James makes case for understanding
First Black Leafs player isn’t ready to join push to remove Smythe’s name from trophy
It seems like a no-brainer. A little more than a month after the killing of George Floyd, and after the activism that has followed, this is a moment in history when some housekeeping seems in order. People are tearing down Confederate monuments and toppling statues of slave owners because they glorify a racist past. Others are lobbying for the renaming of one of Toronto’s main arteries, Dundas Street, because it’s named after a late 18th-century politician who obstructed the abolition of slavery. Lawmakers in Mississippi took a step Saturday toward removing the Confederate battle emblem from the state’s flag. If even NASCAR has come on board, banning the Confederate flag from its racetracks, the rest of the sports world ought to take note. The Washington NFL team seems like an easy one; a nickname ought not be a slur, so the team ought to be rebranded. And the Edmonton CFL team — if prominent Inuit voices are telling us that Eskimos is racist, what’s the argument against listening? The list is longer than it should be.
And in some eyes, including mine, it includes the Conn Smythe Trophy, one of the most prestigious major awards in the National Hockey League’s collection, given annually to the most valuable player of the Stanley Cup playoffs. The trophy itself is a gem — a gorgeous miniature rendering of Maple Leaf Gardens, and it’s named after the man who built the place, the man who gave the Maple Leafs their name and presided over one of the great dynasties in the sport’s history, winning six Stanley Cups over a 10-year span ending in 1951. The folks who run Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, nearly 60 years since Smythe sold the team, still profit from the tradition of excellence he established. Smythe was a war hero who helped define an era. But lately he’s been remembered for less flattering legacies, including his oft-repeated reaction after observing the hockey skills of Herb Carnegie, widely considered to be the best Black player in the years before Willie O’Ree broke the NHL’s colour barrier in 1958. Smythe, the story goes, said he’d pay $10,000 to anyone who could “turn Carnegie white” — implying that hockey wasn’t a meritocracy so long as your skin wasn’t the colour of the ruling majority.
So take his name off the trophy, would be the obvious vote.
But that’s not necessarily the way Val James sees it. James is the first Black player to skate for the Maple Leafs. And in an interview this week he said he isn’t ready to join the campaign to have Smythe’s name removed from the trophy.
“The name on the trophy doesn’t bother me,” James said. “It would probably bother a lot of other Black people, that I’m sure of.”
James, 63, is well aware of the heartbreaking aspects of the Smythe-Carnegie story, of how Carnegie grew up wanting to be a Leaf and died believing he was denied his dream by blatant racism. And James, don’t get it wrong, is no stranger to staring racism in the eye and responding with force. If you read his excellent memoir, “Black Ice,” you’re struck by the number of times in James’ career that he absorbed racist slurs from fans and opponents on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border in the late 1970s and 1980s.
“A lot of people that have read the book say, ‘Really? In the ’80s that was happening?’ ” James said. “Yeah, it was happening.”
James learned to fight, and fight well, in part to hold racists to account.
“When the racist insults came from the mouth of an opponent, I had a ready response: I would crack the guy’s skull,” he writes.
But speaking specifically about the topic of renaming the Conn Smythe Trophy, James had some thoughts. As he makes clear in both his book and in an interview, he’s someone who knows how devastatingly hurtful racism can be.
He also knows how devastating the accusation of racism can be, and he’s careful about levelling it. He said he would need to know more about Smythe before he would get behind deleting Smythe’s name from anything.
“You’d really have to be in his head and know the man personally and know exactly what he meant when he said what he said (about Carnegie),” James said.
James is right: One ancient quote, as damning as it may seem, can’t be definitive evidence of anything. Smythe, like most people, was clearly a complex character. Trent Frayne, the great sportswriter who knew Smythe, once described him as a “bombastic, romantic, bigoted, inventive, intimidating, quixotic, terrible-tempered paradox of outlandish proportions.” So Smythe was bigoted. But as Smythe biographer Kelly McParland has pointed out, during Smythe’s day, so was Canada. This was a country that banned Chinese immigrants, interned Japanese Canadians, and sent Aboriginals to residential schools. But while contemporaries knew to hide their racism, as McParland wrote in “The Lives of Conn Smythe,” “Smythe stood out because he made less effort than others to hide his views.”
As James was saying this week: As a Black man he’d be the last man on Earth to defend bigoted views, but he’s a believer that it’s important to understand from where they stem.
At this point in the interview, the voice of James’s wife, Ina, came over the phone connection.
“My husband has got to be the first person I’ve met who’s completely non-judgmental,” she said. “It’s the truth. He accepts everybody, because he knows what it’s like not to be accepted.”
James laughed. Eventually we got back to talking about Conn Smythe.
“Who knows? If you look at it from a marketing point of view, at that point in time, when a lot of people in society were racist, if you put a Black man on ice do you think it would have been much of a draw?” James said.
“Maybe (Smythe) wasn’t racist at all, but he knew that if he could turn (Carnegie) white, he’d have himself a real draw. Maybe he wanted to give (Carnegie) a shot, but he didn’t want to alienate himself from the rest of society by doing so.”
James acknowledges he wasn’t always so open-minded in his views of hockey men. Now living in Niagara Falls, Ont., with his wife of 33 years, he once made his living as a tough guy, mostly in the minor leagues. As the son of a father who maintained an arena in Long Island, N.Y., he was introduced to the sport in the heyday of the bench-clearing, rule-shirking violence immortalized in the movie “Slap Shot.” But as a rare African-American in a sport that was disproportionately white and Canadian, he found he could only hit back at the cruel sting of racial-based hate to a certain extent. Some nights, he found himself showered with racist slurs coming from more mouths than he could possibly punch. And as tough as he was, the hate hurt him.
James only played 11 games in the NHL, four for Toronto in 1986-87, another seven for Buffalo. And it was at the conclusion of one of those games, on a Sabres road trip in Boston, that the windshield of his team’s bus was pelted with a beer bottle while an angry crowd chanted, “Send out your (N-word)!” It’s one of the saddest scenes in James’s memoir — an athlete excited to have just finished playing his first game in vaunted Boston Garden suddenly brought to tears by such inexplicable venom.
James knew better than to fight the mob that night. But in some ways, he had to fight it for years to come. After he retired, he says, he couldn’t watch hockey because of the grim memories of the verbal abuse he absorbed at rinks; it was only in writing his book that he found a measure of cathartic relief.
Racism, in other words, is part of hockey’s past as much as it is part of hockey’s present. James said it’s the future that ought to consume us most. For things to change, he said, we need to spend time trying to better understand one another. We’re all complex. We’re all one-offs. Pretending we understand a man who died in 1980, defining him by a few words for which he’s infamous, wouldn’t be James’s idea of a brave way forward.
“I’m sorry to break into your Conn Smythe Trophy argument,” James said.
“I had to always see things from the other side. If someone had a problem with me, I wanted to know why the problem was with me. I’m not like anyone else from my race. You’ll never meet another person like me. We’re all from the same race — the human race. But we’re all individuals.”