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…

Mo’ Than Just a Moustache – Hockey, masculinity and Movember

By Matt Ventresca “Hey man, nice moustache.” Throughout the month of November, this male-to-male greeting appears more common than any other simple platitude, salutation or secret handshake. It has become so ubiquitous that it almost needs no introduction: for the past month, countless men across the globe have grown moustaches to “raise vital funds and…

“I remember just being so frustrated because I wanted to play”: Former youth hockey player Brianna Thicke speaks about being a girl playing boys’ hockey and the prospects for an elite women’s hockey league

Brianna Thicke is an 18 year-old from Montreal, Quebec. Brianna has been an active athlete her entire life and participated in youth hockey from the age of 5 until she quit the sport as a teenager. She is currently studying Communications at the post-secondary level, and recently completed a project on the state of elite…

In Their Own Words: Sports Illustrated Talks to NHL Enforcers

The latest issue of Sports Illustrated has a fascinating and disturbing article by Austin Murphy about fighting and fighters in the NHL. The article is notable for its extensive interview excerpts, including statements from current or former enforcers George Parros, Tony Twist, Shawn Thornton, Todd Fedoruk, Lyndon Byers, Kelly Chase, and Jim McKenzie. I fully…

Bursting the Dam? The Slow Erosion of Hockey Homophobia

Sport, very much including hockey, is for the most part a hostile environment for people who do not conform to the dominant ideals of the given sporting culture. Especially in physical contact sports such as hockey, football, or lacrosse – in short, sports that have always been associated with and have always celebrated an aggressive…