by Alex Cappannari

Created on: May 05, 2009

Hockey is a game of speed and skill, accuracy and strength. Being on ice accentuates a player's agility and allows them to perform super-human feats. It's a team sport that involves working closely with your line mates and broadly with your team. So why no brothers on skates? It's a question long pondered.

Here in Nashville, we had the honor this season of picking up our very own African-American, Joel Ward. Scoring a goal in his first game, Ward caught the eye of everyone in the arena. He's a fast skater and has become a goal-scorer upon whom you can count. So obviously, being African-American is not hindering him in any way.

Other teams have, at maximum, a single African-American on board, and most don't even have this. And yet, those African-Americans who do play are easily on professional par with their Caucasian counterparts. So why is the balance tipped so heavily? Part of the answer is geographical.

Ice tends to form in regions that have populations of mostly Caucasians, such as Canada, Croatia, and Russia. African-Americans typically don't have the same exposure to the thrill and excitement of hockey because they do not densely populate regions where hockey is a big freaking deal. With the exception of the extreme north, America grew up being a country more interested in sports that do not require frozen lakes as we have a shortage of those.

After this geographical precedent had been set, the sport came into being as mostly Caucasian. As hockey matured, racial tensions in America were continuing to be perpetuated, making it difficult for single members of either race to feel totally comfortable in environments dominated by another race. After the notion of African-American hockey players being an oddity, it must have been even more difficult for the first few who wanted to play.

Even today, in this age of political correctness, it continues to be a myth of the sport that there is some physical reason African-Americans are not as inclined to play hockey. This is, of course, ridiculous, and I know that those dedicated professionals will continue to right this decades-old wrong.

So, from a birth of cold Caucasians to an adolescence of racial tension, it is almost no mystery that hockey continues to be today a mostly Caucasian sport. I look forward to a time when this is no longer the case, and if the trend of smoothing over race relations continues, then I am certain hockey will eventually be more integrated.

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