Larry Kwong was NHL’s 1st player of Asian descent
Larry Kwong’s National Hockey League career began and ended on the same night. He played a single shift, lasting a minute or so, for the New York Rangers against the Canadiens at Montreal on March 13, 1948. He scored no goals, had no assists and received no penalties.
Kwong, a five-foot-six centre known as the China Clipper for his speed, played in Quebec and Europe after that season. But when he died Thursday in Calgary, Alta., at 94, he was remembered as an NHL pioneer. A Chinese-Canadian born in British Columbia, he was the league’s first player of Asian descent.
The Rangers discovered
Kwong after he played for a Canadian army hockey team in the Second World War. They signed him in 1946 for their Rovers farm team, with which they shared the Madison Square Garden ice. The unofficial mayor of Chinatown, Shavey Lee, and two showgirls from the China Doll nightclub in midtown Manhattan honoured him there one night.
The Rangers called Kwong up from the Rovers in March 1948 with only a few games left in their season. But their coach, Frank Boucher, waited until the Montreal game was nearly over before putting Kwong on the ice.
“When I had a chance to become a Ranger I was really excited,” Kwong told The New York
Times in 2013. “I said to myself: ‘That’s what I wanted to be since I was a young boy. I wanted to play in the NHL.’ ”
But he didn’t dress again for the Rangers.
“I didn’t get a real chance to show what I can do,” he said.
Long afterward, a schoolteacher in Calgary, Chad Soon, who was also of Chinese descent and had heard stories of Kwong’s career from his grandfather, campaigned to honour him as an NHL trailblazer.
“So compelling a story, so deserving of recognition,” Soon once told The Globe and Mail.
“I became determined to do what I could to get him some attention.”
He succeeded. The Calgary Flames honoured Kwong at their arena, the Saddledome, in 2008, and the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto obtained a sweater he wore in the early 1940s with the
Nanaimo Clippers of British Columbia.
Kwong was interviewed for the 2011 documentary “Lost Years,” telling of the Chinese-Canadian experience, and the British Columbia Sports of Hall of Fame inducted him in 2013.
To mark the Chinese New Year, the Vancouver Canucks honoured Kwong before their game with the Boston Bruins on Feb. 17 in a ceremony at which his daughter, Kristina Heintz, dropped a ceremonial first puck.
Larry Kwong was born Eng Kai Geong on June 17, 1923, in Vernon, B.C., the second-youngest of 15 children. His father, who emigrated from the Canton area of China in the 1880s, owned a grocery store named Kwong Hing Lung (commonly translated as Abundant Prosperity).
Since customers referred to the family as the Kwongs, the boy took the name Larry Kwong.