Unit 17 · Capstone

Dutch painters of the early 1600s left some of the oldest pictures of games on ice. Hendrick Avercamp painted crowded winter scenes on frozen canals. In several of them, people swing curved sticks at a ball. The Dutch game was called kolf, and it was also played on land. The paintings show a pastime, not a league, with no fixed teams or lines.

In Britain and Ireland, people played field games with sticks and a ball under names such as bandy, shinty and hurling. When British soldiers and settlers came to Canada, they carried these games onto frozen rivers and lakes. On the ice, the games had no agreed size of team and no written rules. Each town and garrison played its own way.

The Mi’kmaq people of Nova Scotia played a stick-and-ball game of their own. In the 1800s, Mi’kmaq carvers made many of the hardwood hockey sticks sold in Canada, often from hornbeam trees. Their sticks were shipped to clubs across the country. This trade connects the sport’s early equipment to Indigenous craft workers, whose names seldom appear in club records.

Windsor, Nova Scotia, says that boys at King’s College School played hockey on a pond in the early 1800s. The town points to a passage in the writings of Thomas Chandler Haliburton, a Nova Scotia author who attended that school. Kingston, Ontario, and Montreal have made their own claims. Each town has a museum, a plaque or a local story to support it.

A birthplace claim is a statement that a sport began in one place. Such claims help towns attract visitors and take pride in a game. Historians ask a harder question: what written record, made at the time, shows the game being played? A memory written down decades later is weaker evidence than a newspaper printed the next morning.

By that test, the Montreal game of March 3, 1875, stands out. It was announced ahead of time and described afterward in print. That does not mean nobody played hockey earlier. It means 1875 is the earliest date that historians can tie to a public, organized indoor game with a primary source behind it.

The Victoria Skating Rink opened in Montreal in 1862. It was a long brick building with a roof over natural ice. Members paid to skate there, and the rink held carnivals and costume balls. A roof meant the ice was protected from snow, and the walls marked the edges of the playing space.

On March 3, 1875, James Creighton brought two teams of nine players to the rink. Creighton had grown up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and moved to Montreal as a young man. The players used a flat wooden disc instead of a ball. The Montreal Gazette said this choice would keep the object on the ice and protect the people watching.

The rink changed what hockey could become. A game in a building could be scheduled, advertised and watched by paying spectators. In 1883 Montreal’s Winter Carnival held a hockey tournament, and in 1886 clubs formed the Amateur Hockey Association of Canada. A room, a crowd and a club came together, and written rules soon followed.

In February 1877 the Montreal Gazette printed seven rules for hockey. Students and club members in the city had drawn them up. Several rules were adapted from field hockey and rugby, which the players already knew. Printing the rules in a newspaper meant that anyone in Montreal could read the same text.

A written code lets strangers play together. Before 1877, a team from one town might argue with another about what was allowed. After the rules were printed, a captain could point to a sentence in the paper. McGill University students formed a hockey club in 1877, and they played under the new text.

The rules kept changing for decades. Team size fell from nine to seven by the 1880s, and later to six. Leagues added a referee to enforce the rules and a goal judge to rule on scores. Each change was voted on and printed, so historians can date many of them.

Frederick Arthur Stanley, Lord Stanley of Preston, was Canada’s governor general from 1888 to 1893. His children played hockey in Ottawa, and his daughter Isobel was photographed on the ice around 1890. In 1892 Lord Stanley bought a silver bowl in London. He gave it as a challenge trophy for Canada’s best amateur hockey club.

Stanley named two trustees to hold the bowl and settle disputes. The champion club had to accept challenges from other clubs that qualified. The Montreal Hockey Club, part of the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association, was named the first holder in 1893. Stanley went home to England that year and never saw a Cup game.

Over time, professional teams took over. The Seattle Metropolitans of the Pacific Coast league became the first American team to win the Cup, in 1917. By 1926 only National Hockey League teams played for it. Winners’ names are engraved on bands added to the base, so the object itself became a record.

By the early 1900s, hockey players could be paid openly. The International Professional Hockey League, based in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and nearby towns, played from 1904 to 1907. In Canada the National Hockey Association began in 1909. Its owners quarreled often, especially with Eddie Livingstone, who owned a Toronto club.

On November 26, 1917, several owners met at the Windsor Hotel in Montreal. Instead of expelling Livingstone, they formed a new league without him: the National Hockey League. The first NHL season had four clubs, and one, the Montreal Wanderers, dropped out after its arena burned in January 1918. The league’s founding shows that a charter can be written to exclude as well as to organize.

The NHL grew in the 1920s by selling franchises, the rights to own a team in a city. The Boston Bruins joined in 1924 as the first American club. In 1926 the Chicago Black Hawks, the Detroit club and the New York Rangers joined. The Black Hawks, owned by Frederic McLaughlin, won their first Stanley Cup in 1934.

Black communities in Nova Scotia date back to the late 1700s, when Black Loyalists arrived after the American Revolution. In Halifax and nearby towns, Black churches were centers of community life. In 1895, Black players and community leaders formed the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes. Its teams came from towns around Halifax and Dartmouth.

The league played for decades, drawing crowds to games on outdoor and rink ice. White clubs and associations did not admit these teams, so the league created its own schedule and championships. Historians George and Darril Fosty told its story in their 2004 book Black Ice. Much of what is known comes from old newspapers and family memories gathered in that research.

The NHL’s first Black player came much later. Willie O’Ree of Fredericton, New Brunswick, first played for the Boston Bruins in 1958. The gap between 1895 and 1958 shows that an unwritten color line can shape a sport even when no rule names race. The Colored Hockey League is one of the institutions that kept playing during those years.

Around 1890, Isobel Stanley, the governor general’s daughter, was photographed playing hockey outdoors in Ottawa. By the 1890s, women’s teams played at Canadian universities and in towns. They often played in long skirts. In the 1930s, the Preston Rivulettes of Ontario won many Canadian women’s titles.

International bodies were slow to add women. The International Ice Hockey Federation held its first Women’s World Championship in Ottawa in 1990, and Canada won. Women’s hockey joined the Olympic program at Nagano, Japan, in 1998. The United States won that first Olympic gold medal, beating Canada in the final.

In American colleges, Title IX of 1972 pushed schools to add women’s teams. The NCAA held its first national championship in women’s ice hockey in 2001, won by the University of Minnesota Duluth. In 1992 goalie Manon Rhéaume played in an NHL preseason game for the Tampa Bay Lightning, the first woman to do so.

On May 15, 1908, delegates met in Paris and founded the Ligue Internationale de Hockey sur Glace. Today it is called the International Ice Hockey Federation. Its first members were European, including France, Belgium, Switzerland, Great Britain and Bohemia. Canada and the United States joined in 1920.

Ice hockey first appeared at the Olympics in 1920 at Antwerp, Belgium, during the Summer Games. Canada sent the Winnipeg Falcons, a club made up mostly of players from Icelandic immigrant families. The Falcons won the gold medal. When the first Winter Olympics were held at Chamonix, France, in 1924, hockey moved there.

International hockey needed a shared rule book, because North American and European rinks and rules differed. The federation wrote rules for its tournaments. For decades the Olympics admitted only amateurs, so NHL players stayed home. NHL players first took part in the Olympic tournament in 1998.

For decades most NHL goalies played without masks. On November 1, 1959, Montreal Canadiens goalie Jacques Plante was cut in the face by a shot during a game in New York. He returned wearing a mask he had made for practice. His coach had resisted, but Plante kept wearing it, and masks slowly became normal for goalies.

On January 13, 1968, Bill Masterton of the Minnesota North Stars hit his head on the ice during a game, and he died two days later. He was the first NHL player to die from an injury suffered in a game. The league later named a trophy for him. His death led many to call for helmets, but the league did not require them at once.

In 1979 the NHL adopted a rule that players entering the league after that year must wear helmets. Players already in the league could choose, under a grandfather clause. The last player to play without a helmet, Craig MacTavish, retired in 1997. The rule shows how leagues often change slowly, protecting new players while exempting veterans.

In 2004 a historian in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, drew attention to a town bylaw from 1791. It banned playing games such as "baseball" within eighty yards of the new meeting house, to protect its windows. The bylaw was written almost fifty years before 1839. It shows that a game with that name was already common enough to regulate.

The English novelist Jane Austen mentioned "base ball" in Northanger Abbey, written in the late 1790s and published in 1817. Her heroine enjoys the game as a girl. English children’s books of the 1700s also printed rhymes about a game called base-ball. These sources point to a family of bat-and-base games brought to North America from England.

Historians call the Doubleday story an origin myth, a story that gives a sport a single inventor and a single birthday. The real history is a slow change, from folk games to club rules such as the Knickerbocker rules of 1845. The Pittsfield bylaw is a municipal record, a town document that recorded a problem, not a sport’s triumph.

Around 400 BCE, a scholar named Hippias of Elis compiled a list of Olympic victors. Elis was the city-state that ran the festival at Olympia. Hippias counted backward through the winners of the footrace called the stadion. His list began with a runner named Koroibos of Elis, dated to what we call 776 BCE.

Later Greek writers used this list to count time itself. They dated events by Olympiads, the four-year spans between festivals. The philosopher Aristotle also worked on a list of victors. Much later, Christian and Roman writers copied these lists, and the 776 BCE date passed into modern textbooks.

Modern historians treat the early part of the list with care. Hippias wrote more than three hundred years after the first names on it. He may have used local memories, temple records or guesses. Archaeology shows that people used the site at Olympia before 776 BCE, so the date marks the start of a list, not proof of the first games.

A plaque at Rugby School in England says that in 1823 a pupil named William Webb Ellis picked up the ball and ran with it, in disregard of the football rules of his time. The story first appeared in 1876, in a letter by Matthew Bloxam, a former pupil. Bloxam had left the school before 1823 and did not see the event himself.

In 1895 the Old Rugbeian Society, a club of former pupils, looked into the story. It found no one who could confirm it. Webb Ellis had died in 1872, in France, after a career as a clergyman. He never claimed to have started a new game. Still, the society accepted the tale, and the school honored him.

The story shows how an institution can adopt a legend. When the first Rugby World Cup was held in 1987, its trophy was called the Webb Ellis Cup. Historians describe rugby’s real history as a slow split among school football codes, leading to the Rugby Football Union in 1871. The plaque is a record of what people later believed.

The first FIFA World Cup trophy was a gilded statue of a winged figure. It was later named for Jules Rimet, the FIFA president who pushed for the tournament. In March 1966, months before England hosted the World Cup, the trophy was stolen from a public exhibition in London. A week later, a dog named Pickles found it wrapped in newspaper under a hedge in south London.

FIFA’s rules said that a nation winning the trophy three times would keep it for good. Brazil won its third title in 1970 in Mexico and took the Jules Rimet Trophy home permanently. It was displayed at the offices of the Brazilian football confederation in Rio de Janeiro. In December 1983 thieves stole it there, and it has never been found.

FIFA commissioned a new trophy, designed by the Italian artist Silvio Gazzaniga, first awarded in 1974. Under newer rules, winners do not keep the original; they receive a replica. The two thefts show that a trophy is more than a prize. It is an artifact, an object that carries a nation’s memory, and losing it cannot be undone.

At the first modern Olympics in Athens in 1896, winners received a silver medal and an olive branch. Runners-up received a bronze or copper medal. Third place received nothing official. The now-familiar order of gold, silver and bronze was first used at the 1904 Games in St. Louis.

The 1912 Games in Stockholm were the last to award medals of solid gold. After that, the cost of gold made such medals too expensive. Modern rules from the International Olympic Committee say a gold medal must be mostly silver and plated with at least six grams of pure gold. Each host city designs its own medal within those rules.

A medal’s metal tells a story about money and meaning. The word gold stays in the name even though the object is mostly silver. Collectors and museums prize medals from 1912 and earlier. Some athletes have sold their medals, and some Olympic medals have been reissued after officials changed results.

James Naismith’s original rules for basketball fit on two typed pages from December 1891. The pages stayed with his family for decades. In December 2010 the auction house Sotheby’s sold them in New York. David Booth, an investor who had studied at the University of Kansas, paid about 4.3 million dollars.

Booth gave the pages to the University of Kansas, where Naismith had coached and taught from 1898. The university built a new home for them, the DeBruce Center, which opened in 2016 next to Allen Fieldhouse. The pages are shown behind glass with controlled light. An auction moved a family keepsake into public view.

The sale raised questions that historians and collectors still discuss. Should key sports documents belong to families, private buyers or public museums? A provenance, the record of who owned an object and when, helps buyers trust that a document is real. The Naismith pages had a clear line of ownership from the inventor to his family.

Comiskey Park opened on Chicago’s South Side on July 1, 1910. White Sox owner Charles Comiskey built it of steel and concrete. The architect was Zachary Taylor Davis, who later designed the park now called Wrigley Field. Concrete stands replaced wooden ones, which often burned.

The park hosted the first Major League All-Star Game in 1933. It also hosted the East-West All-Star Game of the Negro Leagues from 1933 on. The White Sox played their last game there on September 30, 1990. A new park opened across 35th Street in 1991, and the old one was torn down that year.

Today the site of the old park is a parking lot. A marble marker painted into the pavement shows where home plate stood. The architect’s site plan, the drawing of where the park sat on its block, helps historians match old photographs to the ground. A marker turns an empty lot into a record of a building.

Other major league parks added lights for night games starting in 1935, in Cincinnati. The Cubs’ owner, Philip K. Wrigley, planned to add lights in 1941. After the attack on Pearl Harbor that December, he gave the steel and wiring to the war effort. For decades afterward, the Cubs played every home game in daylight.

Wrigley Field sits in a crowded neighborhood of homes and apartments. Neighbors worried that night games would bring noise, traffic and late crowds. In the 1980s, state and city rules restricted night games there. In 1988 the Chicago City Council approved lights, with a limit on how many night games the Cubs could play each season.

The first night game at Wrigley began on August 8, 1988, but rain stopped it before it became official. The first completed night game came the next evening, August 9. The fight over lights shows that a ballpark is part of a city’s zoning, the rules about how land in each area may be used. A city council can shape a team’s schedule.

From the 1960s to the 1980s, many cities built round, concrete stadiums for both baseball and football. The Orioles’ new park in Baltimore went the other way. Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened on April 6, 1992. It was built for baseball only, on the site of an old railroad yard downtown.

The design kept the long brick warehouse of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad beyond right field. The park used steel and brick to look like ballparks of the early 1900s. The Maryland Stadium Authority, a state body, paid for and owned it. The architecture firm HOK Sport led the design.

Camden Yards began a wave of retro ballparks, new parks built to look old. Cleveland, Denver, San Francisco and Pittsburgh soon opened parks in the same style. The plan shows that design copies design. It also shows adaptive reuse, keeping an old building and giving it a new job.

The National Baseball Hall of Fame held its first election in 1936. Voters chose five players: Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson. The museum opened in Cooperstown, New York, on June 12, 1939. Its location rested on the Doubleday legend.

Other sports followed. The Hockey Hall of Fame was established in 1943 and later built a home in Toronto. The Pro Football Hall of Fame opened in 1963 in Canton, Ohio, because the league that became the NFL was founded there in 1920, in a car showroom. The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame opened in 1959 at Springfield, Massachusetts.

A hall of fame is a museum and a voting body at once. Its members, called inductees, are chosen by committees or writers. Those choices decide whose names and objects are preserved. For decades, Negro Leagues stars and women athletes were missing from many halls, until special committees began adding them.

In August 1971 a small group of baseball researchers met in Cooperstown. Led by L. Robert Davids, they founded the Society for American Baseball Research, known as SABR. Members, many of them unpaid, dig through old newspapers and box scores. They correct records, write biographies and publish research journals.

In 1989 David Smith founded Retrosheet, a project to collect the play-by-play of old major league games. Volunteers type up scorebooks and newspaper accounts so that the record of each game can be checked. Their work has helped fix errors in official statistics. The data is free for anyone to use.

Some archives came from the Games themselves. The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics ended with a surplus, and part of it created a foundation in Southern California, now called the LA84 Foundation. Its library holds books, magazines and Olympic reports open to researchers. An archive like this keeps paper that clubs and leagues might throw away.