The Philadelphia Flyers and Detroit Red Wings met at London, Ontario’s John Labatt Centre on Thursday night for an exhibition game. The scene at these neutral site exhibition games is often one of pure fan jubilance, but a despicable incident during the shootout would serve as an unsought reminder of one of hockey’s demons. A fan tossed a banana peel from the upper deck directly into the path of Wayne Simmonds as he skated towards the goal.
For the uninitiated, it takes a special kind of ignorant inhuman piece of shit to draw and act upon the racist connection between a banana and a black man. As much as we like to think that hockey has become a much more culturally diverse game in the last 20 years, it hasn’t. The NHL is still made up of roughly 93% white men. Hockey hasn’t shaken its label as a ‘white man’s game’ and Thursday’s incident in London called out our naivety for thinking we were beyond this type of ignorance.
