11 Cara Hedley’s Twenty Miles and the Challenge of the Hockey Barbie

The Hockey Barbie

One of the enduring prejudices against women in sport has been the belief that “if a woman is strong, she must not really be a woman” (Robinson 2002, 10). Justine Blainey experienced this prejudice when she pursued her court case in the 1980s. In Twenty Miles, Hedley challenges the prejudice by combining descriptions of the strong bodies of the Scarlets with traditionally feminine elements. This begins in the opening scene, in which Iz reports for her first practice. On the way into the arena, Iz notices another player, who turns out to be Hal, the Scarlets’ team captain. Hal, Iz observes, has “the three-headed monster heels of hockey players.” She is tall, with “the bulk of her thighs given away by her jeans,” and is so strong that she carries her black hockey bag over her shoulder “as though it were the weight of a purse” (Hedley 2007, 8). In the dressing room, Hal pulls off her street clothes to get into her hockey gear and reveals “a ridge of muscle” as well as “a black lace bra” (8, 11).

The mixing of strength and femininity continues during Iz’s tryout for the team. A key moment occurs during her first scrimmage, when she accidently lays Hal out with a bodycheck. Afterwards, Hal sprawls, her gloves and stick “littering the ice in a circumference appropriate to impact, like a plane wreck” (17). Someone yells “Yard sale!” and the coach and others rush over to help. Iz tries to apologize. “I forgot—” she says, “I played hockey with guys, and—” Meanwhile, Hal picks herself up and a teammate, Toad, asks if she is alright. “I was just laid out by a fucking Barbie doll,” Hal replies. “Other than that, I’m fine” (18).

Iz checking Hal echoes a key scene in Scrubs on Skates in which Bill Spunska hits Pete Gordon at an early practice. Though the circumstances of the two scenes are somewhat different (especially since bodychecking is not allowed in women’s hockey), the core elements are the same: each features a new player trying to make a team who takes out a star player. In Scrubs on Skates, Pete lands “with a sickening thud” and, when he staggers to his feet again, there is “no spring to him” (Young 1952, 26). Bill’s hit is both awkward and powerful; nobody can figure out “whether he planned it … or whether it was an accident” (26). The awkwardness suggests the rookie-status of Bill (he isn’t sure yet how to play properly), but the outcome suggests the ability and toughness that will allow him to excel. Something comparable is implied by Iz’s hit on Hal. The scene also calls to mind the mythic episodes in King Leary and The Natural, which I discussed in chapter 7, in which Leary bests Newsy Lalonde and Hobbs bests the Whammer. Sports literature often tells a version of the aging monarch story, the old—sometimes infirm—monarch supplanted by the new hero, in a process that hints at both death and renewal. By echoing this classic sports literature motif, Twenty Miles hints at continuities and differences between the men’s and women’s games, while also playing with the mythic patterns so often associated with sport.

The check on Hal illustrates the toughness of the Scarlets. The first reaction of the other players—“Yard Sale!”—is a joke that minimizes the hit’s violence. The implication is that the Scarlets are not phased by body contact, even though, technically, bodychecking is against the rules. When Moon, the Scarlets’ coach, tends to Hal, her concern is only the regular one of dealing with a potentially injured player. There is no sense of special treatment, nothing to imply that a female player should be cared for differently than a male player. Hal’s burn on Iz also downplays the hit while revealing how self-aware the Scarlets are about feminine stereotypes. “Barbie” makes fun of Iz for being traditionally feminine in appearance, while stressing that the Scarlets reject the Barbie version of femininity, with its emphasis on attractiveness and passivity.

“Barbie” in Twenty Miles is related to “totsi,” a term that the Scarlets use to describe women who are Barbie-like without irony. As Toad puts it: “The thing about being a totsi is that it’s so boring, so predictable. I mean, where is your sense of irony? You know, if you are going to wear hot pants and have blond hair, at least throw on a Harvard Debating Cardigan too” (Hedley 2007, 103). The context of Toad’s comment is a gathering of the Scarlets in a Hooters restaurant where another teammate, Heezer, is a server. The news of Heezer’s employment—and willingness to dress up in the revealing Hooters uniform for money—causes a debate among the Scarlets. Does Heezer’s willingness to exploit her traditional feminine features make her a totsi? Heezer resolves the issue by pointing out that she has two sets of “big guns”—her breasts and her biceps (98–99)—and she intends to enjoy them both. Heezer’s retort adds to the proof that femininity and strength are not mutually exclusive.

The nickname “Barbie” stays with Iz. On Rookie Night, she is forced to dress up as a Hockey Barbie. Her costume blends stereotypes of hockey and femininity. Her dress is “a massive, hot-pink number with shoulder pads and a yellow bow drooping from the waist.” When she is dressed up, her teammates use make up to add a black eye, rainbow bruises, and stitches. The final touch is a “Jill strap” which is also a “chastity belt” on which are written the words “DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT, PERV” (69, italics original). Iz’s Rookie Night costume combines the classic image of hockey toughness, the Happy Warrior, with the stereotype of the Barbie. This creates a rich set of linkages and ironies between femininity and strength.

As the image of the Hockey Barbie suggests, the Scarlets are self-aware about their identities as hockey players, just as they are about their identities as women. Their raunchy humour, their use of nicknames for each other, and the pinup poster of “David Hasselhoff in a green Speedo and a Santa hat” all reproduce and parody characteristics of male hockey team culture (10). When the team shorts arrive with “HOCKEY” across the backside, Toad jokes “I love how the shorts announce our junk in the trunk. Like everyone can’t tell what we play, come on. Yeah we’re fucking gymnasts” (29). Toad’s joke plays on the traditionally huge glutes of hockey players mixed in with the stereotypical self-consciousness of women about their bodies. Similarly, on Rookie Night, the players tell various gender-themed jokes. Toad claims to have been traumatized as a child when she received figure skates for Christmas: “The horror. And there you have it, ladies.… I was a hockey player trapped in a figure skater’s body” (70).

The Scarlets’ self-awareness extends to a common prejudice related to “if a woman is strong, she must not really be a woman.” This is the claim that women who like sports must be lesbians. The Scarlets deal with this prejudice by treating the lesbians on the team as they treat everybody else. When two players, Duff and Hugo, are discovered to be in a relationship, the other players arrange a “celebration” for them rich with ironies. Part of the celebration includes party hats with “Duff and Hugo are Gay!!!” scrawled across the back (118). There is some back-and-forth among the players about the appropriateness of the party (and the hats) but Boz provides the clinching argument in favour: “[What] do we do to everyone else when they like someone? We bug them, right? You get teased if you have a crush. Lord help you.… So the fact that Duffy and Hugo have been ignored by us … [is] tragic” (118).

The details in Twenty Miles that play with the relationships between strength and femininity ultimately make a key point: the Scarlets come in different shapes, sizes, and sexual orientations, but they are all women, all strong, and all hockey players. A telling moment along these lines occurs in class one day when a boy remarks to Iz that she doesn’t “look like a hockey player.” When she challenges the boy to explain what a female hockey player looks like, he replies, with a smile, “Not you.” The boy is trying to flatter her, to tell her that she is attractive, unlike female hockey players generally (whose strength means they can’t be real women). Iz dismisses him. To her the Scarlets “all looked like hockey players” (131).

Last-Year Stories

Though the Scarlets represent an opportunity for Iz, the team itself, in keeping with the historical pattern of women’s hockey, struggles for resources. Twenty Miles identifies Iz’s rookie season as the team’s second year of operation. The returning players have an “unending” supply of “last-year stories,” many of which have to do with underfunding. The inaugural season, it turns out, was “a test run for the university and so the team had been on welfare … paying a fee at the beginning of the year, buying their own jerseys, paying for their own meals” (128). The situation is now somewhat improved, but the money dedicated to the women’s team is “still not as much as the other teams” (129).

Despite improvements, then, the Scarlets remain lower in status than the men’s varsity team—and they know it. When Toad discovers that Iz has become friends with Jacob Copenace, a player on the men’s team with whom Iz played as a child, she warns Iz to be careful. “Know what they started calling us last year?” Toad asks. “The Scarlet-ettes. First of all, what? Second of all, they have their panties all tied up in knots ’cause they think our team’s going to end up taking away their money from the program. Uh, have you seen their dressing room compared to ours?” (54).

Even when the university tries to give more equal treatment to the two teams, there is sexism in the attempts. When the Scarlets get team jackets, for example, they are duplicates of the men’s jackets, boxy and unfashionable, and wearing one makes Iz feel like she is “wearing a mascot costume” (94). When the university plants a story in the campus paper to promote the hockey program, the story includes matching photographs of the men’s and women’s team captains, but the photograph of the men’s captain is a game shot of him “leaning nearly parallel to the ice as he cut a sharp corner,” while the photograph of Hal is of her in “a black, low-plunging dress with jewel-studded spaghetti straps”—a shot taken during the previous year’s athletic banquet (125).

A particularly telling episode occurs after the team’s night at Hooters. Once they leave the restaurant, the players go to the campus pub for last call. They chug more beer and make their way back outside. In the parking lot, Toad announces that she has to “whiz” (106). Following Toad’s lead, they all line up against a wall, drop their pants, and begin to urinate. While they are in the middle of this, a campus security guard appears and asks “Uh, what are you doing?” (107). The security guard—a young guy “with a sad, failed attempt at a moustache”—reminds them that there are “ladies’ bathrooms all over campus” and Toad retorts that they are not “ladies” (108). This leads to a testy back-and-forth. The exchange ends with the security guard, who has recognized their team jackets, making a threat: “What do you think your coaches are going to say about this?” (108).

The security guard’s reaction suggests a sexist double standard. The guard’s initial confusion has to do with the fact that the Scarlets are women; his choice of the word “ladies” to remind them of the bathrooms suggests that such behaviour is not “lady-like” in his eyes. That he hardens his attitude after Toad makes fun of his moustache adds to the sense that his masculinity is threatened by women acting up. Would the guard react the same way to discovering members of the men’s team urinating outdoors? Unlikely.

The aftermath of this incident reinforces the existence of a double standard. Moon, the Scarlets’ coach, rants at the team members when she finds out. Toad, the most rebellious of the Scarlets, refuses at first to apologize, claiming that “it’s discrimination, this notion that we should have to run around frantically with our knees together looking for the closest powder room, when guys—they just” (109). At this point, Stan, the other coach, joins in to remind the players that they are “ambassadors of this team and the Scarlets Athletic Program” (109). The reactions of Moon and Stan, which have an edge of panic to them, hint at how hard it has been to get a women’s team supported by the university, and how fragile that support likely is. Unlike members of the men’s team, the implication is, the Scarlets have to be extra careful to maintain their image.

On the Ice and Off

As she reveals in her apology after hitting Hal, Iz grew up playing with boys. Back in Tykes League she felt relatively free of gender typing: all the players, with the same voices and faces disguised by their helmets and cages, “were the same” (Hedley 2007, 16). Over time, however, she became more noticeable as a girl on the ice, and the behaviour of the boys she played against changed. By the time she was a teenager, boys tried not to hit her. Sometimes they did without realizing she was a girl, and afterwards, as she was “crumpled on the ice … trying to disguise the pain,” the boys slumped “when they realized what they’d done” (56). Sig calls this the Sleeping Beauty Syndrome, or the Princess force field, in which “no matter what [Iz] did on the ice, no one would touch [her]” (61).

Iz hates the special treatment she gets in the later part of her time playing with boys. She says that she would “rather have her ribs cracked than hear [the boys’] sheepish apologies” (56). In other words, she desires to be like Manon Rhéaume in the poem “Rhéaume” by Richard Harrison. Manon Rhéaume was another trailblazer in women’s hockey, who is famous for being the only woman to play in a National Hockey League (NHL) game (she played in exhibition games for the Tampa Bay Lightning in 1992 and 1993). At the time Rhéaume was subjected to the typical sexism women face in sports, most particularly the idea that no matter what a woman does as an athlete, “she is always a woman and sex is everything.” What Harrison imagines Rhéaume most wishing for as an athlete is “[to] be a woman and have it be her play that counts” (2004, 73).

One of the benefits of playing with the Scarlets, for Iz, is that the Princess force field no longer operates. Another part of her early hockey career persists, however. This has to do with the motto “keep it off the ice.” She first hears this phrase in Tykes League when a boy on her team, Chad Trenholm, breaks down and wails “I want my mommy” (Hedley 2007, 16). The coach then yells at Chad to “keep it off the ice.” The phrase implies that hockey success requires the suppression of emotion, the blocking out of elements not directly part of the game, and the cultivation of the kind of rough masculinity historically associated with being a “real man.” Iz recognizes it as “our first training as men” (16). To someone aware of hockey history, the phrase also echoes Gordie Howe, who, after his near-death experience on the ice in 1950, brushed away questions about the dangers of hockey by saying that “It’s a man’s game.” As I wrote in chapter 4, Scott Young uses Howe’s words near the end of A Boy at the Leafs Camp to rationalize hockey violence.

The novel’s treatment of “keeping it off the ice” implies an important distinction. A source of joy in games and sports is that they always allow us, to some extent, to leave daily life behind. Sports have their own special rules and spaces, and always involve an element of play (even if, in professional sports, they are also work for hire). As Johan Huizinga famously put it in Homo Ludens, play is defined by “a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all its own” (1955, 8). In this sense, then, hockey always involves a degree of “keeping it off the ice.” Iz understands this—and the comfort of it—when she compares how much easier it is to anticipate Jacob’s moves during a hockey game than to anticipate his moves “[off] the ice … with that distance removed” (Hedley 2007, 171). The comfort of hockey, Iz understands, is that it is “just a game;” this is why it can be “[a] safe space for people to put their hopes in” (179).

What Twenty Miles identifies with “keeping it off the ice” is not the inevitable separation of games from the outside world, but the tendency to a further, unhealthy narrowing of what defines hockey and its players. The novel offers two definitions of this narrowing. One has to do with the “highlight reel”—the version of the game reduced to “a list of goals and fights, and nothing else” (146). The other has to do with the denial of the full humanity of the players—as in the example of Chad Trenholm. The two definitions come together in an example late in the novel, when Iz observes some TSN hockey highlights. One sequence is about a Calgary Flames player whose father died in the morning, but who went ahead and played that night anyway, and was rewarded with three goals. Before the replays of the goals, the announcer celebrates the player’s achievement as an example of “keeping it off the ice” (199).

The example of the Calgary Flames player, in the last pages of the novel, is a reminder of episodes in Twenty Miles that more fully expose the limitations of “keeping it off the ice.” An important formal feature of the novel is that game descriptions do not focus on “highlight reel” moments. During the Home Opener, for example, the narrative focuses on Iz’s subjective experience, her nerves beforehand, her taking a penalty against an opposing player who has been harassing Tillsy, the Scarlets goaltender, and so on (60). So focused on other things is the game account that it is not clear, by the end, who has won or lost. Only afterwards does Iz report, almost as an afterthought, that “We lost. To the Pandas” (62).

The game accounts in Twenty Miles are different from those in Scrubs on Skates and Stompin’ Tom Connors’s “The Hockey Song,” both of which read like play-by-play broadcasts (as I pointed out in chapter 1, “The Hockey Song” portrays itself literally as a broadcast). Both of these texts reproduce the hockey myth in an uncritical way and so portray the essence of hockey as transcending history (Bill Spunska’s success makes him “Canadian” in a way that erases the trauma of his Polish family background). The game accounts in Twenty Miles are more like Roy MacGregor’s The Last Season—and for a similar reason. As chapter 6 noted, The Last Season contains almost nothing about Felix Batterinski’s two Stanley Cup wins and ends with Felix accidentally ingesting rat poison in an attempt to break the spell his birth seems to have cast on him—a symbolic attempt to overcome his family history. History, the ending of The Last Season seems to assert, will out; and the attempt to use hockey to escape or erase history is always, ultimately, doomed to failure.

One way history asserts itself in Twenty Miles is in the subplot involving Terry, Hal’s mother. In the middle of the novel’s second part, Iz discovers Hal crying in the bathroom. When Hal comes out, she trashes the dressing room microwave—and it is revealed, by Boz, that Terry is sick (Hedley 2007, 113–14). By the novel’s third part, Terry is in the hospital dying, and Sig forces Iz to go with her for a visit. It turns out that she is the only teammate to make the visit to the hospital. The other teammates try to express their support for Hal indirectly, by dropping off food at Hal and Terry’s house (148). The news of Terry’s death comes one day at practice. When she realizes her mother has died, Hal collapses to the ice crying, and the teammates gather round to console her “as teams do, as families do” (155).

This subplot illustrates the possibilities and limitations of the bonds teammates form with one another. The Scarlets try to help Hal with her grief, and they do to some extent, which implies an improvement in acknowledging Hal’s emotional needs compared to what happened to Chad Trenholm. Yet the Scarlets can’t overcome their awkwardness around death. Being teammates, the novel implies, is not a magic solution to life’s existential challenges. Everything that happens in the subplot after the discovery of Terry’s illness refutes the Scarlets’ first reaction to the news, which is to “[play] on” as if “nothing could get in” (114–15).

A second way in which history asserts itself is in Iz’s relationship with Jacob. This subplot contributes to a wider portrait of Iz as a new student on campus that compares her initiation into team culture with her initiation into university culture. The text is silent about her previous romantic history, which gives her relationship with Jacob an aura of “first love”—an aura strengthened by the fact that first love is a standard theme of coming-of-age novels. There are charming inversions in the relationship that reinforce the novel’s complex portrayal of gender. Jacob has a “girly” laugh (36). He chooses a “chick flick” for them to go to and asks if “we’re growing” (147–48). Iz, on the other hand, feels closer to her hockey teammates than to him.

Jacob is Indigenous. He has a portrait of Ted Nolan, an Ojibwe NHL player and coach, on his wall. Soon after he reconnects with Iz, he explains why he disappeared from organized hockey the year after he played with her. Turns out that his family car broke down and “we didn’t get another one for months” (36). His father set up nets on the reserve for Jacob and his friends to play street hockey with, but his Uncle Grant, driving drunk, smashed them with his truck. Jacob frames this account with a joke about how “You should never be afraid to live the dream” (36). The joke emphasizes the irony in the account. To live the hockey dream, the account shows, is not just about what is “on the ice.” Who is “on the ice” to live the dream, and how the dreamer experiences the dream, are both deeply affected by history.

Changing the Story

The first pages of Twenty Miles make clear that Iz is uncertain about her commitment to hockey. Before she makes the Scarlets, she thinks that getting cut from the team might be “a simple solution” to doubts that she has (42). When she makes the team, she is “flattered” but also “shipwrecked” (43). During an early team bonding session, she is asked by a drunken teammate what she would give up to keep playing. Would she cut off a finger? In the interest of team solidarity, Iz says that she would, but her inner thoughts reveal this to be a lie: “I’d never cut off a finger for hockey. I wouldn’t cut off my hair” (91). The lie makes her realize that she can’t “perform gestures of hockey adoration” without the knowledge that she is “acting”—and this realization means she has begun to “quit hockey” (92–93).

Iz’s uncertainty is, in part, a reaction to her father’s legacy. Her father, Kristjan, was a Junior hockey star who died two months before she was born. After her mother disappeared, Iz was raised by Sig, her grandmother and Kristjan’s mother. Sig was determined to pass down Kristjan’s legacy to Iz, and, as a result, Iz began to skate and to play at an early age (sometimes in Kristjan’s old equipment). Iz, then, never really chose to play; she just went along with the expectation that she would. As she tells Jacob, when you have a family history like hers, “You skate because you are thrown on to the ice because your dad played hockey” (76). By the time of her try out for the Scarlets, Iz feels oppressed by her identity as Kristjan’s daughter. This oppression is made worse by the fact that the Zamboni driver at the university arena, Ed, is an old friend of Kristjan’s and wants to reminisce about him whenever he sees Iz. Eventually, Iz cuts Ed off: she decides that she can’t help him find Kristjan again (152).

The funeral of Terry makes Iz remember the video of her father’s funeral. This memory, in turn, reminds her of the uneasiness she has with her legacy as the daughter of Kristjan “Norse” Norris. Shortly after the funeral, Sig reveals that she too is sick, though what she has is not “the big C” (160). Though Sig seems to be not in immediate danger of death, the reminder of her age and frailty ratchets up the emotional pressure on Iz. Then, at the next Scarlets’ game, Moon gives a pep talk: “I know we’ve all had a rough week and we’re worried about Hal.… But we’ve gotta just get out there and give it a hundred and ten. Play every shift like it’s your last. And just … keep it off the ice” (180). Iz now understands the full import of Moon’s words: “Moon wanted us to imagine. Imagine that the ice was a safe place to put our hope. Imagine Hal and Terry never existed” (180).

Shortly after this, Iz does the unthinkable and walks out on the team in the middle of a game. She falls, not from a hit by another player, but because she trips herself. When she gets up, she skates off the ice and keeps going (182). Back at home, Sig is furious. Over a number of days, she and Iz debate the legacy of Kristjan, the meaning of hockey, and what the opportunity to play for the Scarlets represents for Iz. A particularly telling exchange occurs when Sig tells Iz that playing for the Scarlets—getting an education while also playing hockey—was an opportunity Kristjan never had (189). Iz replies that Kristjan might have been a good hockey player, but he was also just “a kid,” who left behind a mess. She also says that she “never wanted” all the stories that created the mythic version of him (190). Then, when the argument quiets down, Iz quietly alludes to the fact that Sig is sick. “But what will you do?” she asks (191).

Ultimately, Iz returns to the Scarlets. The decision to return occurs after a series of events related to skating. First she has a memory of learning to skate, how she fell, and fell again, and Sig always caught her (193). Then she dreams of herself skating in the clothes of Isobel Stanley. Isobel Stanley—her namesake—embodies the complexity of her relationship to hockey as Kristjan’s daughter and as a woman (Isobel probably introduced hockey to her father, and played herself, but was hindered by the gender-norms of the time; the Stanley Cup is typically associated with her father and not herself). In the dream she has also lost Pelly, one of the most vulnerable members of the Scarlets, with whom she feels a close bond. To dream of losing Pelly probably signals Iz’s fear of losing her bond with the Scarlets, as well as a need to find and care for the Pelly-like part of herself. Finally, she goes skating, in the present, around the oval trail of the lake upon which she learned to skate as a child. She associates falling down with the ripping of muscles necessary to grow stronger (193). After a long hard skate, she senses that the ice is “changing its story” and realizes that she “needed to play” (197).

In one sense Iz’s decision to return is simple: she chooses to play rather than having hockey chosen for her. But the novel doesn’t present this choice simplistically. The end of the novel, in fact, stresses the complexity of her life. The issues she has to deal with are not fully “solved” when she chooses to return. Complexity is consistent with the novel’s criticism of “keeping it off the ice,” which presumes a separation from life that is both reductive and damaging. Iz seeks a version of the game that is more attuned to her own needs and to the complexities of life itself. This implies a game that doesn’t repeat the same old story; a game that evolves and develops, that is an ongoing process.

A Cigar for the Women’s Game

Since the time period depicted in Twenty Miles, women’s hockey has continued to evolve in Canada. Hockey Canada reports a steady growth in the participation of girls and women at all levels of the game throughout the country. The International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) has also reported growth in women’s hockey worldwide, with a 34 percent increase in registered female players between 2007 and 2018 across the 81 nations with IIHF memberships (Murphy 2020). The Varsity women’s game is now well-established in Canadian and American universities. The presence of women’s hockey in the Olympics has boosted interest in women’s hockey and has helped to inspire the formation of professional leagues. As of 2024, the Inaugural Six teams of the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) are gearing up for their second season of play.

Obstacles, however, remain. Attracting funding for women’s sport continues to be a challenge. Sexist attitudes towards women have also persisted in hockey, sometimes with the underlying implication that “if a woman is strong, she must not really be a woman.”

A telling example occurred during the 2010 Olympics, when the Canadian women’s team, after its gold medal victory, went back onto the ice after the arena had emptied for a celebration. Players drank beer and champagne and pretended to smoke cigars. Photographs of the players appeared shortly after, which caused a controversy that had a strong edge of moral panic to it. Reports stressed the fact that one of the Canadian players, Marie-Philip Poulin, was underaged at the time (Knoblauch 2010). Hockey Canada issued an apology, and for a while, there were fears that the International Olympic Committee would sanction the Canadian team in some fashion. The over-the-top reaction to this benign celebration revealed a continuing sexist double-standard (the incident is reminiscent of the Scarlets urinating in Twenty Miles: it is unlikely that a men’s team, in similar circumstances, would be subjected to such intense criticism). And, as history shows, Marie-Philip Poulin was not corrupted by her participation. In fact, she went on to become one of the most celebrated Canadian players of all time, the captain of the 2022 Olympic gold-medal-winning team, whose nickname, “Captain Clutch,” refers to the fact that she scored the gold-medal-winning goals in each of the 2010, 2014, and 2022 Olympics (Wikipedia n.d.).

Progress has been made with regard to gender stereotyping in hockey, but “old school” attitudes towards women in hockey remain. As recently as August 2020, NBC announcer Brian Boucher, a former NHL player, suggested that the isolation of players in the NHL Covid-bubble was “terrific” for those “who enjoyed the focused experience of being with their teammates 24/7” (Houpt 2020). This comment was seconded by another former NHL player, Mike Milbury, who said: “Not even any women here to disrupt your concentration” (Houpt 2020). The league tried to walk back the obvious insensitivity of these comments, which insulted both women (as disruptors of concentration) and men (as unable to control their sexual urges), and the NHL has tried in various ways in recent years to be more inclusive. The Milbury incident, however, pulled the curtain aside on lingering sexism at the highest levels of the game.

Twenty Miles, then, offers a snapshot of an important transitional time in women’s hockey. It also illustrates the need to reimagine hockey in order to acknowledge the wider well-being of players. By exposing the limits of “keeping it off the ice,” the novel suggests new approaches that could be of benefit to both male and female players.

Works Cited