Willie

by Willie O'Ree

  My father, Harry, was smart—he loved to read the papers—and hardworking, too. For nearly forty years he worked in Fredericton’s road maintenance industry, cleaning the streets of debris and snow and eventually rising to crew supervisor. Then, after he retired, he acted as a patrol guard for the schools, making sure kids could cross the street safely. Harry was a relatively small man, about 135 pounds soaking wet, but he was strong and wiry. He was also an excellent baseball player, his pitch sure and hard. And, as I can imagine now, he was a man consumed with providing for his wife and children, which he did with fortitude and discipline.

  Harry was a complete gentleman, who always wore a fedora. When he passed by a woman on the street, he would tip his hat and bid the lady good day. I wear a fedora now as well, and do the same. My father’s courtesy has stuck with me.

  So has his competitive spirit. He was ferocious in contest—you didn’t want to play the wrong card if you were on his team playing Forty-Fives, a Maritime card game that I love, one not unlike Euchre. I would see him leave the table in disgust when a partner played a wrong card. My friends say that I sometimes do the same, but I believe they exaggerate. I just like to win, and aim to win all the time. So if I rise from the table during a game, I might just be standing up for a stretch.

  Rosebud, on the other hand, didn’t care what card you played. She was a loving, caring, tireless mother to us all, with a big, ready smile for everyone. But she did care about her appearance and would dress to the nines every time she stepped out of our house. I like to dress well when I’m in public, and I get that from her. So both my parents are still very much with me, even though they’ve long since passed on.

  By the time I was ten most of my brothers and sisters had moved away. There was just Betty and me living at home. My other sisters were all married, Richard was married, Robert and Lewis were living away from home, and Alfred had passed away in 1949. So there was no big crush to get into the bathroom in the morning. In any case, that was never an issue for me—thanks to hockey, I’ve always been an early riser. And I like to be early, so if I set my alarm for five thirty a.m., I’ll be up and running by five fifteen. Once I’m awake, I stay that way until my afternoon nap, the cherished ritual of pro hockey players everywhere.

  But even though I was the youngest, my mother made sure I didn’t take advantage of her. If she said be home at ten o’clock, I was home at ten o’clock, not a minute later. If I didn’t show up on time I’d be grounded and have to stay in on weekends. So I accepted the house rules and usually kept to them.

  Not always, though. When John “Junior” Doherty, my great friend then and now, would come by with a ladder, I’d climb down from my second-floor bedroom and off we’d go to the movies. (Then, when I’d come home late, I’d climb back up.) This was during the Second World War, and while it was a terrible time for the world, it was a wonderful time for movies, among them such gems as Casablanca and Pride of the Yankees. I especially loved westerns, like Buffalo Bill and The Yellow Rose of Texas. I did get caught a couple of times by Rosebud O’Ree, house arrest being the result. But she never held a grudge. Neither did I. I knew the game.

  My sister Betty, who was a couple of years older, got away with much more than I did. Or maybe it just seemed that way. She would climb out her bedroom window too sometimes, and I don’t know when she came home because I didn’t stay awake to find out. I kept her secret, though, just as one day she would keep mine.

  * * *

  —

  Life in Fredericton was good. When I was growing up, it was a little place, with a population of just ten thousand in the year I was born. And even though the city’s two black families, the O’Rees and the Lawrences, lived on the same street—an easy walk to downtown and to the Saint John River—that was based on coincidence, and again not on color.

  Nor was my childhood defined by race, as my friends and I didn’t judge each other by what shade of the rainbow we happened to be. This is not to say that Canada didn’t have problems, as it certainly did (and does) when it comes to its history with the Indigenous population. And to be sure, people of color have experienced prejudice and bigotry, as have people whose first language is French, or just not English. (When I was a kid in Fredericton, though, English was the language everyone spoke. I did take French in school, but the city and province didn’t become bilingual until much later.) There will always be good people, just as there will always be those who view the dissimilarity of others as a threat. Fredericton was no different in that regard. We had our fair allocation of human nature.

  But my childhood was free of anyone bullying me because of my color. Along with my friend Mike Coster, I loved being part of the local Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, whose meetings were held at St. Anne’s, an Anglican church I went to with my mother and sister and where Mike’s dad was the minister. We’d go on an annual trip to a campsite about fifty miles north of the city, where I learned how to survive in the wilderness—how to build a lean-to, start a fire, and avoid getting eaten by bears. I looked forward to making that amazing trip every year until I was about fourteen.

  My best pals also included Gus Mazzuca, who is Italian, and Louis George, who is Lebanese, and of course Junior Doherty, who is Irish, but we were all just Canadian kids growing up at a time when the world was fighting a terrible war. Looking back, the funny thing is that the war is remembered for having settled the question of whether different ethnic groups should live alongside each other. And there we were, a bunch of pals, settling the question every day, with a side business in standard childhood mischief.

  Though war is unquestionably a terrible thing, and there was always a sense in the air that everyone was eager for it to end, those who lived through it tend to remember it as a time when everything seemed to matter more somehow. Friends and family. Right and wrong. People may not have been happier in the usual sense, but the way they remember it, they were more alive, perhaps because so much was at stake.

  In any case, mine was a very happy childhood. I was loved, looked after, and allowed to play any game I wanted with anyone I wanted to play that game with.

  And my first game was hockey—the game that would go on to make me who I am. Hockey has given me a great life. But when I took my first steps on the ice more than eighty years ago, all I knew was that this was a much better way to get around than walking. And that I never wanted to stop. This game on ice was the beginning of me.

  2.

  THE SECOND BEGINNING

  I started skating a bit before the Second World War began, when I was just three years old. My father would unroll the garden hose, spray water on the frozen back lawn, and just like that, we had a rink. The first freeze came in November and the thaw began in mid-March, so the outdoor skating season was a long one. The frozen ponds, creeks, and rivers of Fredericton were to become my ice rinks, but I started in our backyard.

  Since I was so young, I began my life on the ice with a primitive type of beginner’s skates, which were common at the time: two blocks of wood with two metal blades on the bottom of each, like training wheels on a bike. Attached to each block were two leather straps that my father would loop over my shoes and then tighten up. Then he’d send me out on the ice.

  My father, who didn’t skate, and my eldest brother, Richard, who did, watched over me, but I pretty much taught myself by pushing an old chair in front of me for balance, as generations of Canadians have done. That’s how we still do it, and how I help kids learn to skate today.

  When I graduated to skating without the chair, if I fell down, I would just get back up and go again. It’s much easier to fall when you’re little, and it can even seem fun (although as a player I was always strong on my skates; it would take a lot to knock me off stride, let alone to the ice). Once I was able to glide, my father gave me a hockey stick—and I learned that this was much better for balance than any chair. And then, when I felt the weight of the puck on the end of t
hat stick, I knew that if I could skate, I could play hockey.

  When you’re three years old you haven’t really been walking all that long, but I remember that skating felt like the best thing ever—if we didn’t have wings, well, we could fly on skates. I loved it from the start. And my goal was to be the best skater in the province.

  I played a lot of pond hockey. We tend to romanticize pond hockey, but once you play on a manufactured rink (indoors or out), you realize how rough the ice of a pond can be. That’s because the wind whips the water and it freezes unevenly, with craters and little ice hills all over the pond. Kids today may have a hard time imagining the game on ponds and rivers. Bubbles form in the ice and crack under the pressure of skate blades, creating little hazards. Twigs and leaves freeze into the ice, and because they absorb sunlight faster than the ice around them, they heat up and create little soft spots where skate blades will stick. Natural ice also chips more easily than indoor ice, meaning the rink quickly gets so rutted that your skates chatter and the puck skips around erratically.

  It makes skating bumpy, but it does wonders for your stickhandling. If you can control the puck on the blade of your stick while you’re bouncing around the pond, you can sure control it in the arena. And you need to keep your head up! So I’m glad I learned the game on the pond and sorry to see that tradition disappearing. On the other hand, I’m happy that kids have good rinks where they can learn to skate and play the great game on ice.

  New Brunswick is Canada’s third smallest province, but it’s still pretty large, covering an area that’s a bit bigger than New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Maryland combined. So I had a lot of room to skate. And by the time I was five I was skating every day during the winter, even when it was snowing. We’d take a shovel, clear the snow, and off we’d go. If it snowed we’d take a break, clear the rink, and then skate some more. It had to be pretty harsh weather to keep me off the ice. (A blizzard might have been enough to make me think about giving it a miss.) One of my favorite things to do was skate to school, right along the roads and sidewalks of the city. Then, as soon as I’d arrive, I’d pretty much time my day by the minutes ticking down until I could put my skates back on and skate home. Side streets weren’t plowed back then, so passing cars would pack the snow down into ice, turning Fredericton into a giant, mazelike skating rink.

  I’ve mentioned that my brother Richard (we called him Coot, the nickname his hockey team gave him because I guess he reminded them of the bird) was seventeen years older than me. He was a hockey player and a boxer of talent, and would go on to become the amateur light-heavyweight champion of the Maritimes (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island). He was also my mentor, and a very good teacher. Since my dad didn’t skate it was Coot who taught me hockey, gently at first—we’d practice passing and shooting—and then, as I grew up, challenging me more. He knew I had athletic talent but wouldn’t let me off the hook when it came to working hard at a game. He made me do skating drills: crossover turning left, crossover turning right, stopping left, stopping right, backwards skating. When you’re little and just learning how to play, these are the skills you need to master, repeating them again and again until you take them for granted and can do them without thinking.

  Most kids want to do the minimum. They want to be able to skate just well enough to chase the puck. But Coot knew that skating is the foundation of everything; every other skill builds on it. And in today’s NHL, that’s truer than ever. Coot was a little ahead of his time.

  Coot was patient, though, and was kind to me. It was as if he knew I’d go further in hockey than he would, and so he wanted to give me every chance at achieving hockey’s highest rung—the NHL. Though I wasn’t thinking NHL yet. I was thinking about playing on a team and having my own jersey.

  * * *

  —

  And so I did, when at the age of five I started playing in an organized league at Wilmot Park, less than a ten-minute walk from my home in Fredericton’s west end. (And my first jersey was orange and black, like a tiger, which pleased me greatly.) When I started playing organized hockey, we didn’t even have benches—just an outdoor rink with boards around it. Sometimes the snow would be piled up so high around them that people would just stand on the banks, looking down at us during our games. I didn’t actually play in my first indoor rink until I was fifteen.

  We didn’t have any blue lines painted on the ice, nor did we have any faceoff circles. We just had a red dot painted where the puck should be dropped. But the game was still evolving, as games do. Hockey had been using the blue line only since 1918, and the red line wasn’t introduced until 1943, if you can believe it. When a game stops changing, its time might be up.

  One of the least fun parts of outdoor hockey was dealing with mid-game snowstorms. We’d have to stop and sweep the snow off the rink, but if Mother Nature was in a mood, the snow would sometimes fall faster than we could sweep. The puck would start to slow down and we’d have to call the game off. That really annoyed me, since you’d be either in the middle of winning or in the middle of a glorious comeback.

  I was a left-handed shot and played left wing throughout my early career. The names of the age groups are changing in Canada, but back then we used the old names. First I played novice, then atom, then pee-wee. Then I played bantam, midget, junior. Funny how a kid who plays bantam looks like a giant to a novice.

  I was always ready to play hockey when I was a kid, and my routine didn’t change too much. We usually had Saturday morning games, so I’d eat a little breakfast—toast and jam and maybe some fruit because I didn’t want to be too weighed down. I’d put on all my gear at home, except for my skates. After all, we didn’t have locker rooms at the outdoor rink. We didn’t even have sheds where you could warm yourself up between periods.

  My gear was pretty simple. I wore shin guards, a protective cup, hockey pants, elbow pads, shoulder pads, and gloves. Hockey equipment today is lighter and tougher, and since it fits the contours of your body much more closely, it gives more protection. I still have my equipment from the last year I played pro, but compared to the gear of today, it’s as if we were dressed for a costume party.

  Before I’d get out onto the rink, my parents would be there on the sidelines, telling me to be careful; they didn’t want me to get hurt. I’d always be ready, though, and would do a warm-up on the ice—skating fast, stopping hard, shooting on goal, kind of imagining how I wanted to play the game I was about to play. But not in any sports psychologist sort of way. I was just a kid who loved the game and was now scoring the winning goal in my head before the puck was even dropped—and I couldn’t wait for that puck to get dropped.

  My parents weren’t as lucky as they waited for the game to start, having to bounce up and down to keep warm and then to keep bouncing as they watched me play. They used to come to all my games, even when I was a little guy. It’s good to have someone cheering you on, and I used to play extra hard for them—I knew they’d believed in me from the very beginning of my life as an athlete.

  There was no hanging around talking about the game afterward, either: it was too cold. We’d all just pile into our parents’ cars and head for home. I’d have a shower, wash my underwear, hang up my shoulder pads. Then I’d wait for the next game.

  Hockey thrilled me. It was a kind of life force for me. I had to keep skating, and I had to play hockey, and if I did those things, I felt like I could do anything. I loved the feel of the wind rushing by as I flew along the ice. I loved the sound of ice chips spraying when I hit the brakes and spun around to charge back the other way. I loved feeling the puck hit my stick with a crisp thwack and I loved learning how to make that puck seem as if it was on a piece of string, something that’s done with lots of practice and some natural ability.

  My greatest natural ability was speed. I was fast on my skates, even as a little kid. I could weave and tack and glide and surge through the opponents
, that puck on my stick like steel on a magnet as I raced toward the goal net to fire home the game winner. (I say “net,” but more often than not it was a pair of rocks or boots on the pond with nothing but air behind them to shoot the puck through.)

  As anyone who plays hockey knows, the game is about much more than stickhandling. You also have to learn to play without the puck, so you have to learn the defensive game. This means playing in your own end and backchecking. Ever notice how the puck seems to follow great players around? That’s not luck. That’s the result of years of studying the game. If you don’t have the puck, you’d better figure out where it’s going to be. Otherwise you may not touch it all game.

  And hockey is not for those who don’t want physical contact. You know you’re going to hit and get hit, so I learned how to dish them out and how to take them. When you know it’s coming you kind of roll into the hit so that you go with it, not against it. That way you have a better chance of staying on your skates, snagging a loose puck, and making a play. And you’re much safer right up against the boards than you are a few feet out. If you can distribute the contact evenly along the boards, you’ll be in control. But if you’re flying through the air, you’ll be in for an awkward landing.