Bernie Saunders wrote a memoir titled Shut Out: The Game That Did Not Love Me Black.Courtesy of Harper Collins
Bernie Saunders knows some of you won’t believe him. More than 40 years ago, when he hit the ice for the Quebec Nordiques at the end of their 1979-80 season, he became the NHL’s fifth Black player in history, and a star seemingly on the rise.
But he didn’t last long in the league. When he wrote an op-ed for this newspaper last month about racism in hockey, mentioning he’d walked away from the game because of the brutality he’d faced over the years – from fans, management and other players – some readers suggested in online forums that he probably just wasn’t good enough to make it as a pro.
And yes, Saunders knows and acknowledges there are many factors that contribute to an athlete’s success and/or failure. Still, it is also true that the long-held belief of sports as a meritocracy is being challenged by stories that are now emerging, after decades of people being resistant to hearing them.
Saunders is adding to that re-evaluation with his recently published memoir Shut Out: The Game That Did Not Love Me Black. The book is not, as he writes, intended to “expose people from my past, nor to castigate villains who have ‘done me wrong.’ ” He just wants readers to put themselves in his shoes: “spending your early years preparing for something that you love, and then discovering a very different environment from those depicted in your childhood dreams.”
Last month, on a Zoom call from his home in Greenville, S.C., Saunders elaborated on his desire to add to the official record of hockey’s history. He’d begun writing the memoir in 2016, after the death of his older brother, the pioneering ESPN broadcaster, John Saunders. But the murder of George Floyd last year gave new urgency for him to join the conversation.
“I’m embarrassed to admit that,” he said. “It almost looks bad, if that’s what it took – you know, a Black man, laying in the middle of the street, with a police officer’s knee on his neck. I’m 65 years old, and I faced so much racism, you almost become inured to it over time. You just kind of deal with it.”
But after that incident, and the eruption of news about racism in hockey – from Akim Aliu stepping forward with allegations of abuse by a coach, to an anonymous fan attacking New York Ranger prospect K’Andre Miller with a racial epithet in a Zoom call chat – Saunders felt compelled to add some historical context.
Born in Montreal in 1956, Saunders took to hockey like many Canadian boys of that era, hitting the ice at age four after making such a jealous fuss watching his brother play that a sympathetic coach invited him to join the team. Except, of course, the Saunders brothers did not look like the other boys: Until they saw Mike Marson suit up for the Washington Capitals more than a decade later, in October, 1974, Saunders writes, “John and I thought we were the only Black players on the planet.”
By that point, Saunders had already endured years of abuse, from casual epithets (a local Châteauguay newspaper used to refer to him as “le petit noir”) to an arena full of spectators screaming the N-word, unloading, as he writes, “verbal garbage … at a KKK-rally level.”
There were exceptions: After one such game in Rochester in the spring of 1980, where he was playing for the visiting Syracuse Firebirds of the AHL (scoring the tying goal with 20 seconds left to go, and then netting the winner in overtime), Saunders read a letter to the editor in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle from a supporter of the local team, praising him for his talent and poise, and calling out the bigotry of the other fans.
Saunders probably wouldn’t have written the book if he hadn’t had artifacts such as that letter, attesting to what he’d gone through. “I don’t think anybody would even believe me,” he said. “The vitriol that I faced was almost unimaginable.”
He acknowledges that he even doubted his own memories. “Because so much time had passed, I started to think in my mind: ‘Bernie, is that true?’ ” Had he, for example, actually led the Quebec Nordiques in goals during training camp in the fall of 1980, beating out even the newly arrived Stastny brothers? Had the team still cut him, even before the preseason began? Yes: The proof was there, in the archives.
But that’s the sort of trick that time can play on you, especially when people insist that sports offers a level playing field to everyone. And its corrosive corollary: If you didn’t make it, that must be because you just didn’t have the skills.
Saunders doesn’t blame all of the misfortune in his career on racism. There was what he calls “old-fashioned bad luck,” and some bad management, as well: In the fall of 1980, the Nordiques had ended their affiliation with their AHL farm team, so there was nowhere to send Saunders for development after cutting him from the roster.
He eventually made his way back to the team for a brief stint, but dysfunctional locker-room dynamics didn’t help, and he was sent down again for the second – and last – time.
He wants people to understand that hockey didn’t change overnight when Willie O’Ree hit the ice for the Boston Bruins in 1958, becoming the first Black player in the NHL. And while critics have focused on NHL executives, Saunders believes any substantial change has to come from the players.
When four Chicago fans racially taunted the Washington Capitals’ Devante Smith-Pelly during a February, 2018 game, “his teammates just sat on their hands,” Saunders says. When Aliu’s AHL coach Bill Peters used racist language, “I think his [fellow] players should have said, ‘We’re not playing for this guy.’ Take a stand. Because I firmly believe that the only way we’re going to get through this is that it becomes a ‘we problem.’ Black players shouldn’t be dealing with it on their own.”
At the same time, Saunders says, hockey needs to grapple fully with its own ugly history, with stories like his. Until then, the sport won’t really be able to move forward.
After he quit hockey, Saunders notes that he found a second career, in the pharmaceutical industry. There, he explains, a primary principle is, “you diagnose before you prescribe. People first need to study the history before they solve problems. Hockey has just never done that.”