OFH Throwback- Episode #71- Who Invented Your Favourite Sport?

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Hello and welcome to this throwback episode of Our Fake History.

This week we are throwing you back to season three and episode number 71, Who Invented Your Favorite Sport?

Now, if you're an Our Fake History Super fan, then you might have noticed that this is not the first time that that we've revisited this episode.

I actually chose this episode to inaugurate the Throwback Series way back in the summer of 2020.

Now, I'm sure you don't need me to remind you that the year 2020 was a pretty strange time for the world.

When I first chose to revisit this episode, we were still very much in the grips of the COVID-19 pandemic.

And as a result, the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics had been officially postponed.

At the time, it was deeply unclear exactly when the Summer Games would return.

So when I did that initial re-release, I used the space up front to reflect on the positive aspects of sports and the idealism that has defined the Olympic movement at its best moments.

When the 2020 Olympics were canceled, it was a stone-cold bummer.

It was just another reminder of how upside down the world was at that particular moment.

Now, I reacted on this podcast by trying to create a message that was optimistic and hopeful.

Listening back, I worry that I may have laid it on a little thick and veered into some corny territory.

But you know what?

It was 2020.

Everyone was feeling a little tender, myself very much included.

Maybe a little open-hearted corniness wasn't the worst thing in the world.

It's not like I started singing Imagine or something.

But in that introduction that I recorded in 2020, I copped to being an unabashed fan of the Olympics, warts and all.

In that moment, it felt right to remind those of you listening, or perhaps remind myself, that the ideals of peace, international community, and athletic excellence are worthy of praise.

Now, whether or not the Olympics live up to those ideals is another question altogether.

Now, I've been thinking about this a lot because this summer, as we head into the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, I'm feeling a little less wistful about the Olympic movement.

So I've decided that it's the perfect time to give the Olympics the Our Fake History treatment.

Both the ancient and the modern Olympic Games are hotbeds of historical myths.

In fact, a case could be made that the modern Olympic Games are based on some highly romanticized fake history.

So starting next week, we will be embarking on a new trilogy of episodes exploring the weird and often surprising history of the Olympics, both ancient and modern.

Hopefully it gets you in the mood for Paris 2024 and helps you annoy your friends with historical tidbits while you cheer on your home country.

In the meantime, let this throwback episode about the mythical origins of a number of popular sports wet your whistle.

As you will hear in this episode, this was originally recorded back in the summer of 2018 while the FIFA World Cup was on.

So, apologies for any dated references.

All right, please enjoy episode number 71, Who Invented Your Favorite Sport?

It's the summer of 2018, and that means that the world has just witnessed another FIFA World Cup.

The month-long soccer tournament, or as the rest of the world calls it, football tournament, is by far the most watched sporting sporting event on the planet.

The game of football is easily the world's most popular organized sport.

A recent survey concluded that roughly 4 billion human beings on the planet consider themselves a fan of the game.

It absolutely dwarves the world's next most popular sport, which is cricket.

Cricket only has a paltry 2.5 billion fans by comparison.

So, oh, there you go.

Indeed, it seems like soccer is the world's game.

The sport has become so universal that it's hard to imagine that it had any one particular geographic point of origin.

But this particular World Cup reminded many fair weather fans like myself that the birthplace of football is a matter of national pride for at least one country in the tournament.

As the 2018 World Cup progressed and the real contenders began to reveal themselves, there was one group of fans that became particularly loud.

And they had a chant that was, well,

interesting.

Perhaps you heard this one.

It's coming home.

It's coming home.

It's coming.

Football's coming home.

It's coming home.

It's coming home!

It's coming!

Football's coming home!

Yes, those are fans from England chanting, Football's Coming Home.

Now, as many of you know, the English team made a very strong showing this year, which took them all the way to the semifinals.

For a brief moment, it seemed very, very possible that for English football fans, the sport's greatest prize truly was coming home.

But for some of us who aren't dyed-in-the-wool England fans, this chant seemed a little fishy.

I mean, how could England really claim to be the quote-unquote home of football?

How could a game that is so simple and so internationally beloved really have any one place of origin?

My spidey sense was tingling.

This felt like a historical myth.

Was England really the birthplace of soccer?

This question sent me to the books, and what I turned up was interesting.

It turns out that three years of podcasting about historical myths had perhaps made me a touch paranoid.

England is generally considered to be the birthplace of the modern game of football.

But of course, that comes with a bit of an asterisk.

It turns out that determining the origin of a sport is much like determining the origin of a musical genre.

Earlier this season, I tried to bust some myths about the invention of rock and roll, and I waded into the debate about which song should be considered the first rock and roll song.

What I found is that it can be nearly impossible to pinpoint the moment when one form of expression transforms into something new.

I kept coming back to a quote from the writer Nick Toshes, who said that finding the first rock and roll song was like finding the spot on the color spectrum where blue becomes indigo.

Well, pinpointing the first game of soccer is quite similar.

When does one foot and ball game suddenly evolve and become something new?

As it turns this conundrum is not specific to soccer.

In fact, many modern sports have highly contested origin stories that are riddled with historical myths.

As we've seen with England, the question of who invented a sport and where they invented it can often be a question of national pride.

With sports so deeply tied to our civic and national identities, it should come as no surprise that the history of those sports can get pretty contentious.

Sports myths can sometimes double as national myths, and as a result, sports history can often be more than just fun and games.

So,

what should we believe about the origins of our favorite sports?

Let's find out today on our fake history.

One, two, three, five.

Episode number 71: Who Invented Your Favorite Sport?

There's nothing better

Hello, and welcome to Our Fake History.

My name is Sebastian Major and this is the podcast that explores historical myths and tries to determine what's fact, what's fiction, and what is such a good story that it simply must be told.

This episode is auspicious because it lands on the third anniversary of the podcast.

Yes, back in the summer of 2015, I thought I would try my hand as a history podcaster.

And here we are, three years and literally millions of downloads later.

It's been a truly incredible journey so far, and I really have to thank all of you for coming along with me.

This podcast has been a labor of love, but I really have you, the listeners, to thank for helping me turn it into a full-on second job.

Honestly, if I didn't have the amazing support and encouragement that I get from the listeners, I would probably have hung this up sometime last year.

You wonderful people kept me going by reaching out to me, by writing nice things, by recommending the show to your friends, by buying the extra episodes, by making donations, and of course, by supporting monthly on Patreon.

I appreciate absolutely all of it.

Some of you are actually way too nice, and you will go out of your way to apologize to me for not supporting on Patreon.

Here's the thing: you don't owe me anything.

Do not feel bad about not pledging money.

One of the best things about podcasts is that they're free.

But here's something absolutely every one of you can do that is completely free that could be really awesome for the show.

Our fake history is currently in consideration for a podcast award.

Now, the way that the podcast awards work is that the podcasts with the most listener nominations make the slate of official nominees in a particular category.

That slate is then voted on by a panel of some 1,500 distinguished judges.

So for Our Fake History to progress to the next round, all of you need to go to podcastawards.com.

There, you will be asked to sign up, and then you can make nominations.

We are nominated in both the people's choice category and the education category.

So, this whole operation takes like two minutes, and if enough of you do it, then who knows?

The podcast might win an award.

So, go to podcastawards.com, sign up, and nominate our fake History in the categories of Education and People's Choice.

All right, cool.

Pause the podcast right now.

Go do it.

All right, awesome.

Thanks.

Okay, so on top of this being the third anniversary show, this episode also signals the end of season three and the start of my brief hiatus from podcasting.

So if you're listening to this right when it comes out, then be warned, there will not be another episode of Our Fake History until September 11th, 2018.

Then I will happily cut the ribbon on season four

of the show.

Now, usually for the final show of the season, I do something a little different.

Back in season one, I did a Q ⁇ A episode.

Last year, I had a really interesting interview with the author Mark Adams.

But this year, I thought differently.

The last two episodes of Our Fake History have been somewhat unusual.

We had an interview with Gary Lockman, and then we created an audio tour of Canada's Diefenbunker.

Now, I really loved making both of those episodes, but I'm sure there were a few of you out there who were like, hey man, where are the historical myths?

That's why I subscribe.

And I hear you.

So I thought that this week I would get back to my roots and bust some historical myths.

But I also wanted to do something fun.

And what's more fun than sports?

Sports and games have been part of human culture basically since there's been human culture.

In fact, games might not even be an exclusively human thing.

Octopi have been observed shooting streams of water at targets just for fun.

And every dog owner in the world could tell you that their four-legged friend understands what it is to play.

But organized sport does seem to be something that is unique to the human experience.

The earliest games and competitions seem to have evolved naturally from regular human activities.

Who can run the fastest?

Who can lift the most weight?

Who can throw something the furthest?

Who can jump the highest?

It seems completely natural that since the earliest times, people were staging competitions to figure these things out.

But very quickly, sport also took on a different meaning for us.

In many ancient cultures, sports were not only used as military training, they were also a part of elaborate religious ceremonies.

Take Mesoamerican society, for example.

Ancient Mexico and Central America were the birthplace of dozens of unique and fascinating cultures.

These cultures were also quite distinct from one another.

They had different religions, they spoke different languages, and they had different artistic and architectural traditions.

But one thing that seems to have connected many of these diverse cultures was a sport.

This was the so-called Mesoamerican ball game.

This was a racquetball-like competition where two teams would try and keep a fist-sized rubber ball in play by hitting it with their hips, or in some cases, their forearms.

In later versions, points were scored by shooting the ball through stone hoops.

Now, there's evidence that the ball game was played as early as 1400 BC, and ball game courts have been found as far south as Nicaragua and as far north as Arizona in the United States.

One of the oldest and most mysterious of the ancient Mesoamerican cultures were the Olmecs.

Now, we don't really know much about the Olmec civilization, but we do know that they left behind these massive sculptures of human heads, sometimes called the colossal Olmec heads.

One of the distinctive things about these heads is that they're all wearing this very specific headgear.

It kind of looks like a close-fitting helmet.

Well, some experts have hypothesized that these helmets were actually worn by athletes who played the ball game.

So the colossal Olmec heads might have been a celebration of sports.

Now, of course, the true meaning and significance of the heads remains a matter of serious debate among archaeologists.

But I like to think that those guys were just the LeBron Jameses of their day.

All of this is to say that our connection to organized sport is ancient, and as such, the beginnings of many sports is shrouded in myth.

Take the Olympics, for instance.

The date of the first Olympic Games in ancient Greece is highly contested.

The commonly accepted date is 776 BC.

However, the Greeks themselves believed that the games had an even more ancient origin.

They believed that the games were founded by an ancient godlike figure known as Heracles.

Now, before you get confused, this wasn't the Heracles that the Romans called Hercules, who was super strong and completed 12 labors, yada yada yada.

No, no, this was another guy named Heracles.

The story goes that the demigod Heracles and his four brothers staged a race at Olympia in order to entertain Zeus, who was just a baby at the time.

The winner was crowned with an olive tree wreath, and the competition was decreed to take place every four years.

The mythical founding of the Olympics might be the first known sports origin myth.

Indeed, most athletic competitions are so primal and basic, it would make sense that there would be stories that they were invented by the gods.

But what about modern sports?

As our societies became more complex, so too did our diversions.

Many historians have written about how the Industrial Revolution created new opportunities for leisure, especially for the wealthier classes.

As such, in the 19th century, we see a complete reimagining sport.

Sports became less of a diversion and more a part of someone's identity and lifestyle.

Sports also took on a new place in the world of formal education.

Nameless games that had been played informally for centuries all of a sudden had a label and were codified.

Rule books were composed, leagues were organized, and in some cases, brand new games were born.

This era also gave birth to a new set of sports myths.

These myths very much reflect the attitudes of the times in which they were developed.

The origin of a sport was no longer attributed to the gods, but instead to a specific nation or one particular genius inventor.

So let's take a closer look at some well-loved sports origin stories, starting with the sport that I teased in the introduction, soccer.

Just how accurate were those England chants?

Let's find out.

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game day scratchers from the California Lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question!

Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly.

Must be 18 years or older to purchase, play, or claim.

Does football truly have a home?

Well, it depends on your perspective.

Games that involve kicking a ball with your foot are actually quite common around the globe and throughout history.

The oldest recorded game that seems to fit the general description of football comes from ancient China.

Military manuals from the 2nd and 3rd centuries BC describe a training exercise known as Su Chu.

In this game, the goal was to kick a leather ball stuffed with feathers into a small net, measuring about 30 or 40 centimeters in length.

That's about one foot for you non-metric folks out there.

An opposing team would try and block the shooter at all costs.

And most importantly, the ball was never to be touched with the hands.

So...

Is China the birthplace of football?

Well, it depends if you consider the game of Su Chu to be close enough to the modern game of football to count.

The Japanese also had a foot and ball game called Kamari.

It appears in the sources some 500 years after Su Chu in China.

In Kamari, touching the ball with your hands was also strictly forbidden.

However, you didn't score on a net.

Kamari seems to have been more of an elaborate game of keep it up.

If the ancient Chinese and Japanese versions of the sport seem too unlike modern soccer to count as the originals,

then we have to consider the ancient Roman game of harpatsum.

Harpatsum was a game played by two teams on a rectangular field with a center line.

The goal seemed to be to move a ball across a line on the opposing team's side.

I mean, it sounds very football-y to me.

Except there's no indication that Harpatsum had the essential no hands-allowed rule.

So, is it really football?

Well, as it turns out, the question of whether or not you can use your hands in football was once one of the most hotly contested questions in the sport.

You see, the modern game seems to have evolved out of something that historians of the sport like to call mob football, or sometimes shrovetide football.

This game may have originated in northern France, but it became most popular in the British Isles in the medieval era.

Mob football was played by two teams.

There was no limit to the number of players, so a literal mob could turn up.

The goal of mob football was for your team to get possession of a pigskin ball and to move it all the way across the town you were playing in and to a designated goal post.

You could move that ball by any means necessary.

According to one medieval source from Workington, England, the only rules for this game were that murder and manslaughter were strictly prohibited.

As you can imagine, these games were chaotic chaotic and violent.

Just imagine everyone in your town lining up and then going all out to move a ball to the other side of town.

I mean, it sounds kind of amazing.

Scary, but amazing.

But in the 1800s, the sport eventually took the form that we know today.

But this was hardly a smooth process.

From the beginning, it was rife with controversy.

The development of modern football is deeply tied to a certain type of British education.

In the early 19th century, a handful of British public schools started making sport and exercise a larger part of school life.

Now, in England, public school doesn't mean what it means everywhere else in the world.

These schools were quote-unquote public in that anyone who was able to pay tuition was free to go to them.

In North America, these institutions would be understood as private schools.

Now, these schools were mostly all-boys boarding schools that were for young men aged twelve to eighteen years.

In the early 1800s, all of these schools started playing their own versions of mob football.

But since many of these old institutions like Charterhouse, Westminster, Eton, and Harrow had most of the school grounds paved with cobblestone, the old no-holds-barred game got pretty dangerous.

As such, the rules of the game were adapted to make it a little less violent.

The rules were developed to keep the kids from smoking their heads off of the cobblestone.

At first, each school developed its own unique take on the rules of the game, but eventually the schools wanted to play one another, so uniform rules needed to be agreed upon.

Now, this is where we get into the realm of myth.

There's a story that in 1823 or 1824, a student from a prestigious English school named William Webb Ellis was playing football when he made a bold and rebellious rebellious decision.

The ball had been kicked into the air and William caught it.

At the time, it wasn't illegal to catch the ball with your hands, but it needed to be immediately set down and kicked if it was going to be moved forward, or so said the newly developed rules of the game.

William Webb Ellis was apparently no fan of these overly delicate rules.

So he simply tucked the ball under his arm and and ran for the goal.

William Webb's bold move would so impress his peers and teachers that they would end up adapting the rules of the game and making this controversial maneuver legal.

This style of football would forever be associated with William Webb Ellis's alma mater.

You see, William Webb Ellis was a student of the rugby school, and from then on in, the style of football played there would simply be called rugby.

It's a great story, and it's a perfect example of a historical myth.

The tale of William Webb's defiant subversion of the new football rules fit perfectly with rugby's identity as a sport.

It's been said that football is a gentleman sport played by hooligans, and rugby is a hooligan sport played by gentlemen.

Rugby liked to see itself as both rebellious and also somehow more pure than its feet-only cousin.

But the story seems to have been concocted in 1876 by a former rugby student writing in the school's magazine.

William Webb Ellis himself went on to be a respected clergyman and died in 1872, four

years before the story emerged.

In his lifetime, he never claimed to have invented the sport.

The story seems to have been invented out of thin air by an overzealous former student who simply wanted rugby to have a cool origin myth.

Football historians now believe that rugby has the same mob football roots as soccer.

As it happens, the rugby school just happened to have a large grassy field to play on, something that many of its contemporaries did not have in the early 1800s.

A grassier field meant that the game could stay a little rougher.

Now, the fact that all of these different schools had their own rules for this sport made things incredibly complicated.

So, in an attempt to make things more uniform, a convention was called at Cambridge University.

This convention was held in 1863 and featured representatives from 11 different schools.

There, they agreed upon the rules that would form the basis for modern football.

One of these rules, significantly, was that the ball would not be carried with the hands.

Now, this really upset the rugby school, who had developed a sport that was all about carrying the ball with your hands.

In protest, the representatives from the rugby school dramatically withdrew from the historic summit.

Now there were some attempts to reconcile the two camps down the road, but after 1863, football and rugby would be considered different sports.

So if you think the Cambridge summit was important, then you can see how those England fans might have had a point that England was the home of football.

1863 seems to have been the moment that both football and rugby were born.

British schoolboys were certainly not the first people to ever kick a ball with their feet, but they were the first to write down the rules and give the game the shape that it has today.

Now, that might not be inventing a sport, but it's significant nonetheless.

So sure England, football's coming home.

But what of other countries' national sports and pastimes?

Are their origins just as muddy?

Well,

let's find out.

There's a story that one day in 1839, a young man walked onto a field in Cooperstown, New York with a mission.

He was inspired to create a completely new, completely American game.

We're told that he took four makeshift bases and arranged them in a distinctive diamond formation.

He then laid out all of the rules of a brand new stick-and-ball game that he dubbed baseball.

According to this account, the new game was a refinement of an American boys' game, sometimes called town ball, and had absolutely nothing to do with any stick-and-ball games that might have been played in England.

According to the legend, that inventive young man in Cooperstown, New York was none other than Abner Doubleday.

Doubleday would go on to achieve the rank of general in the Union Army, and he would serve with distinction during the American Civil War.

It seems only fitting that this war hero from the North would also be the inventor of America's pastime.

Or at least, so goes the tale.

The story of baseball's invention might be one of the best loved myths in all of sports.

The reason that the Baseball Hall of Fame is located in the otherwise unremarkable town of Cooperstown, New York is because of this tale.

As recently as 2010, Bud Selig, the man who serves as the Commissioner Emeritus of Baseball in the United States, was was promoting the idea that Abner Doubleday invented the game and should be honored as the quote-unquote father of baseball.

But the Abner Doubleday story is such an obvious piece of fake history that it was debunked almost as soon as it originally surfaced in 1905.

You see, around the turn of the century when baseball was really coming into its own as America's best-loved sport, a commission was set up to determine the provenance of the game.

The commission was organized by the baseball executive and sports goods mogul Albert Spalding.

You might recognize that name, Spalding, from every ball you've ever thrown.

As many baseball historians have pointed out, Spalding's commission wasn't so much interested in discovering the truth as it was establishing baseball as a purely American invention.

To this end, Spalding hand-picked researchers for the commission who had already identified themselves as opposed to any theories that suggested that baseball had evolved from English stick-and-ball games, like cricket or rounders.

One of these researchers was a guy named A.G.

Mill, who had once even given a public speech claiming that he had discovered through, quote, patriotism and research end quote that baseball was an american invention apparently the delighted crowd responded to his speech by chanting no rounders no rounders

so i think we can assume that that guy had a horse in the race

Also, be suspicious of anyone who cites patriotism as one of their research methods.

It's been known to skew the results.

When you consider that this commission was populated entirely with people like Mill, then their results should not be all that surprising.

In 1905, they concluded that baseball was 100%

American.

It had little to do with English sports, and it had been invented by a bona fide war hero in Cooperstown, New York.

In support of this, they cited the testimony of another person named Abner, just to make it confusing.

This guy was named Abner Graves.

Graves claimed that he had seen Doubleday invent the game and even remembered the names of the men who played that first match in Cooperstown.

To support this, he produced a sketch of the original baseball diamond that he claimed was an exact copy of the sketch that Doubleday himself had made the day of the first baseball game.

Now,

if you're thinking this evidence seems a little sketchy, you would be correct.

Graves would prove to be a terribly unreliable witness.

First of all, if the story was true, Graves would have been around six years old when this first baseball game took place in 1839.

So, Perhaps his memory was not as solid as you'd want it to be.

On top of that, Graves would later try to murder his wife and would spend a number of years in a mental hospital.

Now, to be fair, that doesn't necessarily mean that he was lying.

I mean, you can have mental health issues and also have witnessed the first game of baseball.

But if Graves is all you got,

well, that's not a whole lot.

On top of that, it is very easy to prove that Abner Doubleday could not have been in Cooperstown, New York in 1839.

In that year, he was enrolled at the famous West Point Military Academy.

Not only was he not living in Cooperstown, most experts think that it would have been impossible for him to travel to Cooperstown in that year, let alone set up shop for long enough to invent a new sport.

In all of his personal papers, Doubleday only ever mentions the game of baseball once.

In a letter commending a regiment of African-American soldiers in Texas in 1871, he asks his superiors to, quote, purchase baseball implements for the amusement of the men, end quote.

But that's it.

Otherwise, he never mentions the sport, not in a single letter.

He also never publicly claimed to have anything to do with the invention of the game.

The Doubleday myth was so obviously false that only four years after the publication of the Spalding Report, Collier's magazine publicly debunked the story.

The truth is that like most sports, baseball doesn't have any one inventor.

It evolved over the centuries and seems to have been a combination of a number of stick and ball games that originated in England.

In fact, the English seemed to have a game called baseball that was played as early as the

hundreds.

One of the earliest known references to the game comes from an English poem first published in 1744 in a book called A Little Pretty Pocket Book.

The poem was called Baseball, and it read, quote, The ball once struck off, away flies the boy, to the next destined post, and home with joy.

End quote.

So here we have a poem called Baseball that seems to be about kids hitting balls, running, and then trying to get home.

I mean, that sounds a lot like baseball to me.

So I think we can safely say that baseball-like games not only predate Abner Doubleday, they predate the Declaration of Independence.

However, if the English get to claim football or soccer as their own, then I'm okay giving baseball to the Americans.

Here's why.

While the game of baseball clearly evolved from earlier British sports, the rules of the modern game were refined and were ultimately first written down by Americans.

The first written rules of baseball that we know of were recorded by Alexander Cartwright of the New York Knickerbockers Baseball Club in 1845.

This seems to have been an attempt to standardize the rules of the game that often varied from town to town or club to club.

Before 1845, it was nearly impossible for teams from different parts of the country to play each other.

At one point, a different set of rules popular in New England, known as the Massachusetts game, rivaled the New York rules.

But ultimately, it was the Knickerbocker rules that caught on.

The New York game became baseball.

And the Massachusetts game became just an interesting footnote.

So the Americans quote-unquote invented baseball in the same way that the English invented soccer.

They took a game that had been around for centuries and refined it, wrote down the rules, and then insisted that everyone else follow their rules.

It's not so much inventing a sport as it is codifying it.

The Abner Doubleday myth reminds us that sometimes even this isn't enough for some patriotic sports fans.

That myth exists because some people wanted a nice, clean, holy American origin for the game.

Now, I may not be an American or a Briton, but I can understand how patriotism can influence how you perceive the history of a game.

You see,

I'm a Canadian, and for Canadians, there is no sport more deeply tied to the mythology of our country than hockey.

So it's time that I turn the microscope on my own country and ask some hard questions about the origins of Canada's favorite sport.

In my home country of Canada, there is no sport with more cultural significance than hockey.

And yes, for the nitpickers out there, I am talking about ice hockey.

But in Canada, we don't call it ice hockey.

It's just hockey.

Even forming the words ice hockey in my mouth feels deeply unnatural.

With all due respect to the sport of field hockey, which I've just learned follows cricket as the third most popular sport globally.

In Canada, field hockey is pretty niche.

Ice hockey is everywhere.

So forgive me if I just call it hockey from here on in.

We all know what I'm talking about.

Now, I should also say up front that I'm actually not a massive hockey fan.

Unlike many Canadians, I didn't grow up playing hockey.

I came from a family of skiers, so that was my winter sport.

But nonetheless, I couldn't escape the popularity of the sport.

Whether you like hockey or not, you cannot deny that it's part of our national fabric.

Anytime Canada's national hockey team wins Olympic gold, well, my heart swells with a little national pride.

Hell, one time I even paraded through the streets in a moment of pure joy after Sidney Crosby scored the winner in Vancouver.

If a Canadian NHL team makes it anywhere near the Stanley Cup, you can basically guarantee that their home city will riot, win or lose.

Montreal has a long and storied history of hockey riots.

Vancouver's gotten some good ones in there too.

But aside from the professional game, hockey has become a huge part of our communities.

Around the country, kids still play on outdoor neighborhood rinks maintained by volunteers.

And Canada is also a country of immigrants.

And amazingly, many of our immigrant communities have thoroughly embraced this very specific winter sport.

Perhaps the greatest example of this is the fact that you can currently watch Hockey Night in Canada broadcast in Punjabi.

Here's a clip.

I don't know about you, but I think that's a beautiful thing.

So, as you might imagine, the idea that hockey was invented in Canada is very important to Canadians.

Now, within Canada, there are four different places that claim to be hockey's birthplace.

They are Kingston, Ontario, Montreal, Quebec, Delene, Northwest Territories, and Windsor, Nova Scotia.

Now, for a long time, Kingston was widely accepted as the birthplace of hockey, as the city claimed to have hosted the first recorded ice hockey game in 1886.

That game was played between students from the Royal Military College and Queen's University.

But very quickly, this claim crumbled in the face of better scholarship.

How did these students learn about this game?

Where did the rules come from?

Not only had the game not been invented in Kingston, Kingston didn't even host the first organized hockey match.

That distinction goes to Montreal.

Montreal was the site of the first organized hockey game in 1875, some 11 years before the Kingston match.

This game took place on March 3rd and was the first ever recorded indoor game of ice hockey, having taken place at the Victoria Skating Rink.

For proud Montrealers, this is the true birth of hockey.

Those in favor of the Montreal thesis assert that because this was the first time a game had been properly officiated and organized, this was therefore the first hockey game.

Everything before this point was merely hockey pre-history.

Now, interestingly enough, apparently directly after this 1875 game, there was even a fight.

Not between players, mind you, but between rowdy fans.

So if you needed more proof that this was the first hockey game, the fact that there was a punch-up...

Well, that only adds to Montreal's case.

This would be the beginning of a long and storied tradition of hockey fighting.

But here's the thing.

The game that was played in Montreal already seems to have been a fully developed sport.

Many hockey historians believe that it had been developed not in Montreal, but in Nova Scotia.

Hockey historian and author of The Puck Starts Here, Garth Vaughan, has made a very strong case that the game of ice hockey was first developed in the town of Windsor, Nova Scotia.

He claims that the sport came out of Canada's very first private boys' school, King's College School.

It was founded in 1788.

Vaughan asserts that students from this school invented the game by taking the Celtic sport of hurly or hurling and adapting it to the ice.

Now, for those of you that don't know hurling, you really need to check it out.

I'll put some videos up on the Facebook page and on the page for this episode on the website.

It's still super popular in Ireland.

It's sort of a lacrosse-like game, but you're using like these big shillali-like sticks to whack a ball into a net.

It's pretty cool.

Check it out.

Anyway, by Vaughn's estimation, ice hockey evolved out of hurling.

Vaughn also points out that one of the things that makes hockey distinctive is the use of a puck as opposed to a ball to play.

He points out that the pucks and the sticks originally used by the Nova Scotian players were handmade by the indigenous Mi'kmaq people of Nova Scotia.

So it doesn't get much more indigenously Nova Scotian than that.

Soon the game was being played in the colonies, and now provinces, largest city, Halifax, where the so-called Halifax rules of the game were invented.

In further support of this this case, Vaughan has pointed out that the first hockey game in Montreal was played using the Halifax rules.

And the local papers even noted that the hockey sticks used in that game had been imported specifically from Nova Scotia.

Vaughan has also pointed out that you can trace the spread of the game through the migration of Nova Scotians.

By his estimation, the only reason students at the Royal Military College in Kingston were playing hockey was because a kid from Nova Scotia showed up and taught them the game.

The Nova Scotia thesis is compelling, and I think that Vaughan has made a great case that the province was instrumental in the development of the game.

But here's the thing.

Hockey might predate all of that.

Now,

you have to understand the danger I'm putting myself in here.

For a Canadian to say that hockey is not Canadian,

well, let's just say I'm half expecting a uniformed mountie to knock on my door and demand that I turn over my passport.

But here's the thing.

In 2014, a trio of hockey researchers, Carl Guidem, Patrick Houdat, and Jean-Patrice Martel, published a book called On the Origin of Hockey, where they completely upended the traditional understanding of the origin of the sport.

These researchers found evidence that a game called hockey or sometimes called shinty or shinny was being played in Britain and Ireland as early as the 1700s.

There's also a small amount of evidence that the game may have originally come from the Netherlands.

The first potential hint of ice hockey in the past is actually found in Dutch paintings dating from the 1500s.

The 1565 painting Hunter on the Snow by the Dutch master Bruegel seems to have people playing a game on a frozen pond with sticks.

Arendt Arendt's skaters on the Amstale also seems to have an image of a man with a stick that looks like a hockey stick pushing something that looks like a puck.

Hendrik Averkamp also painted similar scenes that featured people with what might have been hockey sticks.

So is this proof that the Dutch invented hockey?

Well, not so fast.

First, it's very unclear what those people in those paintings are actually doing.

Some historians have claimed that the figures in those paintings are actually playing a popular club and ball game that has more to do with golf than ice hockey.

Apparently this game was called kolf.

That's C O L F and it was super popular in the Netherlands at the time.

So these paintings are not as convincing as you might think.

The historians who wrote on the origin of hockey instead point to dozens of references in letters and newspapers and other documents that prove that the game has its roots in Great Britain.

The earliest known reference to hockey is actually found in Scotland, in a history published in 1646.

In it, the author claims that a game of shimmery, or shinty, a potential precursor to hockey, was played on the ice in the winter of 1607.

This reference reads:

The sea phrased so fair as it ebbed, and singery went to ships upon ye, and played at the shimmery a mile within the sea mark.

In the seventeen hundreds you get all sorts of references to hockey like games, including one from a British admiral in the seventeen nineties, claiming that his men often played hurly on the ice.

There's a report in the Aberdeen Journal in 1803 saying that two boys from Glasgow, Scotland died after they fell through the ice while playing, quote-unquote, shinty.

But perhaps the hardest thing for Canadians to stomach is the research done by these historians that suggests that the word hockey itself comes from England.

According to the authors of On the Origin of Hockey, the term comes from the original pucks.

Apparently, the game was originally played with the round, flat corks that were used to stop up large bottles of beer.

One of the most popular beers to come with these corks was called hawk ale.

The game was therefore nicknamed hockey.

One of the most remarkable instances of the term hockey being used to refer to an ice sport actually comes from the papers of a mega-famous scientist,

Charles Darwin.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Darwin was an early hockey player.

In 1853, Darwin wrote a letter to his son William, in which he references playing a game of hockey in Shrewsbury, England, in 1820.

He wrote, quote, My dear old Willie, have you got a pretty good pond to skate on?

I used to be very fond of playing at hockey on the ice and skates.

End quote.

So there you have it.

Darwin is telling us that a game called hockey that was played on ice with skates was being played as early as the eighteen twenties.

Altogether, the authors of On the Origin of Hockey have made a very compelling case that shinny or a game like hockey and even a game called hockey was being played in Britain before the King's College students in Nova Scotia apparently invented it.

At the very least, this deeply complicates Canada's ownership of the sport.

But here's the thing.

If America gets baseball and England gets soccer, then I still think that Canadians get hockey.

The development of the so-called Halifax rules counts as the codifying of an existing sport.

The fact that those rules were used at the first recorded indoor game further cements that version of the sport as the basis for the modern game.

Nova Scotians probably didn't invent the game from scratch, but they gave it the shape.

that we recognize today.

So here's the thing.

Many of the world's most popular sports simply do not have an inventor.

Of course, there are some notable exceptions.

Basketball was famously the brainchild of the Canadian James Naismith.

But for the most part, our favorite games and pastimes have evolved.

Sports and games are as much a part of human culture as language, food, and music.

All of these things shift and change along with the culture with which they are connected.

We care about sports not only because they're fun and because there's something innately thrilling about human competition, but because they can be emblematic of our culture in the same way as our cuisine or fashion is.

But culture is not a static thing.

It changes.

People can sometimes have a hard time accepting that, but it's it's the truth.

The story of the origin of sports is often the story of cultural change.

We shouldn't be afraid of this kind of change.

It can give birth to truly beautiful things.

Sometimes, you just gotta pick up that ball and run.

Okay,

that's all for this week, and that is all for this season of our fake history.

Before we go, though i have some very important announcements so don't shut off the podcast yet first and foremost i need to thank the following people big ups to rob justice mark carey joanne renaud jeffete gonzalez sean scott jordan nelson aaron george adam villagomez Austin Silva, Damian Mankoff, Sam Atkinson, and Mr.

Pikes.

All of you have decided to support the show at the $5

or more level every single month.

You know what that means?

You are all beautiful human beings.

Now, some very important news about the Patreon.

We are so close to hitting our goal.

We are literally like $40 away from hitting the next Patreon goal.

So, because I'm not going to be able to speak to you guys for the next month, because the show is going on a bit of a hiatus, I am going to open up the voting for the next extra episode now.

So, if you have an idea for what you would like the next extra episode to be, if you're a Patreon subscriber and you have a suggestion, then you can send it to me via Patreon.

There's a messaging service within the Patreon site.

That's patreon.com slash our fake history.

And you can send me your idea.

I'll then take the ideas that I like the best, the top five,

and I will create a poll on the Patreon site.

So, in the coming months, keep a lookout on that Patreon site and see if the poll is coming up.

I may make an announcement on this feed to let you know when you can go and vote.

We will then have a period of voting on your favorite topics, and then whichever topic gets the most votes, I will then create an extra episode on that topic.

So if you're a Patreon subscriber, that is anyone from the $1 all the way up to the $5 plus level, then send me a suggestion if you've got one for the extra episodes.

And then keep watching patreon.com slash our fake history

for when the suggestions go up to be voted on.

Now, I will not release that extra episode until we actually hit our goal, but man, we're so close.

I know we're probably going to hit it in the next few weeks.

So I figured I better start the process while we're still in communication here.

If you've been on the fence about supporting on Patreon, now might be a good time to pledge, because once I'm gone for this summer month, you might miss me.

And there's all sorts of extra stuff that you get on Patreon.

Not only are all the extra episodes up there, but for those who are supporting at the $3 or more level, I just released my lecture that I gave at the Diefenbunker.

So that's not the Diefenbunker episode.

That was a completely different public lecture that I did while I was up in Carp, Ontario.

There's going to be the remix of the rock and roll episodes coming very soon where all of the music tracks will be edited into the episodes.

So it'll be the episodes you know and love, except with

the music incorporated into the episodes.

On top of that, there's also this new extra episode that's going to be coming very soon.

There's just so much extra stuff coming your way

that now's a great time to join, and it might help you get through the summer months without me.

If you want to get in touch with me while I am on my hiatus, you can always send me an email at ourfakehistory at gmail.com.

You can hit me up on Twitter at Ourfake History or you can go to the Facebook page.

That's facebook.com slash ourfakehistory and reach out to me there.

The theme music for the show comes to us from Dirty Church.

You can always check out Dirty Church at dirtychurch.bandcamp.com.

And all the other music that you heard on the show today was written and recorded by me.

My name is Sebastian Major.

And remember, just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't real.

One, two, three, five.

There's nothing better than a one-place life.