General

Hockey and minstrel shows—together at last!

I hate to admit how much time I spent trying to get this photo today, but Deadspin finally beat me to it. I saw this last night while watching the Habs’ game on RDS and had to pick my jaw up off the floor afterwards.

For those of you who aren’t hockey fans, first things first: What’s wrong with you? Second, here’s what went down: Sometime around the middle of the game, the camera inexplicably cut to these two doofuses in the crowd at the Bell Centre. The announcers initially seemed a little dumbfounded—not by the fact there were two Al Jolson wannabes taking in the game, but by why they’d be dressed up at all. When one of them noticed their t-shirts say “Subbanator” everything became crystal clear and perfectly reasonable.

P.K. Subban, you see, is a highly-touted prospect plying his trade in the Canadiens’ minor-league system and he’s already a bit of a fan favourite. He’s also black and, for some reason, no one involved in broadcasting (or attending) the game appeared to think this was a problematic way of feting Subban. Certainly not the dude in the truck, who left the shot up for a good 7-8 seconds; certainly not the announcers, who seemed to see it as “just a couple o’ guys havin’ fun at the game”; and certainly not Bell Centre security, who appear to be more concerned with preventing folks from sneaking beer into games than suggesting minstrel theatre should, at the very least, be confined to a different venue.

Ugh. Quebec just leaves me speechless sometimes.