The Winner is: Heated Rivalries For Olympic Gold And Romance Fiction

The NHL playoffs are set to start next week, and for Canadian fans there are three— country ‘em— three home teams with a shot. Montreal and Ottawa will try their luck at ending the 23-year Stanley Cup drought in the tough Eastern Conference while Connor McJesus will look to slingshot Edmonton into the final in the weaker Western Conference again. 

Considering that the Oilers would not have qualified in the East and that Ottawa only just crept into the posteseason any real hopes for a Canadian Cup lie with the Canadiens. (They’ll have to overcome the Carney Curse after letting the PM photo-bomb their dressing room.) 

When all is said and done— and when the venerable Scott Oake signs off from HNiC— the season will probably be known for two bigger stories than just another Stanley Cup. Foremost was the underdog U.S. men’s team getting the game of a lifetime from goalie Connor Hellybuyck as they won the Olympic gold in February. “Do You Believe In Three On Three?”

The heart-stopping hockey made the game a thing in America, a banner story. Needless to say politics also piggy-backed on the win with president Trump supposedly insulting the U.S. women’s gold medalists by mentioning them as an add-on during a raucous dressing-room celebration. The players, too, were excoriated by the Trump Derangement banshees of correctness for visiting the White House. But not for showing up on SNL.

As we wrote March 2, the hysteria peaked in Ottawa (where else) when Trump was made the story. “Or so you’d think from some woman TSN reporter in Ottawa asking Senators captain Brady Tkachuk about Trump’s offhand reference to being impeached if her didn’t invite the women’s team. “I know you supported the women’s team — I saw you watching their semifinal. Would you understand how they could feel pretty put down by that moment?

When Tkachuk responded “I have no other comments than for the things that we control, and that was that we supported them and they supported us. You can’t control what other people say — that’s just life.” the reporter continued “Why would you laugh when they got invited?”  Inanity.

As we reported breathlessly on Dec. 22 in Brokeback Zamboni, the other milepost hockey story was “hockey romance fiction. Bodice rippers such as Wicked Games, bestselling author Maureen Smith’s “sizzling new interracial romance series featuring four sexy-as-sin hockey players who lose their hearts on the road to winning the Stanley Cup…” Don’t worry, there’s many more where that came from. 

The books sell like hotcakes. We bring this up because of the kerfuffle over Rachel Reid’s Heated Rivalry, now a movie showing on Disney, HBO Max and Crave. It’s a hockey saga about two beautiful people—one Russian, one Canadian— brought together in desire. The kicker? Both are male hockey rivals . Yes, a gay hockey theme. Brokeback Zamboni. And, says the New York Times, “Since its Nov. 28 debut, fans have gone back to devour the books — “Heated Rivalry” is the second of six steamy romances in Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series — outpacing supply and forcing Harlequin, the publisher, to play catch-up.”

Harlequin has now reportedly sold more than 650,000 books in the Game Changers series. Well, then… (Ironically, Heated Rivalry is a production of Jacob Tierney who’s also part of the alpha male comedy Shoresy.) In almost every realm outside male sports and the priesthood this might be ho-hum. But in men’s hockey? The NHL? 

The omertà on LGBTQ content is the same as it was in the days of Rocket Richard and Gordie Howe. It’s stunning that in the 50 years since gay came out of its closet no active NHL stars have taken the opening. Nor has anyone in the LGBTQ community outed anyone famous. Crickets.

There isn’t much dressing-room “intimacy” anymore— players don’t shower or dress in the open, and are rarely seen naked as in the past. Women reporters forced that change. But the motto of “what happens here, stays here” remains. And that includes who is sleeping with whom.

With so many other distractions— salary, playing time, promotional apperances— teams have discouraged any domestic dramas in rooms that threaten unity. The few that have surfaced— the Gary Leeman/ Al Iafrate conflict in Toronto in the 1980s comes to mind— are strictly heterosexual. And poisonous to team unity.
 

Homosexual relations are still taboo. And there doesn’t appear any cultural or legal framework that will challenge that soon.

Which puts them at distinct odds with the women in sports. As the U.S. women’s soccer team showed, women’s sports are very liberated from the conservative standards of men’s sports. Led by the ubiquitous Mega Rapinoe, women are open about their homosexuality. They flaunt it. You can’t swing a cat without hitting a lesbian in a women’s sport.

There are couples on the same team and married couples on opposing squads. Canadian hockey star Gillian Apps married rival American player Meaghan Duggan . But, amidst the media’s sexual liberation theology on everything else, there is a distinct lack of coverage of how unique team building is in women's sports. Why?  As the soccer players showed, the athletes are quite willing to discuss it. Some want to shout it from the roof tops. 

Or is it that a media that acts so brave in blaming “the patriarchy” for everything that goes wrong is reluctant to report anything negative that might make the LGBT women look unfavourable or emotional?” 

All that remains to be seen is whether the director of the FBI decided to party with the Stanley Cup winner should Canada’s entries fall by the wayside again.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his 2023 book Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, was voted a Top 20 greatest professional hockey books of all time by bookauthority.org . His previous book with his son Evan, Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. His new poetry collection In Other Words is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca and on Kindle books at https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1069802700