The Olympic Games are a beautiful thing. There are only, to my knowledge, two arenas in which all countries can regularly come together and depart without coming to blows. The Olympics are one such arena (hockey fights and curling controversies excepted), and the United Nations is the other. Thankfully, I am not paid to write about the goings-on of the latter.
But I would have been a fool to think that people would not want to discuss the supposed political ramifications of the United States Hockey
Team winning a Gold medal over Canada, our next-latitude neighbors to their north. I feel no such sting about our team winning Gold. I was happy beyond belief especially for Jack Hughes in that moment, someone whose career I have always watched intently as a Devils fan and a writer for this site.
All About the Jersey has a few rules. They were largely written ten years or longer ago by the site’s founder and my direct predecessor, John Fischer. One such rule reads:
No politics, religion, science, “big” subjects. This is a Devils blog, those topics are not up for general discussion, and so this is not the right forum for them. Very rarely, they may be involved with something surrounding the Devils – but this site is not your personal soapbox for that. This is far easier done than said with a little effort. I do it, so will you.
As I noted in a comment thread earlier today, this situation has begun to fall under the category of “Very rarely, they may be involved with something surrounding the Devils,” and I now have to say more words about it than I want to.
Perhaps it was an oversight for Team USA GM Bill Guerin to invite the FBI Director to the Team USA locker room after the win. But let’s be honest: he’s been at a ton of hockey games throughout his adult life and has been closely following big hockey events for awhile here. His attendance of the game did not come out of left field, and it was very predictable if you remember the Ovechkin all-time goal scoring chase. That said, maybe Bill Guerin should be asked about that before the players on his team. As GM, he should be serving as the head of their public relations outreach for any events surrounding their victory and not just a coordinator behind closed doors. If he’s letting his players take heat from non-hockey media sources without saying something, I have a problem with him for that.
What is even less surprising and not even at all out of the ordinary is the men’s team getting a call from the sitting President of the United States after their win. Did the President make an inappropriate comment about the women’s team during the phone call? Yes. But I would have expected any President of the United States to be on the phone with that team in the aftermath of the game, giving congratulations if they were not able to be in attendance in person. If media has an issue with the comments, they should probably direct their concerns to the person who made them. Or, if they have issues with the politics of any politician, they are certainly free to do more coverage of what people in government are doing, for good or ill.
Thankfully, the New Jersey Devils have a very smart young man in Jack Hughes, who said this when asked about him thinking about Megan Keller, his fellow American Golden Goal scorer, after he had won the game in overtime:
“If there’s a camera on me and Quinn when the women’s team won, we’d look like the biggest superfans of all time. We were just jumping up and down. We couldn’t believe it. And we locked in, said goodbye because we had a game the next night. It was late, and we sprinted out of there. But I remember I saw Megan in the caf. I think it was the night we beat Slovakia, a night after they won the gold medal and we were just waiting for food and we were talking. I was just like, Megan, I’m so proud of you. I’m so happy for you. You know, couldn’t have happened to a better person. And, obviously, you know, when mine went in I’m just like: so many things, thoughts, and, you know, one of my first thoughts was her. I’m just, like, so proud to join her as a gold medalist.”
He also said on Good Morning America before losing the microphone feed:
On top of that, I know that there’s been, like, so much headlines about us and the women’s hockey team and you know, the video, but we hung out, like we were in the cafeteria with them at 3:30 in the morning…
Just like Bill Guerin should have stepped in to handle questions for his players at this point, I would greatly appreciate it if Tom Fitzgerald started making statements to deflect some attention from Jack. But if your bosses don’t have you, sometimes an outspoken parent has you. Ellen Hughes, who was one of the guiding hands behind the women’s Gold victory, did not really take the issue head-on and instead spoke about the team’s unity.
At the end of the day, it’s just about the country, and the moment that these players — both the men and the women — can bring so much unity to a group and to a country: people that cheered on that don’t watch hockey, people that have politics on one side or on the other side, and that’s all both the men’s team and the women’s team care about. If you could see what we see from the inside and the men and women sharing, you know dorms, dorm rooms and halls and floors and the camaraderie and the synergy and the way the women cheered on the men and the way the men cheered on the women, that’s what it’s all about. And the other things, they cannot control. They care about humanity, unity, and they care about the country.
I think that everything said by the Hughes family throughout the last couple of days has aligned very well with their history of talking about hockey as a place for everyone to come together. Some people have recently reposted Jack Hughes’s comments from a couple years ago about the team’s Pride Night initiatives when some teams around the league were doing away with their Pride events.
The team I play for, the Devils, we really support that and we’re a really welcoming organization. So, I think a bunch of the guys on our team were looking forward to that and obviously with how we grew up, my family really supports that too. I can’t speak for other teams, but I know in New Jersey that’s a night everyone on our team was really welcoming and they know it’s really important. It wasn’t even a thought about not doing it for us.
A year earlier, his older brother Quinn had this to say about the Vancouver Canucks’s Pride Night. But why do I assemble all of these statements from the Hughes family? From those comments that the Hughes brothers made around their team Pride Nights about hockey being for everyone, to the comments Jack Hughes made talking about the brotherhood of the USA Hockey program, to their responses to the questions about the women’s team over the past couple of days, the Hughes family has always endorsed a message of hockey as a unifier. But you’re going to see people spin today’s events in a couple of different ways.
One way is that Team USA’s visit to the White House makes them feel like hockey is not for them. They have different beliefs from, apparently, many of the players and their visits to the White House and the State of the Union signify that even further. If that applies to you, I ask, what were you going to do if your team won a Stanley Cup? They’re going to visit the White House. And while Americans tend to get tired of their Presidents a lot faster than their terms expire, we only have those elections every four years. Whether or not hockey is a place for everyone shouldn’t be influenced by the temporal powers that be.
Another way these events may be spun is that the players attending is a victory for one side of the political aisle. To that, I think the players’ value in the political arena is being very overestimated among some writers in the media. Nobody is getting some massive swing of approval or disapproval based on their bringing the players to do an event to celebrate their Gold medal victory. People are going to continue forming their political opinions based on the lives they live. These players are not attending any event in Washington D.C. to send any kind of “message” to anyone.
I think that the Gold medalists should continue to do events to celebrate their Gold medal victory. I would very much enjoy it if the New Jersey Devils and the State of New Jersey organized some way to honor Jack’s Gold medal victory. Since Jack also has a history of wanting to inspire the next generation of hockey players, it might be a good opportunity to promote youth hockey in New Jersey. Jack is already an inspiration to them.
For now, they’re just going to Washington D.C. to be honored for their victory. Some kids are going to see that and want that to be them one day. Hockey does not often get its moment in the sun. If the Mayor of New York can go to a very ideologically-opposed White House after an election victory, I think it’s reasonable that the Olympic Hockey team can visit the White House after winning Gold. Every American Gold Medalist should be honored publicly this year, nationally and locally.
And honestly, I would be surprised if they stayed for the entirety of the State of the Union. I won’t comment on any of what may or may not be said at said event, but I will venture to be so political as to say that I think politicians who thought these speeches should be short had it right. If this speech gets up to two, two-and-a-half, or three hours…I don’t expect it to keep the interest of a bunch of jetlagged and party-recovering hockey players. Most of these guys probably don’t keep up with the news much, and I’d bet that some of them haven’t even voted yet. I don’t even watch the State of the Union, and I am a very opinionated person. These players are going there to be honored for winning Gold, and for nothing else.
Team USA did not win Gold over Team Canada to make a political statement. They won because they were making a statement on the ice. They won because many of them grew up playing hockey in international competitions and may have even grown up playing on some of the same teams, and have been at this for years and years and years, and this was the biggest international stage they have ever gotten to play on.
After they won, the team didn’t start making political statements on the ice. They went up to the crowd to take Johnny Gaudreau’s kids onto the ice for a photo after skating their father’s jersey around the rink. They could not wait to honor their friend and teammate.
But even if Team USA lost in the final to Canada, the Olympics would no less show the beauty of everyone getting together. When Team USA wasn’t playing, I was rooting for Nico Hischier and Team Switzerland, for Simon Nemec and Team Slovakia, and for Jesper Bratt and Team Sweden when I could. Those players got to feel the love from their home countries at the Olympics, too.
If Team USA lost on Sunday, I would have went, well, that was good hockey. That’s how I felt after the Four Nations loss. I didn’t get all too upset that Canada won then. It was a great show of countries coming together and playing great hockey games for the entertainment and togetherness of all. The Olympics were that on an even bigger scale. After watching so many games, I was thrilled that our team won the Olympic Gold. I was thrilled for Jack and thrilled for the players on the ice, and I was thrilled for the fans like me who were watching that game.
Don’t let politics twist it for you, one way or the other. Save your political energy for the arenas and situations where it makes sense to share it. If you are upset about the happenings in America and the world at large, there are far better and more effective avenues to pursue change than debating the political ramifications of hockey players going for a ceremonial tour.
Let’s get back to hockey here.
