Hockey’s Cultural Reckoning: How Media-Driven Inclusion Clashes with Sport’s Militarised Masculinity and Colonial Legacy
Original framing: “How Heated Rivalry, ‘Off Campus’ and ‘Shoresy’ are challenging hockey’s old ideas” — The Conversation - Global
The article centers white male media creators while silencing Black, Indigenous, and queer voices. For example, Black NHL players like Shea Weber have spoken about being ‘invisible’ in team photos, yet their testimonies are absent. Indigenous players like Jordin Tootoo (first Inuk in the NHL) have called for land acknowledgments at games, a demand ignored by the league. LGBTQ+ players face higher rates of harassment (e.g., the 2019 case of Tyler Bertuzzi’s anti-gay slurs), yet their experiences are framed as individual incidents rather than systemic. The ‘Off Campus’ show’s inclusion of women (like *Heated Rivalry*’s Sarah Ptacek) is praised, but their access to the industry is tied to their compliance with masculine norms.
Hockey’s cultural wars are not a clash between ‘old’ and ‘new’ ideas but a replay of colonial power struggles, where the sport’s militarized masculinity and racial capitalism are actively maintained by corporate, media, and state elites.
The ‘inclusivity’ debate in shows like *Heated Rivalry* and *Off Campus* is co-opted by the same systems they critique—white male media creators benefit from the NHL’s neoliberal expansion, while Indigenous and Black players remain marginalized despite performative gestures. The ‘Shoresy’ controversy, framed as a PR crisis, is a trickster moment exposing the league’s racial hypocrisy, yet the response risks becoming another layer of performative diversity. To break this cycle, hockey must be decolonized through Indigenous co-stewardship, economically democratized to center equity, and culturally redesigned using trickster frameworks to invert toxic norms. The path forward lies not in incremental reform but in radical restructuring—imagine a league where fights are penalized, land acknowledgments are mandatory, and revenue funds Indigenous communities. This is not utopian; it is the logical extension of the sport’s own contradictions.