| Not
surprisingly, given the natural human instinct to hit things with sticks from
an early age, hockey dates back over 4000 years, with early versions of a game
similar to hockey found in drawings in the ancient Egyptian tombs of the Nile
Valley. These showed men holding curved sticks and playing with a round object.
The Romans are
also recorded as playing a game called paganica with a bent stick and a leather
ball stuffed with feathers. (It is also thought that paganica was the origin of
golf.) The Aztecs are also believed to have enjoyed that sport. The
modern game evolved in England in the mid-19th century. The first men's hockey
club, Blackheath, was founded in 1849, and this led to the establishment of the
Hockey Association in London in 1886. (The game was thought to be too dangerous
for women and it wasn't until 1887 that the first women's club was formed, in
East Mosley, England.) The
British army introduced the game to India and throughout the British Empire, leading
to the first International competition being held in 1895. Hockey
has been a regular on the Olympic roster since 1928 but only appeared in the Commonwealth
Games in 1998, in Kuala Lumpur. |
