Black people have been playing hockey in Canada since the beginning of the game. They formed the Coloured Hockey League in Nova Scotia in 1895 and arguably invented the slap shot. These are some of the admittedly surprising takeaways from Black Ice, a documentary about the racism in hockey that had a hand in erasing the Black community’s presence in the game.
“That’s what intrigued me from the beginning,” says director Hubert Davis, describing his own astonishment over the buried history. “And then on the flip side of that, we had the experience of players today.”
Ahead of Black Ice’s TIFF premiere, Davis joined NOW on a Zoom call alongside producer Vinay Virmani and Toronto Six player Saroya Tinker. The latter appears in Black Ice speaking out about her own experience with anti-Black racism and her efforts to change the game by mentoring BIPOC women in sports.
Davis, Virmani and Tinker discuss the film, the experience being BIPOC in hockey, how Canadian identity is often tied up with a sport that has a tendency to exclude and how the denial of racism is fierce on and off the ice. Listen to the whole conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or the player below. Or read the edited and condensed version further down.
NOW: This realization that Black hockey was around a hundred years ago, that was the source of wanting to tell this story, right?
VV: That was the original pitch. Shout out our friend, the great Charles Officer. He gifted me [the book] Black Ice by George and Darril Fosty. He came to see me close to five years ago with a scripted idea that he wanted to do. When he told me this history, as a Canadian, I was just really confused. Why don’t we know this? Why isn’t this taught? Why isn’t this a part of our history? Why isn’t it a part of sports education [or] our curriculum in general? I just felt a lot of emotions.
As the years went by, the story just never left me. And then we looked at doing it as a documentary. Charles connected Hubert [Davis] and myself. Hubert really elevated this story and the material [by asking] how do we make it relevant to today’s audience and how do we make it about what people are talking about today; not look at the experience in hockey as isolated incidents, but a larger systemic problem. The beauty of the film is it’s taking past, present and future and really bringing all these conversations together in a cohesive way.
NOW: You get a visceral reaction when you look at at all the different ways hockey is just tied to Canadian identity. Saroya, I want to know why the hell did you end up in hockey to begin with and did you process the rejection from this sport and community as a rejection from this idea and sensibility of what is Canadian?
ST: My dad grew up playing hockey in Scarborough. He remembers being on the Scarborough bus and being called names, [people] saying he shouldn’t be playing hockey. My dad wanted to put us in the sport. I guess he saw it as a challenge. But he always told us that we were going to experience things and it should just go in one ear and out the other. Honestly, I think hockey was a piece of my identity. I always knew how to skate.
But throughout my career, there were definitely times where I hated it. I felt like I didn’t belong. I viewed it as just a job. I’m not one to quit something. I just wanted to push through and prove everybody wrong. But that just led to me being very angry.
NOW: Vinay, this is a full circle moment for us because the first time I ever talked to you, you produced a movie about Sikhs playing hockey called Breakaway. Did you feel that hockey was part of your Canadian-ness?
VV: Absolutely. And by the way, 12 years ago, when we were pitching that project around about five guys in turbans playing hockey, everybody thought we were absolutely crazy. They thought we were nuts that we would even try to make this movie. That was a broad family comedy but we were trying to talk about why hockey culture is the way it is. And now, a decade plus later, we’re still having those conversations.
Like you said, hockey is so tied into our national identity, our fabric, but, if there’s so many cultural problems within the game at every level, what does that say about us as Canadians?
NOW: Hubert, I know you for making documentaries in the basketball world. My immediate assumption about you [as a Black man] is, “He knows that he doesn’t have a place in hockey.” Am I wrong to assume that?
HD: No, not at all. I didn’t grow up playing hockey. Basketball was my thing. I think that as a director, I’m often looking at things from the outside. There’s not a lot of diversity as directors. You’re always a bit on the outside looking at something. This kind of was the same thing.
I have a really good friend of mine from university and he’s heavy into hockey. At the beginning, I was having some doubts. I was like, “Is this my thing? I didn’t grow up in the sport.” And he’s like, “No, that’s exactly why you should be making [this film]. It’s because you can look at it objectively.”
What has happened before in a lot of previous work is it’s people who are within the system of hockey who are trying to tell stories, but they’re also worried about getting their access to the sport cut off. And for them, that’s all they have. Let’s say I’m a reporter and I’m covering hockey. If I get cut off from that, I have no career. I think that code of silence that exists in the sport is something that also we wanted to be able to address and talk about.
VV: I think that really helped the project a lot. You being an outsider, not having any ties to the sport or to any particular network or the game in any way. Same here. Hockey doesn’t support my business. I’m not dependent on it to exist. And I mean that with all due respect. We wanted to tell the story how it was meant to be told and really be truthful with it.
NOW: So that’s nice for y’all. Saroya, you’re not an outsider in this world.
HD: That’s why they’re so brave, though. When I say trailblazer, I don’t take that lightly. Saroya is standing up. She has something to lose. And that is what makes it courageous.
ST: I think that’s why I do it now. Because I was at the point where I didn’t care if I didn’t have the hockey connect anymore. I went to Yale for a reason. I wanted to be a doctor. I didn’t plan to be in the hockey community. So, in that sense, I was like, “Why not just fix it before I leave, or try to fix it?” I realize that I do belong now and that there’s going to be a space that I’m creating for these girls once I leave.
NOW: Is there something about hockey that makes it more toxic than the sports world in general?
HD: I don’t know if I qualify it as toxic. I think that it’s a closed loop. There is a transparency problem that happens because you’re either inside or outside of that loop in hockey. I think when things aren’t transparent, then that’s when shit can happen; it can get covered up and people don’t want to talk about it.
VV: We at [sports platform Uninterrupted Canada] work with all different types of athletes across all sports. For some reason, when it comes to hockey, a lot of players are afraid to show their individuality. They’re afraid to speak up on various different things. It can be culture, pop culture, politics, whatever it may be. I think right from early ages, that mindset is set that nobody’s above the team. Be a team person, keep your head down. For some reason, even as we do content, I hear all these other players wanting to build their brand and try different things and explore facets of their personality. For some reason the hockey world is very closed off.
A very prominent NHL player told me once that he did a photoshoot for GQ. It was a high fashion photoshoot. He said he walked into his locker room and he did not hear the end of it; the trolling and the terrible things they were saying to him. And that’s just a small example. You can imagine if it were taking a knee or speaking up, what would those players go through? Going back to the film, hats off to every player that just opened up their heart and their soul to us in this film.
NOW: Your exploration of the hockey world becomes a metaphor for just Canada. You show us hockey as a petri dish for how Canada works and how Canada denies racism. We felt that brand of denial in recent incidents like when television personality Jess Allen called the hockey world toxic on The Social. She made a comment about her experience of the hockey world being toxic and she got this vicious reaction from the hockey community: “How dare you accuse our kids of being bullies?” Jess Allen should feel vindicated with what’s going on right now when as find out about the Hockey Canada sexual misconduct payouts.
HD: The reason why the players are coming forward to do this is to make it a better space. And that actually comes out of a deep sense of love for the game and for the environment. Because if you didn’t love hockey, then why would you try and make it better?
That’s what I think is the interesting thing. I’m Canadian. I grew up in Canada. I love Canada. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t problems that exist within Canada. Can we not even say there are some problems? Are we not allowed to address that there are any issues going on? You’re doing it because of the love for it.
I think that’s where it seems to get confused; like we’re attacking the whole thing, like I’m attacking your experience if you grew up in the world. I’m not. I’m just saying, can we look? Are we allowed to have a space that is open that we can actually even talk about it? And that’s the crazy thing. I don’t even know if we can. We’ll see when this doc comes out. Some conversations I have with people, as soon as I mention that I’m making the documentary, I just see their face glaze over. They’re just like, “I don’t want to hear about that.”
VV: Because it goes against this sense of Canadian identity that we think that we have. There’s this great line in the film. Somebody says hockey is worth saving. There’s so many amazing things about the sport. It’s a beautiful team game. I think that for new Canadians, it ultimately becomes their first access and entry point in the Canadian culture.
You referenced my film from ten years ago: Breakaway. It was a love letter from the Indian community to the game of hockey. Hockey night in Punjabi was massive. Till today, I think more Indian people love hockey than they do basketball and other sports. I genuinely love the sport. But I feel like it has to reflect our population. It has to reflect our culture.
And honestly, this film is not coming from a sense of hatred or a hit job or we want to point fingers. We’re not pointing fingers at any one institution or person. But I think it’s important, as Hubert said, that we are allowed to have these questions about something that really defines us domestically and globally.
ST: It’s been frustrating for me because I’ve seen no accountability. I think accountability and putting this movie out go hand-in-hand. The people that don’t want to watch it are the ones that don’t want to be accountable and have those uncomfortable conversations. Even when I speak out and get judged for it on my team, it’s not that I want all the attention. It’s that I want the game to be better. I want the little Black girls that I mentor to be welcomed in the sport and not get pushed out when they’re 12, 13, 14, because they feel like their teammates hate them.
NOW: Another uncomfortable situation I want to discuss: You remember the Humboldt bus crash. I was very heartened by seeing the empathy and forgiveness come from the families of the Humboldt bus crash. So what I’m about to talk about does not reflect on them. There’s a writer named Nora Loreto who was making a lot of sympathetic comments on a Twitter thread about the Humboldt bus crash. But then she also observed how much money they raised after this tragedy: $4 million at the time, which grew to $15.2 million. She gently pointed out that whiteness alongside youthfulness played a significant role when it came to how much grief, sympathy and charity were being directed at Humboldt. In comparison, when a white man killed [six] Muslim men in a mosque in Quebec, only $400,000 was raised for the victims families. She got [attacked] online for making that kind of observation.
I get that people are grieving and they’re sensitive to the timing of that comment. But again, they don’t want to address the fact that Canada reacts when it’s about hockey players. But when Muslims in a mosque are massacred, you don’t bat an eye. The way people didn’t want to even have that conversation was extremely toxic.
ST: I definitely knew about the situation. And it is true. I think there’s outpouring of support for the white community within hockey. They do stand behind each other. But the moment you reach out and want to include a different culture or include something that’s outside the norm, it’s just shut down. It’s not talked about. You don’t even get to have the conversation. In terms of the Humboldt situation, obviously it’s amazing the amount of money they raised. But at the same time, if we could raise that amount of money to have Black kids play hockey and be able to afford equipment for the remainder of their career, I think that that’s what we’re aiming to do.
VV: What I really was amazed by in this film is the players that we’re following. They are almost rebuilding this game and breaking down barriers themselves from a grassroots level without much institutional support. They don’t have big sponsors, big leagues, high profile individuals. I went to Saroya’s camp. I saw what she’s doing with Saroya Strong Black Girls Hockey Club. I went to Hakeem Olajuwon’s camp, Seaside Hockey, and Wayne Simmonds’s camp. They’re doing it themselves. That was so incredible to see. Hats off to all you guys that are like, screw it, we don’t need the institutions. It’s just so beautiful how you guys are trying to break down those barriers economically, socially, politically and really the way that they’re welcoming people of different nationalities, people from different economic areas into the game is really, really beautiful. And I hope that really shines in the film.
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