The National Hockey League was about 10 years late when it came to integration. All the other professional sports, including tennis, bowling, and golf were racially integrated by 1950. Hockey was the holdout. It was the whitest sport. There were no Black players, coaches, team owners, or sportswriters.
That changed in 1958, for a short time at least, when Willie O'Ree made his debut in the NHL. He was with the Boston Bruins for two games. In 1961, after two more years in the minors, O'Ree had a longer stay with the Bruins -- 41 games. O'Ree never played another game in the NHL. It took the league 50 years before it received its first Black player and there wouldn’t be another Black in the NHL for 25 years.
Willie O'Ree was born October 15, 1935, in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, a small city in coal mining region just northeast of Maine with only two or three Black families residing there.
He started skating when he was three years old and began playing in a league at age five. "That was the thing to do in the winter," he says. "Everything freezes over, the ponds, rivers, creeks. Every chance I had, I was on the ice. I even skated to school. My Dad squirted the garden hose on the back yard, and we had an instant rink."
Willie played in local hockey leagues before joining a junior team while in high school. The juniors in Canada roughly equate to college hockey teams in the U.S. Willie was also a very good baseball player. In 1956, he was invited to the Milwaukee Braves minor league facility in Waycross, Georgia. He told them that he planned to make hockey a career and had no interest in becoming a professional baseball player. He told them that he played baseball in the summer just to keep my legs in shape and to keep my reflexes sharp. They talked him into going anyway. He had a good camp, but he left after three weeks. It was his first time in the south and he did not like the White-only or colored-only culture. He had to sit in the back of the bus until he got further north.
During the 1955/1956 hockey season, Willie played for the Kitchener-Waterloo Canucks, a junior league team. During a game he was struck with a puck in the right eye. The injury was so serious that he permanently lost 95% of the vision in that eye. A doctor advised him to stop playing, but that was inconceivable to Willie. In eight weeks he was back on the ice. He had only one problem. Being a left wing, his right eye was closest to the puck. When I came back, he would loose sight of the puck, so he switched to the right side.
Willie turned pro the next season when he signed with the Quebec Aces, a minor league team affiliated with the Boston Bruins. He signed for $3,500 with a $500 signing bonus. That year the Quebec Aces won their league championship. Willie spent a few weeks at the Bruins training camp before starting the next season in the minors.
That winter the Bruins roster was depleted by injury, and the team found itself especially short at winger. Willie got the call. On January 18, 1958, in Montreal, Willie took the ice with the Boston Bruins, becoming the first Black player to make it to the NHL. The reaction to Willie's achievement was decidedly underwhelming. The press handled it like it was just another piece of everyday news. He didn't care that much about publicity for himself, but he thought it could have been important for other Blacks with ambitions in hockey.
He played another game in Boston before returning to the Quebec team. Willie toiled in the minors the next two years and continued to improve, despite being legally blind in one eye. He was called up again by the Bruins in 1961, and he finished the year with the team, playing in 43 games and scoring a modest 4 goals and 10 assists.
Life in the NHL wasn't easy for a Black player. "Guys would take cheap shots at me, just to see if I would retaliate," he says. "They thought I didn't belong there. When I got the chance, I'd run right back at them. I wasn't a great slugger, but I did my share of fighting. I was determined that I wasn't going to be run out of the rink." The intimidation erupted into full-scale donnybrook one night in Chicago. "I was behind the Chicago net, and I passed the puck out front. Eric Nesterenko came around on my blind side and butt-ended me in the face with his stick. He knocked out two of my teeth and broke my nose. Blood was squirting out all over. I knew he did it on purpose, so I hit him over the head with my stick. Nailed him above the right eye. Back then the players didn't wear helmets. Both benches cleared. They had to put 15 stitches in his head."
"Racist remarks from fans were much worse in the U.S. cities than in Toronto and Montreal. I particularly remember a few incidents in Chicago. The fans would yell, 'Go back to the south' and 'How come you're not picking cotton.' Things like that. It didn't bother me. Hell, I'd been called names most of my life. I just wanted to be a hockey player, and if they couldn't accept that fact, that was their problem, not mine."
Willie was known mostly for his speed. He was one of the fastest skaters in the NHL. His happiest moment in the NHL came in 1961 in a game at the Boston Garden on New Year's night. "We were playing the Montreal Canadians. It was late in the third period. I received a pass and was sweeping around the Montreal defense. I took a low shot, keeping the puck along the ice, and it slid into the corner. It turned out to be the winning goal. The fans gave me a two-minute standing ovation."
Willie O’Ree went home to Fredericton. His future looked bright. His friends and relatives were excited for him. But six weeks later he got a call from a sportswriter asking him what he thought of the trade. Willie's contract had been sold to the Montreal Canadians, and the Bruins hadn't bothered to inform him. Willie was stunned. “Considering the talent Montreal had, I knew I had no chance of making their squad. So I wasn't surprised when I was assigned to their Hull-Ottawa minor league affiliate.
Within two months, Willie was again traded to the Los Angeles Blades of the Western Hockey League. Willie played the next six seasons for Los Angeles and won the league goal scoring title in 1964 with 38 goals. When the NHL expanded to twelve teams in 1968, Los Angeles got one of the franchises and the Los Angeles Blades folded. Willie's contract was purchased by the San Diego Gulls. The Gulls management told Willie they were glad to have him on the team instead of scoring goals against them, as he had with the LA team.
Willie won the WHL goal scoring title again in 1969 at the age of 34 with 39 goals. The Western Hockey League folded in 1974, and Willie retired. The Gulls retired his number and it is now hanging from the rafters at the San Diego Sports Arena. In 1978 another team was put together in San Diego as part of the new Pacific Hockey League. The San Diego Hawks invited Willie to join the team. Willie had been keeping himself in good shape, so at age 43 he laced up the skates one more time. Incredibly, Willie missed only a half-dozen games of the 70-game season and scored 50 points. It was his last hurrah.
O’Ree is not sure if the NHL was discriminatory, but he has cause for suspicion. "There were Blacks in the minor leagues and good ones too. The Quebec Aces had a history of having Black players. Before my time, they had an all-black line with the Carnegie bothers, Herbie and Ossie, and Manny McIntyre. You talk about three players who were good, stick handling, passing, shooting--you name it, they could do it. But they never got a chance. Not one of them was ever called up."
Incredibly, it took 25 years for another Black to make it to the NHL, when Mike Marson was drafted in 1974. There are 17 Black players currently in the NHL, the most prominent being Jarome Iginla, Anson Carter and Mike Grier. Art Dorrington was the first Black player to sign an NHL contract, in 1950 with the New York Rangers organization but Dorrington never played beyond the minor league level. NHL players are now required to enroll in a diversity training seminar before each season, and racially based verbal abuse is punished through suspensions and fines. Minority players are still rare in the NHL. Part of the reason is that blacks and other minorities don't make up a significant portion of the Canadian population, and few Black athletes take up the sport in the U.S.
The most fitting tribute to Willie's career came when the NHL created an all-star game for young minority hockey players and named it in Willie's honor. The Willie O'Ree All-Star Game is held every year at the World Junior Championships. He is now the director of youth development for the NHL’s diversity task force. The NHL/USA Hockey Diversity Task Force is a non-profit program for minority youth that encourages them to learn and play hockey. On January 19, 2008, the Boston Bruins and NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly honored O'Ree at TD Banknorth Garden in Boston to mark the 50th anniversary of his NHL debut. On February 5, 2008, ESPN did a special on him in honor of Black History Month.
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