Shinny used to thaw relations with North Korean
The Howes hope trip with be an annual event to foster sporting camaraderie
A motley group of amateur hockey players, led by a Vancouver fatherson duo, have returned from North Korea, where they took on that country’s national hockey team in a series of friendly charity games.
Organizers Scott and Dan Howe say they hope this trip, the second they’ve put together, will become an annual effort to melt the sometimes-frosty relations between North Korea and the rest of the world through sporting camaraderie.
“The thing that was most shocking to me the first time I went — and I’ve heard this from a lot of our participants — is the first time you see somebody smile,” said Scott Howe, 28.
“It can take you aback, because the coverage generally in western media serves to dehumanize them.”
Howe, who served as a United Nations intern after graduating law school, now runs a consultancy that helps launch business and NGO projects in Asia. He was in the North Korean capital Pyongyang in 2015 to work with entrepreneurs when the hockey idea was born.
“They drove me past the ice rink,” Howe said. “It’s a really interesting looking arena, designed to look like a toque. I asked if they played hockey, and sure enough they had a national team.”
Hockey in a building shaped like a toque. It was a sign.
Howe’s idea was straightforward: organize a tour of hockey enthusiasts curious about North Korea, charge everybody enough to pay for the trip as well as a couple of charitable endeavours over there, and take to the ice for some relaxed shinny.
“We threw the idea out and we were actually told by pretty much all external observers that it would never happen,” Howe said.
Turns out, you never know until you ask. Their first North Korea hockey trip was about a year ago, and they just got back last month from a second five-day trip.
“They’re just anybody who wants to sign up,” said Howe of the 18 players who went this year. “Usually we end up getting two or three players that have played at elite levels. This year we had two former NCAA division one players, and three former Finnish second division players. But then our goalie was 71 years old, and we had a couple of players that hadn’t been on skates in decades.”
Howe falls between those two skill levels. “The first tournament I managed to get myself a goal, but this year nothing. I was more of a fourth-liner.”
North Korea isn’t a hockey powerhouse yet, but their players showed the benefits of full-time training against the Canadian amateurs. This trip, the Canadians practised with the Koreans before playing three games against them, with the Canadians losing in the double-digits. Then they mixed up the players, with two evenlymatched Canadian-Korean squads facing off.
“That’s a little bit looser tempo game, everyone is joking around and having fun,” Howe said. “Sometimes it needs to go through a translator.”
In the cheering section for the trip was Howe’s 61-year-old father Dan, the longtime chief executive officer of Special Olympics B.C. On the first hockey trip in 2016, he connected with North Korean officials to set up a coaching session for about 15 intellectually challenged children at a Pyongyang elementary school.
“We had a small classroom, it was too cold to go outside,” Dan Howe said.
“You can teach a lot of things in a little space — balance, how to jump how to catch things, even to catch a handkerchief you’re getting the fine motor skills.”
Families were there to watch, he added. “Parents, wherever they are, want just the best for their kids, and were very open. it became really more about the people and less about the politics.”
They kicked balls and used plastic bats as well, he said. Dan Howe joined the trip again this year to talk to officials about helping the Koreans train their own coaches for children with intellectual disabilities.
For Scott Howe, this past March’s hockey trip was his fourth time in North Korea.
And in the face of media reports of a nuclear buildup ordered by unpredictable leader Kim Jong Un, Howe said the North Koreans he talks to are well-informed about world affairs.
“On some of the trips, I’ve been on a visa that’s allowed me to walk around without minders,” he said. “I make a habit of not really commenting on politics in my official capacity, but sometimes we’ll go for drinks with local Korean people. There was some talk of Donald Trump on the last trip.”
Next up for the Howes, they hope to add female hockey players to the mix, and bring a squad of Canadian women to play North Korea’s national women’s team.
As well, North Korea has agreed to let them bring a group of young Korean hockey players to Canada for training at a school here, if they can find a B.C. school that will take them.
“We could get them on a plane probably in three months if we could find a good school,” Scott Howe said.