Fans came to mourn Adam Johnson but amid the flowers and tears were fears and defiance
The flowers have been spreading like pooling water outside the National Ice Centre, one bunch after another, red, pink, purple, white, yellow and blue, most wrapped in Cellophane or paper, many with handwritten notes attached. Rest in peace, Always our 47, Thank you Adam. There were drawings among them, too, and framed photographs, even a carved pumpkin. The pile grew five, 10, 20 yards square; so big, in the end, that the Nottingham Panthers put up railings and set a steward to watch over it. Last Saturday bunches were still arriving in a steady trickle, new blooms on top of older.
The people who left them stopped and lingered for a slow moment. No one seemed entirely sure of themselves, no one really knew what to say or do. For the first week after Adam Johnson died when he was struck by a skate in a match, no one knew when, where, or even whether the Panthers would get back to playing, or how the fans were supposed to act when and if they finally did. There was no precedent, nothing in the rulebook or league regulations. After 12 days, the Panthers announced that they would play a memorial game against the Manchester Storm on Saturday 18 November, three weeks to the day after the accident.
There was a TV crew off to one side of the arena. Usually they pull crowds, but this time nobody stopped to listen or watch. The presenter was rehearsing a piece for the evening news, going over the details. “Johnson, a 29-yearold forward, from Hibbing, Minnesota, was involved in an on-ice collision with the Sheffield Steelers’ Matt Petgrave …” The wall of the club shop was in shot, and the slogan, Panthersland, was in the background. A stream of fans filed in quietly behind her. It wasn’t just a match, but a gathering. There were 6,500 people there, the largest crowd the club have had since before the pandemic.
They weren’t just from Nottingham but all corners: London, Sheffield, Cardiff, Glasgow. There are 10 teams in the Elite Ice Hockey League, and more hockey, and more hockey fans, in the UK than anyone would guess from the mainstream coverage it gets. The club regulars were surprised to see so many new faces in the crowd, but fans from other teams explained they simply felt they needed to be there. They are a small community, but devoted. They wore shirts with their heroes’ names splashed on the back, Connolly 9, Betteridge 74, Critchlow 11. And now Johnson 47, too.
His name was everywhere, on the jerseys of the players and referees, the black armbands worn by the coaching staff. In the stands, fans banged a drum through the warm-up, and chanted his name over and again to the rhythm of Let’s Go by the Routers, while the players played rock, paper, scissors with the kids pressed up against the glass. They broke off to gather in a circle under the big screen while the club played a montage of Johnson’s career, and banged their sticks on the ice when everyone else rose in a standing ovation when it was announced that the Panthers are retiring Johnson’s jersey.
The match, the announcer explained, was meant as a celebration of Johnson’s life, and the game he loved. But the emotions were more complicated than that made them sound, the atmosphere in the arena was bittersweet. It mixed grief, confusion, anger and dismay, and, it seemed to me, pride and defiance. For the past few weeks this small club, with a backroom staff you could count on your fingers and a playing budget which would just about cover a top NHL player’s paycheck for a fortnight, has led sports bulletins right around the world. A sport that has been starved of coverage suddenly found it had more of it than anyone involved wanted.
News journalists have pulled apart the lives of the people involved, with every last little detail laid out for everyone else to read about, and the incident itself has been endlessly pored over by pundits. But after all that talk and all those takes, the question remains how anyone can really unpick what happened in those split seconds?
On 14 November, the police arrested a man on suspicion of manslaughter. Privacy laws mean that the British media have been unable to report his identity. But at the match everyone was talking about it anyway. In the interval the smokers gathered outside were going around in circles. “We’ve all got our opinions, I would never say to anybody that theirs was wrong”, and “at the end of the day Adam lost his life”. It’s rare for an “on-the-ball” incident to come to court, especially in professional sport, or else every foul tackle would be a legal action waiting to happen. Exceptions are made only where the conduct is “sufficiently grave” to be considered criminal. Nothing about it is straightforward. At the same time, the club, the league, and the sport itself have also come under intense scrutiny. The International Ice Hockey Federation recommends that players wear neck protectors, but there is no requirement for anyone older than 18 to do it. The coroner’s preliminary report was unequivocal “that deaths may occur in the future if neck guards or protectors are not worn”. The uncomfortable truth is that in sport these sorts of rules often only change because it is already too late. The same thing happened in cricket, where neck protectors were introduced only after Phillip Hughes was killed by a short ball in 2014. And even now, there are countries – until last month including Australia – where they are still optional.
The EIHL has not yet committed to making players wear them, but the English Ice Hockey Association, which controls the sport at a lower level, has done. Some of the players in the Panthers’ memorial match did have them on, some didn’t. After taking legal advice, the club refused to comment on any of it.
Johnson’s death has, entirely against the wishes of his family, become part of a culture war in the sport. Petgrave is a black player in a predominantly white sport, and he has been vilified online, often by racists who resent ongoing attempts to make the game more diverse.
The match stopped in the 47th minute and an ovation broke out, swelled louder and louder and louder, so that by the end you felt there might have been two, three, or four, five times as many people there joining in with it; so loud, in the end, that every hockey fan in England might have been part of it. The Panthers may be a small club by the standards of professional sport, but they are a fiercely proud one. They were founded in 1939, and have played, on and off, ever since, while the leagues they participate in have folded and then been reborn or reconstituted.
When the memorial game was over the players stayed on the ice and skated lap after lap after lap of thanks, as if they didn’t want to leave the rink. The club continues, the season continues, the game continues. Everyone presses on, because that’s what we always do. The spotlight will move on soon, the club, and the sport, will be a little different once it has gone; older, sorrier, more scarred and more familiar with sorrow. If the authorities who run it do the right thing, it will be safer, too.