William Douglas has been writing The Color of Hockey blog since 2012. Douglas joined NHL.com in 2019 and writes about people of color in the sport. Today, he profiles the 10th anniversary of “Soul on Ice: Past, Present & Future,” the Black hockey history documentary by filmmaker Kwame Mason.<\/p>\n
Filmmaker Kwame Mason can hardly believe it has been a decade since the premiere of “Soul on Ice: Past, Present & Future,” the Black hockey documentary he poured his heart, money and, yes, soul into.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I sit back and I look at it, you know, time does go by fast,\u201d Mason said. \u201cBut then when you think about it being 10 years, you’re just like, \u2018Oh, wow, man, it’s been a road, a very interesting road traveled.’\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSoul on Ice\u201d made its United States debut on Jan. 13, 2016, at a screening in Washington, D.C., hosted by the NHL and Washington Capitals.<\/p>\n
Commissioner Gary Bettman and Capitals owner Ted Leonsis attended. So did Willie O’Ree<\/a>, who became the NHL\u2019s first Black player on Jan. 18, 1958, when he debuted with the Boston Bruins. Anson Carter<\/a>, Kevin Weekes<\/a> and other current and former NHL players were also in the house.<\/p>\n They were awed by Mason\u2019s 86-minute labor of love that chronicles Black history in the sport from the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes in the 1890s to the successes and obstacles encountered by today\u2019s Black players.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat stood out most was the energy in the room — you could feel that people knew they were experiencing something important,\u201d Leonsis said recently.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"William Douglas has been writing The Color of Hockey blog since 2012. Douglas joined NHL.com in 2019 and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":483111,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":["post-483110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=483110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483110\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/483111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=483110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=483110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=483110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}