The NHL's changing face: the seven blacks to play this season are role models for a market the league wants to grow

Sporting News, The, Feb 10, 1997 by Karen Crouse

Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the face of the NHL is changing, wit the sticks of players such a Canucks left winger Donald Bras hear effectively serving as airbrushes.

Brashear is one of seven black players to have appeared in at least one NHL game this season. They are, in the words of Panthers prospect Kevin Weekes, who dreams of joining the ranks of blacks in the NHL, "a little fraternity." They also are ice-breakers, pushed by circumstance to be what Tiger Woods is to golf, role models for a mass-market audience that the NHL is making a concerted effort to reach.

To look around General Motors Place or Miami Arena on a game night is to conclude the NHL has its work cut out for it The crowds tend to be as white as the playing surface.

"Sometimes I look around and say, `Oh, yeah, there aren't many of us out there'" Brashear says.

But hang out at the players, entrance at any of the buildings a few hours before a game or after a practice and you'll be swept up by the warm winds of change. At Miami Arena before a game last month, two black kids on in-line skates waited to get goaltender John Vanbiesbrouck's autograph.

Outside of GM Place, where the Canucks play, a handful of kids are waiting for their favorite players, hugging binders filled with hockey cards. One of them, a 13-year-old of Canadian African descent, says he is hoping to get Pavel Bure's autograph, and yes, Brashear's, too.

"You turn on the television and look at MTV, VH1, whatever, and see how many rap artists and R&B artists are wearing hockey jerseys and it's ironic," Weekes, a goaltender who grew up in Toronto says. "Timing is the essence of everything, and right now the timing couldn't be better for the involvement of different ethnicities in the game."

It behooves the NHL to broaden its fan base, if for no reason other than to keep its arenas and its coffers filled. Bryant McBride, who oversees the NHL's diversity task force, readily admits the league is trying to "grow as a game in all quarters."

Bernadette Mansur, the NHL's vice president of corporate communications, says, "What we're seeing is because of the in-line skating roller-hockey phenomena, all the barriers to bringing this game into diverse markets are being erased."

In Canada's multicultural, hockey-crazed climate, diversity is a non-issue. Brashear was born in Bedford, Ind. Had he remained there, he might very well have become a football player with NFL aspirations. But his mother, a French Canadian, left his father, who was of African American descent, and returned to Quebec before Brashear started kindergarten.

His mother initially left Brashear with his father, whom Brashear says had problems with alcoholism. He eventually joined his mother and her second husband in Quebec, then landed in three foster homes in and around Quebec City. It was while in the last of those that he was introduced to hockey by three of the boys in his foster family.

"Maybe if they would have played basketball I would have become a basketball player," says Brashear, a fourth-year pro who turned 25 last week. "But as it was, I felt light at home at the rink. That's the game everyone around me was playing."

At school, some of the kids would call him names, such as Chocolate. There were other racial taunts. But on the ice, Brashear says, "It's never mattered that I'm black.

"We're not many. But that doesn't matter. I feel white out there."

Jarome Iginla, the Flames, standout who is bidding to become the first black player to win the Calder Trophy given to the league,s top rookie, also says that prejudice isn't a problem.

"I haven't noticed anything," says Iginla, a 19-year-old of Nigerian Canadian descent. "Maybe it is a little different because you're a minority. But it's really no big deal."

In the American Hockey League, Weekes is served regular reminders that he is different.

"I'll walk into arenas and I'll hear people say, `There's the black keeper,' or `There's the black goalie,'" says Weekes, a 21-year-old from Toronto. "Initially that took a little bit of getting used to. But I don't really think twice about it now. I'm used to it."

Mike Grier is a rookie winger with the Oilers by way of Boston University. He has played in 42 games this season, becoming the first black who was born and trained in the United States to play in the NHL. He entered the league 38 years after Bruins forward Willie O'Ree broke the color barrier in a game against Montreal.

Grier says he is aware that his ethnicity sets him apart but adds, "It doesn't bother me. Ifs always been that way, so it doesn't faze me anymore."

Grier, 22, whose father Bobby is the director of player development for the New England Patriots, feels the tug of history. He feels it daily on his dress slacks or his jersey, from pint-sized fans with big dreams that they now see can come true. "I do take some pride in the fact that maybe I am (a role model) for other minority players," he says.

So does Iginla, who says, "When I was younger I looked up to guys like (St. Louis goaltender) Grant Fuhr. I hope I can be (a role model for the next generation).