The NHL is botching Pride Night on every level
Pro sports leagues are having trouble even paying lip service to tolerance.
Dear readers,
This is the final Sunday before our favorite sport, baseball, begins its regular season. And while the season itself is still going to be long —162 games long, to be exact — each one of those contests is likely to be significantly shorter thanks to the league's new pitch clock, which is being introduced at the Major League level for the first time this season.
The pitch clock is among a whole host of rule changes that MLB has made this season, but it has been the most divisive. If you’d like our extended take on the change, you can check this piece that Calder wrote for POLITICO Nightly, but which could just as easily have been published in Southpaw itself.
Long story short, we’d say this: stop whining. It’s still going to be baseball.
Today, though, we’ve got to dive back into NHL teams having a lot of trouble with carrying out normal Pride Nights. Hope you enjoy, and as always let us know if you have any comments/questions/complaints.
-Ian and Calder
Why is this so hard?
NHL teams and players just can’t seem to figure out Pride Nights. Meant as well-meaning (if somewhat robotic) shows of support for LGBTQ players and fans, these annual events should unfold like every other promotion schtick that sports teams do every year: a pre-game ceremony takes place, the players wear some colorful gear, and everyone smiles through it.
Yet for some reason, the NHL continues to get in its own way. For the past few years, some team or player has caused an uproar by making a very public show of opting out of wearing rainbow colored jerseys or refusing to wrap their stick in rainbow tape. This year, the main offenders were the Minnesota Wild, who had second thoughts after flying in Jack Jablonski, a former hockey player who is openly gay (and also partially paralyzed after an accident), to participate in Pride Night. With Jablonski already in attendance, they essentially canceled their Pride Night, with Jablonski making the meager gesture of showing off a Pride jersey to the crowd.
The New York Rangers followed the Wild’s lead in tripping over their own feet. After announcing a Pride Night of their own, the team abruptly canceled a major plank of the evening, with players all wearing their regular warmup jerseys rather than Pride jerseys during warmups on Jan. 27.
And that’s not all. Philadelphia Flyers defenseman Ivan Provorov sat out of all of his team’s Pride Night activities, staying in the locker room during warmups and telling reports after the game, “I respect everybody, and I respect everybody’s choices. My choice is to stay true to myself and my (Russian Orthodox) religion.”
All of this sounds like pretty standard anti-LGBTQ bile, and much of it is. But by once again indulging its more homophobic players, the NHL has also accidentally waded into an even more significant geopolitical issue — and one that has potentially weightier consequences than tolerating garden-variety homophobia.
Earlier this year, the Vladimir Putin’s government issued a statement reminding Russians that it is “illegal to spread ‘propaganda’ about ‘nontraditional sexual relations’ in all media, including social, advertising and movies.” The NHL — and all of the teams listed above — have a significant number of Russian players on their roster, some of whom participated in the Pride Night events without raising a stink. But among the ones who didn’t, a question lingers: Whose edicts were they actually following? Those of their conscience, or those of the Kremlin’s?
Now, we don’t want to suggest that Russian players who wear pride jerseys would seriously risk receiving a knock on their door in the middle of the night, only to show up a few months later in a Siberian gulag a la Brittney Griner. But as Russia’s war in Ukraine drags into its second year, bucking Pride Nights provides Kremlin-sympathetic athletes with a two-for-one deal of sorts: throw a bone to social conservatives in the United States while at the same time signaling your fidelity to Putin back home. By going along with it, these teams may have unwittingly played into Russia’s hand.
This whole recent incident, though, serves to highlight the weird place that Pride Nights and other apparently “socially conscious” promotions play in the social politics of professional sports. Pride Nights were presumably designed to signal the league’s support for LGBTQ players and fans, but they have come instead to highlight the homophobia of a small number of players (and, incidentally, the spinelessness of the league and its owners).
Meanwhile, social conservatives in the U.S. point to events like Pride Nights to argue that liberal “woke” ideology (or whatever the term de jure is) has infected America and its corporations, and that once sacred (read: conservative) institutions are no longer safe. But ironically, the repeated debacles over Pride Night prove that these social conservatives have things exactly backwards. The events require the most minuscule and perfunctory forms of participation from athletes, and yet when a handful of players refuse to comply, the teams immediately have their back.
Contrast this treatment to how professional sports leagues approach displays of “patriotism” (i.e. pro-military propaganda.) Players and fans are required to “honor our nation’s troops'' at least once — and often twice or even three times — every game, and yet the prospect of a team canceling even one of these displays due to resistance from a few players is unthinkable. On the extremely rare occasion that a player even intimates that he may be skeptical of the use of America’s military might abroad, he is swiftly and summarily banished, personally humiliated, and professionally destroyed. Just ask Colin Kaepernick.
This is the real power of cultural hegemony — that people who do harbor views that run counter the status quo simply shut up and keep to themselves — and in American sports, that power still firmly belongs to the conservative elements. The Minnesota Wild were willing to trot out a gay player to broadcast their tolerance, but they were also willing to abandon him after the situation became even a tiny bit politically messy. That’s cultural power. Anything that would actually require the league to put its neck on the line for queer people — like, for example, speaking out against the authoritarianism of the Russian government — is dismissed out of hand.
We’re not asking players to risk jail-time for a photo op, which remains a legitimate possibility under Putin. But in a strange way, the decision to truly put yourself and your stated values of tolerance on the line — by the league, teams, and players — could turn Pride Night into more than just lip service. Instead, we’re left with events that feel more hollow than ever.
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