How Referees were Invented

Near the start of the hockey era, games were played mostly in the winter. The games that were played in the summer soon became water polo matches, but that's another story.

At first, there were not many rules. Things were very wide open then, a breakaway could take hours to bring to a stop. Soon, things like the size of the hockey 'rink' were standardized. Before standardization, rinks were as large as the lakes that Pierre and his buddies played on. This made for great exercise but quickly eroded the fan base.

Rink size became the same all over Canada, players usually wore the same type of bayonets on their skates and sticks that were too curved were soon outlawed. However, players still called the shots when it came to rules about scoring and interpersonal things, such as fighting, and many players were injured in the wild and rough pre-referee days.

Trappers, the guys who wore those early baseball mitts of the same name in order to 'trap' beaver and mink, sometimes resorted to an early form of camouflage which allowed them to creep up on unsuspecting animals. Camouflage, which really means 'look like an idiot', tends to make people invisible in certain surroundings. This, contrary to popular belief, does not work in malls or in schools.

Anyway, at that time there were a group of trappers who were called referees. They wore black and white striped camouflage which was very useful in the birch woods of Canada. At that time there were two types of birch, white birch which you still see today, and black birch which was outlawed during Canada's brief but intense apartheid era. The word referee came from the French/Gaelic/Italian/Scotch/Hebrew word for "men who capture animals with a leather glove and who wear black and white striped shirts all the time and need glasses." The actual word sounds much like the Welsh word for flatulence and is generally unpronounceable.

The referees, sturdy short men who usually were quite vain and opposed to wearing glasses, watched the games from the safety of the birch forests. Pierre and his friends often saw them standing at the edge of the forest. One day, when there was a fierce battle on the ice, several referees rushed down onto the frozen lake and took control of the game. The fighting stopped and Pierre, by now an elder statesman of hockey, asked the referees to stay and control other games.

The question remains, however, as to why the referees stopped the fight in the first place. The true reason may never be known but legend states that the fight was actually started over a mink that slipped out of a referees glove and scurried down onto the ice surface. That referee, his name was Buckner as I recall, raced into the game to retrieve the mink and the players stopped fighting to help him.

Hockey's early days were shrouded in the mists of time and some of the details might be a bit different from what I have written here but it makes a good story anyway, right?