Iginla leads Class of 2020 into Hockey Hall of Fame,
It will be 25 years in December that Jarome Iginla was traded by the Dallas Stars to the Calgary Flames before he had played an NHL game. And let’s just say his welcome to Calgary wasn’t exclusively a warm one.
The player going the other way was the beloved Joe Nieuwendyk, who had been a 50goal scorer on a Stanley Cupwinning team for the Flames years earlier. Sure, in acquiring Iginla, Dallas’s 11th-overall pick in the 1995 draft, the Flames were getting a younger commodity who had been a prolific scorer as a junior for two Memorial Cup-winning teams in Kamloops. What they weren’t getting was a household name.
A headline in one Calgary newspaper wondered: “Jarome Who?” An article about the trade included a pronunciation guide to the new guy’s surname. You say it, as we’ve all come to know, “ih-GIHN-lah.” In the Yoruba language of Nigeria, the country from which his father emigrated to Canada, it means “big tree.”
So it was fitting on Wednesday that, on the day Iginla found out he was being inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility, he paid homage to the importance of roots.
He wasn’t only talking about the parents who supported him and the maternal grandfather who first signed him up for the game that would become his life as a young boy growing up in St. Alberta, Alta., not far from Edmonton. He was also talking about his Black predecessors in the NHL, of which there aren’t many, and his Black predecessors at the Hockey Hall of Fame, of which there are even fewer, and how much their presence, and their excellence, meant to him as a kid filled with drive and dreams.
When the hall of fame’s induction gala is held in November — in person or virtually, we’ll see — Iginla will be just the third Black athlete to become an honoured member as a player and the fourth all told. The other players are Grant Fuhr, the Edmonton Oilers goaltending great, and Angela James, Canada’s dominant women’s player of the 1990s. Willie O’Ree, who broke the NHL’s colour barrier in 1958, was welcomed into the hall in the builder category in 2018.
“I didn’t view myself in minor hockey as a Black hockey player, but I was also aware that I was,” Iginla said. “And if that doesn’t make sense, I’ll try to explain it. I had a lot of positive, wonderful, wonderful experiences. But a question I got asked a lot was, ‘What are the chances of making it to the NHL? You know, there aren’t many Black players in the NHL.’ ”
Indeed, there weren’t many. Iginla, growing up in Alberta, was a fan of Oilers immortals like Mark Messier and Wayne Gretzky, the same as the other kids.
“But it also really was special to me to see the Black players who were in the NHL, to see Grant Fuhr starring — to be able to say to other people, ‘Well, look at Grant Fuhr, he’s an all-star’ — and to see Claude Vilgrain and Tony McKegney,” Iginla said.
Knowing those Black players were making their way at the highest level of the game, Iginla said, gave him “answers” to those who questioned his odds of making it as a distinct minority in a predominantly white sport.
“It was very, very important for me following my dreams,” he said.
As hall-of-famers go, Iginla is a no-brainer. He twice won the Rocket Richard Trophy at the league’s top goal scorer. In 2001-02, when he lost a narrow media vote to Jose Theodore for the Hart Trophy as league MVP, he won what has since been renamed the Ted Lindsay Trophy as the most valuable player as named by his peers. Only 15 players have scored more than Iginla’s 625 regularseason goals. Thirteen of those men are already inducted into the hall. The other two, Jaromir Jagr and Alex Ovechkin, are locks to follow. And for all Iginla’s talent as a scorer, he’s perhaps best remembered for setting up one of the epochal goals in his country’s history. In one moment, Sidney Crosby was calling for the puck with an audible “Iggy!” In the next, Canada had defeated the United States for a gold medal that capped the host country’s watershed haul at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.
It wasn’t his only big performance playing for the country. As an unexpected addition to the 2002 Olympic team, Iginla shone, scoring two goals and adding an assist in another gold-medal win over the U.S. Fitting, then, that his birthday falls on Canada Day. He turns 43 on Wednesday.
This year’s other honorees in the player category include: Marian Hossa, a three-time Stanley Cup winner with the Chicago Blackhawks; Kevin Lowe, the glue-guy defenceman of the 1980s Oilers; Doug Wilson, the 1981-82 Norris Trophy-winning blueliner; and Kim St-Pierre, a three-time Olympic gold medallist and the first women’s goaltender to earn a hall nod. Ken Holland, the Edmonton Oilers GM who made his name as an executive with the Detroit Red Wings, was nominated as a builder.
Just as Iginla spoke of the power of seeing Fuhr excelling in the NHL, St-Pierre, said she was inspired by another groundbreaking moment in the game’s history, specifically Cammi Granato and Angela James becoming the hall’s first women inductees in 2010.
“When I first found out that a woman would be inducted into the hall of fame … it made it so special for me to be a women’s hockey player,” St-Pierre said. “And to now be the eighth woman to join the Hockey Hall of Fame makes it very special.”
Indeed, even the greats need role models. It helps to see it if you want to be it. Last week, when I was researching an article on the innovative Colored Hockey League of Nova Scotia, which was based in and around Halifax from 1895 to 1920 and beyond, one of the historians who wrote the definitive book about the league offered a stern critique of what he sees as the hall’s insufficient celebration of the game’s diverse history.
“The hall of fame hasn’t done enough,” said George Fosty, who co-authored “Black Ice: The Lost History of the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes” with his brother Darril. “We’ve never worked with (the Hockey Hall of Fame). It tells you everything you need to know. There are people in hockey circles who don’t like change … They need to step up. They need to do more.”
Which brings us to an impending opportunity. What better occasion than the induction of the hall’s fourth Black honoured member and eighth woman than to correct some of the oversights and under-representations of years past in the name of better years ahead? As kids, both Iginla and St-Pierre will tell you it’s true: You’ve got to see it to be it. Seeing it in the game’s sacred shrine can have an impact that makes a city and a country remember your name.
On Wednesday Iginla said his mother reminded him of a photograph he’d taken with Fuhr when Iginla was around 10 years old. It was summertime. Fuhr, the NHLer, was dressed in a baseball uniform after a game.
“It’s pretty neat to think that (Fuhr) obviously got to the hall of fame (in 2003). And I got in there with him,” Iginla said. “It is an honour in so many ways. Seeing that it’s possible, I know it was special to me. Maybe me (getting in the hall) will be special to some other kids in the way it was to me.”