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. 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 <farranth...@gmail.com> Sent: July 29, 2012 7/29/12 To: "Pentax-Discuss Mail List" <pdml@pdml.net> Subject: Re: OT: London Olympics 2012 On 30 July 2012 11:21, Daniel J. Matyola <danmaty...@gmail.com> 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 PDML@pdml.net 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 PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
