Wednesday, November 14, 2018

A Brief History of Lacrosse

Ah lacrosse.  Is there any more noble game?  Compared with lacrosse cricket is just farming for inbreds and and yachting is piracy where all the plundering takes place before the boat hits water.  How can one match the thrill of watching two high quality teams of lacrosse players doing, whatever the hell it is they do.

Lacrosse is a French word meaning "wave the stick about" but the game itself comes from North America.  Early, apparently French, settlers in North America loosely adapted the traditional indigenous sport of competitive butterfly catching.  Games would go on for days and points were awarded for number of butterflies, variety of species and protein content.  Points were deducted for bruised wings, inadvertently captured bees and hitting your opponent over the head with a stick and stealing his butterflies.

At some point in between giving the locals smallpox and pinching their land the newcomers figured they might as well go for the trifecta and do a little cultural appropriation as well.  For some unknown reason they chose lacrosse.  Also for some unknown reason they chose to call it lacrosse.

While the French may have seen it first (apart from all of the Native Americans who had seen it so often they were probably bored with it) but it was left to an English settler to codify a set of rules that could be used without the embarrassment of asking the natives what to do next.  He was highly qualified for this task as he was a dentist.

There are many variants of lacrosse, all with slightly different rules but fundamentally the game is very simple, not surprising since it was translated from Iroquois, via French into English by a dentist. Complicated concepts would not just have been lost in translation, they would have been deliberately led into the woods and left there to die. 

To play lacrosse you need a patch of open ground, butterflies are now optional.  There is a ball, there are goals, there are sticks with nets at the top and there are ten players on each team (twelve for women's lacrosse).  Advocates of the sport will no doubt go on about the rules and the objectives but essentially it is about twenty people running around in circles hitting each other with sticks.  Think of it as ice hockey for the Summer months.

There is a ball and technically you are supposed use your stick with a net to put that ball into the goal (your opponents goal being preferred).  Of course it is much easier to do this if most of your opponent's team has been concussed "accidentally" as you challenged for the ball.  Pads are worn to protect vital areas and one can almost hear generations of dead Native Americans sneering in contempt.  Even the butterflies are curling their wings in derision.  Traditionally the Native American version went on until the butterfly supply ran out but nowadays sixty minutes is considered sufficient to work up a light sweat before the players get on to the serious business of drinking beer and hitting on cheerleaders.

Attempts have been made to get lacrosse accepted as an Olympic sport.  It was included in the 1904 and 1908 Summer Games and got a couple of demonstration gigs subsequently but eventually the IOC decided that nobody really cared that much about lacrosse.  Considering some of their other decisions this is actually surprising.  Until the heady day when lacrosse players can march into the Olympic stadium butterfly nets held proudly aloft it will have to settle for being played largely in Canada and the United States.  One thing I do know, the moment it is accepted as an Olympic sport Australians will be demanding that we win a gold medal in it.

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