Random Canadian Facts: For Nay-Nay

After a short hiatus, Random Canadian Facts: For Nay-Nay is back with a post about Canada’s beloved sport: hockey (ice-hockey for all those field hockey countries).

Nay-Nay, did you know that hockey is not in fact Canada’s national sport?

Everyone seems to think it is…well, anyone that knows Canada plays hockey. I guess it’s just an assumption based on our fierce devotion to watching 10 players trying to put a piece of frozen rubber in a net. Intelligent stuff, I tell you. There’s also this issue of how good we are at the sport. Few countries, with exception to the Soviet Union/Russia can claim hockey dominance. So it really makes sense that hockey would be Canada’s national sport.

There is much debate over where hockey was actually invented. Some say Russia, some say Canada. In either case, it has meant that we cannot claim it as a national sport. Instead, we picked the great game of Lacrosse.

What is Lacrosse? It was a game developed and played by the First Nations people. The object is, like hockey, to get a piece of rubber into a net, however there is no ice and barely any padding.

What you have instead is a stick with a little net on the end. You can carry the ball in this net and pass it to other people using a flinging motion. To score, you fling the ball at a small net guarded by guy that looks like the Jiffy Lube man. He has an extra big net on the end of his stick.

The game can be played outdoors on a field or indoors on a converted hockey rink. The two versions are different, but the object is still the same.

Also, a professional league has sprung up in the United States and Canada, however most would say that hockey is still much more exciting. One of the reasons for this, in my mind, is that lacrosse games end with scores like 21-19, so goals don’t come at as much of a premium. Hockey, on the other hand, has scores like 3-2.