By CHAD HOLLISThe Dartmouth Staff
For most of my athletic career, I've been somewhat of an anomaly. For starters, I'm from Florida, but one of my main sports growing up was ice hockey. Even more uncommon for a hockey player, I'm black.
I've played this game since I was eight years old I consider myself a hockey player. The week after the 1997 Stanley Cup Finals, my parents bought me my first pair of ice skates. I joined my first youth league the following year.
It's hard to explain the experience of being a black hockey player. In my 14 years of hockey, I've only played with three black teammates (two are from this year's Dartmouth club hockey team) and 99 percent of the teams I played were 100 percent white.
Just imagine that you were an amazing cricket player and that you've loved the game since you were a little kid. Because there's no (good) competitive cricket in the States, you were forced to relocate to Mumbai, India to play for a boarding school.
How would you feel?
Cricket is your sport. Whenever you step onto the field, you're in your element. You love the game and you never want to stop playing, but you're very self-conscious about your surroundings. You feel the extra pressure to prove yourself because you're different than everyone around you. You think that people are judging you because of your heritage, and you're worried they've written you off before your first play.
This was my life for my entire youth hockey career.
Every time I stepped onto the ice, I would get funny looks. I was never denied the opportunity to play, but I always felt like an outsider. All of my teammates have always been very supportive, but my opponents have not always shown me the same respect.
When I was 12 years old, a player on the other team called me a "nigger" after I checked him into the boards. I'd love to say that I handled this event with dignity by telling the ref and skating back to my bench, but I instead proceeded to beat the sh*t out of the kid.
I would love to say that this was an isolated incident, but similar altercations happened throughout my youth hockey career. I'd love to say that I was able to build up a resistance to the bigotry, but each hurtful attack was met with an equally violent response. I'd love to say that these incidents ended once I played hockey for my boarding school outside of Boston, but my illusions were shattered when a kid from our rival school used that word in a heated JV contest. I'd love to say that these incidents ended once I started playing for the Dartmouth club hockey team, but I was once again disappointed when someone from the University of Southern New Hampshire told a teammate of mine that he was going to "find me a banana for after the game."
Basically, I've dealt with this sh*t for my entire life.
I would love to say that our modern American society has moved past racial profiling, but we're still a long way from truly accomplishing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream. We often have images burned into our heads of how things and people are supposed to look. CEOs are old white dudes, basketball players are black and every Asian kid we go to school with is from China and definitely good at math. I don't care who you are at one point in your life, you made an assumption about someone because of their appearance. And I'm positive that several people have made unfair assumptions about you.
If I show up to a pickup basketball game, I'll probably be picked early if the captains have never seen me ball. If I show up to a pond hockey game, I'm one of the last people chosen. I'm a terrible basketball player and a pretty decent hockey player, and I'm sorry if my skin color confuses you.
This is not a difficult problem to fix especially in the sporting world. Pioneers such as Jackie Robinson gave everyone the opportunity to play a sport that they enjoy. If we focus on the game itself and ignore the subtext generated by race, gender and culture, no one will feel excluded. If we encourage kids to try every single sport instead of pigeonholing them into games that seem race or class "appropriate," we can introduce a whole range of new sports to areas they would not reach otherwise. Most importantly, if we treat newcomers with the same warmth and support demonstrated by all of my hockey teams, each sport will have an athletic community as diverse as our country.
