Indian Immigrants Are Saving Canadian Hockey: HOW THE PUNJABI DIASPORA RESCUED CANADA'S NATIONAL SPORT.

• Author: Dalmia, Shikha

LOVE SOMETIMES SHOWS up in the strangest places. For Canadian hockey, that place is the Punjabi Indian diaspora, which hails from my own ancestral province of Punjab in Northern India. Thanks to Harnarayan Singh, the turbaned-and-bearded Sikh host of the weekly TV show Hockey Night in Canada: Punjabi Edition, the community has overcome a fear of rejection and embraced its adopted country's national sport with a hot passion.

The standard English version of Hockey Night in Canada has been a must-watch for fans of the sport since its TV debut in 1953. But lately, it has been languishing. Singh's spicy new Punjabi version, on the other hand, has been catching on--and not only among South Asians. (Punjabi is the language spoken in the northern Indian province of Punjab, where Sikhism was born.)

President Donald Trump and his fellow immigration restrictionists warn that "mass immigration" from "shitholes"--and Punjab would certainly qualify--poses a threat to Western culture. On a trip to England in 2018, Trump said it was a "shame" that excessively loose immigration policies were changing the "fabric" of Europe's culture. In fact, the E.U. admits about as many immigrants per capita as the United States does--fewer than five per 1,000 people in the host country.

Canada admits eight per 1,000. The foreign-born make up over 20 percent of that country's population, compared to less than 14 percent of America's. And Canadians with South Asian ancestry are projected to hit 9 percent of Canada's population by 2036. If Trump were right, ice hockey would be on its way out, and cricket, a far more popular sport in India, would be ascendant in the Great White North. In fact, the opposite is the case. Instead of threatening this quintessential Canadian institution, immigrants are strengthening it at a time when it needs the help.

TO SAY THAT hockey is an institution in Canada is an understatement. It is more like a national religion. Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper once called it the great "common denominator" that glues the country together. Fully half of players in the National Hockey League (NHL), which despite the name has teams from both the U.S. and Canada, are Canadian--down from 75 percent in 1980. The United States, a nation of 330 million people, had about 562,000 registered players in 2017-18, according to the International Ice Hockey Federation. Canada, a country with one-tenth the U.S. population, had 637,000.

That represents a decline of about 80,000 from Canada's 2014-15 peak, a development that has generated a great deal of angst up north. The main reason for the drop is that blue-blooded--or, per local parlance, "old stock"--Canadians are developing qualms about the cost and safety of the sport.

At first blush, immigrants who hail from the Indian subcontinent--many of whom had never seen snow, let alone skated on ice, until they arrived in Canada--seem like unlikely saviors of the game. An additional challenge is that this group has tended to see hockey as a white man's sport, where minorities (and women) are not welcome.

Their perception is not altogether mistaken.

Hockey has been more resistant to diversifying than some other sports. A decade after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball in 1947, the NHL was still hanging on to an informal no-color policy. It finally relented in 1958, allowing the injury-ridden Boston Bruins to recruit Willie O'Ree, a black Canadian player.

It's hard to conclusively say whether racism is worse in ice hockey than in football or basketball, where racial and ethnic minorities have a larger presence. But in the NHL, only about 25 out of some 700 total players are black, and only four are of Asian descent. The league is 93 percent white. Lack of diversity doesn't necessarily stem from racism, but it can offer fertile soil for it.

Hockey teams are like warring tribes, and a subset of fans has shown itself willing to reach for whatever intimidation tactic it can to obtain a psychological advantage over the other side. That can include screaming, and sometimes hurling racial epithets, at the opposing players. Fans have been known to throw bananas or make monkey calls at black members of the opposing team. Players, too, lob racial insults to get under the skin of their opponents. P.K. Subban, one of the NHL's highest-profile black players, was subjected to a deluge of racist tweets after he scored two goals, including the overtime game winner, against the Boston Bruins in 2014.

In March, an opposing player confronted Jonathan-Ismael Diaby, a semiprofessional Canadian defenseman, in the penalty box and showed him a picture of ababoon on his cellphone. Meanwhile, fans began harassingDiaby's girlfriend and telling his father, a former professional soccer player from the Ivory Coast, to "go back home." Diaby was so outraged that he walked out midgame. That same month, an amateur league playoff in Western New York was canceled following a similar incident.

But racism is arguably an even bigger problem at the lower levels. Earlier this year, after two 13-year-old black American players in two different states were separately subjected to highly publicized taunting, Subban sprang into action. He made a video telling one of the kids, Ty Cornett, whose parents had told NHL.com they were thinking about pulling him out of the sport, to "stay strong" and hang in there. Meanwhile, Subban's dad reached out to the other kid, Divyne Apollon II, and encouraged him to not give up. "You are not defined by the...