Sport names...basketball, obvious. Baseball, duh. Football, again obvious.

Thank you. I should have written 'football...international'.

The hockey game was invented by North American native kids, they began by using sticks made from tree branches to bat around a frozen horse bun for a puck on a hard snow surface. They would make two teams of a few players on each side to  compete against each other trying to score goals by batting the 'puck' to go between two markers at each end of the 'rink'.

 
  What is a horse bun, please?
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It's a horse hairdo ... like a ponytail.

Ok.  Other than ribbons or bows being applied to manes or tails, I wasn’t aware that horses are given hairdos. 

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Horse poop comes out in the form of small buns, that is what I am referring to; frozen horse buns used for a hockey puck.

 

  Oh again.
  Where I come from, they were called road apples.
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That sounds tastier.

 

  

According to On The Origins Of Hockey, Society for International Hockey Research (SIHR) members Carl Giden, Patrick Houda and Jean-Patrice Martel present information pointing to Britain as the place hockey first was played.  The researchers also discovered how the name “hockey” came to be: in the first games in England, the puck was made from a cork bung that was commonly used as a stopper in beer casks; at that time, Hock Ale was a popular drink. Put the two together and you can see how the word came into the common vernacular.

https://www.si.com/hockey/news/do-you-think-hockey-was-invented-in-canada-think-again

Interesting, it appears the game or variations of it was invented in multiple places around about the same times.

Nice story, needs more dragons.

FIELD hockey is older than ice hockey and played with a ball rather than a puck - so that etymology is horse puckey.

The original balls were actually baby pumpkins. Also, racquet-ball was already taken.

racquet-ball racquetball. I already corrected that on this thread, but you obviously weren't paying attention! Grrrrr.