Former Toronto, Detroit and oakland defenceman Kent Douglas usaed the heaviest stick in NHL history. At almost a pound, it’s three times as heavy as modern-day sticks. As his career progressed, Douglas started to use different sticks for different game situations. “I used to have three different sticks. One for the power play. One for regular play. And one for penalty killing... they got heavier as you went along. For penalty killing, I’d just skate to our bench-- the benches were real close together and the sticks were at the point where they were closest-- and I’d say, ‘Give me a log and make it even’. Of course, they could hear you on the other bench.”

Considering that Douglas logged 631 penalty minutes in just 428 games, a request for the heavy lumber could only have meant one thing to nervous opponents. Stan Mikita remembers Douglas’ jumbo stick-- “It was the biggest handle I’d ever seen on a stick, it was a two-by-four.” Mikita’s other memories of the Douglas lumber were less fond. “He took a swipe at me with the stick and he hit me dead over the head with it. I wasn’t wearing a helmet at the time. Right in Toronto-- some people saw it, and as soon as he hit me, the blood came out like a fountain of youth. It was a good 40 stitches-- on the outside. I don’t know how many they put on the inside.”

Stan Mikita discovered the curved stick by accident in Chicago in the early 1960s? “It was toward the end of practice. My stick cracked, the blade of the stick cracked in the backhand part of it. It wasn’t a clean break. It was still in one piece on the forehand. The crack itself turned into almost -- what do they call that thing you can’t throw away? Yeah, a boomerang? And I said, ‘Oh shit, now I’ve got to get a new stick.” “So out of anger, I took a slapped the puck against the boards, hoping to break the stick all the way. Well, it didn’t break, but I noticed when the shot hit the boards the sound was a little different. I noticed the puck took off a little different also. It felt like I really caught the whole part of the puck so I slapped another one and then three and then four. Then I shot a wrist shot. Then it finally broke.”

When Mikita finally got downstairs in the Hawks dressing room, he couldn’t escape the sound and feel of those shots with the broken blade. “So I started bending some sticks till they broke. Then someone said, ‘Hey, asshole, they bend easier if you wet them.’ So I ran a couple of them under hot water and bent them. Then to keep it in a bent position, I got a chair and I put it under the handle and I put the remaining part of the blade under the door. So it stayed overnight and I got there the next day and and sure as hell it was dry. So I just taped it up and worked on it a little bit. Then I went out on my own before anyone else came up those stairs and just started shooting the puck, wondering what might happen. Well, the first slap shot I took from the red line acted like a knuckler in baseball, it dropped and shot to the side. And I thought maybe I‘d done something wrong again. I had no idea what it was going to do. The next shot I took was an upshoot and God, it was doing all sorts of different things.

Red Wings’ sniper Brendan Shanahan uses the same stick pattern as a low-scoring team mate? “It was when I was with St. Louis. I don’t remember exactly, but for some reason I think I’d run out of blades-- the dreaded snow storm in Montreal-- so I went out and I used Garth Butcher’s blade. I probably had a good game, so when my batch came in, I sent them back and said, ‘Scratch out the Butcher and put my name on it’. If I ran out from then on or broke too many, I would just go to Butchie directly.” Understand that in 14 NHL seasons, Butcher amassed a grand total of 48 goals. Through 14 NHL campaigns, Shanahan had 466 goals. But Shanahan uses Butcher’s blade pattern. You can imagine what comes next. “Brett Hull’s a connoisseur of sticks, and I got a lot of grief from Brett. He’d succeeded in having me change the knob on my stick from something the size of a puck to what it is now. When he saw that I was using Butchie’s stick, he just shook his head and said, ‘You scored fifty goals, I’m not going to argue. “So then we had a competition, because Kelly Chase used Brett’s pattern. We had a contest, who would score more goals-- Garth Butcher and me together or Brett Hull and Kelly Chase together.”

The result? “Usually Butchie would outscore Chase, but Hullie would always outdo me.”

Adam Oates uses the shortest blade in hockey? When seen up close outside the dressing room of the Washington Capitals, the blade of Adam Oates's Sher-Wood model has only a small curve to it and looks like it suffered an encounter with a meat cleaver. About three-quarters of the way to the toe, the blade is truncated on a 90-degree angle. It appears as if the manufacturer simply knocked off early for lunch and forgot to finish Oates' stick. "Most of the guys laugh at it," says Oates, who's made a living feeding snipers such as Brett Hull, Cam Neely and Peter Bondra with the stubby stick. "They try to use it but they throw it away and say it's ridiculous, they say how do you use that thing or what are you doing with a kid's stick?"
How did the Weston, Ont. native arrive at such an unusual model? "It's funny but I used to have a rather long blade. What happened was I was in Boston and I got a shipment of sticks. But they were all cracked... broken close to the toe. I thought, okay, I don't want to waste them so I'll just cut them and use them for practices. So I took the saw and cut them off square at the end and used them in practice. Well, they felt okay. The balance in the stick shifted a little higher up the shaft. So I started using them in games, and I did okay. A while later I tried to go back to the old blade but it wasn't the same. Since then I've lengthened the shaft a little and Brett Hull taught me how to rocker the bottom of the blade."

With over 1200 points in his career, it's hard to argue with Oates' results.

The Jeremy Roenick’s the most finnicky player in the NHL when it comes to sticks? "I kiss them and rub them and, you know, show them lots of love," he says in the Coyotes dressing room after practice one day. Roenick's fastidiousness means that no one is allowed near his Easton aluminum models. "I've been know to-- if a guy grabs my stick, or if another guy's stick touches it, I'll put it in for a spare and go make a new one that's nice and fresh and virginized. I get vocal about it. I'll give a quick little scream and tell them to stay away. After that, they get the message pretty quick. I'm very particular about who touches my stick, how it's curved, the weight. I'm constantly on the phone to Easton, letting them know if the blades are too thick, if they're too heavy, if the shafts are too whippy. That's my bread-and-butter, what makes me score goals. If you're not comfortable with your stick or skates, you struggle."

One hundred fifty years after it was first carved from a hornbeam tree near Truro, Nova Scotia, the hockey stick endures in every recess of the culture. It tells us who we are and why we do things differently from the rest of the world. Such as shoot lefthanded.

How in the name of Wayne Gretzky does lefthandedness with the stick make us distinctive? Well, Gretzky shoots left; so do seventy percent of stick purchasers from St. John's to Victoria. This in spite of the fact that Gretzky and 90 percent of his fellow Canadians are right-handed in all other things. But Americans are the mirror image: seventy percent of U.S.-born players shoot right. "It may be a cultural thing," says Mark Hughes of Easton. "It really is strange."

And not a passing whim, either; statistics kept by Sher-Wood over the decades consistently reflect this ongoing 70/30 left-right split . Canada also produces a higher proportion of left-handed golfers (Mike Weir) and baseball hitters (Larry Walker, Matt Stairs) than does the U.S. “Maybe Canadians are just smarter,” says Todd Levy of Ice Hockey in Harlem, an American-based community program. Thank you, Todd. But before we get too chuffed about Canadian ingenuity, it should be pointed out that almost ninety percent of European players shoot lefthanded-- in keeping with the traditional 90/10 split in the general population. That means that while Americans may be totally clued out on the subject, about 20 percent of Canadians are dim bulbs on which way to shoot. (Including this author).

But why are we so different from Americans? The simplest explanation may be that to exploit the full reach of a hockey stick when poke- or sweep-checking, you must hold the stick at the knob end. If your dominant hand (usually the right) is placed at that end, you have greater control of the stick . Putting left hand below right on the stick makes you a left-handed shooter. As well, a left-handed shooter finishes his follow-through on the dominant right leg, helping him put more force behind the shot and maintain better balance.

The playground suggests a more homespun explanation. In ball hockey, players must take a turn at all positions, including goal. A left-handed shooter can hold the goal stick in his right hand, then quickly adopt a shooting position by grabbing the shaft with his lower (or left) hand. A right-handed shot in goal, however, must either hold the stick in his left (weaker) hand or else reverse the stick each time he shoots-- an inconvenience that takes time. Young players soon learn to shoot with their dominant hand on top when they play goal in ball hockey. It's a cultural quirk that Americans, who slide the dominant right hand lower on golf clubs or baseball bats, are denied.

So when it comes to hockey sticks, Canadians are used to taking sides.

So how does a stick propel the puck? Here's Stephen Murphy of Bauer/ Nike, who did his PhD. thesis on The Slapshot.

"A player hits the ice about 45 or 50 centimetres behind the puck, contacting the ice before the puck. The first 30 centimetres are just bringing the blade tangentially to the ice-- you're just skimming, you haven't lost any velocity yet, you're getting the biofeedback of being comfortable with where you are. It's happening quickly, in 10 milliseconds. You're just ramping up, the load is two kilograms-- five pounds-- not a lot of weight down vertically yet.

"Then when you get close to the puck-- about 15 or 20 centimetres-- you start leaning into the shaft, loading up the blade. Then you hit the puck with the blade. The puck is made of rubber and the new blades are made from material that actually `noodles' around the puck -- the impact deforms the blade. Sometimes that can make the puck move ahead of the blade, which isn't good because you're chasing the puck. But most of the time you're loading the puck onto the blade, and unloading it on the follow through. The puck is on the blade 3.5 milliseconds, about seventy times longer than a golf ball is on the face of a club. By comparison, a golf ball stays on the club face about and .5 milliseconds. Golf is pure impact."