The issue isn’t with a president getting on the phone to congratulate an Olympic gold-medal-winning team. America’s men’s hockey players deserve every syllable of celebration a proud and grateful nation has to give them.
The issue is with a president who got on the phone to congratulate only one of our nation’s two gold-medal-winning hockey teams, and then using part of that telephone call to casually dismiss Team USA’s women, who also won gold in Milan with an overtime goal against Canada.
Amid the beer-chugging, bro-hugging antics inside the men’s celebratory locker room Sunday, it was extra partier Kash Patel, the director of the FBI, who put the president on speaker phone with the victorious players. Part of the conversation was an open invitation from President Donald Trump for the team to visit the White House, and specifically to attend Tuesday night’s State of the Union address. It came with a condition, however.
“I must tell you, we’re going to have to bring the women’s team. You do know that?” the president said.
He was laughing, and as he was, players could be heard laughing, too. It continued as Trump joked he’d “probably be impeached” if he didn’t include the women’s team.
To him, those women were a punch line.
To me, they are American heroes.
Now more than ever. The women politely declined the chance to be afterthoughts at someone else’s party. Officially, a spokesperson for the team said it couldn’t accept “due to the timing and previously scheduled academic and professional commitments following the Games.” The statement made sure to insist, “We are sincerely grateful for the invitation extended to our gold-medal-winning US women’s hockey team and deeply appreciate the recognition of their extraordinary achievement.”
If only that recognition felt more sincere. Instead, the perfect storm of sports forces combined to remind us just how far the fight for respect of women’s sports still has to go, and how much simmering sexism continues to bubble under the surface. That our president found a way to demean these women by reverting to his previously held defense of acceptable “locker room talk” is not a surprise. Women, particularly those in sports or other traditionally male-dominant spaces, have come to expect nothing less from a political career based on baseline misogyny. But that no one else in that moment seemed to realize or even acknowledge how demeaning it was to laugh out loud at the idea of equal inclusion for the similarly golden women’s team is such a disappointment.
To me, those actions speak louder than any words we’ve heard since.
This was Jack Hughes quoted by reporters outside a Miami nightclub late Monday night: “People are so negative out there and they are trying to find a reason to put people down and make something out of almost nothing. I think everyone in that locker room knows how much we support them, how proud we are of them.” And this was his brother Quinn, while the two appeared on “Good Morning America” Tuesday: “There’s been so much headlines about us and the women’s hockey team and the video, but we hung out — we were in the cafeteria with them until 3 in the morning.”
It’s classic cognitive dissonance. I don’t doubt the Hughes brothers believe they support women and women’s sports. Their mother, Ellen, once played for Team USA. They attended the women’s gold-medal game. But rather than take a chance to extend any apology — “We’re sorry, no one should have laughed” — they opted to move the goalposts to include the wider discussion of mutual support.
What the men’s team did in Milan was extraordinary, winning the United States’ third-ever gold medal and first since Lake Placid in 1980. That “Miracle on Ice” victory has lived in our collective consciousness with such force and permanence that even coming close to it revs our patriotic engines to overdrive. These NHL players weren’t the amateurs and college players of 1980, but their accomplishment was fantastic nonetheless.
Yet what the US women have done is statistically more impressive. Consider that women’s hockey was only added to the Winter Olympic slate in 1998. Team USA, with three gold medals, was ready from the outset, standing alongside Canada as immediate hockey heavyweights. The United States has never failed to medal at an Olympics.
In sports, that’s what we do: Keep score. Over in Italy, Team USA men’s and women’s hockey did equal damage to the scoreboard, undefeated along the way to their equally dramatic and hard-fought twin golds. But when it came to celebrations back home, that equality got lost.
Complain all you want that I’m being overly sensitive. That’s your right. Rant all you desire if you feel the men’s gold-medal performance is being unfairly overshadowed. But that’s not my fault. Blame the locker room celebration seen ’round the world, and the laughter whose echo won’t go away.
Tara Sullivan is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at tara.sullivan@globe.com. Follow her @Globe_Tara.