James Reimer’s thin excuse to sit out Pride Night warmups alienated some fans – including me

This may surprise some people, but I really only started closely following hockey in 2011.

It’s weird to think about, considering that now, only 12 years later, I’m covering the sport as my job. But at the same time, that’s now almost half my life where I’ve a diehard fan of hockey.

I’d still had some brushes with the sport before that. I witnessed Sidney Crosby’s golden goal in 2010, and in 2009 I followed the Detroit Red Wings-Pittsburgh Penguins Stanley Cup Final, rooting for the Pens to spite the Wings fans in my family. But, I never really closely followed hockey as a kid.

Part of it was because as a kid, I was scrawny and short (before my growth spurt in high school), so sports weren’t really all that fun to me and I mostly just played baseball because I had to do the least amount of work, especially since I was bad at it. I always had more of an affinity for superheroes, action figures, and video games anyways. Besides, my dad, often the primary role model for getting a young boy into sports, had been turned off from hockey after the lockout in 2005, so sports-wise, I grew up with football.

One day, my little brother came home with NHL Slapshot for the Nintendo Wii, and I started playing it and got more interested in hockey. I started watching the sport, particularly the Toronto Maple Leafs games, because living two hours from the city meant you got all the games on TV, and that was who my dad rooted for, so I always said I was a Leafs fan to people anyways.

Of course, I was getting into a Leafs team that was in pretty bad shape at the time. They were well outside of a playoff spot and didn’t have their first-round pick for the upcoming draft. The future was bleak. But, suddenly they started winning games and making a playoff push, largely due to a young goalie coming out of nowhere by the name of James Reimer.

Naturally, I gravitated towards the guy, was always cheering him on every game, and I even got a Reimer jersey the following season, wearing that bad boy to high school the day after every win.

I always had his back, even after the team in front let him down in the late stages of Game 7 against the Boston Bruins in 2013, even as Randy Carlyle kept going to Jonathan Bernier, and I even felt a bit of nostalgia in 2015-16 when he was putting a lottery team in a playoff position partway through the season. And of course, I was devastated when he was dealt at the deadline that year, especially because it was an underwhelming return, even though I knew moving on made sense at the time.

After that, I drifted away from following him too closely since I wasn’t watching him play as much. That was around the time that I knew I wanted to make a career out of writing about hockey, so for the most part, I stopped with getting too attached to players. Considering that the politics of the league were getting more exposed in the Donald Trump era, it was probably for the best with how often the NHL and its players made themselves look bad.

I also made more and more friends through the sport, especially through Twitter, and started to see how diverse the fanbase was. While it was still predominately white, straight, and male, there were fans all over the place of different genders, nationalities, races, and orientations. Between being more integrated to different types of people in the hockey community and the typical self-discovery one goes through when living on their own in university, I realized that I wasn’t exactly straight. I started out leaning more in the realm of biromanticism, and then eventually developed into more of a panromantic.

Now, I’m not going to claim my life has gotten harder as a result. Outside of being called slurs a few times, my life has basically stayed the same, and everyone in my life who knows has been completely accepting of it. There are members of the LGBTQ+ community and in the LGBTQ+ hockey community who have had to put up with much worse than I have.

I also haven’t really had the opportunity to explore that side of me yet, nor have I really immersed myself into the LGBTQ+ community. And yet, I’ve still been welcomed with open arms, because they know what it’s like to be an outcast and are accepting of everyone.

Unlike some people.

Even if I’ve been fortunate enough to not really experience the negative aspects of identifying with the LGBTQ+, it still hurts when the likes of Ivan Provorov and the New York Rangers decide that wearing a jersey for Pride Night isn’t something they want to do. They can hide behind religion as an excuse, but it’s quite clear that they just don’t want to wear it.

And I tell you all of this backstory of my hockey fandom so that you can recognize that it hurt a little bit more when I heard that James Reimer also wasn’t going to wear the jersey because it conflicted with his beliefs based on the Bible.

I rooted for Reimer because, while I don’t know him personally, he always seemed like the nice, humble guy who always had to prove everyone wrong with his play. That was something I really related to as a kid, whether it was proving to people that I do know a lot about hockey without playing the game at a competitive level, or whether it was later in life as I discovered more about my sexuality that not everybody agreed with.

So, it felt like a stab in the back of my inner child to see him make that decision. Adult me who stopped looking to celebrities and athletes as role models was unfazed, but the child in me saw that as Reimer rejecting who I am as a person.

Now, let’s get one thing straight: don’t look at him using his faith as him being a pacifist sitting on the fence amidst this conversation. If he really stood by what the Bible said, he wouldn’t play hockey games on Sunday. He would also sit out for Military Appreciation night and not wear that jersey, considering that the military likes to break the sixth commandment a lot, and especially since as a Mennonite he should hold nonviolence and pacifism as a core foundation for his beliefs.

He’s doing this because he leans towards the anti-LGBTQ+ stance that Christianity has always adopted and on a larger scale has yet to change. He may not be outright homophobic, but at the very least, he isn’t an ally.

I grew up as a Catholic, but I haven’t been religious in years in part due to the church’s hypocrisy on issues like this. But, I still have no problem with people who are religious, as long as they don’t shove it in other people’s faces, or use it as an excuse for bigotry. For every religious person like Reimer who does, there are plenty more that are truly accepting of everybody because they recognize the core foundation of their religion is love and acceptance.

Take my late grandma, Laurette Maxwell, for example. She was as religious as they come, going to church every Sunday to the point that missing church was a sign that she was in trouble. As myself and several other of her grandchildren found themselves identifying in the LGBTQ+ community, she could have very easily used her faith as an excuse to reject us, and we probably would have been disappointed but not surprised.

But she didn’t, because at the end of the day, we’re all human beings, and we were her family, and who we loved didn’t change that she loved us.

So no, Ivan Provorov or James Reimer’s faith is not an excuse to back their lack of support for the LGBTQ+ community. It just displays that they use it pick and choose what rules they do and don’t follow without feeling like they’re morally wrong because it’s what they’re told to do or not to do.

Reimer can choose who he does and doesn’t support. It’s his life at the end of the day. I’m not trying to cancel him or end his career over this, nor do I think he owes me anything just because I supported him as a kid. But in making this choice, he’s alienated parts of the Sharks fanbase, the Hurricanes fanbase, the Panthers fanbase, the Leafs fanbase, and his own fanbase in general, and that’s something he needs to recognize going forward.

You can say that the LGBTQ+ community reacting to his choice is also being unaccepting of someone’s viewpoint. But Reimer’s faith has never been a reason for his career or even his life to be significantly slighted, while there are a lot of people in the LGBTQ+ community that have been persecuted. That’s what Pride Night is acknowledging in the first place, and that’s what Reimer is saying he doesn’t want to publicly support.

There’s no going back now, he can’t “both sides” this, he can’t walk this back and say he still supports the community. He’s shown how much he’s willing to support people like me, and it’s not even to the point of simply wearing a jersey to acknowledge our existence and celebrate our commmunity. And for someone who once admired Reimer as an example of proving people wrong in spite of what they think of you, it sucks to see that admiration proven to be misplaced.