I love hockey.
That's an easy sentence to write. It's even easier to say and far harder to make clear how much I mean it. But here's an attempt: I love hockey because of everything it has given me and the community I have found within its fans and within its fandom.
So when someone tried to deprive Philadelphia Flyers forward Wayne Simmonds of that Friday night, it made me angrier than I can rightly express.
In an exhibition game between the Flyers and the Detroit Red Wings played in London, Ontario, Simmonds lined up to take a penalty shot when someone in the crowd threw a banana peel onto the ice. Simmonds is African-Canadian, making him one of a few black hockey players and, sadly, leaving him open to a number of incomprehensibly racist and disgusting acts at the hands of a few ""fans.""
Those quotations are necessary because the idiot who threw a banana peel at Simmonds, just like the ignorant bigots who dressed in blackface in Wisconsin's own hockey student section last year, are not true hockey fans. They must not love our game.
Because they were trying to take our community away from Simmonds, and true fans would never do that. If the person who threw that banana peel was a real hockey fan, they would have known that hockey is open to everyone, that it is never a tool for exclusion—like any sport, it's a place where people find themselves.
The hockey community I know welcomed me with open arms. I came to it a stranger who couldn't skate and didn't know how offsides worked; someone from a place where lakes didn't freeze over, where I never played it growing up and where the NHL ranked a solid fourth in local attention. But the game never kept its mind closed. From day one, I found something special through hockey, a connection to its fans, its players and the game itself that I haven't gotten anywhere else.
I know that's not unique to hockey and that every sport can have that effect and become the place where someone finds that home. There's a difference, though, between knowing it can happen and experiencing it. I don't just think hockey can be a community; I know it because that's what I've lived for the past few years.
But that's easy for me to say. After all, I've never been shunned from this sport I love—I've never had to endure someone calling me a slur or throwing a banana peel at me.
It's a position of privilege I've enjoyed, and one that has allowed me to see how beautiful and welcoming hockey can be; how much someone who never quite fit in elsewhere can find himself in it.
And that's why events like the one in London infuriate me. Because they deprive someone else of that love. They keep someone from experiencing that happiness, that joy, that acceptance—that community so many people have found in hockey.
There isn't a crime greater than that.
It's one Brendan Burke, the openly gay student manager of Miami's men's hockey program who worked to eliminate homophobia among his teammates and in the game, sought to conquer before his untimely death. It's one Simmonds rose above Friday night.
Burke was bigger than that homophobia, and Simmonds was bigger than that racism. (In a bit of disappointing irony, on Monday night Simmonds shouted a homophobic slur at New York Rangers forward Sean Avery - apparently he thinks some people are worth excluding, which is frustrating and disheartening.) But I don't doubt that there have been men and women who weren't; people who thought they had found acceptance in hockey only to see someone keep the sport they loved from loving them back.
There's a corny set of commercials that runs on the NHL Network fairly often. They show kids of all sizes and colors playing hockey and enjoying themselves, and include a group of pro players saying, ""Hockey is for everyone.""
Hockey was for me, it was for Simmonds—cliches be damned, it is for everyone.
So when a hockey ""fan"" pulls the crap that person in London did Thursday night, they don't just insult Simmonds, and they don't just insult black hockey players. They insult the sport we love and the community we have found within it by depriving someone of the right to be welcomed into hockey the way we were.
Hockey is for everyone. But we have to make that true.
What were your thoughts about the incident in London, Ontario? E-mail Nico at nicosavidge@gmail.com.
