Final Rating: 3/5
To the outside world, watching hockey feels like watching a white person’s sport. Teams rarely have more than one or two players of colour, the coaches and management staff are all white and if you look around an arena you’ll see mostly white fans. Even women are far and few between. Some teams have female athletic trainers, several have female Assistant General Managers and there is an untapped market finally being looked at with a growing number of female fans. This ignores the rich history that the sport has with the black, indigenous and other peoples of colour has provided. Black Ice is a documentary that uses the non-fiction novel Black Ice: The Lost History of the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes by Darril and George Fosty as a jumping off point to look at the history of racism in hockey and the triumphs of black athletes who were able to overcome systemic barriers to reach greatness in the game and be trail blazers.
The film, directed by Hubert Davis, follows a talking heads and clips formula to interview some of the biggest black stars in hockey, on both the mens and womens side, along with pioneers, relatives of important historical figures and academics of the game. We get interviews with current NHL stars like PK Subban, Wayne Simmonds, Anthony Duclair, Darnell Nurse and Matthew Dumba, we also hear from women who represented their countries internationally in Sarah Nurse, Blake Bolden and Saroya Tinker and many other important figures. Each of the athletes share stories about how growing up they were forced to deal with acts of racism from their teammates, opponents and even parents in the stands. How coaches and other authority figures would brush off intolerance in order to not rock the boat and leagues refusing to suspend or take any sort of action to punish incidents and prevent future ones.
We get to go into communities like Parkdale, Oshawa, Preston and Halifax, which feature black populations who through recent initiatives have seen a spike in hockey registrations. You have organizations like Seaside Hockey, a GTHL team for youths that realized young black kids just were never asked if they were interested in hockey. The team is over 85% subsidized because the price of gear is cost prohibitive for many families these days (an issue affecting hockey in all demographics). We learn about the CHL, not the Canadian Hockey League, which is the biggest feeder of future NHL talent, but instead the Colored Hockey League. The CHL existed primarily in Nova Scotia consisting of a league of all black teams. From 1895 until 1930, teams, mostly ones organized by churches, would play hockey on outdoor rinks and would draw considerable paying crowds. The epicentre was Africville, a black community in Halifax, which produced some of the greatest talents. It is revealed that the CHL had the first instance of the slap shot, something that didn’t appear in the NHL until much later or the goalie being able to leave their crease to play the puck, now a mainstay in the game.
If you pay close attention to the politics of hockey, it isn’t news to you hearing about how a banana was thrown at Wayne Simmonds in London, Ontario back in 2011 when he played for the Philadelphia Flyers, or when newly drafted New York Rangers pick K’Andre Miller did a Zoom meet and greet and the chat was overwhelmed with racist comments, or Akim Aliu breaking the dam by coming forward to formally accuse former coach Bill Peters of repeatedly directing racial slurs. There is a point in the movie where up to a certain point we’ve gotten a bunch of one off stories, anecdotes about a single opposing player calling a goalie the N-word in a junior game or archival footage of Herb Carnegie talking about the time that former Toronto Maple Leafs owner Conn Smthye publicly said “I will give $10,000 to anyone who can turn Herbert Carnegie white” when it turns into a montage of how every current, former and hopeful black player in both the mens and womens side of the game has experienced it showing the true systemic nature of racism in the sport.
Overall the movie focuses more on current stars of the game and scandals that have rocked the sport in the last few years. While it is fantastic that we see interviews with the likes of Subban, Dumba, the Nurses and others, it would have been great to hear from players like Jarome Iginla, one of the greatest all time NHLers and the first black Canadian winter Olympian (regardless of sport), Val James who broke the colour barrier for the Toronto Maple Leafs (and who has an autobiography also called Black Ice) and Grant Fuhr who won five Stanley Cups in the 80’s. We are lucky to hear from Willie O’Ree who in 1957 broke the colour barrier in the NHL by suiting up for the Boston Bruins. It is an insightful film full of knowledge and a must see for anyone who hasn’t come to terms with the racism in the sport, both in the past and currently.
Black Ice was seen during the 2022 Vancouver International Film Festival. Thank you to Elevation Pictures for the screener.
