Former NHL Star P.K. Subban Opens Up About Racist Abuse He Faced On the Ice as a Child: ‘Parents Yell The N-Word And Different Things At Me’

Former NHL defenseman P.K. Subban shared an emotional story about the racist abuse he faced playing hockey as a young player and how his mother refused to let him quit.

Subban was a guest on Tuesday’s edition of The Pivot Podcast — hosted by Ryan Clark, Channing Crowder, and Fred Taylor. The ex-Montreal Canadiens great explained how he frequently heard disgusting racial slurs directed his way on the ice when he was a young player in Canada.

“I heard all that stuff in hockey,” Subban said. “Four years old playing on the ice, my parents sitting in the stands, they’re hearing parents yell the n-word and different things at me on the ice. This is at a very, very young age.”

Subban, who retired from the NHL in 2022 after 13 seasons, how one incident of racist taunting nearly drove him to quit the sport.

“I remember, I’ll never forget this story,” Subban began. “I would’ve been probably six or seven years old. A kid said something to me on the ice. He called me the n-word or whatever.”

“And I’m crying in the room, and the coach is there, and the coach is like, ‘Mrs. Subban, Maria, you gotta come down. There’s something going on with P.K.’ She’s like, ‘what’s going on with P.K.?’

After the coach informed Subban’s mother, Maria, that a player on the other team had hurled a racial slur at Subban, she came down from the stands to gracefully tell her son to ignore the awful things people said to him and that he would not quit hockey because of verbal abuse.

“She pulls me out the room, and she goes, ‘what are you crying about?’ I said, ‘well, this kid called me this,’ she’s like, ‘so what? So you’re not gonna play? You’re gonna take your equipment off? You don’t want to play?'” Subban said.

“She’s like, ‘if you don’t want to play, it’s gonna be because you don’t want to play, not because somebody called you something.’ That’s how my parents were at five, six, seven years old. There was no excuses,” Subban added.

Subban credited his parents for not allowing racial slurs to affect him or his brothers, Malcolm and Jordan, as they went through the ranks of their hockey careers.

In January, Jordan was subjected to a racist gesture from a player on the South Carolina Stingrays of the East Coast Hockey League. According to Jordan, the player made “monkey gestures” toward him during a scrum after the whistle blew.

Watch above via The Pivot Podcast.