I’m considering becoming an Arizona Coyotes fan. Not because I have an affinity for either the Arizona desert or the wily mammal in the team name. Since I’ve lived in or around Toronto most of my life, I’ve always considered myself a Leafs fan by default.
But I’m beginning to think – even in sports – I should support people with more admirable attitudes. And recently, Coyotes defenceman Travis Dermott did an admirable thing. He used Pride Tape on his hockey stick in a game Saturday night.
“I have some family involved in the LGBTQ community,” he told ESPN in 2021. “I’d like to step forward and take part in supporting them.”
Dermott did so in spite of the fact that last summer the National Hockey League banned teams from wearing practice jerseys with Pride colours and other LGBTQ insignia during practice sessions or warm-ups. After announcing this silly rule, Gary Bettman made it worse by disallowing players’ use of Pride Tape on their hockey sticks.
When questioned during the all-star weekend last February, the NHL commissioner seemed to say that demonstrating tolerance and inclusion is a distraction.
“You know what our goals, our values and our intentions are across the league,” Bettman told reporters in Florida. “But we also have to respect some individual choice, and some people are more comfortable embracing themselves in causes than others.”
It’s pretty clear from the experience of the past decade or so, that few fields of endeavor demonstrate worse homophobia than that of the spoiled and privileged world of professional hockey. Unlike most other professional sports organizations, the NHL has dragged its bladed-feet on the matter.
The story of Brendan Burke reveals the tip of an extremely large and dark pro-hockey iceberg. Born the son of outspoken NHL coaching legend Brian Burke, the talented and aspiring goaltender quit hockey in high school; he worried that his teammates would discover he was gay. He chose hockey management as a career, and came out to his family in 2007, still fearing the worst. But then in 2009, he made international headlines coming out and speaking against homophobia in pro sport.
“Working for a sports team where I knew I couldn’t come out because I’d be fired or ostracized …” he told ESPN, “people in that situation deserve to know that they can feel safe, and that sports isn’t all homophobic.”
At the time, Brendan Burke was considered the closest person to the NHL to come out publicly and say he was gay. He died in a car crash just a few months later. And his father has carried the torch for tolerance and understanding all the way to the top of the NHL. But the league has apparently turned a deaf ear.
And if Commissioner Bettman and an elite community of wealthy professionals can’t step up and do the right thing, what does that say about the rest of us who salivate as fans to join this very exclusive community – by our TV viewing, ticket buying, wearing their corporate jerseys and cheering them on?
It’s clear to me that the NHL has exacerbated a growing problem. In December 2022, a Hockey Canada report revealed 900 documented or alleged incidents of on-ice discrimination, 61 per cent of which involved sexual orientation or gender identity.
What’s more alarming is that the NHL appears to ignore the very people who feather their fat salaries. “What is the league going to do?” Minnesota Wild defenceman Jon Merrill asked The Athletic rhetorically, “Take me off the ice? Give me a penalty?” Philadelphia Flyers Scott Laughton said, “I’ll use the tape if I have to buy it myself.”
Commissioner Bettman interprets the misgivings of a few NHLers against Pride support for reasons of religion or nationality, as a distraction.
Addressing that issue, Tampa Bay Lightning star Steven Stamkos recently told the Toronto Star, “If 98 per cent of the players that wore the jersey and enjoyed wearing it … whether it was the Pride, the military night, the cancer nights, the story shouldn’t be the guy that didn’t wear it.”
As I write this (late in the day Oct. 24, 2023), news is breaking that the NHL has reversed its decision, and will allow players to use rainbow-coloured Pride Tape on their sticks. That says two things:
First, that the league didn’t bother to consult the people who are its bread and butter in the first place.
And second, that any events living up to the league’s former claim that “Hockey is for all,” remain in limbo.
That doesn’t change my new perspective, however, to cheer for open-minded players, not Neanderthal commissioners and pro teams that can’t skate out of prehistory.