I have not watched any hockey for almost 40 years. I did go to the Garden to watch the "couldn't quite get over the hump" Rangers lose. I also watched The New York Islanders when they were on their great Stanley Cup run.
After that, even though the great Gretsky was AMAZING to watch, I lost interest in the game.
So, it was with great surprise I read the following in "The Gothamist" - DC Edition -- (as always, follow link to original)
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Last night, Capitals fans were exuberant when Joel Ward scored the
game-winning goal to clinch the team's first-round playoff series with
the defending Stanley Cup champion Boston Bruins. And it didn't take
long for many to notice that Ward, playing his first season with the
Capitals, is one of a small number of black professional hockey players.
Some celebrating the Caps' victory pointed to that proudly, if a bit awkwardly:
Meanwhile, on the ice in Boston's TD Garden, the Bruins and Capitals
were cordial in congratulating each other on a well-fought series.
Unfortunately, not all of the Bruins' fans took the loss that well.
In fact, some Boston fans, armed with Twitter accounts, unleashed a
flurry of obscenely racist statements about Ward, born in Toronto to
Barbadian parents, and the color of his skin. The website Black Sports
Online caught note,
and archived many of the hate-fueled messages. Warning: The tweets, some of which are presented below, contain repeated use of racial slurs and other vulgarities:
The jarring nature of these tweets is shocking enough. One hopes it
represents only a small fraction of the Bruins' fan base. But sadly,
what should have been remembered as one of the most gripping playoff
series in recent years, will instead by chalked up as yet another
chapter in the sorry racial history of the Boston sporting scene.
The so-called Hub of the Universe might appear to be a nest of
progressivism, but on the sporting field, Boston has been perhaps more
closed-minded than any other professional sports town. The Red Sox were
the last Major League Baseball team to sign a black player. Pumpsie
Green, a backup infielder, joined the Red Sox in 1959, a full 12 years
after Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier. (Incidentally, it
was the Bruins who signed the NHL's first black player, Willie O'Ree,
who played 43 games in the 1960-1961 season.)
Well into the 1980s, the Red Sox's black players faced segregation from their white teammates. A 2007 story in Boston magazine
recounting the city's long struggle with race and sports featured an incident that ultimately cost one player, Tommy Harper, a coaching job with the Red Sox after he retired:
Red Sox outfielder Tommy Harper had an experience similar to
Jones’s. In 1973, during spring training in Winter Haven, Florida, he
and other black players were not invited to dinners his white teammates
attended at a segregated local club. Twelve years later, while working
as a member of the Sox coaching staff, he described the incident to the
Globe. Within a year he was fired. He eventually brought a
discrimination lawsuit against the club that resulted in a settlement.
Not long afterward, Jim Rice—for years the lone black Sox
player—supposedly told a young Ellis Burks to leave the city as fast as
he could.
Over the years, many of baseball's greatest players refused to play
for the Red Sox, according to the article, including Ken Griffey Jr.,
Albert Belle, David Justice, Tim Raines, Dave Winfield and Gary
Sheffield
The article also extends the pattern to the Celtics, who under Red
Auerbach were one of the first NBA teams to feature black players. Bill
Russell recounted an incident in which vandals broke into his home in
order to defecate on his bed. Russell, one of the NBA's all-time greats,
has called Boston a "flea market of racism."
And the tweeted epithets about Ward aren't even the first instance of
Boston-bred racism impacting the D.C. sporting scene. Until the 1932
season, the NFL featured a handful of black players. By the following
year, it was an all-white league. The difference? The establishment of
the Boston Redskins by George Preston Marshall, who despite his ability
to manage a team to victory, expunged the league of its black players in
hopes of expanding what was then a northeastern and midwestern sport
into the segregated south. It wasn't until 1962 that the Redskins, by
then having moved here, finally signed their first black player, but it
was only under duress after Interior Secretary Stewart Udall told the
team that unless they integrated—well more than a decade after the rest
of the NFL—they would lose their lease on D.C. Stadium (now RFK
Stadium). The Redskins' troubled history, born in Boston,
is one reason there is a proliferation of Dallas Cowboys fans in Washington.
Getting back to the Tweets directed at Ward, some see them less as a
reaction toward the game-winning goal and more a reflection of recent
political trends, specifically the rise of the Tea Party. The Bruins'
goalie, Tim Thomas, is every bit the small-government enthusiast, once
even wearing the Gadsden flag on his helment. In January,
he was the lone member of his team to bail on the customary White House visit awarded to major sports champions, and last week, on an off day in Washington, he visited the offices of Freedom Works, a leading Tea Party group.
Speaking to The Nation's Dave Zirin,
Howard Bryant of ESPN suggested that Thomas' apparent support for the
Tea Party, a movement that sometimes features nativist overtones, gave
agency to behavior we'd rather forget:
“The goal itself wasn't particularly important.
[Barbadian-Canadian] Anson Carter was a Boston playoff hero during the
1999 playoffs. The significance of Ward's goal is that the man he beat,
Tim Thomas, has through his thinly veiled racism undermined what should
be a glorious revival of hockey in Boston. In turn, he encouraged the
revival of an attitude that people wanted to think was out of fashion. I
don't care if it was a lunatic fringe or a larger portion of the
Bruins' fan base, but Thomas by himself turned new Boston into old
Boston, and the embarrassing fan response to Ward's goal proved it.”
As I wrote at the top, one hopes those awful tweets were the thoughts
of a slim minority. Of course, as Zirin writes, racism is not strictly a
Boston thing, it's a sad reality everywhere. Instead of
celebrating an unlikely hero's late-game feats,
we're served up with a disturbing reminder that despite more than a
half-century's worth of progress, we've still got a long way to go.
Ward, for his part,
told USA Today
that while the tweets were "shocking to see," they "didn't ruin my
day." He's doing what he should—concentrating about the next round of
the playoffs.
And to blame Thomas' politics on the outbursts, as Bryant hints at,
seems a bit thin. Thomas' concerns about the scope of government or his
demurral from the White House were not a factor in the behavior he
showed in defeat last night. He, and the rest of the Bruins, showed
nothing but class in their congratulations to the Capitals and in their
postgame comments.
If only their fans were half as gracious.
