Comment Home Horror: Hockey's Black & Indian Roots

 Lemmy might not remember this bit:

"Black people dominate this shit! Basketball, baseball, football, boxing, track! Even golf and tennis! And as soon they make a heated hockey rink, we're gonna take that shit too. Motherfuck Wayne Gretzky. Wait 'till you see LeBron on some skates. You ain't seen nothing yet! He just gonna have one skate, chilling. He won't even have a stick, he'll just smack the puck in with his dick. Pow! Slapshot, bitch!"

Think Chris Rock was full of it? Prepare to have your mind blown:

Instead of only the sport of Canadian college boys, hockey was played at a professional level by the sons and grandsons of former American black slaves, whose families made their way out of the Deep South along the Underground Railroad to settle in Nova Scotia,...

The Colored Hockey League operated from 1894 until about 1930 and at its peak before World War I featured more than 400 players -- a professional sport that was drawing 1,200 fans to the rinks around Halifax.

The slap shot was not created by Canadian Bernie Geoffrion in the late 1940s,...but by Eddie Martin of the Halifax Eurekas in the late 1890s when the Colored Hockey League played the game with a “baseball and stick” approach.

Black hockey in Nova Scotia in the late 1800s has been denied by the Canadian traditionalists claiming that pictures of black hockey teams were only vaudevillian acts. “Blacks have weak ankles and can’t skate,” the deniers would claim, Fosty said.

Black hockey was being played on the ponds along with native Indian players but began to be professionalized when a black Baptist preacher brought the young hockey players to church with promises of hockey games after the services.

After years of research, the Fosty brothers found 165 newspaper articles on the CHL in the Maritime Provinces written by white reporters for white newspapers of the time.

The CHL was beaten down by the white Canadian hockey interests and eventually died out as the players went off to Europe to fight in World War I, returning to a Canadian depression that forced the black families to migrate south to the Boston area where they took their hockey skills with them.

“This league had incredible talent,” Fosty told the Muskegon audience of the CHL. “It was an effort among the black community to lift up its members through hockey.”