Dave Bidini ·
My latest for the Star (see text below)
Courage, we’re told, is in the DNA of the male hockey player. It’s born and bred into them; whipped by mentors and coaches into their psyche. We’re told how they have stared down life-threatening injuries and a damaging mental toll to keep skating and help lead their brothers to victory. Bobby Baun scored on a broken leg. Peter Forsberg won the Cup with a bleeding spleen. Matthew Tkachuk’s hip was nearly swinging off its hinges when parading the Cup around the ice.
It’s the one thing the game’s champions like to wave at athletes from other sports. Baseballers, they say, play on a soft field and chomp hot dogs while waiting for an at-bat. Football players suffer but 17 games a year. There is no fighting or hitting in basketball or soccer and golfers could still play their game while holding a dart and drinking a beer. Hockey players, we’re told, fight through the deep cold to wage ice wars in front of hostile crowds, roaring coaches and parents who have poured their life savings into getting their kid closer to their dreams of winning.
But no hockey player among the 20 who visited the White House and stayed for the State of the Union yesterday (five abstained from the visit altogether while Maple Leafs star Auston Matthews skipped the State of the Union) showed enough courage to politely — that’s another thing we’re told; hockey players, off the ice, are polite — decline an invitation from a sexual predator and felon who has ordered the mass imprisonment of people with a different skin tone than his.
None of those players had the courage to say, in the moment or after, that laughing at the women’s team was wrong. The relatively simple ask from those of us who love hockey but deplore fascism and hate and all of the cruel damage engineered by the Trump administration — a lot of it in Canada’s direction — wasn’t anything more than that, at first. But, seen in the raw light of day, anything less than a denouncement of the president from players with the highest platform in the country is emptied of the guts and courage we’re told they have always had.
Last night, the players stood in the House Chamber right before Trump celebrated his dismantling of the DEI initiative, and if hockey players are noted for defending teammates preyed upon by opposing thugs, their endorsement of this policy reflects cowardice, not vision or courage. Their behaviour implicates everyone involved in this sport. These gold medal winners will never be seen the same way again, but neither will moms and dads who help run minor hockey in this country, broadcasters who unabashedly stump for their game, or potentially anyone who walks down the street in their favourite hockey sweater. They have dripped some poison into a culture we love that may well have been poisoned all along.
Today, I was sent two notes from friends who are struggling with what to tell their children after they asked about the team’s visit to the White House. In other words, if 12-year-olds knew something was wrong with the extravagant endorsement of the Trump administration, how did, say, Auston Matthews, the captain of the Leafs whose mother was born in the Sonora region of Mexico, one of the country’s busiest immigrant corridors, not know this?
How did the Winnipeg Jets star goalie, Connor Hellebuyck, whose mom is a children’s book illustrator and dad is a former stock car driver, not understand the effect of his actions on a sea of kids who believe in athletes as superheroes? How did myriad management teams and agents and parents who engulf these players not suggest that validating the actions of a criminal tyrant would be ignored because they won a gold medal at a hockey tournament? How wide a desert does one need to bury so many heads in the sand? There was room for the American women’s team in that arid plain, too, only they decided to celebrate with a hip-hop icon who has never sent brown children into cages because their parents came to a country looking for a chance for survival. Like one writer said: thank God for the PWHL.
Speaking of cages, the late pitcher Dock Elis of the Pittsburgh Pirates once refused to participate in the team’s autograph day because players were put in separate pens to greet fans and sign pennants. Dock told ownership that the arrangement echoed slavery, and because he did, the routine changed. Later, he openly advocated for an all-Black starting nine, and that happened too. Players play a game and the men on Team USA were, and are, the best at their game. But until they openly apologize to the nation of fans, we should never consider them to be what we once were told they were.
[Thanks Paul Corby]