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Lacrosse
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Lacrosse
Lacrosse is one of many varieties of stickball games being played by American Indians when Europeans began coming to America. Almost totally a male team sport, it is different from the others, like field hockey or roller hockey, by the use of a netted racquet with which to pick the ball off the ground, catch and ‘throw' it into or past a goal to score a point. The rules of lacrosse are simply that the ball, with few exceptions, can not be touched with the hands. Early info on lacrosse, from missionaries like French Jesuits in Huron country, is vague and often different from source to source. Their information is mostly about team size, equipment used, and the length of games and length of playing fields but say very little about stick handling, game strategy, or the rules of play. The oldest sticks are from the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and the first detailed reports on Indian lacrosse are even later. George Beers provided good information on Mohawk playing techniques in his Lacrosse (1869), while James Mooney in the American Anthropologist (1890) described in detail the Eastern Cherokee Ball-Play, including its legend, rituals, and the rules and preparation for play. Given the little amount of info and vagueness of early instructions, we will probably never be able to reconstruct the history of the sport (darn J). Connecting it to the rubber-ball games of Meso-America or to an even older game using a single post covered by some animal hide and playe...
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