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:
Joel Ward gets Chocolate City through to the second round of the NHL playoffs. They'll face New Jersey or Florida, who play Game 7 tomorrow.
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.
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