Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Shoots and Scores by Bathroom Readers’ Institute Read Free Book Online Page B

Uncle John heads to the lab to find out.
    B OOM! BOOM!
    No one knows for sure who actually invented the slap shot, but Bernie “Boom Boom” Geoffrion, who played for the Montreal Canadiens in the 1950s and ’60s, gets credit for popularizing it. Bobby Hull, Al Iafrate, Al MacInnis, Sheldon Souray, Zdeno Chara, and others improved on hockey’s hardest, fastest hit, becoming famous for slap shots that traveled more than 100 mph. But how exactly does the slap shot work, what contributes to its power, and how fast do the fastest ones travel?
    SCIENCE SHOWCASE
    For the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, NBC produced a short TV segment that asked Dr. Thomas Humphrey from the Exploratorium in San Francisco to explain the science behind the slap shot. To determine why a puck moves so fast off this particular shot, physicists used a high-speed camera to capture every motion. Playing the film back in slow motion, scientists can study all the details of an action that actually takes less than a few seconds. Here’s what they figured out:
    â€¢ First comes the windup. Standing with one leg slightly behind the other, a player rotates his upper body to bring the stick high overhead. During this windup, potential energy (energy that’s just waiting to be released) is stored in the hockey player’s body and in the stick.
    â€¢ The more momentum in the swing, the more force is transferred to the puck and the faster it will travel. So as the player brings the stick down into the swing, he rotates his torso, transferring his weight from his back to his front leg to drive the stored energy forward.
    â€¢ The key to the extra power of the slap shot, though, comes just before the stick hits the puck. The player first strikes the ice about10 inches behind the puck, causing the shaft of the hockey stick to bend. That causes the stick to act like a loaded spring. Just as it hits the puck, it snaps back to its original shape, colliding into the puck with an average of 100 pounds of pressure, which translates to a shot that can rocket toward the goal cage at about 100 mph. The weight of the stick makes little difference, but the more flexible the stick, the faster the shot.
    â€¢ The finale of the slap shot is a flick of the wrist and a follow-through that stabilizes the puck it so it will go where it’s aimed.
    WHO SHOOTS THE HARDEST?
    â€¢ Bobby Hull claims that he once clocked a slap shot at 118.3 mph during a practice session. There’s no proof of that, and the NHL doesn’t recognize it as a record. But if it’s true, it would be the fastest slap shot ever.
    â€¢ Technically, Russia’s Denis Kulyash holds the slap shot record of 110.3 mph…but he’s not in the NHL. As of 2011, the official NHL record goes to the Boston Bruins Zdeno Chara, who hit a slap shot that was recorded at 105.9 mph during a slap shot competition at the 2011 All-Stars Game.
    â€¢ And Sheldon Souray holds an unofficial record of 106.7 mph from a 2009 Edmonton Oilers Skills Competition.
    * * * * *
    WHO’S HIS AGENT NOW?
    Mike Danton played for the New Jersey Devils and the St. Louis Blues from 2000 until 2004, and then started playing again on a pro team in Sweden in 2011. What did he do in the intervening seven years? Served time in federal prison after being convicted of trying to hire a hitman to kill his agent. (Danton maintains that he did not try to hire a hitman to kill his agent…he says he tried to hire a hitman to kill his father.) Representatives from the Swedish club said they knew all about Danton’s background, but didn’t have a problem with it, as “that was years ago.”

THE VERSATILE DIT
    Bruin great Dit Clapper was the only player to be an NHL all-star at both forward and defence…just not in the same year.
    O NE MORE DECADE AND HE’D BE A GOALIE
    The statistics covering the achievements of Aubrey “Dit” Clapper in his splendid career with the Boston