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South Korea, next Olympics host, shops in North America to build its hockey teams

 
Published Feb. 24, 2017

SEOUL, South Korea — Some female college students received emails a few years ago that sounded like a phishing scam, offering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for free travel and a spot on South Korea's Olympic women's hockey team.

The offers were sincere. Officials in South Korea had apparently scoured online rosters of North American college hockey programs, looking for women with last names that looked as if they might be Korean. They were on a shopping spree to assemble Olympic hockey teams from scratch for the 2018 Winter Games.

As the host of the next Olympics, next February in Pyeongchang, South Korea has automatic berths in the men's and women's hockey competitions, which are premier events at any Winter Games. But hockey in South Korea is an afterthought, so the country had to get creative if it wanted to field teams that would not be humiliated.

"I never dreamed this would happen," said Danelle Im, who was born in Toronto to Korean parents and was attending Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario in 2012 when she received the curious email. She is now a forward on South Korea's national team.

Countries commonly take advantage of loose citizenship rules to import Olympic-level talent in all sports. South Korea's hockey project is among the more aggressive and novel examples.

For the men's team — which could be facing teams stocked with NHL players; the league hasn't decided whether to participate in the Games again — they recruited several North Americans playing on one of the three South Korea-based teams in the Asia League. They offered naturalization to a handful of players from the United States and Canada who had no Korean ancestry.

Mike Testwuide, a Colorado native, was approached by the national team coach, Jim Paek, a two-time Stanley Cup champion with the Pittsburgh Penguins, during his second season with Anyang Halla of the Asia League. On a men's squad that includes players with a wide range of abilities, Testwuide, a strapping 6-foot-5 center out of Colorado College, offers the big, physical presence in short supply in South Korea.

The prospect of joining the Olympic fraternity thrilled Testwuide, 30. But it took him a week to agree to become the first men's hockey player to become a dual citizen of the United States and the Republic of Korea.

That was how long he needed to gauge his comfort level with two prospects: Could he hold his right hand over his heart during the playing of a national anthem that was not "The Star-Spangled Banner" and not feel like an impostor — or a traitor? And how would one of the world's most homogeneous cultures react to a towering, pale-skinned forward representing them on the world stage?

"There's a lot of negativity out there," Testwuide said. "In the U.S. it was like, 'Why would you want to play for another country?' And in Korea it's like, 'Why are we bringing you guys in?' "

The naturalization process took roughly a month, Testwuide said, and included memorizing the Korean national anthem. It took considerably longer for him to feel comfortable in his dual role as hockey ringer and proselytizer of puck.

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"You want to be as Korean as possible, but in your head you're kind of fighting it and you're questioning whether you're doing the right thing," Testwuide said. "It's a big responsibility, and it's a ton of added pressure."

Tyler Brickler, a Chicago native whose mother is from South Korea, is in the process of acquiring his citizenship. Brickler, 26, was invited to a national training camp in South Korea during his senior year at SUNY Geneseo and signed out of college with the Asia League, his interest whetted by the possibility of an Olympic berth.

"It is a very weird situation for me, for sure," Brickler said. "Playing in North America, I was sometimes considered the Asian player on the team, but when I came out here, I'm considered the American."

Marissa Brandt, who played at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minn., will be a defenseman on the women's team, whose roster is about 20 percent North American. She was born in South Korea and adopted by an American family.

"When I was in the States, I didn't want to be Korean, I wanted to be like everyone else," she said. In the summer of 2015, she traveled to Korea for the first time since her adoption to attend a hockey camp and was transformed.

"It was definitely an eye-opener," said Brandt, who now wears her Korean name, Yoon Jung Park, on her jersey. "Coming back, I am Korean."

When Pyeongchang won the bid to host the 2018 Winter Games in 2011, South Korea had 1,880 registered ice hockey players, according to statistics kept by the International Ice Hockey Federation. The United States in the same period had more than 500,000.

Defenseman Donku Lee, a national team member who plays with Testwuide on Anyang Halla, was blunt in his assessment of the challenge facing the South Koreans in Pyeongchang. "The other teams will be fighting with tanks, and the Koreans will be using wooden sticks," Lee said.

The sport still operates largely in a vacuum in a country that is crazy for speed skating and figure skating.

"There's a lot of people in Korea who aren't as educated about the game; they don't really know what we're up against," said Testwuide, who signed an entry-level contract with the Philadelphia Flyers and played for the Adirondack Phantoms and Abbotsford Heat of the American Hockey League before moving to Korea. "They think, 'We brought you guys in here so we can compete with Canada,' and that's where it's hard. I could barely make an NHL lineup. The reality of it is one of Team Canada's player salaries is probably the entire budget we have for players' salaries and everything for the Olympic run."

It is a challenge complicated by cultural mores as foreign as the Korean alphabet to the North Americans, who recognize that Koreans do not like to lose, especially by lopsided scores that could cause chemyeon, or loss of face. That is a particular concern to the men's team, which opens preliminary play against two-time defending champion Canada.

"It's such a young hockey country," said Matt Dalton, a Canadian-born goaltender who plays for Anyang Halla. "Anything they can put their hat on, they try to use it to further momentum. Like when we beat Japan once and people were like, 'We're better now.' When I hear something like that, my first instinct is, 'Guys, let's not get too high here.' "