Adam Proteau writes a letter to hockey fans 25 years from now about what’s been happening with Pride nights in the NHL recently.
Dear 2048 Hockey Fan,
Hello from 25 years ago. This is a column from an era different from yours. Wanted to talk to you about a couple things – things that probably seem not at all controversial to you but were up for debate at the time this was written.
Mainly, I’m talking about LGBTQ+ and minority representation in hockey. It must seem crazy to you now that the NHL was embroiled in a Pride night issue, in which some players and teams quietly backed away from part of their celebrations of inclusivity. But it happened multiple times in 2023, and consequently, progressive-minded people in this era were upset that a pretty straightforward (pardon the pun) philosophy of inclusion was being undermined for a variety of reasons.
As some of the NHL’s Russian players declined to wear Pride jerseys or helmet decals in the 2022-23 regular season due to anti-LGBTQ+ laws in that country, some others have used their religious beliefs to withdraw from Pride jersey warmups. The latest example before I wrote you this letter was that of Russian forward Denis Gurianov, who turned down the Pride game sweater in warmup before the Canadiens’ April 6 game against Washington, citing “family reasons,” possibly due to the uncertainty of the anti-LGBTQ+ laws. There almost certainly will be more examples after the time this column is published.
However, 2048 Hockey Fan, you probably know by now that the tacit rejection of Pride games by some NHL players was something that reflected more and more poorly as the years have gone by. We’ve had different forms of bias in the generations before us and occasionally still with us. In 2023, for example, many of us could not fathom how professional hockey held back non-Caucasian men in the early-to-mid-20th century strictly because of the color of their skin. But it was true, and it was a microcosm of the society that supported the hockey industry at that time. Hate and ignorance flourished until enough people spoke up and supported ideas of equality and balance in our world.
That’s what I’m expecting to see 25 years after I write these words. As a hockey culture, we’re better in 2023 than we were in 1998, and we were a better hockey culture in 1998 than we were in 1973. But don’t take that to mean we had a perfect civilization. Far from it. Acts of abject racism still took place in 2022-23, such as slurs and racist gestures. But most of us had no tolerance for that type of garbage. The pushback against racism became more forceful until even a hint of that behavior had serious consequences.
Your generation in 2048 will experience the same feelings. Your generation will be better than mine, and the generations that follow you will be better than you were. That’s just the natural life cycle of generations. There’s always a push forward. Any attempt at going in the other direction quickly dies on the vine.
The NHLers who chose not to participate in Pride events had every right to their beliefs when I wrote this. But they were part of an ever-shrinking element of 2023 society. As Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” And inclusion is just. Your generation undoubtedly understands this, to the point you and many of your fellow 2048 hockey fans have a hard time believing anyone would argue otherwise.
I’m not here to tell you all the people whose actions pushed against inclusivity were villains. To be sure, people can be wrong and have good intentions. That’s always been true, no matter what era we’re talking about, no matter what subject we’re talking about. And it probably took too long to get hockey culture to the point it was today, in 2023. But we did make headway, year-by-year, person-by-person. We did not back down and abandon vulnerable human beings when it became clear we weren’t doing a good enough job to make the sport feel safe and welcome for them. At long last, we finally figured out that a rising tide lifts all boats, and as a result, hockey got better at including people from all corners of our world. Xenophobia was compartmentalized into smaller and smaller compartments.
Wherever you are, I hope you’re enjoying hockey in 2048. You undoubtedly have a new generation of Connor McDavids and Connor Bedards as next-level superstars, just as generations prior to 2023 had our Wayne Gretzkys and Mario Lemieuxs who led the way on the ice. But the best part about the future of hockey, and society in general, is that the arc of the universe always points to the proper part of the moral spectrum. And one day, you’ll be saying the same thing to a new generation of hockey fans.
That’s progress, and progress only moves in one direction.