Hockey Player (The)

Attention all Heated Rivalry devotées! Shot over the last five years, The Hockey Player follows Canadian-born defenseman Luke Prokop as he decides to become the first — and still only — professional athlete playing under contract to an NHL team to come out as gay. Growing up in Edmonton steeped in Canada’s tough, often homophobic hockey culture, and playing without gay role models throughout professional sports, Luke’s path to coming out of the closet has been neither easy nor obvious.

The film charts Prokop’s personal journey against the backdrop of a professional hockey industry that has had, at best, an ambivalent relationship to diversity. As the film sensitively reveals, being publicly out certainly came as an earthquake to his family, especially his father Al, who as Luke’s mentor and sometime coach represents the most complex and moving relationship in the film. In that way, like its fictional HBOMax counterpart, The Hockey Player is ultimately a love story — between a player and his family, and a player and his sport.

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