Look, Holtby isn’t perfect either, but this is a good example of an athlete surrounded by people who either willfully or ignorantly saw no problem at all with Trump, or who actively supported him– and Holtby was able to recognize that this was something with which he did not want to align himself. He didn’t let the ‘this is just what you do if you win’ narrative dictate his actions.
This isn’t just because Holtby is a better human than everyone else in hockey or whatever. There were several other Caps who opted out that year. Devante Smith-Pelly cited racist remarks made by Trump. Brett Connolly said, “It’s about what’s right and wrong. And we’ll leave it at that,” as an explanation for his refusal to participate in the visit. (source)
Some of the guys on that team are probably actual Trump supporters and were thrilled about it. There’s TJ Oshie, who, uh… once dressed his kids up like Trump and Melania for Halloween and was recently getting some flak again for his Trumpposting, and there’s whatever the hell Ovechkin’s political deal is (sigh).
But a lot of them probably just didn’t think that hard about it. If you are a straight white male professional athlete, Trump’s policies and the kinds of hate he tends to stir up just don’t impact your day to day life all that much. You have the luxury of not thinking about it if you don’t want to, and some of these guys are just not that inclined to think real hard about anything other than hockey.
The thing that I always found so interesting and noteworthy about Holtby wasn’t necessarily his moral alignment– although I appreciated that, obviously. It’s that he was usually so smart about things. You can tell, like with this decision, and with a bunch of other stuff he found himself involved in over the years, that he wasn’t just going with the flow or clinging to tradition for its own sake, he’d actually think about things and how they matched up with what he valued (or not). And when missteps happened, he usually thought about it and what he could do better, and then he’d say that, instead of reflexively digging in his heels out of a sense that he couldn’t ever be criticized.
I think this, almost more than the morality, is what’s relatively rare in pro sports… and maybe especially in the NHL, where because of the high socioeconomic barrier to entry in youth hockey, the overwhelming majority of pros come from privileged backgrounds where they are insulated from the necessity of thinking about this stuff.
