tale of a young group of ice-hockey players in Minnesota who come under the command of their new court-appointed coach, Gordon Bombay, and in that wonderful feel-good atmosphere of nineties movies, shows that with a bit of support and good old fashioned teamwork, these youngsters could surmount the insurmountable and triumph, not to mention discover themselves along the way. And at the heart of it all- Ice Hockey.

 

I remember watching this as a child and feeling exhilarated by the graceful gliding on freshly polished ice rinks, the passion for the game, the physicality of the play, and most of all, just how ‘cool’ it looked. It all seemed so foreign- the city streets of Minneapolis, the tundra-like plains of the American Mid-West. So naturally, I pestered my parents into buying my rollerblades and a hockey set. Myself and my brother and a few friends from home all learned to skate and played hockey matches in the driveway. Alot of my youth was spent in this way.

 

And while it was no doubt unusual to be playing roller-hockey in rural Co. Kilkenny, there was something familiar about it nonetheless, that I never grasped as a youngster. Occasionally a hockey stick would break and we would substitute a hurl in its place - something more familiar to us in Kilkenny, or indeed when the puck got lost or stuck down a drain, we seamlessly substituted a sliotar.

 

Some years later, and in all likelihood in a pub, I heard someone say that Ice Hockey was in fact an Irish sport. ‘It is, I’d say’, I said noncommittally. My mind running over all the other improbable people, events and customs of international importance that the Irish like to claim - how an Irish monk was the first European to set foot in the New World, how the celebrated revolutionary Che Guevara was in fact Irish, as was Buffalo Bill and every other US president, how the submarine was invented in Co. Clare…. and the list goes on. But something in the claim did catch my attention so I decided to take a look.

 

Ice Hockey is a big deal! The National Hockey League, the premier professional ice hockey league on the planet, consisting of 31 teams (24 in the USA and a further 7 in Canada - rendering the ‘national’ in its name somewhat erroneous), has annual revenues of upward of 5 billion dollars. Its best paid player, currently Edmonton Oilers centre Connor McDavid will earn in excess of 18 million dollars this season (including endorsements, etc). This salary is part of an 8 year 100 million dollar contract! (To compare, Lionel Messi is in the middle of a 126 million dollar contract with Barcelona)

 

As well as Canada and the USA, it is popular across Nordic and Eastern Europe as well as Russia.  (USA, Canada, Finland, Czech Republic, Sweden and Russia make up international hockey's ‘Big Six' and have won all but 21 World Championship titles). The International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF), based in Switzerland, acts as the governing body and boasts 81 member states under its remit. The IIHF in a survey published in 2013 stated 1.64 million people world wide are registered as players with organised clubs.

Next week: 'Where did it come from?'...