A History of Shame in Canada's Game: We Interview the Principals Behind TIFF's Black Ice

There’s some noticeable basketball lineage in Black Ice, the unflinching documentary about racism in hockey, both historically and present day.

The documentary, which closes out its run at TIFF on Wednesday, is exec produced by LeBron James and Raptors’ celebrity ambassador Drake.

And its director Hubert Davis, was nominated for an Oscar for the short Hardwood, about his relationship with his Harlem Globetrotter dad Mel Davis.

So, I ask jokingly, is Black Ice basketball’s revenge on the other arena sport?

That gets a laugh from Davis, who admits he wondered if he had any business calling out hockey for its sins (the movie counterpoints the now little-remembered Coloured Hockey League in the Maritimes, the exploits of the great Herb Carnegie who never got to play in the NHL, and a litany of current Black players recalling incidents of “N-bombs” and tossed bananas).

“At the beginning, I was unsure,” Davis says at a sit-down talk that also included Saroya Tinker of the Premier Hockey Federation’s Toronto Six and producer Vinay Virmani (Breakaway).

“’Should I be doing this?” Davis asks rhetorically. “I have never been into hockey. But I talked to a good friend of mine who I went to university with, who’s heavily involved in hockey and whose kids are heavily involved.

“He said, ‘This is exactly why you should be doing this movie, because you have an outside perspective on it. You grew up in Canada, you understand the culture.’ I’ve shot commercials with P.K Subban and Sidney Crosby, so I’ve been in that space, but I’m just outside of it.

“Sometimes it’s hard to see the big picture once you’re inside the sport – especially hockey, which is a very closed sport.”

Director Hubert Davis

What he discovered was he was going in with the support of his subjects. These include: Akim Aliu, who tweeted on the past behavior of his onetime minor-league coach Bill Peters (who subsequently lost his job with the Calgary Flames), the Leafs’ Wayne Simmonds, who is among Black players who’ve had bananas thrown at them, and Tinker, who remembers first being on the receiving end of the N-word in a locker room at age 12.

“I actually reached out when I heard about this project,” Tinker says. “I wanted to be involved. I was at a point in my career where I wanted my truth to be told, and I was trying to decide whether I was going to continue to play.

“And I really wanted to see female opinions in the film, because we have a history as well.”

Asked whether there is solidarity among Black women hockey players, Tinker says, “We’re all kind of sisters at this point. We have to feed off each other. Obviously, we have Angela James, who was the first Black woman to play on the National Team.

Currently we have myself, Sarah Nurse, Mikyla Grant-Mentis, and Whitney Dove.”

The history of the Coloured Hockey League includes fascinating claims of its players “inventing” the slapshot and on-the-knees goalie styles long before they showed up in the NHL, as well as offensive images of the players that ran in the local papers.

As for Carnegie, whose heart was broken by the colour barrier, he inspired a famous quote by then Leafs owner Conn Smythe, “I’ll give any man $10,000 who can turn Herb Carnegie white.”

Davis says the past and present were both necessary. “You had to tell both, because there is a through-line between the historical and what’s going on today. People very often don’t want to look at the history of things, like how we got to where we are at this exact moment.

“It’s not like these things aren’t being passed down. Like Wayne Simmonds and the banana, for instance. The person that throws that banana isn’t inventing the connection between Black people and bananas. That’s been passed down.”

Says producer Virmani: “For me, having attended so many BIPOC hockey camps while making this film - Saroya’s camp, Wayne’s camp, Seaside Hockey Club in Scarborough, Akim’s camp - meeting these kids and their families. it’s so inspiring, and I’m happy they can have a film they can look to, and see their great mentors profiled.

“It means a lot to see people who look like you in a sport,” says Virmani, whose Breakaway was a comedy about a group of young South Asian men who form a hockey team. He says he was inspired by the Punjabi broadcast of Hockey Night in Canada.

“To be honest with you, if there was no Hockey Night in Punjabi there would be no Breakaway. It was me seeing two men in turbans calling games. And I was like, ‘Hey, if they can do that, I can make a hockey movie.’”