Who Gets To Wave The Flag?

Hockey gonna Hockey, as a great man (Jason Goff) used to say.

For sports fans like me, it's a pretty interesting, or tiring, stretch over the next few months. Those of us that love, or at least claim to love or used to love, hockey, baseball, and soccer, have international tournaments for all of them in 2026. One obviously just concluded. All come with more questions than we were ever used to dealing with, back when we first started rooting for the guys with "USA" on the jersey. Yes, the World Baseball Classic doesn't rise to the level of the Olympics and World Cup, but it'll come with some of the same issues, ones that no one within the sport are equipped to deal with.

When the Olympic men's hockey roster was announced, I and many others expressed an uneasiness with getting as behind this team as we had in the past. Some of it was the actual picks and what it meant on the ice. But more it was just that we knew too much now. We know hockey is mostly comprised of players from affluent, lilly-white suburbs filled with conservative viewpoints on taxes and societal issues and more, who had financial advantages over their peers that they mistook for superiority, and that's the root of a lot of our problems these days. We can put a good portion of that aside during the NHL season. But slap a Team USA jersey on them, and it gets impossible to ignore, given what it is they're representing. We knew who would attach themselves to Team USA, which isn't really the fault of the players but also not really against their wishes, either. We knew that Hockey Culture was going to step (or crawl, or slither) out into the light, which is never good for Hockey Culture.

So it has proven. It only took the men of Team USA an hour or two to dim any excitement of their gold medal win (though to be fair to them, I'm not sure who keeps the head of the FBI out if he really wants to get in, no matter how big of an incompetent loser he is). We knew Trump would call, if not straight up attend, though none of these players will ask themselves if he would call had they lost and what that means. It didn't take long to connect that the SOTU was only a couple days later and how that might work, and then the players confirmed that only a few minutes after that. It was everything we dreaded, and everything that made us uneasy to get patriotic.

This is the problem with hockey. It has increasingly felt like it is not for me, or for the crowds I run with. The fandom may change, but the players and the execs still remain conspicuously backward in all sorts of ways. Those that run the game, that market it, are still terrified of running off those that are most aligned with the players and execs, desperately holding on to a "base" that is not welcoming to anyone else. The aftermath of Team USA's men's Olympic triumph felt like the hilt of that. Hockey isn't for everyone, we keep getting reminded, even when it is supposed to represent the country as a whole.

"This is who hockey players are," is the easy lever to pull, because it's never wrong. We on the outside can push to change the fandom, the marketing, the atmosphere, and there have been successes on that front. But at the end of the day, these players come from affluent or backwater places, stop going to school in 7th grade, for all intents and purposes, leave home at early ages to live with strangers who clearly aren't doing much to shape them, and grow up in hockey locker rooms. Can't get much more sheltered and closed off than that.

That doesn't mean I think most or all hockey players are evil. They're just highly malleable, and even more so than the highly malleable in every day society that have been lured to the conservative side, because hockey players have money and the carrot of lower taxes is always the piper's tune underlying it all. Those doing the shaping have also grown up and lived in hockey locker rooms, and this is what you get.

Perhaps what people find so upsetting, or surprising, is just how uninformed and clueless these guys are, and how representative of how uninformed and clueless so many others are, too. I would wager that, while some of Team USA are gleefully sticking to the libs by showing up in DC tonight, most really don't know the difference. Their lives have been only about one thing for so long, and it takes that level of blinders and focus to get where they are, they really don't know about any of the things you and I see and talk about every day. That can't be just waved off in a "it is what it is" fashion, because it's dangerous when those things are on a massive scale, as we've seen far too much and far too violently. It's disappointing and frightening all the same. And yet they wave the flag so proudly, which makes us even more hesitant to do so.

We'll do this all again come June, perhaps on a larger scale, with the World Cup. Yet the USMNT feels different, at least to me. While it will have Christian Pulisic front and center, at best an uninformed doofus from Pennsyltucky, it also looks more like what America should look like, and does look like. It has Black players, it has Latino players, it has players not born here, from various backgrounds. Soccer isn't much more of a meritocracy in the youth ranks than hockey is, of course. But it seems more interested in being on, if only by a sliver.

The fandom feels different, too. That's hardly a worldwide case, and we saw that just last week in Portugal. But here, in the States, soccer fandom does lean left. Just last summer, Fire fans in Section 8 were harassed by security for bringing pro-Palestinian banners into the stadium. It's not universal, but "ultra" groups from clubs across the country have used their platform to forward various causes from the progressive side. This could all be in my head, I guess. But that's how it always has felt.

Which is funny, given that both fandoms were born out of a sort of counter-culture vibe. A lot of us got into soccer because it wasn't mainstream, just like a lot of us got into hockey. But getting into soccer felt more "worldly," I suppose, which is an appeal to a very different crowd.

That won't stop the hate-mongers from trying to co-opt the tournament this summer. They only arrive every four years and leave just as quickly, but they're always there, ready to yell "U-S-A!"

Yet it's always us who have to feel apologetic or less American. We're in the wrong. But in the past, during Olympic hockey tournaments and World Cups when Obama was in office, the only times the toothless and illiterate and hateful and the ones screaming they're the real America watch those sports, they still wave the flag. Do we not get to, no matter the time, as well? To not stand for what we believe this place can be and the things within it we love? Doesn't seem so.

I wonder, because I hate it when I'm told what America is, who it is. Because it's always all of it. At the base of it all, that's the problem. There are just too many different kinds of America to get it all pulling the same direction at once. That can also be the beauty, I suppose, though that's a needle we've never been able to thread. That doesn't mean we stop trying. As much as the masked, vested, cowardly nazis kidnapping people off the streets are America, that woman in her bathrobe outside in Minneapolis in the winter recording and yelling at them is, too. So is everyone who has stood up there, and here in Chicago, and everywhere, and done everything they can to protect their neighbors The country is all of it, good and bad, good and evil.

What's letting me down, and others, is that it feels like yet another moment where feeling patriotic and waving the flag in support of a team we've always rooted for has led to making us feel bad about doing so. Hockey specializes in this. Yet if we leave it, a sport and place that has provided us memories and friends and distraction and joy for most of our lives, leave it to the fuckwits and assholes, then it becomes a place only for fuckwits and assholes.

Well, I don't want it to be only a place for fuckwits and assholes. Just like I don't want the country to only be for fuckwits and assholes. Maybe it always has been, but we don't believe it has to be that way forever. This is another moment where we can nudge both just a little closer to that. I can wave the flag for that.