Hate travels fast in the age of Twitter. No sooner had Joel Ward's shot found the back of the net late Wednesday than racist rants began spewing on the Internet.
Web sites such as Chirpstory and BlackSportsOnline collected dozens of the vile tweets. Most used the n-word modified by the f-word. A few issued death threats. And some combined both: "That (n-word) deserves to hang." "Shocking to see," Ward told USA TODAY Sports, "but it didn't ruin my day."Web sites such as Chirpstory and BlackSportsOnline collected dozens of the vile tweets. Most used the n-word modified by the f-word. A few issued death threats. And some combined both: "That (n-word) deserves to hang."
"Shocking to see," Ward told USA TODAY Sports, "but it didn't ruin my day."
Ward, who was born in Toronto of parents from Barbados, heard about the tweets while on the Washington Capitals' flight back from Boston after his Game 7 overtime goal knocked out the defending champion Bruins. Teammate Jeff Halpern showed Ward some of the tweets and apologized that he had to see that.
"Halpern just took offense that people weren't talking about the goal, (but rather) getting into racist remarks," Ward said. "I think he was telling me he had my back."
So did Caps owner Ted Leonsis, who attacked the haters on his blog, Ted's Take: "What these people have said and done is unforgivable. I hope they are now publicly identified and pay a huge price for their beliefs."
The NHL issued a statement that called the comments "ignorant and unacceptable" and said the people who made them "have no place associating themselves with our game."
Some Twitter users attacked the racist tweets. By Thursday evening, 31 of the 40 tweets highlighted on Chirpstory.com had been deleted and 17 of those accounts deleted. One tweeted an apology, saying he was 16 and had made a stupid mistake.
"I think it is just kids," Ward said. "It has no effect on me whatsoever." Some of the tweeters indicated they were Bruins fans, though it is hard to know how many are from Boston, a city with a fraught history of racial tension.
"Social media gives a voice and prominence to a bunch of idiots," said author Richard Johnson, curator of The Sports Museum, which is adjacent to TD Garden, where Ward scored his game-winning goal. "This is probably going to dredge up a lot of bad stuff about Boston."
Four decades ago, Boston produced indelible images of racism — the stoning in white South Boston of school buses carrying students from black neighborhoods. Boston Celtics' Hall of Fame center Bill Russell once called the city a "flea-market of racism."
Dan Lebowitz, director of Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society, said that as soon as he saw the goal, "I knew the backlash was coming." But he said he didn't think such reaction is unique to fans of hockey, a largely white sport (the NHL has 38 minority players, 18 of them black), or of Boston.
"If this had happened to a team in New York or Philly or any other city, or in another sport, we'd have seen a lot of the same reaction," he said. "The problem isn't limited to sport, or to the Internet. It's a comment on our society."
A complicated history
For much of the last century, said Thomas Whalen, a Boston University political historian and the author of several books on Boston sports, "Boston was as segregated as Birmingham, Ala. It's still very segregated, like a lot of cities."
Sport and race always has been a combustible pairing in Boston. In the 1970s, when Russell was coaching the NBA's Seattle Supersonics, he said that as an African-American he'd rather be a lamp post in Seattle than the mayor of Boston.
Perhaps reflecting the racial attitudes of owner Tom Yawkey, the Red Sox were the last major league team to sign a black player (Pumpsie Green, in 1959). Years earlier, the team held a tryout at Fenway Park for Jackie Robinson and other black players, a charade designed to placate a liberal member of the city council.
But the historical record is complicated and, in some respects, exonerates Beantown. In 1958, Bruins' winger Willie O'Ree became the first black player in the NHL. The Celtics were the first NBA team to sign a black man (Chuck Cooper in 1950), the first to start five black players and the first to name a black head coach — Russell.
Northeastern University athletics director Peter Roby said it is unfair to blame Boston for Internet racists who can be found in any city.
"There's been too much progress made here," he said. "That doesn't mean there are not still pockets where people are being discriminated against or made to feel less than welcome, but there is no way I'm going to let a couple of people who don't see the world the way they should spoil the way people look at the city of Boston.
"There is no excuse for this because it suggests we can only see people in regard to their ethnicity or their origin instead of giving them credit for being a professional, skilled and talented athlete. That's what I take offense with the most." Ward did his best not to take offense. "I'm definitely getting a lot of support," he said. "There have been a lot of Boston fans who have supported me, which is very cool to see."
An instant forum for expression
"How would you like to be Danny Ainge today?" asked Whalen, author of books on the Red Sox and Celtics. He was referring to the Celtics' president of basketball operations, who faces a summer of trying to sign free agents, most of whom will be African Americans and who may already harbor some reservations about living in Boston.
"This puts the word out there — Boston is still inhospitable for athletes of color," Whalen said.
Joseph Reagle, a Northeastern communications professor who studies Twitter and other online platforms, said such incidents are to be expected in forums such as Twitter. They start out small and intimate with relatively like-minded users. But that changes as they get more popular and attract more users, to the point where — after incidents like last night's — people will call for filters.
His take: the explosion Wednesday night was less a deliberate expression of racism by Bostonians, or hockey fans, than an accidental, unmediated expression of biases that might otherwise go unprofessed. He distinguished between what he called "purposeful racism" and some of Wednesday's tweets, which he said were probably inadvertent revelations of racism — people writing in a virtual stream of consciousness to what they think is a small community of readers. Twitter offers an easy, instant forum for expression, he said, "and (tweeters) forget that the whole world gets to look at it."
Still, as former Red Sox pitcher Dennis "Oil Can" Boyd said: "People that are talking like that, feel like that. That's the scary thing. A lot of things haven't changed. It's just bad, bad, bad."
The most diverse sport
African-American NHL player agent Eustace King represents several players of color. "I look at the NHL as being the most diverse of all of the big sports," King said. "We have Russians, all other Europeans, Canadians, Americans, and people have gotten along well."
He finds it disheartening that Washington players who should be celebrating an important win are dealing with this issue instead.
"This is not what they signed up for," King said. "I think the league has to pursue these individuals just to send a message that says we are here to protect our athletes. Maybe it wouldn't amount to anything from a legal standpoint because people can say what they want, but the league takes a stance that fans should stick to a certain etiquette or face repercussions."
A fan threw a banana on the ice in London, Ont., during an NHL exhibition game last September when Philadelphia Flyers winger Wayne Simmonds, who is black, was attempting a shot during a shootout. The 26-year-old fan got a $200 fine on Jan. 9 for provincial trespassing after police decided there wasn't enough evidence to file charges for a hate crime.
Simmonds heard about the Ward case Thursday. "Obviously, things get said. It's the Internet. They can say whatever they want and they don't have to show their face. It's disgusting. I've had things like that happen to me before."
Simmonds and Ward are from Scarborough in suburban Toronto. Ward is 31 and Simmonds 23, but they've become close friends since meeting four or five years ago, workout buddies back home over the last two summers.
"It's sad in this day and age that it continues to happen," Simmonds said. "People can be as gutless as they want and they don't have to show up. They just throw a comment out there on the Internet."
The one black guy in the room
Ward said he has always felt comfortable in an NHL dressing room and on the ice.
"There is no lying about it. … I'm definitely the one black guy in a room with 20 white guys," he said. "There are definitely some cultural differences, such as taste in music, but I've never heard anything derogatory."
Teammate Matt Hendricks put it this way: "He's the only black guy on the team, but do we look at him like that? Not all. We look at him like he's part of the family."
Leonsis, the Caps' owner, said in his blog: "There should be zero tolerance for this kind of hate mongering. Their messages should now stay glued into the algorithms to place a forever warning and a mark upon these people and their actions. They shouldn't be able to escape their keystrokes."
Peter Cooney is Ward's Boston-based agent. He watched Wednesday's game with his fiancée and they cheered for Ward all game. One Bruins' fan tapped them on the shoulder mid-game to ask if they were Ward's parents."
"We're white," Cooney said. "We laughed and explained that I'm his agent. And when Joel scored the winning goal that fan congratulated us and wished the Capitals luck. The Bruins do not have bad fans. There's a small percentage in any city."
Cooney said he talked to Ward on Thursday to ask if he needed him to come to Washington for support.
"And Joel said, 'What, you're going to be my bodyguard?' And he laughed. He said, 'Peter, I dismiss all that. My focus is to play hockey for the Washington Capitals.' "
A difficult town
Arizona Diamondbacks hitting coach Don Baylor played 16 seasons in the majors, including one with the Red Sox in 1986-1987.
"It was a difficult town," Baylor said. "I think everybody looks at it by team, more than anything else. If the team is doing well, they don't care who is out there performing at the time. But individually, out on the street, you know what it is. It's Boston. Going there my entire American League career, you could always sense that. You experienced the same thing in South Florida a lot of times. You could always feel your color in Boston and Florida. …
"You always had players, maybe not as much today as back then, say certain things that were happening. I know Oil Can was always saying about things that happened to him. He was a bomb ready to go off every day. Here's a kid going from Mississippi to Boston, and it was a tough experience."
Boyd said he didn't experience much racism in Boston himself. "I was very open about showing my blackness and how proud I was," he said. "Fans loved me and the city loved me." But he knows all about the city's past.
These comments about Ward make it "look like Boston itself hasn't changed — like South Boston has risen up again. That ain't the city, fool. That's not the city. You ain't gonna tell me that.
"Boston is a very diverse place, a melting pot. "
Darnell McDonald, an African-American outfielder in his third year with the Red Sox, said: "I've had the n-word written on my car, in Boston. It's individuals, man. Racism is everywhere; I'm not just going to say Boston. It's just unfortunate that people are that ignorant."
Tommy Harper, 71, is a former Red Sox outfielder and coach. "We're never going to eradicate that kind of thing, so why worry about it?" he said of the offending posts. "Like any African-American, if I were to respond to every idiot in the world, you could never have a day."
Source. I don't claim to know anything about hockey, not my kind of sport, but it is still a good read. It is sad though.