Hockey is for everyone: A deeper look

Along with all of the All-Star weekend hooplah came the most recent installment of the NHL’s Hockey is for Everyone campaign.  Canadian Governor General, David Johnson, with Gary Bettman and former Boston Bruin (and first black NHL’er), Willie O’Ree  were on hand at Rideau Hall to announce the introduction of the H.E.R.O.S program in Ottawa.…

The 1928 Cree and Ojibway Barnstorming Hockey Tour

Over the weekend Torontoist published an excellent article by Kevin Plummer that provides an overview of a 1928 hockey tour featuring two teams made up of Ojibway and Cree First Nations players. The article is well-researched and historically/socially contextualized, and I highly suggest giving it a read. While I do not want to simply rehash…

Brian Burke’s Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

By Simon Darnell When Kanye West dropped a bomb on the musical world in 2010 with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, music critics lost their collective shit trying to process, internalize and communicate what they had just absorbed. So sprawling and epic, so contradictory, so unabashed in its assessments was the album that it could…

The World Junior Hockey Championship: The Best of Both Worlds

By Matt Ventresca “It’s a holiday tradition!” says TSN’s Bob McKenzie in this year’s edition of the network’s marketing campaign for the World Junior Hockey Championship (WJHC). This year’s advertisement features a number of former WJHC competitors from Eric Lindros to Theo Fleury to Darcy Tucker to Andrew Ladd exclaiming “I was there in [insert…