HockeyHijabi Origin Story

Which parts of our identity do we curate for ourselves as children of immigrants, and which parts do we hide away

I was in the 6th grade when I fell in love with hockey. It was 1994, and my teacher, Mr. Falls, was a guy’s guy with a sarcastic streak and a short temper for kids’ shenanigans. But he treated us like small adults so we loved him anyway. There was something special about the 6th grade. As the oldest class in the elementary school, we felt like we were on top of the world. Mr. Falls loved sports and used anything sports-adjacent in his teaching For our current events unit, he would do one news story from the city section of the newspaper for every five from the winter Olympics. For art, he would have us draw and colour in hockey team logos. For math, we made a bracket of that year’s NHL playoff teams.

My father was a soccer fan who’d moved to Canada in the early 70’s, and he’d always lamented how little Canadians paid attention to soccer. At home, we barely watched pro sports, tuning into a tennis match here or there, and the World Cup once every four years. Hockey, though, was a revelation. In spite of the hugely padded toothless men who played, it was elegant, graceful, like a ballet on ice.

Every moment was, well, momentous. Watching hockey, I fell in love with the speed at which a skater raced up the ice, the way the puck slid smoothly from a defender’s stick to his attacking teammate, balanced perfectly for a split second before the force was redirected into a wrist shot at the net. I fell in love with the way the goalies scrambled in their crease, making one spectacular save after another, the oddly named ‘butterfly’ positions they held.

My love for hockey was real and sincere, but there came with it a bonus I could not overlook - hockey was undeniably Canadian. It gave me (an 11-year-old Arab Muslim girl in her first year of wearing a hijab) something to hold up to anyone who questioned my belonging. I followed Doug Gilmour and the Toronto Maple Leafs on a three-round run into the playoffs; read every article about the team I could find in every pre-internet newspaper; snuck down to the basement, where our TV sat, after fajr prayer at 4 am and turned on TSN to see the late-night highlights for the West coast games. There I would sit in the dark, bathed in the glow of the television’s rays as the ticker ran through one game after another, goals and postgame interviews repeated on a loop.

In high school, I wrote a regular column for the paper, a riff on Don Cherry’s Coach’s Corner, with my friend Eva. We called it The Opinionated Fan’s Corner. The Junior A hockey players in our English class took exception to our analysis and tried, unsuccessfully, to rewrite our columns.

As the internet took off, I joined early-web hockey forums, followed scouting reports, read post-game summaries in detail. When I joined Twitter in 2011, looking for a creative handle, I went with @hockeyhijabi. It seemed like a great way to telegraph both aspects of my identity: I was a hijab-wearing Muslim, yes, but I wasn’t a scary hijabi, I lived and breathed that most quintessential of Canadian sports, hockey!

On Twitter, I made friends with the hockey fandom and got to know sports reporters, bloggers, and youtubers. I also found a community of others like me, fans of colour, fans who loved the sport even if it didn’t always love us back.

Twitter was fun and new in those days, and I was a new mother in a state of sleep deprivation and burn out. My writing was on sabbatical and social media was my preferred form of connection, consumable in bite-sized packets of wit and banter, a quick hit of dopamine for my addled brain. I stayed incapable of a regular writing practice for years, maybe because of my Twitter addiction, maybe because I was working full time and my youngest child didn’t believe in more than 4 hours of sleep a night.

Either way, my writing was still minimal the day Don Cherry, self-proclaimed preacher of the Canadian hockey pulpit, finally said the last racist thing in a long line of racist, sexist, awful things and got himself fired for accusing immigrants of not showing respect to Canadian war veterans. I went online the next night and wrote a thread about the whole thing, about my history and my thoughts and my feelings, and then my son started running a mild fever and I put my phone away and took him to bed.

The next day I found myself fielding calls from various TV and radio stations. I briefly considered the idea that my thread had hit a nerve, but the reality, in hindsight, had more to do with being the ideal person for the moment. Don Cherry had attacked immigrants, and here I was a hockey-loving child of immigrants who’d grown up watching Coach’s Corner and Rock‘Em Sock‘Em videos. Hockey, like much of the world in 2019, was being forced to confront its toxic culture, which meant that suddenly hockey media was looking to include more diverse voices. For the next couple of years, I was invited as a regular commentator on sports stories on TV and radio, whether the Habs’ Cinderella run to the Stanley Cup Finals in 2021 (so close!!), or as a postgame guest on the Game Over: Montreal podcast.

Photo by Pascal Bernardon on Unsplash

But a funny thing was happening simultaneously. Once the Habs Stanley Cup run ended, I found myself caring less and less about hockey. In truth, the transition had been a long time in the making, with other interests growing and time for hockey shrinking to make room in my schedule. I went from watching multiple games a week to watching only when I was due on a post-game show. I went from paying attention to the whole league to following only the Habs. And then the Habs crashed and burned and started rebuilding, and the team was suddenly comprised of young prospects. While I knew that this was best for them, I couldn’t bring myself to truly care about the new players. Maybe someday, I would go back. But at this point, the hockey half of @hockeyhijabi was dormant.

This posed a challenge, having curated my online identity for so long as a hockey fan. With the internet friends I’d already made, I knew we’d be ok. The bigger concern was trying to figure out who I was again in public, how to present myself. For so many years, I had reduced my online persona to one very consumable aspect of my being, one non-threatening, familiar façade. I was like the Muslim version of those US Weekly magazine segments: Muslims: they’re just like us!

Now, in trying to determine which parts of me I would share again, I knew I didn’t want to be as reductive and narrow. I didn’t want to avoid certain topics, like sports, which I still very much enjoyed, but I didn’t want them to define me either. In truth, I am still trying to navigate this balance, but I’ve concluded that, while I may not share every detail of my life, I want to show up as my whole self, not a sanitized version that is less scary to those uncomfortable with my faith and my background. It was only once I lost interest in hockey that I realized I had spent years subconsciously internalizing the model minority myth. It may take years to unravel that thread again, and present myself as I really am.

Have you ever over-represented certain aspects of yourself to make the people around you more comfortable?