Toughness is an essential part of hockey. If you never battle through some pain you will never finish a game. Every year in the NHL, specifically in the playoffs, there are dozens of players who play through injuries and pain. For example Maple leafs’ Bobby Brown in the 1964 got hit in the ankle by a shot from Geordie Howe, one of the best players in the league, breaking his ankle. He went to the locker room to get it taped up not knowing it was broken and not letting on how much pain he was in. Brown decided to play through it and go back out. Fighting through the pain he scored the game winning goal in overtime to force a game seven of the series. One of the only sports you could argue is tougher than hockey is boxing. According to ESPNs study, boxing beats out hockey for the toughest sport by about half a point (72.350 to 71.750). ESPN Toughest Sport. While it is close, boxing is a super tough sport and probably tougher on the body than hockey, because obviously getting punched in the face over and over is not easy, but to my knowledge there are no stories of someone being willing to do whatever it takes to succeed as much as Jiri Fischer. Jiri Fischer in 2005 who went into cardiac arrest on the bench of his hockey game and was unconscious for 6 minutes before being brought back to life by CPR. Fischer, convinced he was fine because he was somehow still alive, wanted to continue playing. After dying and being resurrected he still wanted to tough out the rest of the game. Obviously they did not let him do that and took him to the hospital but it shows how much pain players are willing to go through to succeed.

    A hockey player will always be okay at any sport they play, but ask a soccer player to play hockey and it will be a complete mess. Hockey has so many different aspects to the game and you have to be good at all of them to succeed in the sport. Unlike most sports where the base of the game is running; the base of hockey is skating. You have to be able to skate extremely well if you want to be able to learn any other skills. This alone takes years of practice. I started skating at one and a half and never touched a stick or puck on the ice for almost three years. While it may be hard to argue that hitting a baseball is not the hardest thing to do in sports, the difference is just that there are so many more different skills that you can do in hockey compared to baseball. There are so many little skills that casual fans have no idea about. For example if you asked a casual fan the difference between a snapshot and a wrist shot according to a study by me only around 15% would not know the difference. That difference is something that every hockey player knows so they know what type of shot to take depending on where you are. You have to be able to shoot from all different angles and multiple different types of shots depending on the situation. There are different types of skills too though like being smart about how you play so you don't put yourself in a position to get hurt. Yes, that is a skill, no matter how fast you are or how good your shot is if you don’t learn to have spatial awareness you wont get past Bantam hockey. Hockey has so many different small skills that if I tried to name all of them I would be writing for hours and while one of them might not be the hardest on its own they combine for an extremely complicated sport.

    Hockey is a sport that takes an absurd amount of courage and is difficult mentally. First of all, the courage aspect. If you ever play hockey at a somewhat high level odds are that you eventually get some sort of injury playing hockey. For example, I got a knee injury yesterday in my game. Jackson Masters, who is one of the toughness kids I know, got a skate to the neck playing hockey and got injured but was able to survive with no long term effects. If that player's skate was less than a inch deeper into his neck he could have died. Jackson, who to my knowledge is not afraid of anything, was “nervous to start playing again.” It is scary going out every shift knowing that with one wrong turn or one bump in the ice can end your season and even your career. According to most professionals golf is the hardest sport mentally which I agree with. You have the ability to get a hole in one on almost every hole it is just if you are able to follow through with a good shot. Hockey still does require mental toughness though. It is impossible to have a perfect game or even a perfect shift. Every shift you mess up something and if you don’t you aren’t playing hard. If that’s from just losing a battle or worse missing a good scoring chance like a breakaway. Missing something like that can weigh you down but if you focus on what you should have done you will never be able to focus on the rest of the game. You can’t play to not make mistakes, so when you do you have to be able to deal with them. You have to be able to move past it and focus on the rest of the game. Dealing with failure is an important part of hockey and is essential to being a good player.

    Toughness, skill, mentality; what else is there to say?