National Post (National Edition)
LEGEND WILLIE O’REE ON BEING BLACK AND A BRUIN.
PLAYER WHO BROKE NHL’S COLOUR BARRIER STAYS COMMITTED TO DIVERSITY
Bigots made a big deal about Willie O’ree’s skin colour, but leading the way for black players was not the only remarkable feat of this gentleman.
O’ree was able to keep playing through the minors to earn his NHL shot despite being blinded in one eye in his junior days in Fredericton, N.B., making his eventual trip to the NHL — and next week’s induction to the Hockey Hall of Fame — all the more remarkable.
He was hit by a shot from future Toronto Maple Leaf Kent Douglas, but kept the injury from the Boston Bruins, who owned his NHL rights. His condition wasn’t fully revealed until the closing years of his career in the Western Hockey League.
We mention this because when Maple Leafs defenceman Bryan Berard suffered serious eye damage in March of 2000 from an errant stick and faced delicate surgery, O’ree was among those who phoned him for support.
“I told him if you just know in your heart that you will overcome your handicap, you will,” O’ree said at the time.
Berard eventually did return to the NHL, played two full seasons and parts of four others.
By the time O’ree’s condition was known, he’d made history via a two-game call-up to Boston midway through 1957-58 season and 43 games in 1960-61. Having spent most of his career in Eastern Canada to that point, he was certainly not immune to shabby treatment at times, but never subjected to the blatant racist taunts he heard when arriving in some American NHL cities.
“Fans would yell, ‘go back to the South’ and ‘how come you’re not picking cotton?,’” O’ree recalled. “It didn’t bother me. I just wanted to be a hockey player, and if they couldn’t accept that fact, that was their problem, not mine.”
He was a three-time 20-goal winger playing for future Toronto boss Punch Imlach’s Quebec Aces at the time of his recall, with the Bruins playing in Montreal and needing an injury replacement. The date was Jan. 18, 1958, and though the Saturday night game would’ve been televised, no copy of it was kept. Almost 50 years later, in a happy coincidence, hockey film archivist Paul Patskou was going through CBC News footage from that day when the Prime Minister of Laos, Prince Souvanna Phouma, was on a state visit to Canada and was the guest at that Habs’ game. A clip of O’ree made it into the TV series Hockey: A People’s History.
It had been 10 years since Jackie Robinson had broken the colour barrier in baseball, but O’ree wasn’t thinking big-picture at the time. He didn’t realize he’d made NHL history until reading about it in the newspaper the next day.
“He isn’t black, he’s a Bruin,” was Boston coach Milt Schmidt’s standard answer when the media would ask about O’ree’s heritage.
The late Schmidt told Postmedia a story from one night at old Madison Square Garden in New York when some abusive fans gathered outside the heavy screen window of the Bruins room, uttering racial epithets at O’ree and threateningly sticking their fingers through the wire.
“One of our guys closed the window on their fingers,” Schmidt said, laughing. “That was the end of that.”
O’ree played just 45 NHL games, but his pro career spanned 25 seasons, carrying him right into the 1970s before he hung up the blades at age 43. He won two scoring titles in the Western League, but there was a 14-year gap before another black player came into the league, Mike Marson. O’ree says almost 30 black players have joined the NHL by his count.
“I don’t know why it took (so long after his first game), but now there are 31 teams in the league and you can see the black players and the players of colour,” O’ree said. “They’re there because they have the skills and the ability, and not just because of their colour.”
Black players in Canada were present in the late 19th century when the Coloured Hockey League of the Maritimes was formed in and around Nova Scotia. The original idea was to keep young men involved in local Baptist churches. The league is said to have allowed its netminders to go down to make a save before the rest of hockey adopted the rule.
Other blacks had been considered for the NHL before O’ree.
Art Dorrington was signed to a contract with the New York Rangers in 1950, but never got higher than the minors. Herb Carnegie, born in Toronto, was older than O’ree and a better scorer in his prime, but faced more racial roadblocks, even in the war years when good players were scarce.
Today, the 83-year-old O’ree continues his role with the NHL’S diversity program, visiting everything from schools to juvenile delinquent facilities.
“My Dad said, ‘Willie, find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life’ and when I started working with the program, I just fell in love with it.
“I can see the influx now that these programs are having, and there’s more boys and girls playing hockey today than ever before. That’s just due to the fact they’ve watched it on the telly and there are more rinks being constructed to get these boys and girls the opportunity to get on the ice. Those that can’t are playing roller hockey and street hockey. So, the game is growing.”
Many of today’s prominent black players — Joel Ward, Wayne Simmonds and the retired Anson Carter — waged a long campaign to have O’ree’s name put up for nomination. Ward wore 42 as both a tribute to O’ree’s 22 and Robinson’s number with the Dodgers.