‘Our game’ hasn’t been everybody’s
Unearthing hidden history of a sport where Black players have often felt unwelcome
In his 76 years residing in Halifax, Wayne Adams has been a community leader and a trailblazer. He was the first Black member elected to Nova Scotia’s legislature back in 1993. He was a long-time municipal councillor. He’s been a member of the Order of Canada since 2003.
But as much as he has been an opener of doors, he has had a few slammed in his face — notably the one to the arena dressing room. Adams grew up loving hockey. He fondly remembers listening to NHL games on the radio alongside his father, but he also remembers being fed a cruel lie. Black boys, he and his friends were told as schoolboys in the 1950s, weren’t fit to play Canada’s national winter sport
“We were told, ‘Your ankles are too weak. If you skate, you’d definitely do some serious damage to yourself.’ I remember my mother said, ‘Listen to the authorities.’ So I listened to my mother, and I never played,” Adams said in a recent interview.
So imagine Adams’ surprise when historians George and Darril Fosty informed him about a decade ago that he was a descendant of an unlikely line of athletes: hockey players. Unbeknownst to Adams, both his grandfather and father played the game. The Fosty brothers unearthed that previously buried bit of Adams family history in writing the book “Black Ice: The Lost History of the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes,” which chronicles the rise and fall of a league, formed by the sons and grandsons of escaped slaves, that was in operation from 1895 into the 1920s — a league whose history had been mostly (and perhaps deliberately) erased. Thanks to the research for that book, Adams came to understand that his grandfather, Augustus Adams, was both an organizer and a goaltender in the earliest days of the Colored Hockey League (CHL).
The book shed extensive light on a significant chapter of hockey history that had previously been almost wholly ignored. The CHL preceded baseball’s Negro Leagues by a quarter century and predated the National Hockey League by 22 years. And even more than a decade after the 2008 printing of “Black Ice,” most fans don’t know that the CHL’s best players deserve credit for developing an innovative, athletic style that was ahead of its time.
Eddie Martin of the Halifax Eurekas was noted for using the slapshot long before Bernie (Boom Boom) Geoffrion, perhaps the most famous one of the shot’s supposed innovators, was even born. Goaltender Henry (Braces) Franklyn was dropping to the ice to stop shots many years before the goaltenders who’ve traditionally been credited with pioneering the technique.
It was groundbreaking stuff. For Adams, it was a personal revelation. Learning of his family’s history in the league explained something he’d long struggled to understand about himself.
“You ask yourself a question: Why do you like hockey? Why do you watch when there’s not one Black guy among them? What’s the reason?” said Adams. “As a kid I liked boxing, I liked playing with the guys in touch football. But hockey was in my heart. Why was it? Well, of course, because it was part of my blood. But I didn’t know that until much later on.”
One hundred and twenty-five years since the Colored Hockey League began entertaining fans around the Maritimes, Black hockey players are still engaged in a struggle for fair footing in their beloved sport.
In the weeks since the killing of George Floyd launched a wave of global protest, some of the NHL’s most prominent Black players and alumni, among them Wayne Simmonds, Evander Kane and Joel Ward, formed the Hockey Diversity Alliance, a group aimed at eliminating racism and promoting diversity. In doing so, they’ve been encouraged by the likes of Colin Kaepernick, the NFL quarterback whose one-knee protest of police brutality and systemic racism has taken on new resonance. Kaepernick has reportedly encouraged the group to lean into the Black history of the sport, to take ownership of the Black influence on the game’s early beginnings.
And for good reason. What if the history of the Colored Hockey League, instead of being long buried, had been properly honoured? What if it had always been household knowledge, handed down as sure as Gretzky was great, that the history of Black achievement in the sport runs more than a half a century deeper than Willie O’Ree breaking the NHL colour barrier in 1958? What if Black players had consistently been seen through the ages as respected innovators rather than as unwelcome interlopers?
“It would have given me more wind beneath my wings, for sure,” said Kevin Weekes, the Toronto-bred NHL Network analyst who played goal in the NHL from 1998 until 2009. “If we had factual evidence from history that we had been a part of the sport going back more than a century, it wouldn’t have been as rare, or as weird to be a Black kid playing the game.”
As Jamal Mayers, the former Maple Leaf, was saying this week: “Knowing that history can give kids of colour a sense of pride, and a better idea that there’s a place for them in the game.”
Mayers, who recently wrote an illustrated children’s book, “Hockey Is For Me,” based loosely on his struggles growing up Black and economically challenged in Toronto as the son of a single mother, said he wished stories from the Colored Hockey League had been a part of his childhood canon. But he’s of the belief that, to Kaepernick’s point, there’s a new appetite for such content.
“If (‘Black Ice’) comes out three months from now, it’s a bestseller. Quite frankly I think times are changing,” Mayers said. “I think that book would do extremely well right now if it was re-released. I think people are willing to challenge their own beliefs about the history of the game.”
As much as George Fosty is one half of a brother duo that has been credited with bringing this important history to light, he can’t help lament how much history has been lost. Almost no physical artifacts of the CHL remain. Nary a uniform has been unearthed. Fosty said there are nine known photographs of the league, all of them team pictures. Though some of those photos feature trophies, none of the hardware has been located. Not that a historian doesn’t hold out hope.
“We’re waiting for the day somebody shows up with a diary — a diary documenting life in Halifax between 1890 and 1920 where they talk about the CHL,” he said. “We know it’s got to be out there somewhere.”
Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. When the Fostys went looking for the Black newspapers that once served various Maritime communities, they were told many of them had been donated to various government archives. But George Fosty said the archives haven’t preserved those gifts.
“There seems to have been some effort to deem (Black history) as unworthy and garbage and throw it out the door,” he said.
A lot of “Black Ice,” then, is based on the accounts of white newspaper writers observing a Black league, many of them offering “glowing reports,” never mind the prevailing bigotry of the time. Not that establishment writers haven’t been guilty of whitewashing the history of the sport.
“In the 1920s, when a lot of writers started writing about the NHL, they eliminated a lot of history in order to create a narrative about Canadian greatness in hockey, and all they focused on was the elite white hockey players in the 1920s,” Fosty said. “They ignored the Russian history, they ignored the Finnish history, they ignored the minorities, all the Canadian First Nations history of hockey and the French-Canadian histories. They did a disservice, not just to the Blacks, but to all groups that didn’t fit into their narrative.”
What’s emerged has been a mythology often devoid of diversity. Canadians call hockey “our game.” But history tells us it hasn’t been everybody’s.
“The word ‘our’ is used a lot of the time, and quite frankly it’s exclusive to white Canadian people, especially if you’re rural and you’re white Canadian,” Weekes said. “That couldn’t be any more hurtful.”
Adams, for his part, said he and his Halifax friends who also have ancestors who also played in the CHL have often kicked around a question: Why didn’t their grandfathers and great uncles and fathers hand down the stories of their on-ice exploits? Why was the history of the CHL set aside for most of a century, only to be unearthed relatively recently? The 76-year-old Adams, whose grandfather died before he was born and whose father died when he was age 13 having never spoken a word about his hockey career, said he and his friends have come to a conclusion: Their forebears feared the danger inherent in suggesting hockey ought to be for everyone.
“They didn’t want to be the victim of people who’d want to attack you for playing ‘our game,’ for stealing ‘our sport.’ That’s what we determined,” Adams said. “There was so much secrecy around their hockey because they were afraid. Why else would you keep something like that as a secret?”
“If we had factual evidence from history that we had been a part of the sport going back more than a century, it wouldn’t have been as rare, or as weird to be a Black kid playing the game.”
KEVIN WEEKES FORMER NHL PLAYER