This week, as we count down to the Star’s 125th anniversary, we revisit stories that have inspired readers and changed lives.

It began as a hopeful, somewhat naive plea from a 12-year-old. Then it played out as a lengthy courtroom saga that would forever alter kids’ hockey in Ontario.

And if Justine Blainey-Broker understood the suffering she would endure, it’s unlikely she would have made the push to break the gender barrier and play boys’ hockey back in the mid-’80s.

“If I knew how hard and hurtful it would be, the things that people would say, the things people would think about me, there’s no way,” she says now. “I wouldn’t have been strong enough.”

“I had no conception of how far we’d go, how difficult it would be, that it would be a precedent — no clue. That was probably an asset in helping me get through it.”

Blainey-Broker turned the hockey world, a male bastion at the time, upside-down as her fight took her through the Supreme Court and the Ontario Human Rights Commission. But it got ugly outside the courtroom. The teenager had arena coffee dumped on her and was spat upon at the rink. She was shunned by friends and teammates, and even pushed down the stairs in a subway station.

To this day, it is rare she will ride a bus or subway alone.

“It was hurtful for me but helpful for women’s hockey,” says the 44-year-old, who is now a chiropractor with her own wellness centre in Brampton.

Today women are in the Olympics and in the Hockey Hall of Fame. There are 2,910 female teams in Ontario, compared with around 250 in 1985. Last season, around 1,500 girls were in the 33,000-player Greater Toronto Hockey League (GTHL) at all levels. But in 1985 such crossover was unheard of and women’s hockey was in its nascent stages.

That’s when a preteen girl from Toronto’s Beach neighbourhood, frustrated in her attempts to play boys’ hockey, wrote to the Sunday Star.

On a page called Have Your Say — a mishmash of readers’ letters, many soliciting help — prominently displayed was an appeal from Justine Blainey, as she was known then. In the letter, she explained that tryouts were starting for the Metro Toronto Hockey League (the precursor to the GTHL) but, in the past, she’d been told that while she was good enough to play on a boys’ team, she wasn’t allowed.

She explained that boys’ hockey was more competitive than what was available to her and girls’ teams only played half the games of a top MTHL team.

“Is there an individual or group that can help me? Is there a lawyer willing to donate his or her time to fight this unfairness? I want to be judged on my ability alone,” she concluded.

In the next day’s paper, the Star published a news story on Blainey-Broker that explained how she had played three years of girls hockey for the Leaside Wildcats and believed her play had grown beyond that level.

“Last year I was like a one-man team,” said the young defender. “There’s not much you can do when there’s no one to pass (the puck) to and there’s no one to pass it to you.”

Longtime Star minor hockey writer Lois Kalchman helped connect the Blaineys to a lawyer, Anna Fraser, who took on the case pro bono. Justine’s parents were divorced and her mother couldn’t afford a long legal fight.

A boys’ organization called the Toronto Olympics signed Blainey-Broker to play on its peewee A team, the third highest level. However, the MTHL said it would reject the registration because the sport’s provincial governing body, the Ontario Hockey Association (OHA), dictated girls could not play on boys teams.

Fraser argued that rule didn’t apply under Canada’s Charter of Rights.

The gloves came off and the case worked its way through the courts.

The legal wrangling got complicated, but more than two years after Blainey-Broker’s initial letter, the matter went before an Ontario Human Rights Commission board of inquiry in the summer of 1987.

That inquiry heard experts say playing on a boys’ team distorted a girl’s personality in the teenage years, and that girls were “out of their league” physically trying to compete with boys.

Awaiting a decision, Blainey-Broker played on girls’ teams and practised with boys. Sometimes she travelled to tournaments in the U.S. with the boys, registering as Justin.

In December 1987, inquiry commissioner Ian Springate ruled in her favour. The far-reaching decision said “discrimination on the basis of sex in athletic activities is now unlawful in Ontario.”

Blainey-Broker was thrilled, but at almost 15, she was no longer sure if she could even make a boys’ team. She’d stopped growing at five-foot-four. But she eventually suited up for the A-level Toronto East Enders in the formerly all-male MTHL.

Not everyone was happy.

“It’s been a two-and-a-half-year, useless, obscene waste of money,” MTHL president John Gardner said at the time. “It will cost the OHA well over $100,000. Now that it’s over maybe we will be spared the agony of hearing any more about the name and the cause.”

Fran Rider, president of the Ontario Women’s Hockey Association (OWHA) called the ruling a “negative step for females in sport,” believing the best girls should stay together and develop the game. Rider said defections could create other problems such as weakening girls’ argument for equal ice times or causing some teams to fold due to a lack of players.

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Kalchman, now retired, wrote about the case, and recalls the anger Blainey-Broker often faced.

“She felt the whole hockey community was against her at that time,” she says. “(Rider) felt it was going to destroy women’s hockey. It certainly has not because it’s grown so tremendously . . . (Blainey-Broker) opened it up for girls being allowed to play on male teams and I think that in the long run that has been helpful.”

Rider, today, stands by the stance the OWHA took in the ’80s, though she calls Blainey-Broker “a good person and a good athlete.”

“We were against the principle, not the person,” says Rider, who remains OWHA president. “We still feel as much as we’ve grown, had we been on the winning side of that case, we would have had more opportunity to grow.”

Rider says she is “saddened still that women playing women’s sports are not given more credibility.” She believes that when the top female athletes aspire to play men’s sport, it hurts that credibility.

While the Blainey-Broker legal proceedings played out, it was a tumultuous time for the girl who just wanted to play hockey like her brother.

Strangers confronted her on the street. Teens and adults would question her morals and falsely accuse her of sexual misbehaviour. She recalls teachers slamming doors in her face or trying to fail her, despite her 80-per-cent average, because she’d spent so much time in court. And adults pressuring kids to sign a petition to get her out of hockey.

“In girls hockey, I was hated,” she recalls. “People wouldn’t be friends with me, they wouldn’t talk to me. At one point, I went into a dressing room and all the girls got up and moved to the other side of the room to dress. You can imagine 16 girls on one side and I’ve got a bench all to myself because I have the cooties and no one wants to sit beside me.”

Blainey-Broker says she was similarly ostracized at school where no one would have a locker beside hers. There would be prank, sometimes obscene, calls to the house. Police even discovered her name on the “hit list” of a sexual predator who had been calling her house trying to meet her.

“I was told that I was gay and that was the reason I wanted to play hockey. Or I was told I’d never have kids. No one would ever want to marry me,” she says. “When you’re 14 or 15, that hurts.”

In women’s hockey, she often played with much older teammates and began drinking at age 12, desperate to fit in and make friends. She says she stopped at 19.

Blainey-Broker believes that by hanging in and showing girls could play at a higher level, she helped bring women to the game. Coverage of her in the paper, she says, also got more people thinking.

There’s no question that women’s hockey grew rapidly in the late ’80s and early ’90s but that was also the time when it was being accepted globally, with a world women’s tournament at North York in 1987, a world championship at Ottawa in 1990 and Olympic approval in 1992 (and a debut in 1998). Female role models such as Angela James emerged as well.

After a little more than three seasons in boys’ hockey, Blainey returned to the women’s game at 19, eventually playing at U of T — where she headed a campaign to save the threatened program — and with Brampton of the National Women’s Hockey League.

Now she and her brother, David, run the Justine Blainey Wellness Centre — the J is shaped like a hockey stick in the logo — a bustling medical centre of chiropractors, naturopaths and massage therapists. She is married to fellow chiropractor Blake Broker, and they have two teenagers: a son who plays AA minor midget in the GTHL and a daughter who hates hockey but is a competitive figure skater.

Blainey-Broker speaks at grade schools and universities and shares her stories. She hopes they inspire others, especially those who feel discriminated against, to work through barriers.

“If they can realize they’re not alone, they realize that even when there’s tough times like I went through, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.”

Blainey-Broker still plays recreational hockey a couple of times a week.

One of those sessions is on a men’s team.

Read more on the Star’s 125th anniversary in Saturday’s special Insight section and at https://www.thestar.com/anniversary.html

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