Editor’s note – Hi. A little while back, Acha, the former managing editor of this place inquired if she could share some thoughts about the U.S. Men’s Hockey team, their locker room conversation with the president, and the attendance of the vast majority of the team at the State of the Union. I agreed without hesitation. While we are primarily a site devoted to the Tampa Bay Lightning, every once in a while we have to step back and take a large look at the hockey world and how actions affect everyone.
If you’re not interested in that, feel free not to read this piece. There are plenty of other posts on here.
TW: There is brief talk about SA and harassment in the following post.
–JustinG.
Recently I sat down with Julie DiCaro to talk through some things that were stuck in my head about the actions of our US Men’s National Team hockey players and the league that supports them, especially after a number of brand-new fans were drawn into hockey as a result of the HBO TV show Heated Rivalry.
There is a place for writing about sports as sports alone, and those articles should be respected and kept that way. This piece is not that place – if you don’t feel like thinking further about any of this, the back button is your friend. For those who want a deeper discussion about this matter, please, come decompress with us.
Please note that for purposes of this chat, when we discuss men’s and women’s sports teams, we’re not discussing issues about gender identity itself. That is an entirely different, and important, matter that is not within today’s scope. With this caveat out of the way, let me continue with my introduction.
DiCaro is a long-time soldier in the sports-writing battlefield; she is a journalist and author of the book Sidelined: Sports, Culture, and Being A Woman in America. She has had a lot of experience handling the way in which major sports leagues have treated her as a result of her honesty about the bad behavior of athletes. She has had her life and job jeopardized for simply stating the truth – and yet she’s carried on.
DiCaro is a hero, and has her fingers on a historic thread about the behavior of men in and around sports that can help unravel and contextualize this most recent situation, and I wanted to hear her words.
Acha:
Hi Julie! Thank you for agreeing to this interview with me. I am a former editor of Raw Charge, from back when it was an SB Nation fan site, and I’ve been following your work for a good eight years now.
Here’s why I decided to chat with you.
A friend of mine, a long-time hockey fan, texted me recently with the following words:
“Are you going to write something about how we are supposed to continue supporting the NHL? I’m dying to read your thoughts because I loved the last thing you published. Please because I’m struggling. Hockey is my peace. But like now? All I see are players laughing at women. I could handle a lot of it. But this! Luckily only one of my Canes players was there but [middle finger emoji x 5].”
This friend is, of course, writing about the celebration in the US Men’s National Hockey Team locker room in which the Director of the FBI, Kash Patel, held up his phone with President Donald Trump on it, who then used language that belittled the achievement of the US Women’s National Team after their gold-medal victory. It was all caught on video, and the players were also caught on video laughing along. Most of them then went and ate McDonalds in the Oval Office, and subsequently sat in on the State of the Union address.
The US Men’s National Hockey Team GM, Bill Guerin, responded to the events. Instead of apologizing or assuring the world that team culture would be addressed, he said, “There was nothing that was set out to be political. There was nothing that was meant to harm anybody.”
Well. The fact that most of the team attended the State of the Union is solid proof that sports are political. Choosing to support a person who is often labeled as misogynistic is a political choice. Maybe it wasn’t done with the intention that the people on the team explicitly agree, but the idea that sportsmen can nod along and have it be meaningless is nonsense.
DiCaro:
Sports have always been political. From MLB integrating before the rest of America, to Muhammad Ali claiming conscientious objector status, to Billie Jean King demanding equal pay for equal work, to the displays of military might before every NFL game. Sports have never not been political. And they reflect our society. We work through our issues via sports, often times before we work through them outside of sports.
Acha:
I think what surprised me most about this most recent experience is how little I was ultimately surprised.
I was not surprised by the misogyny of the locker room culture that let this go by unchecked, because it was more important to this team to celebrate a victory than to pause and call out sexism. This doesn’t stop at the US Men’s National Hockey Team – it is rife in Canadian Junior Hockey and other North American professional hockey leagues as well.
When did you realize it was important to write your book, Sidelined: Sports, Culture, and Being A Woman in America? Was there a triggering event like this one, or was it an accumulation of a number of events?
DiCaro:
So back in 2015, I was working as an update anchor at 670 The Score, the big sports station in Chicago. I had left law to do it, and my background was in criminal law and violence against women. So when Patrick Kane was accused of SA, I was on the air quite a bit, explaining how a criminal investigation works, what a rape exam means, etc.
All the guys at my station were complete kiss-asses to the teams we covered, and this was when the Hawks still ruled Chicago. Anyway, I refused to take part in the “she’s probably just lying” narrative that so many other Hawks fans were spouting. That didn’t go over well, and the online harassment and death threats began.
I literally had to stay home from work one day because someone threatened me on Twitter. Men sent me photos of women’s dead bodies, explicit threats, you name it. So I wrote about online harassment for The Cauldron (which was being published by SI at the time), and it went viral.
Not long after, Sarah Spain and I made More Than Mean, which also went viral. And then a local publisher reached out and asked me if I was willing to write about my experiences. They wanted me to sign with them immediately, but I got an agent and sold the rights to Dutton. So that’s how the whole thing began. The online harassment, and the other women in sports who had experienced harassment, was the triggering event, I guess.
Women in sports media also had quite a whisper network back then – we talked a lot in group chats and privately about what guys to avoid and who was terrible to work with. And then, of course, Me Too happened, so suddenly people wanted to hear about being a woman in a male-dominated workplace.
Acha:
That is a very good summary of the state of sports and misogyny in the past decade. Do you still follow men’s sports?
Due to my own experiences writing about the minor leagues and seeing how players end up getting reassigned there while awaiting jury trials, I have found myself increasingly not watching men’s sports – including during these past Olympics.
DiCaro:
I do follow men’s sports, but far, far less frequently than I used to. I, too, find myself watching a lot more women’s sports. For example, I got into sportswriting because I started a Cubs blog back in 2006, and it was eventually picked up by the Chicago Tribune’s network. For over 10 years, I wrote about the Cubs daily. I planned my entire summer around their games; they were a huge part of my life. When I got my own sports talk radio show in 2018, I lived in Chicago sports 24/7. And I was encouraged not to discuss women’s sports – advice that I ignored.
But after the Cubs’ PR director called my boss and tried to have me fired for speaking openly about allegations of domestic abuse, everything about the team felt so yucky. Same with the Blackhawks after I saw behind the curtain. As we saw in Milan, many of the guys in sports have been completely infantilized – nothing is ever their fault. They never have to take accountability, and there are always women there to explain why they don’t have to take responsibility for their bad acts.
Thank God for the rise of pro women’s sports in the last five years, because men’s sports just don’t feel the same once you cover them regularly. People told me I’d wind up hating the guys on some of the teams I covered, and they were right.
Acha:
With the popularity of Heated Rivalry and a new wave of people discovering hockey (and immediately getting Milkshake Ducked by real hockey players), what advice can you give about the “boy aquarium” and how to watch sports without getting sucked into creating fantasies about who these men are?
DiCaro:
I feel so bad about it! I feel like the OG hockey writers who covered these guys in the mid-2000s should have done a much better job being vocal about how toxic the culture can be – thinking specifically about allegations of domestic abuse against star players and the homophobia around Pride Night.
Acha:
I’ll note that it probably felt this way because although all of us OG hockey writers shouted pretty loudly about it at the time, we were not taken as seriously as we should have been, or had our pieces understood as much as they could have been. I’ll go into a little more detail later.
DiCaro:
But one of the problems with knowing what goes on behind the scenes is that you don’t want to steal other people’s joy. People would say to me all the time, “So and so is my family’s favorite player!” and you just want to say, “If you saw him IRL you would not feel that way.” But at the same time, I didn’t want to ruin the sport for them.
I feel that way about HR. It was so much fun watching all these women discover hockey; no one wanted to ruin it, I think. As a boy mom, it’s led to some good conversations among mothers and sons about what we expect from them when there are no women in the room. We expect them to stand up to their friends, even when we aren’t there. That’s a true ally. And that’s what so many women lack in sports and sports media. It’s still all a big boys’ club, and we’re not in it, no matter how much of a pick-me some women try to be.
I used to complain about the toxic culture in sports radio to one of my guy friends all the time, and he told me something I’ve never forgotten: “Lots of guys love sleeping with women, but they don’t actually like women, themselves.”
And this sort of gets back to the point of Sidelined – women are not in the club, and we need to be on the same side when it comes to dealing with the menfolk. Whether we’re talking about sports or any other industry, we’re not in the club. And part of the reason we’re not in the club is that men can always close the door, use us as the butt of their jokes, and everyone just laughs along.
As for how to watch sports, I watch now warily, and I’m not at all afraid to call them out on their BS. The parasocial relationships we develop with players are something people need to learn to avoid. These guys aren’t your friends, they aren’t your family, and they don’t know or care much about you. That’s hard for a lot of people to accept, but it’s the truth. So, for me, I will love a team or a player until they give me a reason not to. And when that happens, I’ll be the first to be screaming about their behavior from the mountaintops. I sort of treat every team/player like they’re on probation with me. I’ve been burned too many times.
The thing is, women, the LGBTQ+ community, and people of color make up a significant portion of every fan base, and we have a right to have a say. Take the NFL, for example – women make up around 50 percent of the fan base. It’s less in other men’s pro sports, but it’s still a large enough group that teams should care about our opinions.
People often ask me why women have never banded together to boycott the NFL or NHL, and I think it’s just a matter of knowing how big a group we actually are and how much power we have.
No one owns hockey, and it’s certainly not owned by jackasses like the Tkachuks and the Hughes boys. Hockey is for everyone, and we need to treat it that way. If you’re behaving in a way that is not “for everyone,” you deserve to get your ass handed to you by the fans. And that’s how fans should start approaching their teams and those who play for them.
Acha:
I appreciate the tough-love approach that you’ve outlined. This is the way: speaking up, being honest and outspoken, and not letting bad behavior pass unnoticed. It is a reminder to the league that the fans who enjoyed Heated Rivalry can be a significant part of a sports fanbase, and need to have their voices respected, or the fanbase risks losing them.
What the leagues do after hearing us is their own decision, but they need to understand that their decisions also have implications, and they have already lost fans as a result of their inaction.
Maybe the league will decide to do very little, which is what the NHL did in 2017 after paying lip service to another excellent journalist (Melissa Geshwind), who pressed them via petition to address DV and sexual assault issues; not to mention how they ignored all of the other important queer and minority voices that tried their best to get heard over the past two decades. Some of these excellent hockey bloggers, like Nicole Haase, went on to write for outlets such as the Victory Press. Katie Strang and Rick Westhead have not been silent, and probably moved the needle the most for us in terms of covering these issues and pressing for uncomfortable change.
This is in no way a comprehensive list of all of the writing, reporting, or petitions that tried to change men’s hockey for the better – my point is to say that for a long time, we tried, and many of us are still trying.
But maybe, maybe, with all the speed of a beer-league fourth-liner, professional hockey leagues and the US Men’s National Hockey Team will start to take men’s sports culture and misogyny seriously, and address it through education and consequences.
For anyone curious, the education part is super simple. The message can boil down to: “Don’t be a dick.”
Any last words?
DiCaro:
Sports belong to all of us, and cishet white men don’t get to tell us what we can and can’t say about sports, how we’re allowed to watch, or who we’re allowed to criticize. So many leagues haven’t changed because no one forces them to.
Fans have so much power — the power to change the channel, the power to not buy a team’s merchandise, the power to not buy tickets to games. It’s not unreasonable to expect sports franchises to conduct themselves the same way the rest of us are expected to at the office. It’s long past time sports leagues, and their employees, grew up.
Acha:
Thank you for this discussion, and for your time.
Editor’s Note. Comments have been disabled on this post. We thank you for taking the time to read what Julie and Acha discussed. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to send them to sbn.rawcharge@gmail.com
