Tag Archives: Wayne Simmonds

Flyers’ Wayne Simmonds in a Toronto Blue Jays cap? don’t hate, Philly, it’s for love

19 Wednesday Nov 2014

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Flyers' Wayne Simmonds.

Flyers’ Wayne Simmonds.

Yo, Philadelphia, if you see Flyers forward Wayne Simmonds wearing a Toronto Blue Jays baseball cap, cut him some slack.

Sure, that blue lid with the bird head and red maple leaf on it brings back bad flashbacks of Toronto’s Joe Carter smashing a Mitch Williams fastball into SkyDome’s left field bullpen for a ninth-inning, walk-off three-run homer in Game 6 of the 1993 World Series and announcer Tom Cheek screaming “Touch ’em all Joe” as your Philadelphia Phillies dejectedly trudge off the field.

But for Simmonds, the Blue Jays brim brings back a different memory – of his Nana, grandmother Catherine Mercury. He tells a touching first-person story on SI.com as part of the National Hockey League’s Hockey Fights Cancer initiative.

Flyers forward Wayne Simmonds fights cancer for his late grandmother.

Flyers forward Wayne Simmonds fights cancer for his late grandmother.

Simmonds is in a 30-second television ad for the campaign that features NHL stars like the Pittsburgh Penguins’ Sidney Crosby, T.J. Oshie of the St. Louis Blues, Colorado Avalanche’s Gabriel Landeskog, and Flyers’ captain Claude Giroux.

Simmonds’ involvement in the campaign reflects his stature as one of the NHL’s rising stars, a trajectory that began last season when he led the Flyers with 29 goals. Kick in 31 assists, and Simmonds finished third on the team in scoring in 2013-14 with 60 points. He’s scored seven goals and five assists for 12 points in 16 games so far in the 2014-15 season.

Since coming to the Flyers in a 2011 trade from the Los Angeles Kings, Simmonds has become a fan favorite for his scoring and physical play. Nothing says love more in Philadelphia than notching two Gordie Howe hat tricks – a goal, an assist, and a fight – in one season, which Simmonds accomplished in 2013.

But for Simmonds, nothing says love more than wearing a Toronto Blue Jays baseball cap.

 

Myth-busters: Philadelphians shatter athletic stereotypes one game at a time

26 Monday May 2014

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There’s a really nice article in The Philadelphia Inquirer today about the Nomads, a mostly-minority rugby team from the city’s rugged North Philly section: http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20140526_The_raw_joy_of_North_Philly_s_young_ruggers.html.

The story got me thinking, “What is it about the City of Brotherly Love and myth-busting in sports?”

Black people don’t play hockey. Meet Philadelphia Flyers forward Wayne Simmonds, who led his team with 29 goals this season. Visit the Ed Snider Youth Hockey Foundation, a program that’s introducing a small army of children of color to the joys of hockey.

kids and coaches from the Ed Snider Youth Hockey Foundation, Ice Hockey in Harlem and Philly's Wissahickon Skating Club at a recent tournament.

kids and coaches from the Ed Snider Youth Hockey Foundation, Ice Hockey in Harlem and Philly’s Wissahickon Skating Club at a recent tournament.

Polo is a sport for the rich and famous. But someone forgot to tell that to Lezlie Hiner, a University of South Carolina graduate who established Work to Ride, an equestrian program in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park that attracts kids from the poor and working class neighborhoods nearby. In 2011, the program produced the first all-black polo team to win the United States Polo Association’s national interscholastic championship. The program repeated as champs in 2012. Her program put a black polo player in college. http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/sports/Work_to_Ride_African_American_Polo_Team_Wins_National_Championship_Philadelphia-118270169.html.

Then there’s Jim Ellis and PDR. He began an all-black swim team out of a West Philadelphia pool in the 1970s that became a competitive juggernaut and the inspiration of the 2007 movie “Pride.” I had the pleasure of writing about Ellis and the movie that year for what was then AOL’s Black Voices:

  On the gritty streets of Philadelphia , long before Rocky Balboa threw his first punch on the silver screen or ‘Invincible’s’ real-life Vince Papale set foot on an NFL field, Jim Ellis was quietly forging a sports legend — and shattering myths. For more than 30 years, Ellis been the driving force of the swim team at Philadelphia Department of Recreation — PDR — a program that has turned black youths from novice tadpoles into top-notch competitive swimmers and cast aside the long-held racist stereotype that black people can’t swim.

What began with 35 black kids at a tough West Philadelphia neighborhood pool in 1971 grew into a juggernaut in the mostly white world of competitive swimming in the 1980s and 90s with more than 150 children taking lessons or competing in meets. Several of Ellis’ charges swam their way to college scholarships and U.S. Olympic team tryouts.

“It was my contribution to the black consciousness movement,” Ellis says. “It was doing something they said we couldn’t do. It was a way of getting kids out of the neighborhood, exposing them to other things and greater possibilities.” Hollywood has discovered Ellis’ against-all-odds story and made it into a movie. “Pride,” which stars Terrence Howard, Bernie Mac and Tom Arnold, opens in theaters nationwide in March. Lionsgate, an entertainment company riding a string of successful black-oriented films like “Akeelah and the Bee,” Tyler Perry’s “Diary of a Mad Black Woman,” and “The Original Kings of Comedy” is producing “Pride”

PDR Coach Jim Ellis chats with actor Terrence Howard in 2007 in Philadelphia (Photo: Marissa J. Weekes)

PDR Coach Jim Ellis chats with actor Terrence Howard in 2007 in Philadelphia (Photo: Marissa J. Weekes)

Ellis, a 59-year-old Philadelphia public school teacher and department of recreation employee, says he still can’t believe the movie was made — especially with Howard playing him — even though he watched it being shot last year in Baton Rouge, La. “I’m excited, I’m happy, I’m thrilled, but it’s kind of weird,” Ellis says. “I saw the movie trailer and saw Terrence (Howard) say ‘I’m Jim Ellis.’ It’s kind of unreal, something I never expected to happen.”

But if anyone’s story deserves telling, it’s Ellis’, according to officials at USA Swimming , the body that helps develop the sport and selects the Olympic team. “Jim Ellis is an icon, particularly because of his dedication to his sport and community, generating national team talent in an area where swimming is just not on the radar,” said John Cruzat, USA Swimming’s first-ever diversity specialist. “And he does it at a parks and recreation facility with little or no resources.”

Ellis and USA Swimming officials hope “Pride” will prompt more black people to learn how to swim and eventually take up competitive swimming, a sport where black athletes are just beginning to make a splash.

Cullen Jones set a meet record in the 50-meter freestyle at the Pan Pacific Championships in Canada and became the first black swimmer to break a world record when he swam in the 4 x100-meter relay. The feats earned the former North Carolina State University swimmer at $2 million, seven-year endorsement contract from Nike, the company’s richest deal ever for a sprint swimmer.

Maritza Correia — recently featured in an Black Voices profile of black athletes in non-traditional sports — became the first black woman to make the U.S. Olympic swim team in 2004. Despite the accomplishments, the number of black competitive swimmers remains small. Less than one percent of the nation’s 232,000 competitive swimmers are black, according to USA Swimming.

More disturbing, Cruzat and Ellis say, is the high number of blacks who die in drowning accidents every year in bodies of water as big as oceans and as small as bathtubs. The Centers for Disease Control lists blacks as an at-risk group for drowning. A CDC study found that blacks drown at a rate 1.25 times higher than whites. Black children between the ages of five and 19 drown at a rate 2.3 times higher than white children in the same age bracket do. Ellis says it’s not that blacks can’t swim. It’s that they don’t. A lack of exposure to swimming, lack of funds for lessons, and limited access to suitable swimming facilities — particularly in urban areas — are factors that hold many blacks back from the water. Then there’s the centuries-old myth that blacks and water don’t mix. Studies from as late as the 1960s suggested that blacks had a unique buoyancy problem that prevented them from being competent swimmers. The studies were later discredited, but not before some people took the findings as gospel.

  In 1987 former Los Angeles Dodgers General Manager Al Campanis , explaining on ABC’s “Nightline” why blacks could never become baseball field managers or team executives, argued that swimming proved that blacks didn’t have what it takes to reach the top.

“The just don’t have the buoyancy,” Campanis told an astonished Ted Koppel.

“I put that one on my bulletin board,” Ellis recalls. “For motivation.”

Jim Ellis (center) and actor Terrence Howard (second left) in Philadelphia (Photo: Marissa J. Weekes).

Jim Ellis (center) and actor Terrence Howard (second left) in Philadelphia (Photo: Marissa J. Weekes).

But Ellis believes white racist attitudes aren’t solely to blame. He says many blacks are equally guilty for buying into the stereotype, dismissing swimming as a white country club activity or avoiding the water because it’s better to look good than to swim well.

“You still hear people talking about swimming, black females talking about not wanting to get their hair wet, or folks talking about not wanting to catch colds,” Ellis says with a sigh. The reluctance from within the black community and resistance among some whites within organized swimming to embrace a black swim team didn’t deter Ellis from building his program. But he and some of his former students admit it wasn’t easy. Ellis recounts tales of going to swim meets where officials were loath to announce the winning times of some of his swimmers. If a PDR swimmer won a heat, Ellis says, it wasn’t unusual for white parents to approach him and ask what he was feeding his team. “Parents would accuse us of being on steroids,” says Atiba Wade, 28, who swam for Ellis for 11 years before attending the University of Georgia on a swim scholarship. “Things like that were very sobering. But you can never let it diminish your spirit. You don’t let things tear you down.”

That’s a lesson Wade says he learned from Ellis’ tough-love coaching approach. The heat pump at city-run pool where his charges practice at 5 a.m. doesn’t always work. The some of indoor facility’s windows won’t shut, allowing a winter breeze that adds a chill to water that’s already ice cube cold. There’s no state-of-the art weight room or fancy locker room, like some of the more affluent swim programs have.

But Ellis says those factors shouldn’t be a roadblock from succeeding — in or out of the pool. “He’s tough, but not a brutal taskmaster,” says Wade who interrupted his training schedule for the 2008 Olympic team trials to swim as body double for actor Kevin Phillips, III in the movie. “He encourages you, doesn’t want you to quit. Jim sets the bar at an Olympic standard, at a world-class standard.”

Ellis caught the attention of Hollywood after a writer read a profile about him in The New York Times five years ago and approached the coach about writing his life story. Ellis agreed, but thought nothing of it at the time. “He sent me stuff. I read it and threw it in the trash, he sent some more, threw it in the trash,” Ellis recalls. “Then he sent me a contract. After that, things happened within a year.”

Lionsgate films got interested in the story and sought A-list stars like Howard, who earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination for playing a drug-dealing pimp-turned rap artist in “Hustle & Flow,” to be in the film.

“He’s a bright young man, energetic and very intense,” Ellis says of Howard. “He hung out for about a month before the shoot, hanging out with the kids. I don’t how he picked up so much about me.” The glory years of the PDR team have past, Ellis admits. A program that boasted 150 people at its peak is now down to about 40 kids. Ellis continues his hard-charging ways though, barking stroke combination and times from the slippery deck of the pool. He’s hoping that the upcoming movie will produce a renaissance in his program and maybe, just maybe, persuade some generous entrepreneurs to help build a world-class training facility to teach minorities to swim for fun and competition.

“If you gave me what some of the country clubs have what the established white teams have, we’d put someone in the Olympics,” he says with a competitive glint in his eye.

 Myths, stereotypes, and misconceptions are hard to shake, but folks in Philadelphia are showing that they’re up to that task. They’ve got  game – no matter what game it is. 

 

 

L.A. Times writer explains line about Donald Sterling should own hockey team

01 Thursday May 2014

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It’s been a rough week for Los Angeles Times columnist Sandy Banks. Her email, voice mail have been flooded with messages – some of them stern and others Sterno-hot with anger – about a line she wrote in a weekend piece about disgraced and freshly-banned Los Angeles Clippers basketball team owner Donald Sterling following his recorded racist remarks about black people. “Let the real estate magnate take his millions and buy a hockey team,” she wrote. “Then he won’t have to worry about black superstars showing up for games on his girlfriend’s arm.” The line struck a nerve with hockey fans, particularly among fans of color who regularly confront the misconception – from within minority communities and without – that the game is an exclusively white one with little room for diversity. Wednesday, Banks posted a piece on the Times’ website explaining her weekend column. http://www.latimes.com/sports/sportsnow/la-sp-sn-sandy-banks-hockey-comments-sterling-20140430,0,4567727.column#axzz30Q8B4yPE “I realized the danger of intemperate comments on anything race-related this week after a post I wrote about Clippers owner Donald Sterling landed me, in the eyes of hockey fans, right up there with Sterling – whose bigoted comments just got him banned from the NBA,” she wrote. Her mea culpa went on to explain that the “buy a hockey team” line was an attempt to be clever. She quickly learned that many readers thought otherwise. “I understand now why those lines  struck a nerve,” she wrote. “It felt like a gratuitous joke at the expense of the National Hockey League, which does have black players on most of its teams.” But what Banks doesn’t understand is the vitriolic hate and meanness in some of the comments by some fans. “Complaints from hockey fans flooded my inbox, many laced with racial slurs and insults: I’m an ignorant, ugly, racist gorilla – and worse that can’t be printed,” she wrote. “Their rants make Sterling seem enlightened by comparison.” What Banks wrote in her initial column was wrong and hockey fans of all persuasions had a right to complain. But being passionate is one thing, poisoning that passion with hateful responses is another. Disagree, yes. Denigrate, no. If Banks was a hockey player, referees might have given her a two-minute slashing penalty for her unfortunate line. But the refs would have also handed out game misconducts to authors of the more hateful and racially-tinged responses left in the comments section after Banks’ Sterling piece. And it’s not like Banks was the only person in the world to make a flippant remark about Sterling shedding the Clippers and perhaps moving on to a sport that’s supposedly minority-free. On “CBS This Morning” this week, co-anchor Gayle King suggested that Sterling should perhaps consider buying a polo team. Maybe she didn’t realize that a predominately black youth polo team from inner-city Philadelphia’s Work to Ride program twice won the National Interscholastic Polo Championship, even though the ground-breaking program was featured in the past on “60 Minutes” and the “CBS Evening News.” Kareem Rosser, a former Work to Ride member, played for Colorado State University’s nationally-ranked polo team last year. Perhaps the best response to Banks’ Sterling column came from Donnie Shaw, a Washington, D.C., resident and the proud father of Donnie Shaw III., a hockey player for New York’s Elmira College, alum of the Fort Dupont Ice Hockey Club, the nation’s oldest minority youth hockey program, and an NHL Thurgood Marshall College Fund scholarship recipient. Instead of a poison pen, the elder Shaw emailed Banks a short message and pictures of his son and other black kids playing hockey.

Instead of going nuclear in his comments, Donnie Shaw sent L.A. Times columnist a short note and pictures of black kids enjoying hockey.

Instead of going nuclear in his comments, Donnie Shaw sent L.A. Times columnist a short note and pictures of black kids enjoying hockey.

“I know you didn’t mean any harm with your statement about blacks attending NHL Hockey, with a lady on the side,” the elder Shaw wrote. “I’m not going to do a Change.Org petition to get you to retract your line about us doing hockey. However, as a long time Hockey Dad I want you to know that is not cool for you to make that statement…these days. Oh! My son is a former competitive swimmer and he plays lacrosse..” Even in the throes of disagreement, consideration trumps cruelty any day.  

L.A. Clippers’ Donald Sterling could escape blacks by owning a hockey team. Really?

29 Tuesday Apr 2014

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She had to drag hockey into this mess.

In a weekend column in The Los Angeles Times, Sandy Banks wrote that it’s time for Los Angeles Clippers’ Donald Sterling to give up ownership of his National Basketball Association team in the wake of recordings on which he purportedly makes racist comments about black people. Banks offers a novel solution for Sterling if he wants to stay in the sports business.

Boston's Jarome Iginla, a superstar likely Hall of Fame-bound when he retires.

Boston’s Jarome Iginla, a superstar likely Hall of Fame-bound when he retires.

“Let the real estate magnate and Clippers owner take his millions and buy a hockey team,” she wrote. “Then he won’t have to worry about black superstars showing up for games on his girlfriend’s arm.”

Nice.

Reading that line saddened me, angered me, and made me think that maybe I haven’t been doing my job with this blog. Her suggestion that Sterling “buy a hockey team” is a zinger, a real humdinger, perhaps designed to add a little levity to a serious problem. The only problem is that if Banks paid a little more attention to hockey maybe she’d know that the zinger has lost its zing – that hockey isn’t exclusively white anymore on the ice, in the stands, in the broadcast booth, or in the owner’s box.

With one paragraph, Banks bought into a stereotype. Hockey has the hat trick – a feat in which one player scores three goals in a single game. Banks scored a double negative by suggesting that Sterling and his alleged racist ways could find a safe haven in the overwhelming whiteness of hockey.

It’s a false image and its wrong.

Blacks and other people of color have a rich hockey history and are a growing presence in today’s game. If Banks watched Sunday’s Anaheim Ducks–Dallas Stars game Sunday she would have seen Anaheim forward Devante Smith-Pelly, who is black, score two goals, including the tying goal in the closing seconds in the third period that sent the game to overtime.

She would have seen Dallas defenseman Trevor Daley, who is also black, score two goals for the Stars. It was stellar game for Daley, even though the Stars lost the game 5-4 in overtime and were eliminated from the Stanley Cup Playoffs. As a teenager, Daley overcame his then-coach and general manager of his major junior hockey team – former National Hockey League goaltender John Vanbiesbrouck – calling him the N-word in the 2002-03 season to not only survive, but to thrive.  The ‘Beezer was canned from his position with the Ontario Hockey League’s  Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds for using the slur and Daley has gone on to play more nearly 690 NHL games, all with Dallas. If she watched the entire Anaheim-Dallas series, she might have noticed forward Emerson Etem, an African-American born in Long Beach, California, playing for the Ducks.

If she caught any of the other Stanley Cup Playoffs games on television she might have gotten glimpses of other black players: Philadelphia

Dallas defenseman Trevor Daley.

Dallas defenseman Trevor Daley.

Flyers forward Wayne Simmonds (a former Los Angeles Kings player) and his teammate, goaltender Ray Emery; Tampa Bay Lightning forward J.T. Brown, who was brought up from the American Hockey League when Lightning sniper Steven Stamkos was injured but was so good that he remained with the team when Stamkos returned; Boston Bruins forward Jarome Iginla, who’ll likely be the third black player enshrined in the Hockey Hall of Fame whenever he retires; Chicago Blackhawks defenseman Johnny Oduya, who played for his native Sweden in the 2014 Winter Olympics; St. Louis Blues rugged forward Ryan Reaves; and Montreal Canadiens defenseman P.K. Subban, who was awarded the Norris Trophy as the NHL’s top defenseman last season.

If she kept watching between periods she might have witnessed the new normal: former NHLers Kevin Weekes, Jamal Mayers, and Anson Carter and broadcaster David Amber – all black men – imparting hockey knowledge and analysis to viewers in the United States and Canada. If Banks attended a Kings or Ducks game, she might run into Oscar-winning actor Cuba Gooding, Jr.,  rap artist Snoop Dogg, or Isaiah Mustafa, the original Old Spice Guy who’s a hockey player and Kings season ticket holder. Say, wasn’t that director Spike Lee wearing a New York Rangers jersey at Game 5 against the Flyers Sunday in Madison Square Garden?

If Banks glanced at the organization chart of the St. Louis Blues, she’d find David L. Steward, an African-American who’s chairman and co-founder of World Technology, Inc., is a part owner of the team.

And hockey isn’t just for the black rich and famous. Pamela Merritt – Twitter handle @SharkFu – is a black, life-long Blues fan who’s had her heart broken in the playoffs once again by an early St. Louis exit. Twitter’s @Kia1 is a black hockey mom who knows the price of goalie equipment and the art of negotiating the parental politics of organized youth hockey. Then there’s @IceHockeyDanceMom, a Southern California woman who’s raising a dancer-niece and hockey-playing nephew solo. You could almost feel the tears rise from the keyboards from a tweet she wrote last December that said “a coach just told me; I’m not rich, kid is black & So-Cal. #NHLDream unrealistic.”

Her nephew still plays hockey and he still dreams.

Lord knows hockey isn’t nirvana for players and fans of color, as Adam Proteau of The Hockey News chronicled in a recent column. But to suggest that a Donald Sterling would be at home in hockey isn’t a pithy zinger.

It’s just wrong.

“Razor” and the “Wayne Train” roll into MSG, roll out with Flyers 4-2 win

20 Sunday Apr 2014

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“Razor” and the “Wayne Train” rolled into Madison Square Garden Sunday and rolled out with a 4-2 Stanley Cup Playoffs win against the New York Rangers.

Flyers goaltender Ray Emery.

Flyers goaltender Ray Emery.

Philadelphia Flyers goaltender Ray “Razor” Emery and right wing Wayne “Wayne Train” Simmonds keyed the Flyers victory that tied the best-of-seven series at a game apiece. After surrendering two first period goals to Rangers right wing Martin St. Louis and left wing  Benoit Pouliot, Emery played an exceptional game.

He quieted talk about his suspect lateral movement by stopping 31 of 33 shots, including key saves on Rangers rugged forward Rick Nash. Emery, who signed with the Flyers as a free agent during the summer after winning a Stanley Cup with the Chicago Blackhawks, played in place of injured Flyers starting goaltender Steve Mason. He earned his first Stanley Cup Playoffs victory win in exactly three years – April 20, 2011 – as a member of the Anaheim Ducks.

Simmonds sealed the Flyers victory with an empty net goal scored in the closing seconds when he gathered the puck deep in the Flyers zone, muscled through two Rangers players while skating the puck out of the zone, and fired it into the vacant Rangers goal from just past the center ice red line.

The victory tied the series at one game apiece. But it also highlighted the importance of Emery and Simmonds to the Flyers. Emery was brought in to compete with Mason for the starter’s job. When the team tabbed Mason as their Number One goalie, Emery settled in as the consummate back-up, the role he had in Chicago which had Corey Crawford between the pipes.

Simmonds played 16 minutes, 27 seconds of snarly, aggressive hockey with lots of work along the boards and in front of Rangers goaltender

Henrik Lundqvist. But his best and perhaps most-difficult scoring chance came with Lundqvist pulled from the net and with the puck deep in the Philadelphia zone.

The empty night goal was another big moment in what’s been a breakout year for Simmonds, who scored 29 goals, 31 assists and collected 106

Flyers forward Wayne Simmonds.

Flyers forward Wayne Simmonds.

penalty minutes in 82 games. He led the Flyers in goals. Not bad for a player who wasn’t considered the centerpiece of the 2011 trade that brought him, forward Brayden Schenn and a second-round draft pick from the Los Angeles Kings in exchange for Flyers forward and former captain Mike Richards.

But these days hockey people are talking about Simmonds as one of the National Hockey League’s top power forwards. To Philadelphia fans, the hard-working wing  is pure Flyer, especially after he notched Gordie Howe hat tricks – a goal, an assist, and a fight – in February 2013 games against the Pittsburgh Penguins and Winnipeg Jets.

And he’s adding more dimensions to his game, proving he’s more than just a big body player who makes a living scoring close-in goals off rebounds and screens.

“The one area I think he’s improved and he’s starting to establish himself is the Rush game,” Flyers Head Coach Craig Berube told The Los Angeles Times last month. “He’s skating with the puck and doing more things off the rush, a few goals off the rush.”

Sunday’s empty-netter offered a perfect – and timely – example.

 

 

NY-Philly hockey hate takes a timeout to help get mega-iceplex built in the Bronx

19 Saturday Apr 2014

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When the founders of the Kingsbridge National Ice Center achieve their goal and build the world’s largest ice skating facility in the Bronx section of New York City, add an assist to a seemingly unlikely line mate from Philadelphia.

While the Philadelphia Flyers and New York Rangers duke it out of the ice in the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, a group comprised of New York hockey enthusiasts – including iconic former Rangers captain Mark Messier – and officials from the Philadelphia’s Ed Snider Youth Hockey Foundation, established by the Flyers’ founder and patriarch, are working together in helping transform the massive vacant Kingsbridge Armory into a $320 million state-of-the-art ice hockey, skating, and ice sport palace that serves its surrounding community and the city by 2017.

Kingsbridge National Ice Center rendering.

Kingsbridge National Ice Center rendering.

There’s a lot of hockey hate between New York and Philadelphia. Rangers fans haven’t forgotten the pounding and hair-pulling helpless defenseman Dale Rolfe endured courtesy of Broad Street Bully heavyweight forward Dave Schultz during the 1974 playoffs or the sick feeling from being eliminated from playoff contention on the last day of the 2010 season by the Flyers in a shootout.

Flyers faithful always remember their team being looked down on as unworthy hockey heathens by their more gentlemanly Original Six neighbor up I-95 and vividly recall the heartache of watching the 1982 team get unceremoniously bounced from the playoffs by a third-string Rangers goalie named Eddie Mio, who somehow managed to channel his inner Eddie Giacomin.

But when it comes to the KNIC project, there are no cat-calls about Rangers’ Ron Duguay’s flowing curly locks and disco-era fondness for Sassoon jeans or chants that pugilistic former Flyers goalie Ron Hextall sucks! Just cooperation, and lots of it.

“They’re hockey people,” John R. Nolan, KNIC project co-founder, Boston College alum, and long-time Rangers season ticket-holder said of his new-found friends from Philly. “We’ve talked about this. Hockey is a religion and if you’re under the tent, you’re under the tent and everyone wants to help. There’s always room for good-natured ribbing and rivalry but that has never gotten in the way.”

In fact, the close working relationship has taken some of the edge off for Nolan.

“As a life-long Rangers fan who grew up hating the Flyers, in some respects I’m mad at the guys at Snider because they’ve taken that away from me,” Nolan told me recently. “I don’t have the same level of distaste for Philadelphia that I used to. I’ve had to shift that to New Jersey.”

Scott Tharp, the Ed Snider Youth Hockey Foundation’s president, said two things are the ties that bind his program and the KNIC project: hockey and kids.

Flyers forward Wayne Simmonds gives tips to a Snider Hockey participant. The program's ice and educational activities helped sell Bronx leaders on the KNIC project.

Flyers forward Wayne Simmonds gives tips to a Snider Hockey participant. The program’s ice and educational activities helped sell Bronx leaders on the KNIC project.

“It’s not unusual for non-profits with common missions to share information and help each other. Our interest is in helping kids,” Tharp told me recently. “What the Flyers and Rangers do on the ice is kind of separate from what Snider Hockey and the Kingsbridge Armory folks do.”

What the KNIC folks plan to do is turn the 750,000-square-foot armory located just below West 195th and adjacent to the Number 4 Express subway line into the mother of all iceplexes with nine rinks – including a 5,000-seat arena that they hope will attract a minor league hockey team- locker rooms, office space, a health and wellness facility, community center and office space.

The project’s brain trust says that the mega facility will help solve a severe rink shortage in New York, a city of 8.2 million people and only seven indoor year-round ice sheets.

The New York City Council approved the KNIC project last December, enticed by the prospect of the facility becoming a lynchpin for the Bronx’s revitalization efforts and lured by the prospect of it creating at least 260 permanent jobs, 890 construction jobs and boosting the fortunes of nearby businesses.

When completed, Kingsbridge will eclipse the eight-sheet, 300,000-square-foot Schwan Super Rink in Blaine, Minnesota, as the largest ice arena complex in the world.

Kingsbridge National Ice Center rendering.

Kingsbridge National Ice Center rendering.

Winning New York City Council approval was one thing. Winning over skeptical Bronx political and community leaders who questioned the wisdom of putting a giant ice facility in a borough that’s 53.5 percent Hispanic and 30.8 percent non-Hispanic black was another. Several critics dismissively asked “If you build it, who will come?”

“I have to be quite honest with you, that was my initial reaction as well,” Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr., told me recently. “And then I started to notice that those individuals who would make those comments – which, by the way I believe are borderline racist, I’m going to use that word – are blacks and Latinos. I think what happens is you get people who are, for so long, put in this mental box that they start to accept as if it were reality that this is something that their kids don’t want to do or cannot do.”

Messier, Kingsbridge’s CEO and the hockey face of the project, told NHL.com that the project had to stress the benefits of a partnership between the mega rink and the community.

“We had to sell them on that fact,” Messier told NHL.com. “The only way to do that is to get to know each other and gain the trust. We know it’s not our armory. It’s theirs. We have to be respectful of that.”

That’s where Snider Hockey came in. By coincidence, Kevin Parker – hockey dad, founder of KNIC Partners LLC, die-hard Rangers fan, and former Deutsche Bank asset management director – met and dined with T. Quinn Spitzer, Jr. – partner and chairman of McHugh Consulting, die-hard Flyers fan, and a Snider Hockey board member – during a European business trip in 2011.

“These two Americans sit down at a table in somewhere Europe and quickly discover they both have a passion for hockey: one’s a Flyers fan, one’s a Rangers fan,” Nolan recalled. “As the conversation progresses, Kevin shares what he wants to do in New York City and the concerns he has in how he can get a rink or rinks into areas where you would need community acceptance. I think we knew early on that the community angle was not just something we were interested in, but something we needed in order to succeed.”

“Kevin kind of shared ‘These are our challenges,'” Nolan continued. “Quinn said ‘Let me tell you about Snider Hockey.'”

Created in 2005, the Snider Hockey program exposes 3,000 Philadelphia-area children to the game of hockey by providing them with free equipment, ice time, and instruction at five skating rinks. The hockey serves as a hook for participating children to stay in school and improve both academically and as people.

The program works closely with the School District of Philadelphia and Philadelphia’s Department of Parks and Recreation to offer a cutting edge program that blends hockey with a rigorous off-ice life skills curriculum and additional educational services.

“We’re trying to impart skills that help the children grow up to be productive citizens,” Tharp told me in 2011. “Communication skills, the simple things that are taken for granted: the ability to introduce yourself; to look a person in the eye; give a firm handshake; the ability to carry on an open-ended conversation rather than a closed conversation.”

When Snider Hockey began, about 70 percent of its personnel were dedicated to hockey, Tharp told NHL.com. Today, academic aides and tutors outnumber hockey personnel 4-to-1, Tharp said. Over the last three years, 100 percent of the program’s participants have graduated. About 83 percent of the kids moved on to post-secondary education, with a handful of them playing hockey in college.

The program grew so large in size and stature that it struggled to find enough ice time for its kids. In 2010, Snider’s foundation kicked in $6.5 million, which was matched by state funds, to renovate four run-down public ice rinks. Today, those rinks are all enclosed and have National Hockey League-caliber boards, lighting, glass, and community space.

The conversation between Parker and Spitzer in Europe swiftly led to meetings between the KNIC founders and Snider Hockey officials back in the United States. Nolan said he and Stephan Butler, another founding Kingsbridge partner, hopped an Amtrak train to Philadelphia to check out the Snider program and returned to New York  “blown away” by what they saw.

Kingsbridge National Ice Center rendering.

Kingsbridge National Ice Center rendering.

“Everything about Snider in terms of how their organization was put together, what their values were, in terms of how they practiced, the kind of kids they were turning out, literally every aspect of their program was impressive,” Nolan told me. “We kind of took that message back and started selling it in the Bronx in answer to the question ‘Why are our kids going to play hockey?’ There was a huge jump, leap of faith, necessary from the community that minority kids, be they black or Hispanic, would really take to hockey. When confronted with the question our answer was ‘Snider. Take a look at Snider, Snider’s got thousands of kids.’ Snider became an answer to the question.”

So much so that Bronx elected officials and community leaders wanted to see the program themselves. So about 65 of them climbed aboard a chartered bus outside the armory and took it the Scanlon ice rink, one of the renovated facilities, in Philadelphia’s Kensington section.

“What I saw was amazing,” Diaz told me. “To see 75 black and Latino kids in one of the centers enthusiastic about coming in right after school; to see them with their big duffel bags full of equipment that, by the way, was donated and readily-available to them free of charge; to see them getting academic instruction in math and reading; and to see these kids get on the ice as if it were second nature. You look at all of the numbers from the program and we see that school attendance has gone up, we see that bad behavior has gone down. That’s exactly what I want for my Bronx kids.”

The Scanlon tour has been followed up by several telephone conversations between Diaz and Snider.

“I think Ed told him of his vision, told him that we would be willing to support their efforts as consultants, and basically convinced Ruben that hockey was a great vehicle, to help children, to help kids stay the course,” Tharp said.

Diaz said the Philadelphia visit and talks with Snider have set a high bar for the KNIC group in their Bronx community outreach efforts.

“I have a joke with Kevin Parker and Mark Messier. I say ‘You guys messed up’ and they ask me ‘Why?’ And I say ‘Because you allowed me to come to Philly and see the Ed Snider program,'” Diaz said. “And so that’s the standard I’m going to hold for them right here in the Bronx.”

And that’s just fine with Nolan.

“We don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” he told me. “Our intent is to build a program just like theirs. I don’t know if there’s much to improve on, but we’re going to try. They’ve given us the playbook and we’re going to execute.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

USHL’s Everett Fitzhugh wants to rock the mic as an NHL play-by-play radio voice

03 Monday Mar 2014

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Everett Fitzhugh wants to be The Voice – the guy who shouts “goal!” when the home team puts the biscuit in the basket, the person who vocally paints a Picasso of what’s happening on the ice during a hockey game for those who can’t catch it at the arena or watch it on TV.

Fitzhugh aspires to be a National Hockey League radio play-by-play announcer, a career path not normally associated with 25-year-old African-American men. But Fitzhugh, a Detroit native who grew up spending cold winter nights listening to Ken Kal broadcast Detroit Red Wings games and lazy summer evenings hearing Ernie Harwell do Detroit Tigers baseball, is on a mission to join the small but growing club of NHL broadcasters of color.

Calling Bowling Green hockey games while a student stoked USHL's Everett Fitzhugh's interest in being an NHL radio announcer.

Calling Bowling Green hockey games while a student stoked USHL’s Everett Fitzhugh’s interest in being an NHL radio announcer.

He watches David Amber and Kevin Weekes on CBC’s “Hockey Night in Canada,” and former NHLers Anson Carter and Jamal Mayers on NBC Sports Network and NHL Network’s nightly “NHL on The Fly” highlights show and thinks to himself “See you soon, dudes.”

“I think that’s going to be me in 15, 20-plus years, however long it takes,” Fitzhugh told me recently.  “This has been a dream of mine to work in sports, to work in media, since I was seven years old. I didn’t know I wanted to strictly work in hockey until I was in college. But I see those guys on TV and it gives me hope that what I’m doing will eventually pay off. It gives me hope that I can be on ESPN one day and I can become an NHL radio play-by-play man, which is my ultimate goal.”

In the meantime, Fitzhugh is busy paying his dues. He attended Bowling Green State University – alma mater of Pittsburgh Penguins and U.S. Olympics men’s hockey team Head Coach Dan Bylsma – and did radio play-by-play for 120 games for the NCAA Division I Falcons men’s hockey team.

He joined the United States Hockey League in 2012 and is manger of communications for the nation’s top junior hockey league that serves as a stepping-stone to college hockey or the NHL for many players.

Working out of Chicago, Fitzhugh handles the USHL’s social media entries, press releases, YouTube posts and video highlights. The job often gets him out of the office and into the lock rooms of USHL teams. But more than anything, Fitzhugh wants to get back behind the microphone and call hockey games on the radio.

“People call me weird. We used to joke when I was in school that TV guys do half the work but get twice the money,” he said. “But I love radio. I just love painting the picture. I love being able to describe what’s going on and the art of being on the radio. It’s a difficult job, but when you’re able to master hockey radio play-by-play, for me, that’s the ultimate position in sports.”

Amber knows how Fitzhugh feels. He grew up in Toronto listening Toronto Maple Leafs broadcasts and thought that he, too, might be a play-by-play guy some day.

"Hockey Night's" David Amber sees diversity gains on the ice and in the media.

“Hockey Night’s” David Amber sees diversity gains on the ice and in the media.

But he gravitated to sports reporting instead. Now, he’s the pre-game, between-periods, and post-game presence on Canada’s equivalent of “Monday Night Football.” He’s pleased to see more minorities are on the air talking hockey and more people like Fitzhugh in the pipeline waiting for their break.

“The exposure from ‘Hockey Night,’ I’ve certainly had a significant amount of minority faces – mostly black, but even Indian and Asian – say they’re happy to see it’s (hockey) not so homogeneous the way it was maybe 10 years ago; that there are people of color coming in and being able to lend a voice and face to the sport,” Amber told me recently. “It has been a slow transition, absolutely, but there are going to be a lot of new young guys coming up now.”

And the interest of people like Fitzhugh to work in hockey reflects the increasing number hockey players of color and the growing impact they’re are having on the game from the USHL all the way up to the NHL, Amber said.

“There are more black faces in the NHL than there’s ever been,” he told me. “When you look at the guys who’ve made it now, these are impact players whether it’s (Philadelphia Flyers’ Wayne) Simmonds, we know what (Boston Bruins’ Jarome) Iginla’s been able to do over his career, (Winnipeg Jets’) Evander Kane, (Dallas Stars’) Trevor Daley. But because the position of the players have increased and the position of some of the media members has increased from a minority standpoint, I think success breeds success and visibility breeds more visibility and I think that’s a good thing.”

But old stereotypes still die hard. Fitzhugh says people – both minorities and whites – occasionally do double-takes when he tells them what he does for a living and what his dream job is.

“I’ve gotten snide comments, off the cuff comments “Oh, you’re black, you can’t be in hockey, you can’t do this, that and the other,'” he said. “And I’m like ‘No, you look on TV, we’re growing.’ You look at some of the best players in the NHL – up and coming Evander Kane, if he can ever stay healthy; Jarome Iginla fed (Pittsburgh Penguins’)Sidney Crosby to lead Canada to the Gold Medal four years ago; (Winnipeg Jets’) Dustin Byfuglien was barely left off our U.S. Olympic team this year.”

“Black people, we’re not barely surviving in hockey,” he added. “I think we are staples. We’re contributing  day in, day out to the hockey world on the ice, off the ice, in the media.”

Amber said he rarely gets negative comments about his presence on hockey telecasts. But he recalls getting the odd tweet during his NHL Network days from viewers filled with keyboard courage who’d urge him “to stick with basketball.”

“Nothing crazy, certainly nothing like what (Washington Capitals forward) Joel Ward received after he scored the Game 7 OT winner against Boston (in April 2012),” he said. “But a couple of snide remarks, inappropriate remarks. By and large it hasn’t been a big issue. Living in Canada, it hasn’t been a prevalent issue. In the States, I think it’s still by and large viewed as a white guy’s sport.”

Even among minorities. Fitzhugh says striking up a hockey conversation at his local barbershop can be a challenge.

“They look at me a little weird,” he said with a laugh. “My barbers knows that I work in hockey. When I first told them, they kind of looked at me like I was a science experiment like ‘Oh, you work in hockey?’ I enlighten them a little bit, but hockey’s not a regular topic of conversation when I go to the barbershop.”

But Fitzhugh believes that will change in time because “more and more minorities and people of color are becoming aware of the game.”

“Think if anyone goes to a hockey game, they will be hooked,” he said. “If could have a mission, it would be to take everybody, everyone in this country to a hockey game.”

Or to have folks listen to his play-by-play account on the radio.

Special thanks: to Color of Hockey follower and ChicagoSide Senior Writer Evan F. Moore who first reported on Fitzhugh.

Black sports agents scoring in NHL

06 Tuesday Aug 2013

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Hockey has taken Eustace King from bucolic Evanston, Ill., to the bright lights of Los Angeles and from between the pipes to the thick of the business end of the game. It’s taken Brett Peterson on a full-circle journey from Boston and back.

Their separate trips have made King, a former Miami University of Ohio goaltender, and Peterson, a former standout defenseman at Boston College, the rarest of a rare breed: African-American sports agents who represent professional hockey players.

As a managing partner for O2K Worldwide Management Group, King is an agent of change of sorts. He represents several of the growing number of players of color who are gradually changing the face of the National Hockey League.

Peterson, the Boston-based director of hockey operations for Acme World Sports, has a client list that includes Tuukka Rask, the superstar Finnish goaltender for the Boston Bruins, and Alex Broadhurst, the talented young center for the Chicago Blackhawks.

King’s clients include Philadelphia Flyers right wing Wayne Simmonds; St. Louis Blues right wing Chris Stewart and his free agent brother, right wing Anthony Stewart; Anaheim Ducks right wings Emerson Etem and Devante Smith-Pelly; and San Jose Sharks left wing Raffi Torres, a Canadian of Mexican heritage.

He also represents Blues right wing T.J. Oshie; Minnesota Wild defenseman Jared Spurgeon, and Buffalo Sabres defenseman Tyler Ennis.

Sports agent Eustace King (right) with client Emerson Etem of the Anaheim Ducks.

Sports agent Eustace King (right) with client Emerson Etem of the Anaheim Ducks.

King helped negotiate former NHL goaltender Kevin Weekes’ first television contract with NHL Network and he represents Willie O’Ree, who became the NHL’s first black player in 1958 and now serves as the league’s director for youth development and diversity ambassador.

Philadelphia Flyers' Wayne Simmonds, a King client.

Philadelphia Flyers’ Wayne Simmonds, a King client.

“I don’t have these athletes who happen to be minorities because I’m black,” King told me recently. “It’s because I’m highly capable and I happen to be black. One critical point is I understand their history and background, being West Indian or being African-American, and being able to relate to them. That’s the piece that makes the bond that we have so much greater and we’ve been able to accomplish the things we’ve been able to do.”

Peterson said breaking into representation end of hockey wasn’t difficult because of the welcoming nature of the hockey community.

“I played hockey since I was two years old,” Peterson told me recently. “Obviously being an African-American hockey player – it was always rare. But the hockey community is one of the best communities that I know, and it was so welcoming to me. It’s such a tight-knit community that I don’t think, for the most part, anybody really judged it as a black-white thing. You’re judged on your work and your ability to have relationships with people.”

Sports agent Brett Peterson.

Sports agent Brett Peterson.

Still, making it as a black sports agent isn’t easy. In the four major sports – even the predominately black NBA and NFL – only a few dozen top athletes have black representation while “hundreds of others continue to turn to white agents and attorneys to handle the finer points of negotiation on contracts with teams and corporations seeking their endorsements,” ESPN.com’s David Aldridge wrote last February.

“To say that you’re only a black agent and you’re trying to be extremely pro-black in a non-black environment is challenging, I’ll be honest with you, in hockey,” King said. “It’s not that people are going to be necessarily racist or they don’t want to listen to us. It’s just because sometimes they don’t understand us, or understand the experiences that we’ve had to go through.”For example, when some in the hockey establishment expressed concern about Mark Owuya, a black Swedish goaltender now in the Toronto Maple Leafs farm system, after he performed rap songs on his country’s version of “American Idol” when he was 16 in 2006, King questioned the musical tastes of his client’s detractors.

“If he was a country singer, or he was singing rock and roll or something more relevant to the audience he was trying to showcase his (hockey) skills to, I think maybe it wouldn’t have been a big deal,” King told the Toronto Star newspaper.

King said he’s been able to thrive in the sometimes cut-throat representation business because of his hockey-playing experience and the bond he shares with several of his minority clients – like Simmonds, the Stewart brothers and Weekes – who have Caribbean roots.

He also attributes his success to hard work, good fortune, and to a small village of mentors who’ve helped him almost every step of the way in his professional and personal life. It’s a formula he tries to instill in his young hockey-playing clients.

“I really believe that a young man needs anywhere from a minimum 4 to 6 mentors in his life,” King said. “It’s going to be his parents, his coaches, it’s also going to be friends…the ones that are positive.”

And King relies on minority NHL players past and present to pay it forward and mentor the new generation of players of color.

“Kevin Weekes, for example, used to mentor Chris Stewart and Wayne Simmonds,” King told me. “Now I’ve got Chris Stewart and Wayne Simmonds mentoring Devante Smith-Pelly and Emerson Etem. ”

Boston Bruins' Tuukka Rask, a Peterson client.

Boston Bruins’ Tuukka Rask, a Peterson client.

The son of Jamaican immigrants, King grew up in Evanston, Ill. where his father was a veterinary assistant and construction worker and his mother a nurse. Hockey served as a de facto baby-sitter for King: practices at the local recreation center rink were in the afternoon –  times when child care was either too pricey for his parents or too hard to find.”It started off me watching Northwestern University hockey games, Northwestern had a club hockey team,” King told me. “I could barely see over the boards and eventually the coach said ‘Hey, do you want to play?’ I started that way.”Fate intervened at age 7 when the goalie on King’s youth team failed to show up for one game and the team’s coach asked King to strap on the pads.

“They put me in there and I got a shutout,” he recalled. “At that point, my coach back then put out a little carrot for me that they would help me with my hockey – pay for it, kind of scholarship me – which led to me saying ‘Hey, I could play goal.’ The first four or five games, I gave up three goals. So I was pretty pumped about that. I was getting my hockey pretty much subsidized, because my family didn’t really have a lot of money to be able to pay for that, so it worked out.”

His goaltending skill led to a scholarship at the University of Miami of Ohio. There, he compiled a record of 5 wins, 6 losses, 2 ties and a 3.90 goals-against average in his senior year in 1995-96 – stats that hardly screamed “draft pick” to NHL scouts.

“I never really got to be the starter and be the guy until my senior year, at that point I didn’t have the resume I needed to,” he said. “But I did have offers to play pro hockey and I could have played and gotten a contract from, at the time, a team called the Dayton Ice Bandits who were in the (Colonial Hockey League), and I was going to do that.”

King in his college playing days.

King in his college playing days.

But King said a close friend’s father “talked me into the real world.” So he took his Miami of Ohio degree in communications into the advertising world.

From there, connections and mentorships took over. Bryant McBride, an entrepreneur and hockey enthusiast, joined the NHL and became one of the league’s highest-ranking black executives. McBride created the NHL Diversity Task Force – the forerunner of the league’s current “Hockey is for Everyone” program – and brought O’Ree into the fold to help with diversity efforts. O’Ree had been monitoring King’s on-ice and off-ice career and encouraged him to work for the NHL.

“He said ‘Hey Eustace, you’re not playing anymore, you’ve got a great background, we want someone like you to come over to the NHL,'” King recalled. “So I went there and started working in the marketing and business development area.”

As King progressed at NHL headquarters, McBride left the league offices to become a sports agent. He helped Jason Allison secure a $20 million contract with the Los Angeles Kings in 2001.

McBride decided to get out of the representation business about the time King and his partners launched 02K in 2004. Their first client? Jason Allison.

“Really, this whole thing in hockey, in my whole experience, it’s all about relationships and mentors that bring people to the next stop,” King said. “It’s almost like a pay it forward in our group. We have a mindset in our group where everyone from the NHL down to the younger guys, they’re  all interconnected and we make sure that they all have access to each other.”

Peterson started playing hockey at such a young age that he barely remember when he wasn’t on skates. A Massachusetts native, he was a smooth-skating defenseman on the 2001 Boston College NCAA championship hockey team.

Brett Peterson in his smooth-skating Boston College days.

Brett Peterson in his smooth-skating Boston College days.

After college, he had a solid minor league hockey career, playing for the East Coast Hockey League’s Atlantic City Boardwalk Bullies, Johnstown Chiefs, Florida Everblades and Phoenix Roadrunners.  He also spent time in the American Hockey League with the Albany River Rats before hanging up his skates with the AHL’s Grand Rapid Griffins in the 2008-09 season.

Like King, Peterson made the leap into sports representations through past hockey connections.

“I met with a group that represented a bunch of my roommates when I played at BC, kind of formed a relationship with them. The sports agency business was something I always wanted to get into,” Peterson told me. “It just kind of fit that along the time I was thinking about stopping playing hockey they wanted me to come on and work with them.”

“It’s one of the rare cases that it kind of worked right from the start,” Peterson added. “It’s been unbelievable ever since.”