I am not a devoted hockey fan, but if it’s the Olympics or the Avs in the playoffs, I’ll watch a match. So I was Sunday when I saw Jack Hughes’ golden goal just 1:42 into overtime. To see the excitement of the team was absolutely contagious. I replayed the final minute of the match for the kids. We were stoked. And then the players held up Gaudreau‘s jersey and brought his kids onto the ice for photos with the team. It was a beautiful moment and a show of brotherhood that few of us get to experience.
I truly felt proud of these guys, none of whom I follow, but it was a moment—rare these days—to be proud of something the United States of America has done. That was the before.
The in-between was just a few hours later when, as I scrolled through Instagram, I saw the familiar coke-addled, deer-in-the-headlights look of the FBI Director Kash Patel slamming back beers with the team. I felt the moment died right there.
The after was coming to grips with the taxpayer money used to fund such a trip, apparently $100,000. There was no such support of the women’s team when they won their gold medal. In fact, this celebration did feature the women’s team (after a few more shitty beers were had) as they were the butt of a joke by the president himself when he said, “I must tell you, we are going to have to bring the women’s team, you do know that.” Adding that if he didn’t invite the women’s team, “I would probably be impeached.” To this, the men’s team laughed, both after the mention of inviting the women’s team and again after the impeachment joke. There was one man decent enough to be heard saying 2 for 2 in the video, a reference to the USA hockey teams sweeping the medals at the Milano Cortina games, but other than that the video was filled with very bro-y chuckles and slaps on the back.
So there we have the president and one of his closest servants mock women’s sports, even though they pretend to be the party that wants to save women’s sports, but not behind closed doors. Behind closed doors they are pedophile-protectors, misogynist pigs, and care little about serving their constituents or solving a high-profile missing person case (you forgot about Guthrie, Patel). It’s all jokes and glad-handing. Duty and honor are absent from these men. They have proven it again and again. Their love of taking credit for any American victory, whether they played any part in it, is face-palming toddleresque.
The kicker to all this is that as far as I know, no member of the men’s hockey team has spoken out about what went on in that locker room. They could have collectively not let that wee spotlight-grabbing, sad sack of a man in the door to celebrate with them. His role at most, should be to shake hands with the players once they were back in country. And not one man has defended their much more successful counterparts, the women’s USA hockey team, after Trump made them into a joke for all the men and the world to hear.
If I could, I would make the men’s hockey team hear this poem I just heard last night for the first time (potus and Patel are a lost cause, clearly), it’s by Daragh Fleming and it’s titled “If I Ever Have Girls.” Here is a brief passage from the poem, intended for the US Men’s Hockey Team because they clearly need the education:
My girls will know poetry and song.
They’ll know I will listen when something feels wrong.
They’ll learn that “women are too emotional” is an original lie,
And they’ll not grow up with a father who refuses to cry.
So yeah, my girls will make some weak men shake in their knees.
They won’t be the women that society expects.
They’ll be the women society needs.
—Daragh Fleming, “If I Ever Have Girls”
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