I am struggling with this one. I am sitting in front of a computer screen, far too late at night, trying to transcribe thoughts to words.
I was called many names growing up in Central Maine. It was, unfortunately, inevitable as I was one of a handful of Asians who lived in the area. And really, the other two I knew were my brothers. So racial slurs are nothing new to me. And I've been called every name under the sun as the kids I grew up with in grade school tried to find a label that would get my attention. They ran through a litany of Asian epithets as they tried to determine if I was Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese.... Then they started in on the color of my skin: black, yellow, brown, red.... They tried to determine if my eyes were slanted up or down.
However, once I put the skates on at 5, things changed. Names on the playground persisted but in the rink, we were all equal. In 30 years of playing, coaching and officiating hockey, I have never once heard one player turn to an opponent and reference their cultural background. I never had a player come after me with a racial epithet. I have been told it happened and addressed as an official with players and coaches but I have never dealt with it first hand.
Until tonight.
Thursday nights are usually cake walks. We have this one league pretty well trained and all we do is drop the puck, call icings, offside and goals, and joke around with the players. Occasionally we may have to put our hand in the air for a hook or hold. And, of course, there have been less than a handful of fights over the years. But generally, we do not have to deal with aggressive penalties.
Tonight, that all changed. Tonight, I wanted to take the referee sweater off and go after a player. Tonight, we had a Bertuzzi-esque fight that ended with a third player entering into the fray and calling the instigator of the fight the "n" word.
It angers me that racism still exists. I know in my heart that racism will never die. But I continue to have hope that someday we will be able to quell it.
I am lucky since, as the official, I have a rulebook that I can throw at a player in an instance like this. I can and did bounce a player from the game in this situation. But as a player at heart, I wanted to put the whistle away and go after him. Logic and common sense tempered my anger tonight. Yet still I am crestfallen that my children will still have to confront racism and intolerance at some point in their lives.
There is still a long road in front of us. Tolerance, on so many different levels, has still not fully taken hold. But as long as we continue down this path to creating a better home and a better world, perhaps be will some day reach that distant vanishing point.
