As Brits are just discovering, ice hockey is the game of the gods where every sense is slammed

Heather Mallick
Guardian Unlimited
April 19, 2008

As a Canadian, I watch European soccer with pleasure, American baseball with boredom and British cricket with bewilderment (people, you cannot be serious). Nothing beats ice hockey, nothing. I'm only calling it "ice" hockey out of courtesy. What else would you play hockey on?

No wonder Brits have taken up hockey. Congratulations on beating Korea in the World Championships and sorry you lost to Poland and Austria. (Nothing sounds stranger to a New World ear than European hockey, a chirpy echo of a terrible history.)

But this is Canada and nothing here is tainted by history. Our hockey is the swiftest whip-smartest game in existence, as good as Quidditch but it's real. The puck zaps back and forth, making a snapping sound against the boards. When it sails down the empty end of the rink, the players all being congregated around the local net at the other end, that's a crime called icing. It means retrieving the goddamn puck and slowing down the game. Who needs that? When Canadian hockey finally made it onto US TV screens, Americans, so used to the stop-start clunkiness of their football, complained that they couldn't follow the puck and demanded that it be lit up or painted scarlet or something.

I'm sorry that hockey is bloody and yes, the fights are idiotic with much pulling of jerseys. But when you attach knives to your shoes, wield a stick that looks more like a scythe, and coast on an ice trampoline (yes, you do bounce) turned harder than dirt, painful things will happen. That's why hockey players wear as much gear as is humanly possible, not that it helps. None of those men have any teeth left. Those teeth are all snapped into place.

For viewers, every sense is slammed (it's a brilliant game to watch when you're high). The smell of hockey is clean. It is played in indoor arenas, which means soaring ceilings and cool air. The sounds are so distinctive that a Canadian anywhere in the world will rise to attention. At the face-off, the dropped puck snaps to the ice, the sticks make a chunking sound and bodychecking - which often means slamming another player into the waist-height walls and unsmashable screens surrounding the rink - has a heavy bass-drum sound that is supremely satisfying. Checking a player means he can't do the delicate work of teasing the puck away.

That's the genius of hockey - the speed, the intense body contact and the light balletic work of faking, of manipulating the puck with the sound of a chef slicing a carrot on a wooden board. A slap shot, a move where a player is able to put all the power he has behind his stick, sounds like just that, a slap. A wrist shot is a flick.

It's one of the most brutal games played professionally. Imagine being the goalie at the net with a black vulcanised rubber disc headed for your facial bones at 120 miles an hour. Players suffer concussion, frostbite, broken bones and big cuts. Catastrophic cervical-spine injury is a fixture of the game, one doctor says. Let's not talk about necks. The men are a mess, and so will the women be as women's hockey increases exponentially. During the breaks, TV commentators interview these sweaty, spitty, aghast-looking men and it can be off-putting.

But they scrub up good. Hockey groupies are like football wives. We call them puck bunnies.

The BBC (genius organisation, the planet thanks you) covers British league hockey which I don't quite think you have the hang of yet. The Bracknell Bees? Slough Jets? Milton Keynes Lightning? Hmm. Cricket is where men bat at leather balls while defending a little gate, is it?

Look, hockey is a game for people hungry for sensation. Is that Britain? At this point, someone is going to mention "class". Don't. Hockey is fast and pure, it whacks its fans with a stick, it is all-encompassing. Brits, good luck against Kazakhstan today. But the real test in the World Hockey Championships? Beating Canada. Or the Czechs. Anything can happen.