THE GAME-CHANGERS
Willie O’Ree takes his rightful place among the sport’s greats on Hockey Hall of Fame weekend — with a reminder that another legend’s day is long overdue.
Back in June, in the days after it was announced that Willie O’Ree would be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, I got an email.
It was from a reader who insisted that I’d been wrong to claim, in a column I wrote about the hall of fame selections, that O’Ree had broken hockey’s colour barrier by becoming the first Black player to compete in an NHL game in 1958.
“There was no colour bar in hockey. Never has been,” went the email. “O’Ree was simply the first Black who was good enough to make it.”
I thought about that bit of correspondence this week as I was rewatching the 2001 documentary Too Colourful for the League. The film, written by Max Wallace, documents a circa-2000 push, led in part by the late Star columnist Jim Proudfoot, to have Herb Carnegie inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Contrary to my emailer’s belief, the history of Black professional hockey players in this country is long and rich, dating from the current likes of P.K. Subban and Wayne Simmonds to at least the late 1800s. And while there’s no way to tell precisely how many players of colour were denied a chance to play in the NHL in the years before O’Ree finally got his 45-game shot at the big league, there’s considerable historical consensus that Carnegie, a Torontoborn centreman, was undoubtedly one.
O’Ree, who’ll be feted at the Yonge St. shrine on Monday night, has previously acknowledged as much.
“Herbie Carnegie was the one,” O’Ree once said. “It should have been Herbie (to break the colour barrier).”
As a boy Frank Mahovlich, the hall of fame Maple Leafs legend, once spoke of seeing Herb Carnegie dominate a game on an all-Black line that included Herb’s older brother, Ossie, and Manny McIntyre and thinking to himself, “I guess if I ever become a hockey player, I’m going to be playing against a lot of Blacks.” And no less than Jean Béliveau, who played alongside a late-career Carnegie in the Quebec senior league en route to becoming an immortal Montreal Canadien (and a hall of famer), was unequivocal in his endorsement of Carnegie in his autobiography.
“It’s my belief that Herbie was excluded from the NHL because of his colour,” Béliveau wrote.
The story goes that Conn Smythe, the dictatorial Maple Leafs owner until the 1960s, once saw a young Carnegie skate and said he’d offer $10,000 to anyone who could “turn Herb Carnegie white.” And if the particulars of that infamous quotation have been argued by historians, its power was considerable.
“I was conscious of carrying Conn Smythe’s remark with me all the way through my hockey career,” Carnegie, who’d grown up a Leafs fan, said in Too Colourful for the League. “And I always played the game as if to say, there’s somebody bigger than Conn Smythe who will say, ‘Come and play for us.’ ”
In the six-team NHL, alas, there was nobody bigger. Smythe still has an NHL trophy named in his honour that’s given annually to the MVP of the Stanley Cup playoffs. Carnegie, who died in 2012 at age 92, went to his grave knowing he’d been unjustly deprived of even a chance to play for the sacred chalice. Some hockey scribes have argued Carnegie ultimately made a mistake by not accepting a contract to play for the New York Rangers’ top minor-league team in 1948, although Carnegie would later point out that doing so would have meant taking a pay cut from what he was earning in the Quebec league. As a married father of a family that would eventually include four children, he was in no position to do so.
Whatever the circumstances, Carnegie’s flat-lined career arc didn’t go unnoticed. Richard Lord, one of the first Black athletes to play hockey in the U.S. collegiate ranks when he suited up for Michigan State in the 1950s, said the NHL’s apparent refusal to accept Carnegie had a deflating effect on a generation of would-be pros.
“When they blocked Herb Carnegie from the NHL, it broke the dreams of all players of colour. It just shattered them. Not just broke, shattered,” Lord said in Too Colourful for the League. “It was, ‘If he can’t make it, what’s the opportunity?’ … There were many other Blacks playing hockey. But Herb Carnegie was special.”
The notion hockey never had a colour barrier, mind you, has been perpetuated by influential voices. Too Colourful for the League includes a 1999 interview with Harry Sinden, then the Boston Bruins’ general manager, wherein Sinden, while expressing pride in the Bruins’ legacy as the franchise that gave O’Ree his chance, insisted there existed no obstacles to NHL entry for nonwhite players.
“None whatsoever. Never has been, really,” Sinden said. “It’s much different than baseball. There were very few Black boys playing hockey. And had there been more, we would have had more in the league. And since that day, there are a number of Black boys playing, wonderful athletes. If they want to play hockey, they could fill up this league …”
Even after O’Ree came and went, it took time before Black players found a place. The next, Scarborough-born Mike Marson, didn’t arrive until 1974. Carnegie, for his part, moved on, returned to Toronto, built a life. He started one of the first hockey schools in the 1950s. He made headlines as a competitive golfer, winning the Canadian senior championship more than once. He made a good living as a financial planner. And he was feted with many honours, being named to the Order of Canada, earning induction into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame, lending his name to the Herbert H. Carnegie Centennial Centre on Finch near Bathurst, one of the city’s best rinks.
But the push to get Carnegie into the Hockey Hall of Fame, at least the one involving Proudfoot, wasn’t successful. Proudfoot, as it turned out, suffered a stroke that would keep him from arguing the merits of the case at the ensuing selection-committee meeting; he would die in 2001. Former NHL referee Red Storey and ex-Maple Leaf Brian Conacher later picked up the torch, but to no avail. Perhaps there’ve been other efforts. The hall’s selectors work in secret.
The knock against Carnegie’s hall of fame CV, it’s been said, is that he never played in the NHL. Which misses the point. Baseball grasped this decades ago. The great Ted Williams, on the occasion of his induction into his sport’s shrine in 1966, used his speech to advocate for the inclusion in the hall of fame the Negro League stars who’d been largely denied a road to the big leagues in the days before Jackie Robinson paved the way. Legends such as Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson, who made their name outside Major League Baseball, now reside in Cooperstown. It’s important that they do. History gets forgotten if it’s not cherished and preserved.
Back in June, when that email arrived that insisted O’Ree hadn’t broken a colour barrier because hockey never had one, it was politely suggested Carnegie was proof enough of the contrary.
“I apologize,” came the reply. “I had never heard of Herb Carnegie and I thank you for disabusing me of my erroneous belief.”
Here’s hoping O’Ree’s enshrinement sparks more such back and forth. The historic wrongs that kept Carnegie out of the NHL can’t be righted with a ceremony and a plaque. But until they’re acknowledged, they’re as good as endorsed.