After St. Louis Blues’ forward T.J. Oshie scored the clinching goal in the United States’ shootout win over Russia on Saturday, reporter Dejan Kovacevic of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review asked him what it felt like to be called a national hero. Oshie responded saying, “The American heroes are wearing camo. That’s not me.”

Kovacevic’s tweet of Oshie’s quote has 2,300 retweets, and it should. It’s a great quote from a great player who just played probably the most memorable game of his life, and through this, on the world’s biggest stage, Oshie still won’t accept the title bestowed on him of “hero.” It’s a nice story about being humble and not letting these titles go to your head.

A much more troubling story is how the Internet has taken Oshie’s quote and stacked it next to Seattle Seahawks’ corner Richard Sherman’s post-game interview from the NFC championship game win over the San Francisco 49ers in a blatant attempt at some not-so-thinly-veiled racism.

The point I guess they’re trying to get across here is that hockey is a “classy” sport full of “classy” (AKA, mostly white) athletes, compared to the NFL, full of “thugs” and hardened criminals (AKA, black people).

This certainly is not to say that there are not upstanding hockey players, and this isn’t to say that there aren’t players in the NFL with criminal records because there certainly are. This an unnecessary need to take a great moment in American sports history and flip into something that says “these people” are better than “those people.”

The Twitter account @CauseWereGuys, which boasts in its bio line to be the “official page for all guys on Twitter,” put up a similar photo after the Oshie quote that went viral, showing Oshie’s quote and an indirect quote from LeBron James (hey, another black player!) about how he “loves to be a game hero that everyone looks up to.” The tweet has 14,000 retweets.

This is way more than Kovacevic’s original quote. Granted, @CauseWereGuys has a few more million followers than a columnist from Pittsburgh, but the point still remains the same.

Some people are terrible and have to turn Oshie’s moment of essentially saying, “it’s not about me,” into something that they can throw into someone else’s face and say, “look at us, we’re so much better.”

It’s unfortunate that Oshie’s selflessness has been twisted and turned into something very selfish by others.

Next time, why don’t you just come out and say you don’t like black people, rather than hide behind someone else’s “class” to show how “civil and upstanding” you are. Little do these racist people know, statements like this are already helping the rest of us weed you out of the discussion.

Dominic Renzetti is a senior family and consumer sciences major. He can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].