Ice Hockey Organized: Montreal's First Indoor Game

The referee forgot to bring a rulebook because nobody had written one yet. When students from McGill University laced up for history's first organized indoor hockey game at the Victoria Skating Rink in Montreal on March 3, 1875, they borrowed rules from field hockey and lacrosse, swapped a ball for a flat wooden disc so it wouldn't fly into the 500 spectators, and improvised the rest. James Creighton, the organizer and a Nova Scotia native who had played a form of the game on frozen harbors, arranged nine players per side rather than the six that would eventually become standard. The game was rough, disorganized, and electrifying. The Montreal Gazette buried the story on page two. The flat disc, cut from a rubber ball, was Creighton's most consequential innovation. By switching from a round ball to a flat puck, he solved the problem that had plagued every previous attempt at indoor ice games: balls bouncing unpredictably off walls and into crowds. The puck stayed on the ice surface, making the game faster, more controllable, and safer for spectators. Within a few years, formalized rules were developed, largely at McGill, where the first hockey club was established in 1877. The game spread rapidly across Canadian cities and colleges. By 1893, Lord Stanley of Preston, the Governor General of Canada, donated a silver cup for the country's best amateur hockey team. Professional leagues formed within thirty years. That improvised flat disc became the fastest object in professional team sports, clocked at over 110 mph. The sport Creighton assembled from borrowed rules in a Montreal rink became Canada's national game and one of the most popular spectator sports on earth.