Fastest Game on Two Feet BY ELLEN MOYER
A history of how the greater Baltimore region and its athletic talent fostered a once-tribal sport, lacrosse, and elevated it to the mainstream
In 2004, Mike Miller, then-President of Maryland’s Senate, introduced legislation to establish lacrosse as the official Team Sport of Maryland. Since 1962, jousting, the world’s oldest equestrian sport and created for calvary combat training in the Middle Ages, had been and still is the official Sport of Maryland. Senator Miller’s great-grandfather had been a champion jouster. But in this new century, lacrosse was taking the world by storm and the greater Baltimore region had been a major innovator and incubator for the growth of the sport—a fastpaced game once tagged by Baltimore sportswriter W. Wilson Wingate as “the fastest game on two feet.” It is a game that requires stamina, individual skill, and especially teamwork. And so, it was. Lacrosse was officially recognized as the State’s Team Sport.
Famed American writer John McPhee once opined in The New Yorker, “American toddlers learn to handle lacrosse sticks in certain locations more than in others…notably in Baltimore.” How did our region become this center of America’s oldest sport—maybe the world’s oldest, if one accepts that the Algonquian tribes of Canada and the Great Lakes, and the Iroquois of upstate New York, were engaged in this game 3,000 years ago? For the Native Americans, “stick ball” developed warrior skills, settled disputes between tribes, and involved hundreds of players determined to claim victory by throwing a wooden ball from a wooden stick made with gut webbing through the opponent’s identified goal that could be miles apart. These early “games” could continue for days. They also held spiritual significance. It was called “the game of the creator.”
