Want to start a fight? Just ask where hockey was invented. In The Pick Starts Here, Garth Vaughan traces the origin of Canada's great winter game, not to Montreal, not to Kingston, but to Windsor, Nova Scotia, around 1800. Vaughan is not speculating. According to Thomas Chandler Haliburton, as early as 1800, the local version of "He shoots! He scores!" echoed over Windsor's frozen ponds as the boys of King's College School furiously hit a slice from a stick of stove wood towards the opponents' goal with their "hurley" sticks. Soon the youth of Halifax and Dartmouth and the soldiers in the garrisons took up the new sport. By century's end, hockey had spread across Canada, and Lord Stanley had donated his famous cup. This easy-to-read book is illustrated with over 200 pictures. The Puck Starts Here makes thrilling reading for every hockey enthusiast.

A retired surgeon, Garth Vaughan is curator of the Windsor Hockey Heritage Museum and the author of the Canadian bestseller The Puck Starts Here: The Origin of Hockey (1996). Garth is a strong promoter of Nova Scotia's hockey heritage, and his hockey history website, www.birthplaceofhockey.com, is popular with children and adults worldwide. Garth lives in Windsor, Nova Scotia.

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