The Olympic Games are a beautiful thing. There are only, to my knowledge, two arenas in which all countries can regularly come together and depart without coming to blows. The Olympics are one such arena (hockey fights and curling controversies excepted), and the United Nations is the other. Thankfully, I am not paid to write about the goings-on of the latter.<\/p>\n
But I would have been a fool to think that people would not want to discuss the supposed political ramifications of the United States Hockey Team winning a Gold medal over Canada, our next-latitude neighbors to their north. I feel no such sting about our team winning Gold. I was happy beyond belief especially for Jack Hughes in that moment, someone whose career I have always watched intently as a Devils fan and a writer for this site.<\/p>\n
All About the Jersey has a few rules<\/a>. They were largely written ten years or longer ago by the site\u2019s founder and my direct predecessor, John Fischer. One such rule reads:<\/p>\n No politics, religion, science, \u201cbig\u201d subjects. This is a Devils blog, those topics are not up for general discussion, and so this is not the right forum for them. Very rarely, they may be involved with something surrounding the Devils – but this site is not your personal soapbox for that. This is far easier done than said with a little effort. I do it, so will you.<\/p>\n As I noted in a comment thread earlier today, this situation has begun to fall under the category of \u201cVery rarely, they may be involved with something surrounding the Devils,\u201d and I now have to say more words about it than I want to.<\/p>\n Perhaps it was an oversight for Team USA GM Bill Guerin to invite the FBI Director to the Team USA locker room after the win. But let\u2019s be honest: he\u2019s been at a ton of hockey games throughout his adult life and has been closely following big hockey events for awhile here. His attendance of the game did not come out of left field, and it was very predictable if you remember the Ovechkin all-time goal scoring chase. That said, maybe Bill Guerin should be asked about that before the players on his team. As GM, he should be serving as the head of their public relations outreach for any events surrounding their victory and not just a coordinator behind closed doors. If he\u2019s letting his players take heat from non-hockey media sources without saying something, I have a problem with him for that.<\/p>\n What is even less surprising and not even at all out of the ordinary is the men\u2019s team getting a call from the sitting President of the United States after their win. Did the President make an inappropriate comment about the women\u2019s team during the phone call? Yes. But I would have expected any President of the United States to be on the phone with that team in the aftermath of the game, giving congratulations if they were not able to be in attendance in person. If media has an issue with the comments, they should probably direct their concerns to the person who made them. Or, if they have issues with the politics of any politician, they are certainly free to do more coverage of what people in government are doing, for good or ill.<\/p>\n Thankfully, the New Jersey Devils have a very smart young man in Jack Hughes, who said this when asked about him thinking about Megan Keller<\/a>, his fellow American Golden Goal scorer, after he had won the game in overtime:<\/p>\n \u201cIf there\u2019s a camera on me and Quinn when the women\u2019s team won, we\u2019d look like the biggest superfans of all time. We were just jumping up and down. We couldn\u2019t believe it. And we locked in, said goodbye because we had a game the next night. It was late, and we sprinted out of there. But I remember I saw Megan in the caf. I think it was the night we beat Slovakia, a night after they won the gold medal and we were just waiting for food and we were talking. I was just like, Megan, I\u2019m so proud of you. I\u2019m so happy for you. You know, couldn\u2019t have happened to a better person. And, obviously, you know, when mine went in I\u2019m just like: so many things, thoughts, and, you know, one of my first thoughts was her. I\u2019m just, like, so proud to join her as a gold medalist.\u201d<\/p>\n He also said on Good Morning America<\/a> before losing the microphone feed:<\/p>\n On top of that, I know that there\u2019s been, like, so much headlines about us and the women\u2019s hockey team and you know, the video, but we hung out, like we were in the cafeteria with them at 3:30 in the morning\u2026<\/p>\n Just like Bill Guerin should have stepped in to handle questions for his players at this point, I would greatly appreciate it if Tom Fitzgerald started making statements to deflect some attention from Jack. But if your bosses don\u2019t have you, sometimes an outspoken parent has you. Ellen Hughes, who was one of the guiding hands behind the women\u2019s Gold victory, did not really take the issue head-on and instead spoke about the team\u2019s unity<\/a>.<\/p>\n At the end of the day, it\u2019s just about the country, and the moment that these players \u2014 both the men and the women \u2014 can bring so much unity to a group and to a country: people that cheered on that don\u2019t watch hockey, people that have politics on one side or on the other side, and that\u2019s all both the men\u2019s team and the women\u2019s team care about. If you could see what we see from the inside and the men and women sharing, you know dorms, dorm rooms and halls and floors and the camaraderie and the synergy and the way the women cheered on the men and the way the men cheered on the women, that\u2019s what it\u2019s all about. And the other things, they cannot control. They care about humanity, unity, and they care about the country.<\/p>\n I think that everything said by the Hughes family throughout the last couple of days has aligned very well with their history of talking about hockey as a place for everyone to come together. Some people have recently reposted Jack Hughes\u2019s comments from a couple years ago<\/a> about the team\u2019s Pride Night initiatives when some teams around the league were doing away with their Pride events.<\/p>\n The team I play for, the Devils, we really support that and we\u2019re a really welcoming organization. So, I think a bunch of the guys on our team were looking forward to that and obviously with how we grew up, my family really supports that too. I can\u2019t speak for other teams, but I know in New Jersey that\u2019s a night everyone on our team was really welcoming and they know it\u2019s really important. It wasn\u2019t even a thought about not doing it for us.<\/p>\n