Skates Optional

If the freezing system at a hockey rink breaks, then it's tough to have the game. Ice skates, as you might imagine, don't work so well when there is no ice around to skate on.

Unless, of course, you play underwater hockey.

Which, despite the fact that "How to Play Hockey Underwater" sounds like the annoyingly but typically pretentious title of a Grantland piece, is exactly what it sounds like. There is a puck, and there are sticks. In this case, though, the puck is larger and the sticks are smaller. Unlike a regular hockey puck, an underwater hockey puck is heavier so it will not float but rest on the bottom of the pool. The sticks are smaller in order that the players can actually wield them while underwater -- the greater density of water would make the resistance working against the larger stick so strong the sticks themselves would be next to worthless.

Players use snorkels, goggles and fins so they can see underwater and swim slightly submerged towards where the puck is. But to get to the bottom of the pool, they have to hold their breaths and dive down, and when they run out of air they have to surface and the puck may then get taken away by an opponent who has just returned to the depths.

It sounds like it's a fun game to play and to get good at, but I don't know about watching it. A spectator poolside could never see what was going on under the surface, so unless there are underwater cameras and screens to show their feeds, I don't know that this is going to take off on television. But if the players have fun, I imagine they won't care much about that.