This is wrong, of course: when it comes to checks, the hook and the sweep are not the same — they’re just not. It’s a hook-check that Stan Mikita, dressed up here in All-Star garb in the late 1960s, is demonstrating for the camera, though whether or not he resorted to it in actual game-play with any regularity is open for debate, the once-popular manoeuvre having faded out of the NHL by the 1930s. The Chicago Black Hawk superstar was born on a Monday of today’s date in 1940, in Sokolče, east of Bratislava in what today is Slovakia. He was Stanislav Guoth in those years, before making a move with an aunt and an uncle in the late 1940s to St. Catharines, Ontario, where he got a new name and found a new wintry sport waiting for him to discover it.