Amid a silent majority
It can be lonely in the whitest of the four major sports
“It’s about people who look like me, who look like Joel, who look like all of us, being killed, over and over, and nothing happening.” DEVANTE SMITH-PELLY
Would they kneel? J.T. Brown of the Tampa Bay Lightning was the first to say he wouldn’t rule it out; Joel Ward of the San Jose Sharks saw that and said he would consider it, too. He sent a text to four other GTA-area Black players: Philadelphia’s Wayne Simmonds — who had also opened the door to protest — Edmonton’s Darnell Nurse, Minnesota’s Chris Stewart, and Devante Smith-Pelly of the Washington Capitals. Ward wanted to make something clear: If any of them were asked about it, be sure they knew the root of any protest meant something.
“Just making sure the point stays the point,” says Smith-Pelly, a Scarborough native. “It’s not about disrespecting the flag or the military. It’s about equality and justice and Black kids getting killed, and no justice happening over and over and over again. He just wanted to make sure we understood that. I think we did.”
There were fewer than 30 Black NHL players last year in a league of more than 700, and as sports is roiled by protest and politics in the NBA and the NFL — where Colin Kaepernick started kneeling during the national anthem to protest systematic racism over a year ago, and where more than 100 players kneeled this past weekend — the NHL seems ill-equipped for the moment. It is the whitest of the four major sports, filled with Canadians and Europeans, largely removed from the issues at play.
“Well, I think that it would be fair to say hockey fans for the most part come from places where they don’t deal with the issues being protested,” says former player and current Arizona Coyotes analyst Paul Bissonnette, whose mother is half-Black, and who says he understands both sides of the anthem issue. “Some do . . . but the majority haven’t. I haven’t either. But in some cases there has been extreme injustice towards African-Americans. Can we at least agree on that? So players are trying to bring light to it, because here we are in 2017 still dealing with it.”
A strain of racism has always lurked in hockey. Simmonds had a banana thrown at him during an exhibition in London, Ont., in 2011; Ward has talked about the racism he has faced in and out of the sport; Smith-Pelly was at his first rookie tournament in Penticton, B.C., when he was coming off the ice and heard, “Go back to playing basketball!” He tried to go into the stands. Nobody asked him about it afterward. Still, someone might say stay out of it, you’re Canadians.
“I don’t get that argument,” says Smith-Pelly, 25. “Well, I mean I get it because they don’t understand what it’s about. It’s about people who look like me, who look like Joel, who look like all of us being killed, over and over, and nothing happening. It’s not an American-Canadian thing at all.”
Hockey, though, hasn’t exactly provided the most progressive sports environment. Back in May commissioner Gary Bettman said, “I would encourage and I do encourage our players to (protest) on their own time.” This week, Don Cherry barked some typically pinkos-and-kooks nonsense. It was the reigning coach of the year, John Tortorella, who threatened to bench players who protested during the anthem back at the World Cup. And as the weekend debate raged, the Pittsburgh Penguins announced they would visit the Trump White House. Despite the lack of a middle ground in the Trump era, Sidney Crosby tried, as always, to find it.
“I still feel like we look at it as an opportunity,” Crosby told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “We respect the office of the White House. I’m pretty aware of what’s going on . . . as a group, we decided to go. There hasn’t really been a whole lot of discussion about it.”
There are people who know Crosby who will tell you he’s not a Trump guy, but he’s also the guy who rode on the team owner’s plane with the owners themselves to try to mediate the 2011 lockout. He is about team above self, always, and about trying to avoid controversy. In the NBA, one Raptors player said this week that LeBron James being politically active gave other players permission to do the same. Jonathan Toews, who mentioned focusing on the root of the protests with- out ever mentioning it by name, has his heart in the right place but he’s a relative outlier.
“Part of it is the hockey culture,” one former NHL player said. “Star players generally either don’t care enough, or are trying to walk to the line and not step on toes on either side. Players won’t even get in front of a microphone and say the weather is bad.
“I’m not holding my breath for a critique of policing tactics against African-Americans.”
P.K. Subban, who has studiously avoided discussion of race for his entire career, told an audience in Nashville he would “never” kneel during an anthem, saying he had too much respect for the American flag. Which, of course, is not what the protests are about.
“He should know better than anyone else,” says Smith-Pelly. “How many times has he gone into Boston? I’m sure he’s heard disgusting things. It’s just . . . I don’t know, maybe he’s trying to protect his brand or whatever, but at the same time, this is bigger, it’s more serious than that.”
Hockey has been good to Smith-Pelly, to all of them. They love it. But there’s a reason Ward texted four players in four different cities. They are, more than in any other major sport, a minority.
“Yeah, there’s a little bit of a lonely feeling,” says Smith-Pelly. “I mean, all of us are on our teams by ourselves: there’s not two of us together, or three of us together. So if one of us were to do this, and nobody else on the team jumped in, you’re really by yourself.
“I can go to Joel and say, hey — because he understands what I’m going through as a black man in America. I can’t go to anyone on my team and have them understand really how it is to be in my shoes. Just because I’m a professional hockey player: they just don’t understand. So it’s really lonely in that sense. You don’t really have anyone.”
On Thursday, Ward — one of the most beloved figures in hockey, with support from his coach and GM — released a statement saying he would not kneel. He said that in hockey, “we can treat each other better than we do at all levels of the sports,” and said “let our collective focus be on bridging the gap between communities — on working to heal generations of unequal treatment of people of colour in the United States.” Simmonds agreed and said it was “time to refocus on the original issues at hand.” If there was ever a moment for this protest to cross into the NHL, that made it seem less likely.
It would have been hard to kneel, in hockey. But if the sport has a role in this, maybe it should be that more people should listen to why these players considered protest.
“Maybe the more people listen and offer support, the less lonely it will be.