One Minute to Break the Barrier

Shannon Szabados by AP's Mark Humphrey.

Seventy years ago, Larry Kwong stepped onto the ice of the Montreal Forum, blue sweater flapping in the cold air, decked with the diagonal, red and white lettering of the New York Rangers.

It was the third period of a playoff game against Maurice “Rocket” Richard and the Montreal Canadiens, tied at two for each team. They needed a change of pace, a scoring chance.

Not even one minute later, he stepped off.

And that was all the National Hockey League saw of its first Chinese player.

Shannon Szabados, two-time Olympic gold medalist and goaltender, announced her plans in August to seek tryouts for the all-men’s East Coast Hockey League (ECHL) in hopes of breaking the gender barrier there and becoming the first woman to have a full career in that league and the NHL.

Only one woman has done this before: Manon Rhéaume, who was signed to an exclusively pre-season

contract with the NHL’s Tampa Bay Lightning and only played a scanty 24 games in five years of signage with various teams in the International Hockey League (IHL), ECHL, and West Coast Hockey League (WCHL).

But that was the nineties; surely things are different in 2016, right?

While Szabados was not able to join an ECHL team, she was offered a contract with the Peoria Rivermen of the all-male Southern Professional Hockey League (SPHL), making her the first woman to have joined the oldest team in the league.

Two games into the season, however, Szabados was cut from the team after an hour and a half of play, five goals, and two losses. Hardly reason enough to cut a goaltender, particularly one just getting acclimated to a brand-new team.

Adding salt to the wound, coach Jean-Guy Trudel claimed in an interview with Doug Harrison of CBC Sports that he only acquired Szabados as a “package deal” in order to get defenseman Carl Nielsen, effectively reducing her status as an Olympian, a World Cup champion, and a world-class goaltender to a cheap side addition.

He called her “cancerous” to the locker room. He called her acquisition “wrong for hockey.”

This is the message that leagues, teams, and coaches send to players like Larry Kwong and Shannon Szabados: they have more to prove than the average white male player. They must be outstanding players immediately, all while being subjected to the system that is fundamentally biased against them. They must take the pressure of hurled slurs and unfair treatment on top of the challenge of playing for a brand new team, where it takes time to build chemistry with fellow players, and be the savior of the game.

If they are only given sixty seconds, or two games, to do so, they are being told that they cannot be.

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