Acting alone

He is an idiot who acted alone.

The guy (and for some reason we know it was a guy) who threw the banana on the ice at the John Labbats Centre in London, Ont. as Wayne Simmonds (the black guy, get it?) of the Philadelphia Flyers was participating in a shootout, is a singular idiot -- not part of a wide-ranging, black-hockey-player-hating-conspiracy.

I feel confident saying that.

A perfectly rational response is to ignore him and ignore what he did. Ignoring idiots doing dumb things is a life skill.

There were 7,427 out to watch the pre-season game between the Flyers and the Detroit Red Wings Thursday night and only one threw a banana. Millions attend NHL games each season, watching a small but growing number of black players in the league, and somehow get through game after game without crude, race-baiting displays of performance art via highly symbolic fruit.

Until last night, the most pertinent part of Simmonds' hockey biography was that he was a key factor in the trade that sent former Flyers captain Mike Richards to the LA Kings.

That Simmonds is black seemed beside the point, at least until an idiot did a stupid, racist thing and managed the trick of getting exhibition hockey into the mainstream news across Canada and onto ESPN across the United States.

(Look at those Canadian hockey fans - bloodthirsty and rascist!)

But as tempting as it may be, we can't ignore the banana on the ice, and we shouldn't, because incidents like these - and there have been others, such as when then Carolina Hurricanes goalie Kevin Weekes had a banana thrown at him during a playoff game at the Bell Centre in 2002 - aren't about the vast majority of non-idiot, non-rascist hockey fans.

Instead they're about what message is conveyed to minorities about the sport and how welcoming it is for those who don't look like everyone else.

Stereotypes work both ways. While black hockey players are rare enough to be a punchline in some circles, in others their presence proves not that hockey is inclusionary but is evidence that hockey is the sports equivalent of the front-of-the-bus in the deep south not so many decades ago: for whites only, or mostly.

And while we as fans can argue that we're not that way and don't think that way, is that the message that gets through to the father of a black kid who wants to play hockey?

Or does Dad see the banana on the ice and figure, why bother putting my son through that?

It happens. Darwin Murray, the black son of Guyanese immigrants, grew up on the same street as Kevin Weekes, White Heather Avenue in Scarborough, which is the same Toronto suburb that Simmonds is from.

He loved to skate and he loved to play ball hockey, but playing organized pucks wasn't in the cards.

"My father was very reluctant for that very reason, it was a predominantly white sport" says Murray, 34, a advertising executive in Toronto and a AA minor atom head coach in the Greater Toronto Hockey League. "He wanted me to play soccer and run track. He didn't want me to go through any unnecessary adversity."

Murray kept begging to play, however, and so his father, James, sat him down for a talk, explaining that if was going to play hockey he'd have to give "120 per cent more" than everybody else. That was just how it was going to be.

"I remember being kind of sad to hear that," says Murray. "I was like, if I'm a good player why should that [race] matter? But I just accepted it and decided I was up for the challenge."

Sadder still? Murray was seven.

Playing proved to be a great, life-altering decision. With Weekes - the former NHL goalie and the current CBC broadcaster - as a handy role model, Murray quickly gravitated to the elite levels of the GTHL.

He encountered racism and bigotry at times, but more meaningful, he says, is the way so many people - hockey people - went out of their way to pull him into their treasured sport.

"There were always clowns and knuckleheads," he says. "But once you got past that, every break I had was from someone who loved the game and wanted to help me in the game because it would be good for the sport."

Murray stuck with it. He won league championships and provincial titles, he made life-long friends, and he earned a full scholarship to Niagara University.

For the past five years he's been coaching and running clinics.

A black face in competitive hockey is still relatively rare, and he finds that minority parents will approach him to ask if hockey is the right sport for their son or daughter, the one they can't get off the ice because they love it so much.

Murray tells them his hockey story as proof that it is, it most definitely is. His is the hockey story that most of us - the ones who don't throw bananas and save our hate for the idiots that do - want to listen to over and over again.

The problem is one idiot with a banana can make it hard to be heard.

Michael Grange will provide insight and analysis on all the top stories in sports.