Crossing the Blue Line

Wayne Simmonds of the Philadelphia Flyers (left) tussles with Sean Avery (right) of the New York Rangers.

Wayne Simmonds is a professional hockey player (a right winger) for the Philadelphia Flyers who is about to play his fourth season in the National Hockey League.  Mr. Simmonds is 6' 2", 185 pounds, 23 years old, will make $1.5 million this season and hails from Scarborough, Ontario.  Nothing about Mr. Simmonds is exceptional in the NHL except for one thing:  Wayne Simmonds is black.

There were 29 black players in the NHL last season, an average of less than one per team.  The (former) Atlanta Thrashers had the most with four.  Many of those players were bi-racial.  29 black players out of approximately 700 total players in the NHL.

Mr. Simmonds was the centre of a racial controversy in the hockey world last week when a fan in London, Ontario threw a banana peel in front of Simmonds as he attempted a shot in a shoot-out.  He avoided the banana peel and scored a goal.  Media outlets all over North America immediately played up the story.  Simmonds took the high road and only expressed surprise it happened in Canada.

If you Google "Wayne Simmonds & banana," you will find about 900 news articles written about the racial incident directed at Mr. Simmonds in the past week.

Sean Avery is a professional hockey player (a left winger) who plays for the New York Rangers who is about to play his twelfth season in the NHL.  Mr. Avery is 5' 10", 195 pounds, 31 years of age, will be (over) paid $4 million in the final year of his contract and grew up in North York, Ontario - the same province as Mr. Simmonds.

Sean Avery - the pest every hockey fan loves to hate.

Avery is what is known in hockey as a "pest" or "agitator."  Unlike most agitators in the NHL, Mr. Avery has also been known to score the occasional goal.  He has reached double digits in goals scored - 10 or more - five times.  But it's Avery's mouth, not his goal scoring, for which he is most famous.  Or infamous.

Most infamously, Avery walked into the visitors' locker room in Calgary, Alberta in December of 2008 and asked the reporters in the room to gather around him.  He told them he wanted to make a statement.  Avery had previously dated Canadian actress Elisha Cuthbert (24), and she was then dating Defenceman Dion Phaneuf - a star player on the hometown Calgary Flames.  After he had everyone's undivided attention, Avery told the assembled media the following:

"I'm just going to say one thing. I'm really happy to be back in Calgary; I love Canada. I just want to comment on how it's become like a common thing in the NHL for guys to fall in love with my sloppy seconds. I don't know what that's about, but enjoy the game tonight."

Ouch.  If a player like Avery, who is primarily paid to be a pest - get under the skin of an opponent  - is willing to say something like that in public to a large media gathering, imagine what he is capable of saying out on the ice to try and get an opposing player off their game.  The NHL suspended Avery six games for the crude remarks.

So it was a little ironic this week, when the Philadelphia Flyers and New York Rangers met in an exhibition game, that Wayne Simmonds, not Sean Avery, got into hot water during a trash-talking scrum by calling Avery a "faggot" during the game (Avery has been an outspoken proponent of gay marriage in New York).

Trash-talking to try and distract an opponent is a long tradition in most professional sports, and the NHL is certainly no exception.  Only this time the homophobic slur was apparently heard live on the TV broadcast and it was so easy to read Simmonds' lips that they were blurred out in Canada on that evening's hockey highlights and news broadcasts.

Just a week after the banana peel incident, Simmonds was now on the other side of the racial/hate debate.  And to make Avery, who regularly is voted by hockey fans as the most hated player in the NHL, look even remotely sympathetic is no small feat.

So the debate became in today's politically correct world, in which every word from every public figure is scrutinized, is it too much to ask of our athletes to keep p.c. in the heat of battle?  I don't believe for a moment that Simmonds is homophobic, or that Avery is a racist, but that word was the quickest thing Simmonds could think of to get back at Avery.

On the other hand, as the rarest of beings in the NHL - a black player - should Simmonds have been even more aware of not making disparaging remarks about another minority group?  After all, the only thing more rare than a black player in the NHL is an openly gay player.  There aren't any.  Never have been.  Notice I'm saying openly gay, not just gay.  I'm sure there are gay players in the NHL.  Dozens.  But in the macho, testosterone-driven world of professional sports, they are forced to stay in the closest - just as they are in baseball, basketball and football.

In the abstract, I really don't care what professional athletes do or how they behave.  Juice up all you want on steroids, beat up your wives and girlfriends, drive drunk and kill your dogs.  I think it's crazy to look at professional athletes as any kind of role models just because of their proficiency in sports.  All it means when a guy can hit a ball a long way is that he can hit a ball a long way.  That's it.  Nothing less and nothing more.

The problem I have is when their bad behavior - the steroids and racial and homophobic trash-talking, etc. - trickles down below them to the Junior leagues, the high school leagues and then the youth leagues.

In other words, whatever hate speech players like Avery and Simmonds are using in the heat of the moment to gain an edge over an opponent - and many of these derogatory words that we never utter in polite society are freely spoken dozens of times throughout an NHL hockey game - the kids are going to pick up on and use as well.

And that - just like making Sean Avery look sympathetic - is not good for the game.