Culture
Gauthier received death threats for not wanting to play for Flyers
From the moment he was traded to the Anaheim Ducks on Monday, Cutter Gauthier has been pilloried in some circles, with social media-fueled attacks on his character after the Philadelphia Flyers effectively said good riddance to their former prize prospect.
Gauthier answered questions Wednesday about the stunning deal, which saw the Flyers trade the 19-year-old Boston College standout and recent United States world juniors gold medal winner to the Ducks for young defenseman Jamie Drysdale and a 2025 second-round draft pick.
The reaction to reports about Gauthier’s recent dealings with Philadelphia — or perhaps lack thereof — was so toxic that Gauthier said he received death threats via social media. Most of the questions Gauthier has faced have centered around one simple one: Why didn’t he want to play for the Flyers?
“That’s the question (that) kind of everyone’s wondering, and the biggest thing I can say right now is I have to keep it to myself, my family and my agent,” Gauthier said. “It’s been a long process in the past handful of months of dealing with this. I don’t think it’s the right time to kind of discuss it. There might be one day where I kind of get into details on what happened. Right now, I want to keep it to a private matter.”
During a 30-minute telephone call with local reporters, Gauthier said his head is “kind of spinning” in the two days since the trade, and emphasized he’s excited to join Anaheim after his college season ends. He also pointed to death threats in describing the visceral reactions he’s received.
“There’s been a lot of good and bad,” he said. “A 19-year-old kid getting a lot of death threats and a bunch of thousands and thousands of people reaching out and just saying some pretty poor things that I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy, it’s pretty tough to see, obviously. But it’s a business. With all the rumors spreading around that aren’t true, it’s kind of tough to go out and say one word or anything to kind of quiet those people.
“But, you know, people are going to have opinions. People are going to say things. I can’t tell them to have an opinion or not. It’s been definitely a little bit of a stressful situation (the) last 48 hours.”
Expanding on the threats he’s received, Gauthier said: “My (direct messages) right now and Instagram are kind of pretty crazy of what people are saying. There’s been thousands and thousands of messages. I’m still getting some five, 10 minutes ago. And it’s kind of cruel what people are saying.
“I didn’t really mean to put any harm into anyone. I just was looking at a situation, kind of I’d say a pigeon view from above. I thought it was best for me to make the decision I made. Obviously some people aren’t going to be happy with it. I’m not here to please everyone. I’m here to do what’s best for me and my future. I felt that’s what I did. Obviously, people aren’t going to be too happy with that. Yeah, some pretty cruel things that people are saying.”
While he understood the amount of interest that would follow in the aftermath of the trade, Gauthier admits it’s been tough for him to stay off his cell phone or social feeds. But there has been support amid the backlash.
“It’s kind of tough when it’s all right in your face right there,” he said. “You pull up Twitter and you see my name and every report of what’s going on and everyone having their own opinions. It’s kind of tough not to completely stay away from it.
“Like I said before, it’s a business. People are going to say things, especially in the situation we are in right now. It’s kind of tough knowing the real reason why and seeing people put all these false statements out there. Not being able to really express what really happened yet. It’s been kind of hard, but it’s also been good, too. A bunch of people have reached out to me.
“You can definitely see who your circle of friends are in situations like this. It’s definitely been good for the most part and obviously a handful of bad things from Flyers fans.”
In the time since the trade, Gauthier said he did go back and forth on whether to fully explain what went behind going from the Flyers’ No. 5 choice of the 2022 NHL Draft to requesting a trade from them last April after his freshman season with the Eagles concluded. He opted for the discretion of privacy.
“I’ve seen kind of all the rumors that are spreading right now,” he said. “It’s kind of just funny what people are saying at this moment. I don’t think I’ve seen one thing that’s been said that’s been spot on on the reason why this all transpired. People like to talk and people like to make things up and other people like to listen.”
Another aspect of the trade Gauthier sought to dispel is the notion that he didn’t want to play for Flyers coach John Tortorella. He said his interaction with him was positive.
“All those rumors saying I was scared of Torts, that’s not the case at all,” he said. “I’ve had many (tough) coaches throughout my whole life and I think that any coach I will play for would love to have me on their team. I want to do whatever it takes to win. If they’re a hard, yelling, screaming kind of coach, I’ll roll with the punches. I’m never going to disrespect or talk back to a coach. I’m going to give it my all every single shift. That was definitely not the reason why I didn’t want to play in Philly.
“I actually met Torts during dev camp two years back. I was super excited and thrilled to meet him. Obviously, being a big name in hockey and the coaching staff industry, I definitely was not against playing for him whatsoever.”
And while he stayed away from specifics about the Flyers and his dealings with them, Gauthier specifically took issue with St. Louis Blues forward Kevin Hayes being described as someone who influenced his desire to play elsewhere. Hayes, who played with the Flyers from 2020-23, is a former BC player who Gauthier has gotten to know well.
“I’ve kind of seen all the rumors going around about Kevin Hayes having his fingerprints on this,” Gauthier said. “I want to clarify that he has nothing to do with this whatsoever. He has absolutely nothing (to do with it). Some of the people who are kind of saying this stuff about his family and stuff like that, (it) is pretty gutless. He has zero fingerprints on this whatsoever.
“I haven’t spoken to him in a long time. I just wanted to clarify it. It’s not just his word against everyone else’s. I wanted to make sure that (it’s known) he was definitely not involved in this whatsoever. It’s kind of disrespectful to him and his name that he was being brought into this.”
The Ducks made the trade with the strong belief and knowledge that Gauthier would sign with them after he completes his sophomore season with the Eagles, who are the top-ranked team in college hockey. Gauthier said that is his plan and his NHL debut could still come if the Eagles were to play for the NCAA title, as Anaheim plays its season finale five days after the championship game. He said he’s been in touch with current Ducks forwards Troy Terry and Leo Carlsson.
But the prospect of him playing his first game in Philadelphia will have to wait as the Ducks already made their lone visit in October. Asked what he anticipates the first game at Wells Fargo Center will be like, Gauthier said “chaotic.”
“I got that (future) date circled on my calendar big time,” he continued. “I can’t wait to go out there and play my game in front of those fans and do my thing. I’m really looking forward to that game.”
Required reading
(Photo: Andy Lewis / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
Literature
Oedipa Maas from ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
“The unforgettable, cartoonish protagonist of this unusually short novel is a California housewife accidentally turned private investigator and literary interpreter, and the mystery she’s attempting to solve — or, more specifically, the conspiracy she stumbles upon — is nothing less than capitalism itself,” says Ngai, 54. “As Oedipa traces connections between various crackpots, the novel highlights the peculiarly asocial sociality of postwar U.S. society, which gets figured as a network of alienations.”
Sula Peace from ‘Sula’ (1973) by Toni Morrison
“Sula arguably begins to disappear as soon as she’s introduced — despite the fact that the novel bears her name. Other characters die quickly, or are noticeably flat. This raises the politically charged question of who gets to ‘develop’ or be a protagonist in American novels and who doesn’t. The novel’s unusual character system is part of its meditation on anti-Black racism and historical violence.”
The speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ (1964) by Frank O’Hara
“Lyric poems are fundamentally different from narrative fiction in part because they have speakers as opposed to narrators. Perhaps it’s a stretch to nominate the speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ as a main character, but this book changed things by highlighting the centrality of queer counterpublics to U.S. culture as a whole, and by exploring the joys and risks of everyday intimacy with strangers therein.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
More in Literature
See the rest of the issue
Let’s memorize a poem! Not because it’s good for us or because we think we should, but because it’s fun, a mental challenge with a solid aesthetic reward. You can amuse yourself, impress your friends and maybe discover that your way of thinking about the world — or even, as you’ll see, the universe — has shifted a bit.
Over the next five days, we’ll look closely at a great poem by one of our favorite poets, and we’ll have games, readings and lots of encouragement to help you learn it by heart. Some of you know how this works: Last year more Times readers than we could count memorized a jaunty 18-line recap of an all-night ferry ride. (If you missed that adventure, it’s not too late to embark. The ticket is still valid.)
This time, we’re training our telescopes on W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — a clever, compact meditation on love, disappointment and the night sky.
Here’s the first of its four stanzas, read for us by Matthew McConaughey:
The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Matthew McConaughey, actor and poet
In four short lines we get a brisk, cynical tour of the universe: hell and the heavens, people and animals, coldness and cruelty. Commonplace observations — that the stars are distant; that life can be dangerous — are wound into a charming, provocative insight. The tone is conversational, mixing decorum and mild profanity in a manner that makes it a pleasure to keep reading.
Here’s Tracy K. Smith, a former U.S. poet laureate, with the second stanza:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tracy K. Smith, poet
These lines abruptly shift the focus from astronomy to love, from the universal to the personal. Imagine how it would feel if the stars had massive, unrequited crushes on us! The speaker, couching his skepticism in a coy, hypothetical question, seems certain that we wouldn’t like this at all.
This certainty leads him to a remarkable confession, a moment of startling vulnerability. The poem’s title, “The More Loving One,” is restated with sweet, disarming frankness. Our friend is wearing his heart on his well-tailored sleeve.
The poem could end right there: two stanzas, point and counterpoint, about how we appreciate the stars in spite of their indifference because we would rather love than be loved.
But the third stanza takes it all back. Here’s Alison Bechdel reading it:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Alison Bechdel, graphic novelist
The speaker downgrades his foolish devotion to qualified admiration. No sooner has he established himself as “the more loving one” than he gives us — and perhaps himself — reason to doubt his ardor. He likes the stars fine, he guesses, but not so much as to think about them when they aren’t around.
The fourth and final stanza, read by Yiyun Li, takes this disenchantment even further:
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Yiyun Li, author
Wounded defiance gives way to a more rueful, resigned state of mind. If the universe were to snuff out its lights entirely, the speaker reckons he would find beauty in the void. A starless sky would make him just as happy.
Though perhaps, like so many spurned lovers before and after, he protests a little too much. Every fan of popular music knows that a song about how you don’t care that your baby left you is usually saying the opposite.
The last line puts a brave face on heartbreak.
So there you have it. In just 16 lines, this poem manages to be somber and funny, transparent and elusive. But there’s more to it than that. There is, for one thing, a voice — a thinking, feeling person behind those lines.
When he wrote “The More Loving One,” in the 1950s, Wystan Hugh Auden was among the most beloved writers in the English-speaking world. Before this week is over there will be more to say about Auden, but like most poets he would have preferred that we give our primary attention to the poem.
Its structure is straightforward and ingenious. Each of the four stanzas is virtually a poem unto itself — a complete thought expressed in one or two sentences tied up in a neat pair of couplets. Every quatrain is a concise, witty observation: what literary scholars call an epigram.
This makes the work of memorization seem less daunting. We can take “The More Loving One” one epigram at a time, marvelling at how the four add up to something stranger, deeper and more complex than might first appear.
So let’s go back to the beginning and try to memorize that insouciant, knowing first stanza. Below you’ll find a game we made to get you started. Give it a shot, and come back tomorrow for more!
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your first task: Learn the first four lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet. Fill in the rhyming words.
Monday
Love, the cosmos and everything in between, all in 16 lines.
Tuesday (Available tomorrow)
What’s love got to do with it?
Wednesday (Available April 22)
How to write about love? Be a little heartsick (and the best poet of your time).
Thursday (Available April 23)
Are we alone in the universe? Does it matter?
Friday (Available April 24)
You did it! You’re a star.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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