Racism cuts across decades in QMJHL
Three generations of Black hockey players hope today’s youth inherit a different game
There was a time when hockey brought Brian Johnson joy.
It was the first thing he did when he got home from school, racing out to the streets in Côte-des-Neiges, the borough in Montreal where he grew up in the 1960s, with a ball and stick in his hands.
His father, Arthur, played growing up in the same city and his mother, Madeline, played hockey in her hometown of Digby, N.S. It was all they could do to get him back inside at the end of the night.
“I loved the game. I even remember as a kid, every school project, I always wrote about being a professional hockey player,” Johnson said.
When he was eight years old, he tried ice hockey for the first time. He could
barely skate, but still managed to score a hat trick. It was the beginning of a hockey journey that would see him reach the heights of playing professionally that he always dreamed of. But those dreams came at a cost, and the love he once had for the sport was replaced by awful memories.
Things first changed for Johnson when the Verdun Black Hawks took him third overall in the 1977 Quebec Major Junior Hockey League draft.
“It was terrible,” Johnson told the Star, referring to his experience in the QMJHL, one of three leagues under the Canadian Hockey League umbrella. “‘Roots’ was playing on television. I was called Chicken George, Kunta Kinte. I was called every name but Brian.”
He remembers the day the Black Hawks played at the Montreal Forum, the historic home rink of the Montreal Canadiens, who he would watch on television on Saturday nights with his father. “It was an iconic place you’re playing at,” he said.
His family was in attendance and inadvertently bought tickets in the opposing
team’s section, where the abuse hurled Brian’s way was particularly toxic at this game.
“You hear people calling you the N-word and calling you different names,” he said. It was too painful for his mother to listen to, so she walked out and sat in the hallway for the duration, later telling Brian, her fourth child, that she could never come to watch him play again. “I was her baby boy, she couldn’t take it.”
Johnson went on to play professionally for five years, including a brief stint with the Detroit Red Wings in 1983. He retired from hockey in 1986 and returned to Montreal to raise his daughter Felisha and son Chaz, and had no interest in seeing either of them follow in his footsteps.
“My mom actually put a hockey stick in my hand because my dad didn’t want me to play hockey at all,” Chaz Johnson said over the phone from Horseheads, N.Y.
It didn’t take him long to realize he would be treated differently than his teammates. He remembers a coach using the N-word when he was just five years of age.
When Chaz was drafted by the Quebec league’s Rimouski Oceanic in 2001, the racist taunts that had tormented his father in the same league 24 years earlier were still prevalent.
“I had fans yell ‘go play basketball’ or ‘go back to your country,’ ” he said. “All the white hockey players didn’t have to go through anything like that. They could just go and play and enjoy the game.”
Watching his son endure what he did as a teenager, Brian could not sit idly by while fans hurled racist taunts at Chaz from the stands.
In one instance, Chaz told his father he’d been called a gorilla by a fan in Victoriaville, Que. The next time Chaz played there, Brian showed up wearing a black trench coat, dark glasses and a black hat. “I looked like someone from ‘The Matrix,’ ” Brian said. He found himself in an altercation with another spectator after Chaz was once again the target of racial slurs.
“When you’re hurling racial epithets at my son, you’re not only insulting him, you’re insulting me, you’re insulting my father, you’re insulting the whole Johnson name,” Brian said.
Chaz dealt with discriminatory incidents during a 10-year professional career split between the American Hockey League and East Coast Hockey League that wrapped up in 2015, but he and his father both say racism was rampant in the Quebec junior circuit.
“Junior was the worst,” the elder Johnson says.
Yvan-Gabriel Mongo is from Gatineau, Que. and played in the QMJHL more recently, from 2013 to 2018. He says his experience in the league as a Black player was generally positive: “I always felt very appreciated by my coaches, my teammates and by the staff. I never really felt like I was out of place or I was different from anyone else.”
Still, there were painful reminders that he wasn’t always viewed in the same light. During Mongo’s final major junior season with the Drummondville Voltigeurs in 2017-18, he saw an opposing player pick on a 15-year-old rookie on his team. “I went toward him to defend my teammate. We grabbed each other and he called me the N-word.”
Up until that incident, Mongo thought people in hockey today were more open-minded and inclusive.
“It was really troubling, and it hurt me pretty bad at the time,” he said.
Mongo, who played for the University of Ottawa last season, wishes hockey leagues would mandate training on inclusivity and diversity so that players could understand how people from minority communities are treated on a day-today basis.
“I think it’s something that can be done in minor hockey as well. I don’t think we have to wait until players are major junior to teach them about this stuff.”
The Star reached out to all three Canadian major junior leagues (the Ontario Hockey League, Western Hockey League and in Quebec) and asked what steps they were taking to eliminate racism from the game.
Natacha Llorens, director of player services for the QMJHL, said in an email that the league doesn’t employ anyone to speak on racial or cultural sensitivity. According to Llorens, the league is “working on an action plan to implement initiatives that will raise awareness and respect diversity.” The league did launch a wide-ranging antidiscrimination policy back in 2006 following racist taunts by fans toward former Moncton Wildcats coach Ted Nolan, an Indigenous man who went on to coach in the NHL.
Rico Phillips, appointed OHL director of cultural diversity and inclusion last July, said each team is in the process of “advanced diversity training.” According to Phillips, the league is also looking at ways to increase engagement with a more diverse fan base. He adds that the OHL’s harassment, abuse and diversity policy was put in place in 2003 and updated in 2018.
The Star did not hear back from the WHL before publication.
Both generations of Johnsons say greater diversity in the game will lead to progress, and Brian wishes more Black youth were knowledgeable about hockey’s Black history.
“It’s been relegated to a white man’s sport, but if you look at the history, the descendants of slavery used to play hockey,” he said in reference to the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes, an all-Black men’s league formed in Nova Scotia in 1895 that operated until 1930.
Chaz knows cost is often a barrier and wishes more Black NHL players invested in getting disadvantaged Black youth into the sport — particularly in the United States, where young athletes often choose other sports over hockey. He believes it would take a transcendent kind of superstar to change that trend.
“If you had a Black Sidney Crosby or Connor McDavid, a player so good that he was the face of the NHL, that would probably make other Black kids look and be like, ‘Oh, wow.’ ”
Chaz doesn’t think Black youth today have to deal with as much explicit racism as he experienced playing junior hockey in the early 2000s because the repercussions now are much more severe.
“It’s positive, but at the same time if someone’s racist they’re going to remain racist. If someone is racist, especially in management or a head coach, they don’t have to say anything. They’re just going to put you on waivers or cut you or trade you.”
Chaz is a father himself now. He would prefer it if his threeyear-old son Braxley doesn’t play hockey, but says he would support whatever his son wants to do.
Following the footsteps of his father, one more time.
Peter Mendelsohn is a freelance