Need A Reason To Love Hockey? The NHL Puts Woke On Ice!
I have always loved hockey, but of the three major sports the NHL is the baby of the family. The NFL is the big brother, MLB is the middle child and then there is the often forgotten, underappreciated NHL.
Yet, like the youngest child of many families that surprises everyone and rises to a challenge, the NHL has drawn a line in the ice on wokeism. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. The NHL consists of some of the toughest athletes on the planet. The players get cut, break bones lose teeth, etc. they head to the locker room, get patched up and end up playing the rest of the game. Toughness has always been the underlying quality of hockey. I don’t know of anyone that would argue that the Stanley Cup is the most difficult championship to win. In order to win the Cup a team has to win 16 games.
Unlike the NFL, that has gone through its kneeling player stage and advanced to its messages on player’s helmets and in the endzone stage. Definitely, unlike MLB that has recently seen both the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Anaheim Angels desert their fans by bringing in drag queens to mock established religions. The NHL players raised enough hell during this past season for Commissioner Gary Bettman to take a stand.
This past week Bettman announced that the league Will Not ask its players to wear rainbow-colored jerseys on “pride” nights next season. The decision came when numerous players and teams refused to participate this past year.
In an interview with Elliotte Friedman of Sportsnet, Bettman said:
“It’s taking away from the fact that all of our clubs, in some form or another, host nights in honor of various groups or causes, and we’d rather them continue to get the appropriate attention that they deserve and not be a distraction.”
Bettman went on to clarify that players will not be required to dress up for any cause or occasion. Which is a good call. People use sports as an escape, a chance to avoid the division that politics creates. When leagues allow political ideals to bleed into their events, it weakens the bond between the fans and their love of the games. Especially when it is something as polarizing as pride nights that celebrate ad nauseum a miniscule part of the American population.
I hope the NFL, MLB, and all sports, at all levels, take a page out of the NHL’s playbook. Sports already consists of competition, which can create a certain degree of angst between opposing fans. Highlighting woke ideals will only further enflame and create additional resentment.
The truth is that so-called pride nights, months, days, hours, minutes, or whatever, need to be eliminated. There are many other worthwhile causes that could be highlighted, rather than placing a small number of perverted narcissists on some sort of pedestal. The disgusting thing about this group is that not only do many of them want to deny who and what they are, but they want you to believe they are persecuted. Persecution does not consist of simply saying NO to having your beliefs shoved down our throats.
I’m a hockey fan, (Let’s Go Pens) and I hope you will become one as well. Show them that integrity still stands for something.
