LONDON, Ontario – Often as the only black player on his team, growing up in Scarborough, Ontario, Flyers forward Wayne Simmonds dealt with his fair share of racial slurs on the ice as he climbed the hockey ladder.
Few experiences could have prepared him for what happened on Thursday night, as a fan in the John Labatt Centre threw a banana peel at Simmonds as he skated in alone on a shootout attempt during a 4-3 loss to the Detroit Red Wings.
“I caught it from the side of my eye,” Simmonds said. “It was a banana. Hopefully, that wasn’t directed towards me being black.
“Because if it was, that’s just somebody being ignorant.”
The banana peel, thrown from the upper deck, landed directly in Simmonds path toward Red Wings goalie Jordan Pearce during the shootout.
After the game, some of Simmonds’ teammates quietly whispered inside the locker room, shaking their heads in disgust.
“I would have went and kicked that fan’s ass myself,” one teammate said, asking to remain nameless. “That’s just not right.”
Read more: http://www.philly.com/philly/sports/flyers/20110922_Fan_tosses_banana_peel_at_Flyers_Simmonds.html?cmpid=124488749#ixzz1YmcqNlhf
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****sigh****
And people wonder why the Palestinian’s don’t have a state yet? Or why it’s so easy for some kid from Wyoming to kill a “raghead” in Afghanistan?
Someone should ask Todd Palin for a comment.
(He, and some friends, once beat up a classmate for being black.)
“once beat up a classmate for being black”
whose friends grew up and fucked his future wife, lol
Yeah, that’s not much of a surprise, especially at hockey. Canada has plenty of racist history to fall back on, but you tend to see it up front mostly in hockey, which is only slowly losing its mantle of “a white man’s game”.