Paul Newman’s movie, “Slap Shot”, opened 40 years ago to fairly negative reviews but over time has become a consensus pick as one of the top sports flicks of all-time. The trio that stole the show was the Hanson Brothers. And at the center of that mayhem was David Hanson, aka Jack Hanson, (far left [...]
If you were entertaining a visitor from Mars and brought your visitor to a hockey game, how would you explain all those hats thrown onto the ice by fans in the crowd after a player scores three goals in the game? Admit it, the hockey hat trick is an action that requires some explanation for [...]
In mid-century and despite having no major home sports team, sports columnist John Hanlon’s insightful articles and whit combined with Frank Lanning’s legendary cartoon style to help rank the Providence Journal sports pages among the best in all of America. Hanlon was a commanding yet gentlemanly press box presence at all RI Reds home games [...]
The Olympics of 1940 and 1944 were both cancelled because of WWII, but even before the '48 Games at St. Moritz got underway there was another war erupting - a hockey war - that threatened the inclusion of hockey and the appearance of RI’s first Olympic hockey players. The conflict involved two American hockey bodies, [...]
In the Fall of 1964, Brown University’s men's hockey coach, Jim Fullerton, cleverly arranged for Nancy Schieffelin '67, an experienced hockey player enrolled at Pembroke, the coordinate women’s college for Brown, to join a team practice disguised in full uniform. The exercise was to show the men's team how well a woman could play. An [...]
In the early days of international hockey, Canada was all but invincible. It won the first four Olympic tournaments (1920, ‘24, ‘28, ‘32) and the first two International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) World Championships (1930 and ‘31) without losing a single game. When looking closely at the scores, one could see that Canada was occasionally [...]
It may seem odd, but the very first Olympic ice hockey tournament did not take place in Winter. It was held at the 1920 Summer games in Antwerp, Belgium. At the time, organized international ice hockey was still relatively new. The International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF), the sport's governing body, was created on May 15, [...]
In Rhode Island, the game of Ice Polo was the predominant ice sport at both the high school and collegiate levels at the turn of the twentieth century. Like today’s field hockey, it was played with short sticks with rounded ends and a rubber ball. It was taken up by Brown University in 1894 and [...]
Frederick Charles Albert Waghorne, Sr. was born on October 16, 1865 and passed away in 1956. "Old Wag”, as he was known, is an honored member of the International Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. He is best known for his prolific career as a referee – officiating over 2,400 hockey games and 1,500 lacrosse [...]
What do the names Kleenex, Formica, Xerox, Scotch Tape, Coke and Zamboni all have in common? Well, they are "eponyms." Eponyms (we had to look that one up) are proprietary brand names that have become synonymous with product categories: Kleenex with soft facial tissue, Formica with counter tops, Xerox with photocopies, Scotch Tape with cellophane [...]
