Work Text:
Hockey Daily Blog
Q&A: Shane Hollander Sets the Record Straight (Gay)
I need to start off by saying that I said that I wasn’t going to talk about the relationship between Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, and I have stuck to that, but when Shane Hollander Himself reaches out to ask if you (moi) want to interview him, you (moi) don’t say no.
So here I am, talking to Shane Hollander about hockey, Ottawa, That Quote At All Stars, and his relationship with Ilya Rozanov.
(Transcript in full below. Interview was conducted over video call.)
Hollander: Thank you for having me.
Me: Thank you for being here. It is genuinely an honor. You’ve been notoriously sparing in your interviews since being outed, so I feel like I have to ask: why me? I don’t mean to diminish my own blog, but I’m no ESPN.
Hollander: I do read what you write occasionally—
Me: Oh my god.
Hollander: —but mostly I appreciated your coverage of Troy Barrett’s trade to Ottawa. I thought you were respectful of the situation while maintaining a critical eye of some of the mechanisms at play.
Me: Thank you. Oh my god. You read my blog?
Hollander: Not always. But yeah sometimes. My mom sent me one of your posts a few years ago.
Me: Your mom reads my blog? No, sorry, I’m getting derailed. First, let me say congratulations both on your wedding and on your move to Ottawa.
Hollander: Thank you.
Me: You’ve already given about a thousand soundbites about how you feel about both of those, so let me start by asking you about something else: that time at All Stars when that reporter asked you if you were worried about sharing a locker room with Scott Hunter and you asked if he thought you all had sex in the locker room, were you honestly confused or just fucking with him?
[Hollander buries his face in his hands.]
Hollander: Oh god, I had forgotten about that.
[Hollander lifts his head back up. He wiggles one hand back and forth.]
Hollander: My initial reaction was honest confusion, because he asked if I was worried about the locker room and all I could think was that we were going to walk into a locker room with a giant hole in the floor. Once it became clear he was just looking for a homophobic soundbite from me…that reaction was less honest confusion.
Me: Well, I—and much of the internet—appreciated it.
Hollander: Ilya chirped me for a week about it.
Me: Do you feel that reporters have shifted how they talk about queer players since then?
Hollander: Definitely. They’re not all great, and I know all the other captains get asked the same sorts of questions about me and Ilya that we got asked about Hunter, but most of the questions I get now are about hockey, not who I’m married to. Honestly, I think they got a lot of it out of their system the first time around.
Me: To switch to a hockey question, what’s your favorite thing about playing for Ottawa? From a technical perspective, I mean, not the fact that it’s your hometown or that your husband is there.
Hollander: The way the team fits together. For much of my time at Montreal, the team was built around me. Which made sense, structurally, for the team we had, but it also meant that the focus was often around getting the puck to me, making sure I had the opening to score. Other people scored, of course, and I don’t want to make it sound like nobody else contributed, but that simply is the reality of how we played.
Me: But at Ottawa it’s different?
Hollander: It is. There’s no single key player, and a lot more of the focus is on developing our younger players. If I miss, or if I’m boxed in, I know that there will always be another player there to get the puck from me, because that’s how we practice.
Me: Your goals scored is down from this time last year at Montreal.
Hollander: But my points total is up. I have a lot more assists.
Me: Do you and Rozanov compete on goals?
[Hollander laughs.]
Hollander: We compete on goals, we compete on points total, we compete on awards, we compete on basically everything it’s possible to compete on.
Me: Anything you’re winning on?
Hollander: I will always have one more Cup than him.
Me: I’m sure that never gets brought up.
Hollander: Only when he’s being particularly smug about something.
Me: Now I have to ask, you said when you reached out that you had something you wanted to set the record straight on.
Hollander: Right.
[He looks down at his hands. He’s twisting his wedding band around and around on his finger.]
Hollander: There were a lot of rumors my last season at Montreal that I had somehow thrown my last game against Rozanov, that my trip was a ruse to let him score.
Me: You’ve always denied those rumors.
Hollander: And I still do. They’re bullshit. Sorry, I probably shouldn’t be swearing.
Me: You can swear.
Hollander: Then they’re bullshit. I’ve never let Ilya win a game in my life, when we played against each other. He’d divorce me if I tried.
Me: What did you want to set straight?
Hollander: I think that there’s a misconception that our relationship was new, that it started soon before we were outed. That I had never had a chance to throw a game for him before. The reality is that there was not a single NHL game that I played against Ilya before we became…something.
[There is silence. I am doing math in my brain, which is very obvious on my face, because I am bad at math.]
Me: Just to confirm, are you telling me that you have been in a relationship with Ilya Rozanov since before you started at the NHL?
Hollander: Relationship might be too strong a word for what we were back then, but yes.
Me: Holy shit.
Hollander: It was more like a…situationship until significantly later, but if I had thrown games simply because I was sleeping with Ilya, there would have been evidence during my entire career. But the reality is that I never threw games for him, and he never threw games for me. Part of our relationship is built on mutual respect for each other’s hockey, and neither of us would ever even consider throwing that away for—what, the chance to play a mediocre game against each other? A Cup that we didn’t earn? What the fuck would be the point? We’re the best players in the League, and throwing games would be a betrayal of each other and the game.
Me: Yeah. Sorry. I am still caught up on the fact that you have been together with Rozanov in some form since 2010, and also that you know the word situationship.
Hollander: Harris [Drover] said it fit.
Me: Having watched every one of your games against Rozanov since you started in the NHL, I can say my experience was that it always seemed you played harder against him than anyone else. Obviously everyone attributed that to your rivalry.
Hollander: We definitely had a rivalry, it just wasn’t based in the mutual animosity that people ascribed to it. We’re both people who want to win. We’re just also in love.
Me: You’re doing something unprecedented.
Hollander: In the NHL, maybe, but professional women’s hockey has had openly queer players in relationships with each other for years. It’s great to play together now, but playing against each other was never the challenge that people act like it should be. We’re professionals.
[From somewhere in the background, Rozanov shouts something in Russian. Hollander rolls his eyes.]
Hollander: He wants me to ask you something.
Me: Yes?
Hollander: Man Who Would Eat Hockey If He Could?
Me: Oh my god—
[Hollander is still laughing when the video ends.]
MontreNOT @montreall 🔁 Hockey Daily @hockeydailyblog
I’m honestly not sure if my favorite part is that Shane Hollander talked about women’s hockey or that he knows the word situationship
Exclusive: Shane Hollander sets the record straight (gay)
hockeydailyblog.c…
gay shane hollander @gayshanehollander 🔁 Hockey Daily @hockeydailyblog
what do you mean he never played a single NHL game before he and rozanov got together?
Exclusive: Shane Hollander sets the record straight (gay)
hockeydailyblog.c…
The Ass That Launched A Thousand Ships @ilyasass 🔁 Hockey Daily @hockeydailyblog
Not Hollander throwing very subtle shade at Montreal
Exclusive: Shane Hollander sets the record straight (gay)
hockeydailyblog.c…
Ottawa Fan Since Before It Was Cool @ilyasotherass
Replying to @ilyasass
“a lot more of the focus is on developing our younger players”
The Ass That Launched A Thousand Ships @ilyasass
“I know that there will always be another player there”MontreNOT @montreall
so polite when he talks about how much the m*tros fucking suck