A Year After His Death Remembering Brendan Burke

February 5th marks the one-year anniversary of the tragic death of Brendan Burke, the openly gay student manager of the Miami University at Ohio hockey team and son of Toronto Maple Leafs president and general manager. The 20 year old Brendan had come out publically only months before, in November, in a manner that defined courage and belied his young age. Brendan was driving during a winter storm, accompanied by his friend Mark Reedy, a Michigan State University student athlete, who was in the passenger seat, the Jeep Cherokee drifting across the Indiana highway into an oncoming Ford truck, Brendan’s death seeming particularly cruel. A pioneer, he had only begun a mission to end homophobia in hockey, and, by extension, to encourage discussions about the struggles facing gay athletes not only in professional sport, but in athletics in general. That his legacy has continued is the source of great hope, however, and as USCHO.com reports, nowhere is that more evident than the Miami RedHawks men’s hockey team. Nick Petraglia, an assistant coach and someone who worked closely with Brendan, says that “One of his biggest impacts on this program with what we went through and him coming out is he really opened our eyes to the language that we use and the types of words we use around the locker room. The gay slurs are, I think, a pretty common part of sports. It is a pretty common part of the hockey culture and he changed that here. You won’t hear our guys use those words, and if you do, if it slips every once in awhile there’s always someone that says, ‘Hey, don’t say that.’ We think about him every day. We still miss him. There’s no question.”Miami (and Oxford, Ohio) will honour Brendan this weekend with the Burke family in attendance. During Saturday’s game the team will wear special sweaters in his memory. “We wanted to do something,” says head coach Enrico Blasi. “The Burke family created a scholarship here at Miami in Brendan’s name and we wanted to do our part. Feb. 5 is going be a tough day but making sure that we respect Brendan for who he was and what he meant to us is very important. I asked Brian Burke and his family [about the special sweaters] and they thought it would be a great idea. The jerseys are going to look great and we’re going to raise some money by auctioning off the jerseys for his scholarship. We’ll all be together, which will be very important and hopefully we can get through it and then continue to push his message forward. That’s what Brendan would want and that’s what the family wants. They want to make sure that everybody gets on with what they need to do. Hopefully we can do that and always keep Brendan in our hearts.”