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John Shipley: Geopolitics put Wild in difficult spot on Pride Night

john shipley, pioneer press
·3 min read
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Pride Night is important, and the Minnesota Wild planned and executed a good one for Tuesday night at Xcel Energy Center. It’s unfortunate that it was, in a very visible way, hijacked by intolerance — perhaps from several thousand miles away.

Lord knows the U.S. has its own problems with prejudice, and that the LBGTQ+ community here has miles to go before it can sleep soundly at night, but it doesn’t appear the Wild’s decision to not wear specially made Pride Night jerseys during warmups Tuesday was locally grown.

And while ultimately an unfortunate capitulation to bigotry, it was understandable.

Roughly three months ago, on Dec. 5, 2002, Russian president Vladimir Putin signed a law that makes it illegal there to promote same-sex relationships or the idea that non-binary orientations are “normal.” Since then, not a single Russian NHL player has worn a Pride Night jersey.

You may know of a local Russian athlete playing for the Wild who, in fact, wore a Pride Night jersey last season.

Tuesday night’s 1-0 shootout loss was in all other ways a positive one for the Twin Cities and its LGBTQ+ community. Among other solid gestures, Wild players donated tickets to QUEERSPACE, the team donated suites to Twin Cities Pride, Twin Cities Queer Hockey Association and Team Trans. Jack Jablonski opened the game with the traditional “Let’s Play Hockey.”

Just as important, nearly every one of the 20 Wild players in the lineup Tuesday made it a point to declare that they are on board with treating their fellow human beings with dignity, respect and acceptance. Roughly 17 of them taped the shafts and/or blades of their sticks with rainbow tape for warmups, among them Connor Dewar, Marc-Andre Fleury, Freddie Gaudreau, Filip Gustavsson, Ryan Hartman, John Merrill, Jake Middleton and team captain Jared Spurgeon.

This is leadership of the best sort.

As the LGBTQ+ community fights for inclusion, there isn’t much better exposure than the one it receives from professional sports teams. Formerly a bastion of toxic masculinity, they are — like the rest of North America — evolving. When professional athletes visibly respect and accept the LGBTQ+ community, it’s important. They are not, for instance, considered “coastal elites,” easily ignored as the woke cognoscenti; they are admired and respected by all people of all castes. Their approbation, in widescreen, is more valuable than yours or mine.

When first parsing something like last’s night’s decision to make those jerseys a healthy scratch, it’s easy to assume that at least one player balked, and that the organization decided not to rock what must be a delicate foundation of teamwork in the dressing room as the team tries to lock down a Western Conference playoff spot over the last month of the regular season.

It’s also easy to say the team should just make the recalcitrants explain their decision not to comply with a team directive, and easy to believe a team would balk at that just so other players don’t have to answer a bunch of questions about an intolerant linemate.

It remains possible that is the case. The Wild aren’t responding directly to the late decision other than to say it was an organizational one and that the team was “proud to continue our support of the LGBTQIA+ community” with its second annual pride night.

But it just doesn’t appear either of those is the case. I don’t want to lean on the cliche that sometimes there are bigger issues at play — there aren’t bigger issues than respect, acceptance and inclusion — but it presented a complicated set of circumstances the team had to navigate. Some NHL players simply have family in precarious places and situations.

Instead, we celebrate our diversity and enjoy the fact that so many of the Wild’s most visible and admired employees made it a point Tuesday to personally show their support for Minnesota’s LGBTQ+ community.

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