A history of racist incidents (and false alarms) in hockey...

Canadiens1958

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Nov 30, 2007
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Food Concessions

Most minor hockey arenas have a "Health Food" section as part of the food concession - apples, oranges and bananas are staples. So the bananas may have been available on site.

Also arenas tend to sell beer, which at times is not a good mix with hockey.
 

vadim sharifijanov

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Oct 10, 2007
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I'm one Canadian who doesn't. "Out of touch" is about the politest thing you could say.


How about "chicken Swede"? Attributing a characteristic to a "race" of people is the definition of racism.

count me as another canadian, among many i might add, who doesn't begin to give cherry a free pass on his xenophobic bs.

as for "chicken swede," "heartless russian," etc., it is regrettable but i don't think it's racist, as i alluded to earlier in this thread. the idea being that these derogatory terms seem to suggest that if tomas sandstrom or alex kovalev had been raised in north america (see: alex steen, paul stastny, etc.), they would be courageous heart and soul players. the failure here is implied to be a product of culture and environment, not some kind of innate racial inferiority* as is implied by the three examples of anti-semitism listed upthread, or the abominations leveled at simmonds, brashear, and others.


* as someone who is not a racist, i can only speculate what goes through these people's minds. but it seems the distinction might be that race is conflated with a very ignorant understanding of genetics and biology, whereas the criticisms of european players is, again, an environmental deficiency. both are obviously awful, but i think the former is more awful than the latter for what it's worth.
 

Big Phil

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Nov 2, 2003
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I myself love Cherry, sure he has overstepped the boundaries of political correctness. But keep in mind he has been on air for 31 years, since 1980. The stuff he said in the early 1990s or the 1980s are a different time. Could he say "Chicken Swede" nowadays? Not sure, but I don't remember him trying it lately.

I think Don's patriotism actually gets held against him a bit if you can believe it. Canadians for some reason are afraid to be proud about things. I think Don's idea of a Canadian player is that of pride. I don't think you are far off at all when you suggest there is an extra gear in the hearts of Canadian players, the Conn Smythe Trophy results are a reflection of this. So I think sometimes his emphasis on Canadians gets held against him and sometimes the fact that he's loyal to Canadians bothers people
 

TheDevilMadeMe

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I myself love Cherry, sure he has overstepped the boundaries of political correctness. But keep in mind he has been on air for 31 years, since 1980. The stuff he said in the early 1990s or the 1980s are a different time. Could he say "Chicken Swede" nowadays? Not sure, but I don't remember him trying it lately.

I think Don's patriotism actually gets held against him a bit if you can believe it. Canadians for some reason are afraid to be proud about things. I think Don's idea of a Canadian player is that of pride. I don't think you are far off at all when you suggest there is an extra gear in the hearts of Canadian players, the Conn Smythe Trophy results are a reflection of this. So I think sometimes his emphasis on Canadians gets held against him and sometimes the fact that he's loyal to Canadians bothers people

Conn Smythes since the lockout:

2006: Cam Ward (Canada)
2007: Scott Niedermayer (Canada)
2008: Henrik Zetterberg (Sweden)
2009: Evgeni Malkin (Russia)
2010: Jonathan Toews (Canada)
2011: Tim Thomas (United States)
 

Iain Fyffe

Hockey fact-checker
as for "chicken swede," "heartless russian," etc., it is regrettable but i don't think it's racist, as i alluded to earlier in this thread.
That's the problem with the term racist, since "race" is not something that's actually well defined. Using the biological sense as I understand it, Swedish people collectively could be considered a race, because there is not a hard definition of what does and does not constitute one.

So sure, if you want to say he's bigoted towards certain groups of people rather than he's a racist, I'd go for that. But it's really the same thing.
 

JaysCyYoung

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In the 46 year history of the award the Conn Smythe Trophy has been won by a Canadian 41 times (89.1%). That's a rather significant percentage in spite of recent trends.
 

BillyShoe1721

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In the 46 year history of the award the Conn Smythe Trophy has been won by a Canadian 41 times (89.1%). That's a rather significant percentage in spite of recent trends.

And for over half of his existence, the league was essentially Canadians with a few Americans, and a very small group of Europeans mixed in.
 

DetRedWings109*

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I'm one Canadian who doesn't. "Out of touch" is about the politest thing you could say.


How about "chicken Swede"? Attributing a characteristic to a "race" of people is the definition of racism.

Thats not racist! They are all WHITE! Caucasian. The word you are looking for is xenophobia.
 

tjcurrie

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Aug 4, 2010
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Who really cares about the chincy stuff like Cherry using terms like "chicken Swede" etc. When you compare that to some of the other bigger issues that's nothing. Cherry's a great personality like him or not and lots of what he says gets taken out of context or made a bigger deal of than what it is.
 

vadim sharifijanov

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Oct 10, 2007
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That's the problem with the term racist, since "race" is not something that's actually well defined. Using the biological sense as I understand it, Swedish people collectively could be considered a race, because there is not a hard definition of what does and does not constitute one.

So sure, if you want to say he's bigoted towards certain groups of people rather than he's a racist, I'd go for that. But it's really the same thing.

well it is true that race is just as much of a cultural construction as nationality. but my point was that there is a different suggestion between racism and cultural xenophobia.

i.e., a canadian criticizing a swedish player because he is swedish suggests that the very same individual, raised under difference circumstances (say, in canada), would be braver.

on the other hand, a white person throwing a banana at an afro-canadian player suggests that there is something irredeemably wrong with that player because of the colour of his skin, that there is no alternative social or cultural situation where that player could be as worthy of respect or concern as a white player.

one also notes, looking at the history of racism in north america, that prejudice against caucasian foreigners by mainstream white anglo-saxon protestants is usually based on culture-- even in the cases where the caucasian foreigner could reasonably be considered "ethnic" (polish, irish, e.g.), these prejudices have historically been shown to accept the "normalization" of these immigrant groups' second and third generations into mainstream north american culture. a familiar "melting-pot" story: once the strzeminski family changes its name to smith, all is forgiven.

on the other hand, the enduring racism against african-americans and afro-canadians seems to regard these groups as something less than human-- the same could be said of hispanics in the united states, and very definitely first nations people in canada.

even if we abstain from judging whether one is worse than the other, they are different kinds of prejudices, NOT the same thing.
 

Dennis Bonvie

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Dec 29, 2007
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count me as another canadian, among many i might add, who doesn't begin to give cherry a free pass on his xenophobic bs.

as for "chicken swede," "heartless russian," etc., it is regrettable but i don't think it's racist, as i alluded to earlier in this thread. the idea being that these derogatory terms seem to suggest that if tomas sandstrom or alex kovalev had been raised in north america (see: alex steen, paul stastny, etc.), they would be courageous heart and soul players. the failure here is implied to be a product of culture and environment, not some kind of innate racial inferiority* as is implied by the three examples of anti-semitism listed upthread, or the abominations leveled at simmonds, brashear, and others.


* as someone who is not a racist, i can only speculate what goes through these people's minds. but it seems the distinction might be that race is conflated with a very ignorant understanding of genetics and biology, whereas the criticisms of european players is, again, an environmental deficiency. both are obviously awful, but i think the former is more awful than the latter for what it's worth.

Cherry hasn't used those terms for quite some time.

And you're correct, with him its the environment and culture, not the nationality.

What people also miss is that Cherry's comments are always in the context of hockey. Saying Europeans and French guys wear shields more than Canadians and Americans is only the truth. I wouldn't be upset if european hockey commentators said Canadians are overly violent because they fight and are more likely to try to crush an opponent rather than take the puck away. Its the way it is in most cases.
 

Human Thumb*

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Who really cares about the chincy stuff like Cherry using terms like "chicken Swede" etc. When you compare that to some of the other bigger issues that's nothing. Cherry's a great personality like him or not and lots of what he says gets taken out of context or made a bigger deal of than what it is.

so it's an objective fact that he's a great personality?
 

quoipourquoi

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Jan 26, 2009
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In the 46 year history of the award the Conn Smythe Trophy has been won by a Canadian 41 times (89.1%). That's a rather significant percentage in spite of recent trends.

And how many of those Canadian winners and probable European runners-up do people actually have a problem with? One? Where Sergei Fedorov finished 8th in playoff scoring?
 

Claimed Off Waivers

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In 1990, Alpo Suhonen, a former coach of the Finnish national hockey team and co-architect of the Winnipeg Jets' remarkable turnaround that season was the brunt of an attack by Hockey Night in Canada commentator Don Cherry, who likened his Finnish name to a brand of dog food and said Suhonen was taking work away from Canadian coachs. The Jets called Cherry's comments racist and threatened to sue. Cherry threatened a countersuit and the issue eventually died. Cherry also said Calgary defenceman Frank Musil, who was Czech, had a named that sounded like “a laxative.â€

And this moron still has a job on CBC. :shakehead
 

Canadiens1958

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Don Cherry

count me as another canadian, among many i might add, who doesn't begin to give cherry a free pass on his xenophobic bs.

as for "chicken swede," "heartless russian," etc., it is regrettable but i don't think it's racist, as i alluded to earlier in this thread. the idea being that these derogatory terms seem to suggest that if tomas sandstrom or alex kovalev had been raised in north america (see: alex steen, paul stastny, etc.), they would be courageous heart and soul players. the failure here is implied to be a product of culture and environment, not some kind of innate racial inferiority* as is implied by the three examples of anti-semitism listed upthread, or the abominations leveled at simmonds, brashear, and others.


* as someone who is not a racist, i can only speculate what goes through these people's minds. but it seems the distinction might be that race is conflated with a very ignorant understanding of genetics and biology, whereas the criticisms of european players is, again, an environmental deficiency. both are obviously awful, but i think the former is more awful than the latter for what it's worth.

Once Don Cherry stumbled onto his TV gig after proving that he was not much of a coach, he quickly realized that his success would come from pandering to the lowest common denominator in the audience. Entertainment = eyeballs. Say what others may think but are afraid to spout and you will build a following, seems to be Don Cherry's TV personna.

As for some of the phrases quoted above, Don Cherry's Canadian forefathers used the adjective "chicken" and worse to describe the anti-conscription forces during WWII and the American Draft dodgers who came to Canada during the Viet Nam conflict. Given the same circumstances today Don Cherry would be using the same expressions to describe Canadians and Americans or others.

The "heartless" adjective is somewhat interesting, translated into Russian or other eastern European languages "бессердечный" has been used to describe warriors from the past that showed no mercy or pity to the enemy. Boris Mikhailov would definitely fit the Russain definition.

So enjoy Don Cherry for what he is, low brow entertainment while he drifts further into self-parody.
 

TheDevilMadeMe

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And how many of those Canadian winners and probable European runners-up do people actually have a problem with? One? Where Sergei Fedorov finished 8th in playoff scoring?

I think that Sergei Fedorov getting robbed of the Conn Smythe in 1997 because of lingering anti-Russian stereotypes fits right into this thread. :)

For the record, he was tied for 7th in playoff scoring, but tied for 1st among players who didn't play for the Flyers or Avalanche (both much more offensive-minded teams than the Wings).
 

quoipourquoi

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Jan 26, 2009
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I think that Sergei Fedorov getting robbed of the Conn Smythe in 1997 because of lingering anti-Russian stereotypes fits right into this thread. :)

For the record, he was tied for 7th in playoff scoring, but tied for 1st among players who didn't play for the Flyers or Avalanche (both much more offensive-minded teams than the Wings).

Oh, I didn't mean to downplay Fedorov or anything, but my point is that it wasn't a slam-dunk over Vernon by any stretch. It's not the case of a 30-point European player losing out to a mediocre Canadian goalie. Vernon rocked. Not a big shutout goalie, but he only let in 3 goals or more in two games, and only one of those was against the Flyers and Avalanche, those same offensive teams. You don't lose a lot of hockey games with a goalie that consistent.
 

TheDevilMadeMe

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It means that you may or may not like what he says specifically but he's wildly popular either way and has been good for the game. He's not some pointless idiot making racist remarks like some try to claim.

Cherry is definitely popular (as well as infamous), but I think many would disagree that he has been good for the game.
 

vadim sharifijanov

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Oct 10, 2007
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Cherry hasn't used those terms for quite some time.

And you're correct, with him its the environment and culture, not the nationality.

when i said "chickens swedes" and "heartless russians," i wasn't referring only to cherry but to the larger canadian hockey establishment, for which these terms were once very prevalent. less so now, but then the hockey cultures that many european born and trained NHLers come from have significantly changed since the 80s and 90s. now cherry (among others) says "sweetheart," and that could just as easily refer to tim connolly as nik zherdev (i know connolly is american, but i can't think of a better example off the top of my head). not to say cherry doesn't still instinctively favour canadian players and give them the benefit of the doubt, but it's much less pronounced than it was fifteen years ago, during the alpo suhonen era (and yes, as someone above said, a lot of the anti-euro stuff was definitely related to "foreigners" coming in an stealing "our" jobs).

to be fair to cherry, he has backed off a lot. i've only lived in canada for two of the last 12 years, one of those was the lockout season, the other was last year. i was actually pretty surprised at how much cherry has toned the BS down since the last time i had watched coach's corner regularly, which was in 1999. he will say things like, "finnish players are more canadian than canadians," which seems to imply that when he says "canadian," it is no longer totally about the country itself, but about a way of playing hockey that he decided to call "canadian" somewhere along the way. yes, environment and culture, not (necessarily) nationality.

that said, the troops stuff still bugs me to an extent. honoring soldiers who gave their lives is one thing (though i'd argue that HNIC is neither the time nor the place), but he often goes much farther than that. certain things he said re: the war on terror is why they put him on a seven second delay ten years ago, right? i think in the end, cherry is a very nationalistic guy. his "with us or against us" rhetoric in relation to conservative politics and the armed forces strongly suggests this.

dennis bonvie rightly mentions above that with cherry a lot of the BS actually had a grounding in observable hockey facts, though i would add that the conclusions he used to draw from them weren't always necessarily fair or accurate. 2011 cherry, i think, has wisely learned to cut down on conflating his nationalism with hockey analysis, though in his political rants and "salt of the earth troops" stuff he has shown himself to be no less nationalistic.

so it's an objective fact that he's a great personality?

well, assuming that poster meant "cherry's a great personality for tv whether you like him or not," then yes it is an objective fact. his ratings and unbelievable popularity among a huge sector of the canadian populace prove it.

i'd also add that strictly as a hockey guy, i enjoy and respect a good deal of cherry's insights. there is just a lot of baggage that goes along with it.
 
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vadim sharifijanov

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Oct 10, 2007
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I don't think you are far off at all when you suggest there is an extra gear in the hearts of Canadian players, the Conn Smythe Trophy results are a reflection of this.

In the 46 year history of the award the Conn Smythe Trophy has been won by a Canadian 41 times (89.1%). That's a rather significant percentage in spite of recent trends.

damn right. courageous canadians like gainey, orr, and parent just plain wanted it more than the european NHLers who... didn't exist yet.
 

nik jr

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Sep 25, 2005
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Conn Smythes since the lockout:

2006: Cam Ward (Canada)
2007: Scott Niedermayer (Canada)
2008: Henrik Zetterberg (Sweden)
2009: Evgeni Malkin (Russia)
2010: Jonathan Toews (Canada)
2011: Tim Thomas (United States)
plus, multiple non-canadians (and multiple canadians) were better than niedermayer in '07. same for nieuwendyk in '99.

That's the problem with the term racist, since "race" is not something that's actually well defined. Using the biological sense as I understand it, Swedish people collectively could be considered a race, because there is not a hard definition of what does and does not constitute one.

So sure, if you want to say he's bigoted towards certain groups of people rather than he's a racist, I'd go for that. But it's really the same thing.
agreed

bigot and racist are hardly different.
 

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