Hockey and golf theory sticks out
By LORNE RUBENSTEIN
Wednesday, October 31, 2001 - Page S5

This week offers an opportunity to examine the intriguing relationship between golf and hockey. There's plenty of hockey, of course, and lots of golf, notably the Tour Championship in Houston and the Southern Farm Bureau Classic in Madison, Miss. Both are PGA Tour events.

The relationship is a long established one. Golf and hockey originated in the common objective of propelling an object toward a target. The motions in the sports involve swinging at an object on the ground, although the puck moves and the golf ball is stationary. Still, the motions are sufficiently similar as to make for interesting study.

Many hockey players have been or are fine golfers, too: National Hockey League players (past and present) Bobby Rousseau, Gary Dornhoefer, Dale Tallon and Mario Lemieux, to cite one foursome. Some golfers have been fine hockey players: Mike Weir and Jerry Kelly on the PGA Tour, and Senior PGA Tour player Allen Doyle.

American golf analysts, in particular, often raise Weir's hockey background in an attempt to explain his golf prowess. He played competitively as a kid, but acknowledges he was never NHL material. Yet there's Weir in the July issue of Golf Digest, wearing a hockey uniform and spraying ice chips as he comes to a sudden stop on the ice.

"Mike Weir is a left-handed hockey player from Canada," the cutline accompanying the photo says, "so how did he grow up to become a force on tour -- and Wayne Gretzky's idol?"

Read Bob Verdi's descriptive piece for the answer. For more on Weir as hockey player, follow golf on U.S. television. It will take only a minute until somebody theorizes that Weir is an excellent golfer because he played a lot of hockey. Weir doesn't really buy the theory -- he points out that most Canadian kids play hockey but don't reach the PGA Tour but there could be a bit of truth in it.

The idea becomes more palatable when one reads Canadian sportswriter Bruce Dowbiggin's outstanding new book The Stick: A history, a celebration, an elegy. Dowbiggin visited Stephen Murphy, whose doctoral thesis at the University of Waterloo was called "Three-Dimensional Dynamic Analysis of the Ice Hockey Stick During the Stationary Slap Shot."

The stationary slap shot. Now that sounds suspiciously like a golf swing. Murphy talked about the St. Louis Blues defenceman Al MacInnis, who apparently has the hardest slap shot in hockey, reaching speeds of 160 kilometres an hour. Murphy pointed out that MacInnis knows how to use his legs in the shot.

"He's bent at the waist, transferring his weight from the back leg to the front leg," Murphy told Dowbiggin, a street hockey player himself, and more than a decent golfer too, "which allows him to generate energy, to deform the stick because he's loading it up while it's on the ice."

That is, MacInnis sits down to the shot. Weir does the same. Sam Snead was probably the best at this, getting into a bowed position with his knees as he neared impact. It's a position of power and balance.
"I think about sitting on my left leg from the top and then unwinding," Weir has said. Sit and strike: It's an impressive way to make a slap shot and a golf swing.

Meanwhile, Doyle, the Senior PGA Tour's leading money winner this year, uses a notoriously short backswing -- the proverbial golf swing in a telephone booth. He hardly seems to take the club back at all.
No wonder. Doyle went to Norwich University in Vermont on a hockey and not a golf scholarship. When Doyle won the 1999 PGA Seniors' Championship, writer Tim Rosaforte explained his swing, in part, as "a slap shot swing honed on Massachusetts munys [municipal courses.]"

And finally, there's Kelly, 34, a PGA Tour player who is 34th on the PGA Tour's money list. Kelly attended the University of Hartford on a hockey scholarship until the school dropped the sport.
"Golf is a big-muscle swing," Kelly told The Golf Channel's Rich Lerner recently. "It's like a hockey shot. You take the hands out. It's like pushing the slap shot through with a static right wrist [for a right-handed player]. Y ou hit the ball much farther with a big-muscle swing." (Weir thinks that a slap shot involves a rolling of the wrists.)

Hockey and golf fans can learn something from studying and playing both sports, which seem to be compatible. The result of closer examination might be that a hockey player/golfer increases the speed of his slap shot and decreases his handicap at the same time. That's just reward for study.
rube@sympatico.ca

The Stick
By PAUL CHALLEN
Sunday, September 1, 2001

Calgary herald sportswriter Bruce Dowbiggin's last foray into hockey books was "Of Ice and Me", a look at how a handful of hockey greats had mastered their craft. But they say that craftspeople are only as good as their tools, so in his latest work, Dowbiggin looks at the implements crucial to the game-- the hockey stick. The Stick uses the long wood (or, increasingly, graphite) shaft with a curved blade as a way of getting to several of the larger truths about hockey and, by extension, Canadian culture.

After an examination of the hockey stick's origins among the Mi'kmaq of eastern Canada and its development in the early North American professional game, Dowbiggin plunges full-bore into his analysis of why the stick is such an important part of Canadian lore. You need only see how hotly coveted any pro player's stick is among young fans to understand the points he makes about the stick as Canadian icon and representation of achievement. He accomplishes this analysis by interspersing details of how the stick's design changed to reflect technological progress, and, most entertainingly for the hockey fan, by chronicling the attachment many of the game's great players have had to their own special sticks.

It's a tough task to carry a tale about a single piece of hockey equipment nearly 300 pages, but Dowbiggin pulls it off in style, due mostly to his skillful use of the narratives of pro players and fans. The Stick will appeal to the two basic kinds of sports readers out there: those who like "pure" sports books filled with descriptions of game action and the players; and those who prefer the sport-psychology genre, where sports is used to analyze larger cultural forces.

From pros to amateurs, everyone has a story about a hockey stick in "The Stick"
By NEIL STEVENS

Pucks are going faster as more and more NHL players pick up new lightweight graphite sticks.

It's a trend to watch.

Players invariably say they can get more snap on shots with the new models than they can with wood sticks. The graphite grab took off with the Synergy stick retailed by Easton, and now other companies are into manufacturing similar products.

The switch has the potential to create the biggest boon to scoring since Stan Mikita popularized the curved stick in the Sixties, says Bruce Dowbiggin, author of his latest book, The Stick.

"We've had shot speeds of up to 100 to 105 miles an hour," says Dowbiggin. "With the new (graphite) sticks, there's a feeling players are going to crank it up to 110."

The Stick -- it is a topic with which most Canadians can identify because most of us have held a hockey stick in our hands, although few have squeezed one of the custom-made models being used by NHL stars because they can be worth more than $500 each.

Dowbiggin's work in radio and television has twice won him the Gemini Award for excellence in sports broadcasting. He writes for the Calgary Herald, too. The Stick is an entertaining read, and one of the best-written works available on the sport literature market this autumn.

"Each one is different, like your kids," the father of three says of his three book projects. "This one has the potential of having a really wide audience because it's not just hockey, it's cultural.

"That's why we chose the cover we did. It's not an NHL game. It's an image from a lake in Quebec, Lac Bromont in the Eastern Townships. We wanted people to see the book has a wide focus.

"I had a great time writing it. It's a fun topic. With all the serious stuff that's going on in life these days, this might be a nice antidote for people to get away to read these things and not be quite so stressed out about life. I'm very proud of it. I hope people get a kick out of reading it."

He chronicles the history of the hockey stick, how it was and is made, how it has been used, how NHL players are courted by manufacturers, and how players such as Brett Hull dote over their sticks.

There are some unexplainable discoveries: 70 per cent of Canadians shoot left-handed, 70 per cent of Americans shoot right-handed, and 90 per cent of Europeans shoot left-handed.

There are interesting characters right and left.

"It becomes a journey," Dowbiggin said of his research. "People would say, 'Well, you've got to speak to this guy."'

There are artists, witches, a basement full of hockey sticks, and a fence made of hockey sticks in the Montreal yard of broadcaster Dick Irvin.

"The way I put the book together shows you the importance of the hockey stick," says Dowbiggin. "In this country, whether you're in Victoria or St. John's, you talk hockey and hockey sticks and you're using a common language."

Stick anecdotes abound -- too many to get into one book.

"I was doing some work around the house and I hacked my arm open and had to go get stitches," says Dowbiggin. "The guy is stitching me up and he knows me in Calgary from my work there.

"We're talking and I tell him about my book about hockey sticks and he says, 'That's interesting. When I was a kid I made snowshoes out of a hockey stick.' I thought, where were you when I was doing research on this book?

"We've set up a website (www.thestickonline.com) on the book hoping people will e-mail us and tell us their favorite memory of a stick or something that happened with it. Everybody seems to have a story."

ON BOOKS
By CHARLES MANDEL
Saturday, October 20, 2001

In his new book The Stick (Macfarlane, Walter and Ross, 259 pages, $32.99) Calgary Herald sports columnist Bruce Dowbiggin argues for the hockey stick as a potent national symbol. Among the evidence he presents is the fact that at Vancouver's Expo '86, tourists to the world's fair were greeted not by a Maple Leaf nor a beaver, but by a giant hockey stick.

Certainly, the hockey stick's roots are in Canada. Dowbiggin traces them back to the mid-1800's when the Mi'Kmaq played a game with a crooked stick and a ball on ice with the Irish soldiers and settlers of Nova Scotia. The best sticks for the new game dubbed Alchamadijk came from the Mi'kmaq carvers, who'd previously played a similar sport called Oochamkunutk using carved alder sticks.

Dowbiggin's The Stick is a fan's notes. Dowbiggin dutifully takes us through the history of the hockey stick, talking about the equipment's development from wood through to the more high-tech materials such as graphite composite. He introduces us to the small businessman who started up stick plants and how larger and larger global concerns steadily swallowed up the competition.

But you sense it's when Dowbiggin talks about the players and their use of the stick that his interest takes hold, reasonable given his background as a sports writer. He spends his time investigating who innovated the first curved blade and its affect on play. He looks at how the type and brand of stick impacted the players' performance. And in the chapter aptly called Laying on the Lumber, Dowbiggin chronicles the use of the stick as a weapon in games.

Some of the more quirky stuff is of interest as well. Dowbiggin interviewed hockey artists and stick collectors. Among the latter is Gord Sharpe, an Ontario resident who believes he might have the world's oldest hockey stick and put it up for auction for $1 million. Equally engaging is the story of Bruce Saville, the Edmonton millionaire who built one of the floors of his mansion out of recycled hockey sticks.

The Stick would have made a tremendous magazine article, but it feels a bit stretched as a book. Dowbiggin often relies on large blocks of quote and occasionally tries to pass off a sentence without any accompanying analysis.

For instance, he writes, "Graphite, or plumbago, is a hexagonally crystallized allotropic form of carbon." Really now, is it? How utterly fascinating. Too bad we don't know precisely what that means.

Hockey fans will love this book. It will give them a manner of things to debate, such as whether one stick material is better than another, or whether so-and-so might not have exceeded his best-ever score if only he had used such-and-such a stick.

But when it comes to the stick's position as a national icon, I'm not buying it. Dowbiggin himself effectively destroys that line of argument by showing how globalized the industry has become, much like hockey itself.