Hockey Can Expand Its Fan Base Without Importing Racial Animosity

The National Hockey League, after taking a hard look at its front offices, players, and coaches, has decided its sport needs a greater variety of faces. So, it has set out to expand demographics. It’s a worthy goal, as long as the league doesn’t import the racial strife that has torn apart other sports.The NHL’s report, “Accelerating Diversity and Inclusion,” found that its workforce is 83.6 percent white, close to the populations of the two nations represented — America at 75.8 percent and Canada at 72.9 percent. Meanwhile, 90 percent of players and almost all coaches and officials are white.By one measure, though, the NHL is already the most international of the major professional sports leagues. As reported in Forbes, foreign-born players make up 72 percent of NHL rosters — more than the NBA’s 23 percent, MLB’s 29 percent, and the NFL’s 2.56 percent.Proving that such statistics are no guarantee of popularity, hockey players have long skated in the shadow of the other sports. The Cincinnati Bengals, the NFL’s least valuable franchise, is worth $840 million more than the NHL’s most valuable, the New York Rangers.Because hockey is a small community, it breeds camaraderie even between fans of opposing teams. When I see someone wearing a jersey on the street, my heart leaps. There are just too few of us keeping the sport going to segregate anyone.The league’s first Black player, Willie O’Rea, is regarded as a hero as much for playing blind in one eye as for breaking the color barrier, as he did in 1958. It’s this unifying example that star defenseman P.K. Subban followed; after the biracial NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt for America’s national anthem, Mr. Subban told Yahoo Sports he “never” would.“I never look at myself as a Black player,” he once told ESPN. “I think of myself as a hockey player who wants to be the best hockey player in the league. I know I’m Black. Everyone knows I’m Black. But I don’t want to be defined as a Black hockey player.”When Mr. Subban won the Norris Trophy as the NHL’s top defenseman in 2013, the focus on his talents alone served as a blueprint for a color-blind society. Compare this to reporters peppering the coach of football’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Todd Bowles, about facing off against another Black coach, Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers.“We don’t look at what color we are when we coach against each other,” Mr. Bowles said. Pressed by a white, female reporter about whether he understood the importance of “representation,” Mr. Bowles grew exasperated. “I have a lot of very good white friends that coach in this league as well. I don’t think it’s a big deal as far as us coaching against each other,” he said.Shared ethnicity can be an individual source of pride, the sort I feel seeing the rare Greek player on the ice and knowing that even my long, vowel-choked last name — like that of journeyman winger Tom Kostopoulos — can fit on the back of a jersey. Those moments lose something if they’re imposed from the top.Bigotry is rare in hockey because it’s dealt with in a swift manner, outside the spotlight of a press that delights in division but pays little attention to this sport compared to the others. Take the 2003 example of John Vanbiesbrouck, a former NHL goalie.When he used a slur to refer to the Black captain of his Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds, Trevor Daley, white teammates objected. Mr. Vanbiesbrouck lost his job and ownership stake, all without news outlets throwing gasoline on the embers.That there’s not proportional representation based on the Census is not a “problem,” as the Associated Press described the results of the league’s report, any more than it’s a problem that most NBA players are Black or that India prefers cricket.Focusing on such characteristics will only impose quotas on management while suborning the talent players show with their sticks to the color of their skin. If anything, it’s society that can learn about inclusion from the NHL, not the other way around. After all, as the league’s outreach program already says in its name: Hockey is for Everyone.

Hockey Can Expand Its Fan Base Without Importing Racial Animosity

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