Willie

by Willie O'Ree

  So, you can see why a trip to the American South was not on my to-do list. My parents agreed. “Don’t go,” they told me. “We don’t want you to get hurt.”

  They had also said this to me about playing hockey, but that was because of the rough-and-tumble nature of the game. Now they were saying it because they didn’t want me to wind up dead in a river. I liked to joke around with people and have a laugh, but what was funny to my friends in Fredericton might be fatal to me in the Deep South.

  My mother and father had grown up in Canada. They’d been able to live where they wanted, to send their kids to school where they wanted, to eat and drink and lodge where they wanted. But they remembered that the O’Rees had begun as slaves. The family had fled the southern United States and made a fine life in Canada. So why on earth would I want to go back?

  Well, because I wanted to be a professional athlete. And here I was, being offered a shot at the big leagues of baseball. Was the benefit greater than the risk?

  I decided to speak to Coot. I trusted him, and I would trust what he had to tell me. Like all wise men, he didn’t tell me anything, but rather asked me what I wanted.

  “How do you feel about it, Willie?”

  I said I was proud that I had a chance to go to a major league camp. And that deep down I’d like to go and test myself.

  And so Coot said, “If you feel in your heart and your mind that you want to go, then you should go.”

  I went home and explained this to my parents. They were worried about me, but I was an adult now and there wasn’t a lot they could do except tell me again to be careful. Which I always was. Of course, I can imagine now, as a parent myself, how worried they must have been about me back then.

  * * *

  —

  The Braves bought me a plane ticket to fly from Fredericton to Atlanta, which in those days meant taking a Trans-Canada Airlines plane to Montreal and changing to a TWA flight south. It was my first time on an airplane.

  When I arrived at the Atlanta airport I needed to use the restroom, so I looked for one when I walked into the terminal. I had two choices: a restroom for Whites Only and another one for “Coloreds.”

  It’s funny, but the only other time I’d made a decision in my life based on the color of my skin was to walk in and get my hair cut at Joe McQuade’s barbershop, where there weren’t any other black people but where it didn’t matter in the end. And it was more about Fredericton’s habits than it was about anything official. So maybe I was seeing two types of discrimination: one an invisible line daring me to cross; the other a wall telling me that no matter what, I wasn’t going to get through.

  When I look in the mirror in the morning I don’t see color, I see me. I see a man. But at that very moment, I was endorsing segregation in the American South by walking into the Colored restroom. I didn’t want trouble as soon as I landed. And I had received the message loud and clear: I was very much a second-class person—and to some, not a person at all—in this part of the world.

  When I exited the terminal I spotted a black taxi driver. At the time, there was, in the United States, a travel guide for black people called The Negro Travelers’ Green Book. It listed places where black people could find food and lodging, given the segregation laws and good old-fashioned racism that prevented us from being served or lodged in white establishments.

  I knew that this taxi driver would be my human Green Book, and he was. He took to me to a hotel run by and for black people in Atlanta and I spent the night there, though I didn’t sleep too well. I was very uncomfortable with what this place was doing to me. For the first time in my life I was being segregated because of my color. I knew I’d come to the city to test my baseball skills against the best, but I was already getting a strong sense of what the cost of this was going to be to who I was.

  The next day I took the bus to Waycross, Georgia, over two hundred miles south of Atlanta—which is to say, the Deep South. Now, around that time, some southern cities and states were desegregating their buses thanks to Rosa Parks, who’d been arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 for refusing to give her bus seat to a white man—an “illegal” act because of the city’s racial segregation ordinances. In response, a young pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church named Martin Luther King, Jr. led a boycott of the Montgomery bus company that lasted a year, until the Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that Montgomery’s segregated bus seating was, in fact, illegal. But I wasn’t in Montgomery; I was on a bus to Waycross, and Georgia still had segregated seating. So I had to sit at the back of that bus for the four-hour ride.

  The Braves’ training camp had been built on the old Waycross Air Force Base left over from the Second World War. The red clay that made up most of the ground surface would have been good for planes to take off from and land on, but it also stuck to our baseball cleats. And the floor of the dressing room—in reality a big, cold concrete bunker—was covered in the stuff. The camp itself was about a half-mile square and surrounded by swamp. (In the morning you’d see the mist rising off it, about a hundred yards away.) The place was used not only for spring training but also for “player evaluation” of guys like me. And it was big: it could hold between 150 and 300 players. When I finally got there and checked in, they gave me a standard gray practice uniform and a number, 14, that I had to sew on myself.

  The great Hank Aaron, who broke Babe Ruth’s record and retired with 755 home runs, had been at the camp in 1954. This great slugger and All-Star right-fielder, who started his pro career in 1952 in the Negro Leagues playing for the Indianapolis Clowns (yes, that was their name), said, “Other than being eaten alive by mosquitoes and shot at, Waycross was great.”

  The “Hammer” really was shot at in Waycross. He’d taken the camp bus into town for a haircut, but missed the bus back and had to walk. It was dark by the time he got there, so he took a shortcut through the surrounding woods and into the camp. That’s when an armed guard spotted this black kid sneaking about and started shooting. Fortunately for Aaron—and the history of baseball—the guard was a lousy shot.

  Aaron was there three years before me, and so he got to bunk with white guys. That’s because, after the famous 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case had made school segregation illegal, white Southerners responded by segregating everything else, including the barracks that served as the camp’s dormitories. There were six of them. Coaches, managers, scouts, and front office people slept in the first barrack; the white American players slept in the next three; the guys from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic slept in the fifth; and the black players like me had the sixth, which was closest to the swamp.

  Still, the Braves had spent money on that camp. It was a big step up from what I knew back in New Brunswick, even if I was living in a swamp surrounded by racists.

  * * *

  —

  After breakfast we’d put on our uniforms and then head outside to begin the morning calisthenics and stretching. We did infield drills and outfield drills, and they had pits where you could practice sliding. And of course there was batting practice on every one of the camp’s four diamonds. These were built around a two-story brick tower that stood about thirty yards from each diamond’s home plate. So as you did drills and swung at pitches, scouts and managers would sit in the tower with a bird’s-eye view of the players on all four diamonds.

  The camp also featured nine wooden buildings left over from the war. One served as office space for scouts, coaches, managers, and so on; another was used as a clubhouse, where three nights a week they showed movies on its TV. It had a jukebox, too, and we could relax with games—ping pong, shuffleboard, horseshoe pits. I made friends with some of the black players from the Deep South: one from Atlanta, a couple from Mississippi. I told them that although we had racism and prejudice in Canada, things weren’t as bad as they were here—and when I told them that most of my friends were white they were astonished. Stil
l, it made my point. Curfew was set at eleven p.m., but there was no Junior Doherty with a ladder to help me escape from this place.

  During the first three weeks we worked out in the morning and then played games in the afternoon, mostly against teams made up of guys in the camp, but sometimes against other teams training in Georgia. I played shortstop and second base, just as I did back home. The first week was all right. The next week we played an exhibition game and I got a couple of hits, but what was new to me were the racial jeers from the white players, both in the camp and on outside teams. I let it go in one ear and out the other, but I’d never experienced anything like that from my hockey player teammates in Canada.

  On the first Sunday we were there I went into town with some of the other black players to a black Baptist church. St. Peter’s Missionary was just a little place, with a piano instead of an organ like my church back home. The service was much simpler than what I’d grown up with, too, much more emotionally direct and musically vital, with the rhythms of African American life in the Deep South driving the hymns. I’d never experienced anything like it. But it was comforting to be among black Christians praying together in this hostile part of the world. I felt my kinship with these fellow Christians keenly.

  And yet, especially combined with my new experience of segregation, it showed me something I hadn’t considered before. The way I’d grown up, there weren’t two ways of doing things—black and white—and certainly not at church. It had never occurred to me that skin color had anything to do with religion. Why would it? But now, among people I considered my brothers and sisters, and who saw me the same way, I had to ask myself whether St. Anne’s and its liturgy would somehow be less mine now that I’d worshipped with people who looked like me and whose history I shared in important ways.

  The question was something I wrestled with. Did I identify more with my black fellows now that I’d shared the injustices they faced every day? I did, of course. My eyes had been opened. I could never close them to what I learned and what I felt in the South, shoulder to shoulder with my people. That much was undeniable. What was less easy to answer was exactly who my people were. Did feeling more black make me feel less Canadian? Did the experience of the Baptist service make me less Anglican?

  The answer was, opening your eyes shouldn’t make you less anything. It makes you more. I was a different man afterward, but I certainly wasn’t less. Nothing was taken from me; I gained a great deal.

  The service lasted an hour. When it was over I shook the minister’s hand; he thanked me for coming and asked if I was new in the area. I told him I was just passing through.

  After church ended we had an hour to kill. It was hot, and we were thirsty. When we spotted a diner I looked for a sign that said “Whites Only” but couldn’t see one. Right inside the front door were four empty seats, so we sat down. There were three or four white guys at the counter who looked at us as if we were some kind of plague that had walked in. They said something to the waiter, who came over and made a crude racial remark.

  That was all we needed to hear. We got up and walked out. I stood by the side of the road for forty-two minutes waiting for that bus to bring me back to training camp, thinking only about the bus that would, eventually, get me out of this nightmare.

  * * *

  —

  During training camp we’d learn our assignments in the morning from sheets of colored paper the coaches would put up on the barracks’ bulletin boards. The one sheet you didn’t want to have your name on was the pink sheet, which said “Will the players listed below please report to the manager’s office before nine o’clock this morning.” If your name appeared on this list, it meant you were being sent home.

  It was in week three when I saw my name on the pink sheet. I was kind of relieved. The manager told me that they were impressed by my play but thought I needed “a little more seasoning.” So they were going to send me home. Not by airplane this time, but by bus.

  It was a five-day trip. As we moved north I’d get off the bus periodically to use the restroom or grab a sandwich, and when I got back on I’d move a little further up. By the time we reached the Canadian border I was sitting at the front.

  And by the time I got home to Fredericton I’d seen my athletic future clearly—and it was not going to be playing baseball in the States. I told myself to forget that game plan, to concentrate on hockey, and that’s what I did.

  * * *

  —

  Even so, I’d have to step back onto the ice as a one-eyed hockey player, and that was something I thought about a lot.

  I was visiting my sister Thelma one day in early summer when someone knocked on her door. After she’d gone to answer it, I heard her call out to me. “Willie,” she said, “there’s a Mr. Imlach here to see you.”

  She sounded a little apprehensive, as if this white man at the door wearing a fedora in summer might be looking for trouble. But no, George “Punch” Imlach was looking for me. In fact, he said he just “happened to be in the neighborhood,” even though he was nearly a thousand miles away from his own neighborhood.

  Toronto-born Punch Imlach stood about five eight and wasn’t a particularly big fellow, but in the world of hockey he was a very big man. He’d go on to become one of the legendary coaches in the National Hockey League, guiding the Toronto Maple Leafs to four Stanley Cup championships. Back on that day in 1956, though, Punch was the coach of the Quebec Aces, a professional team in Quebec City, and he wanted me to be an Ace, too. “Willie, I’m putting together a championship team,” he told me, “and you’re the kind of player we need.”

  I was fast, that was for sure, and I was good with the puck. I’d managed to finish my junior season with Kitchener. But the Aces were a big step up to the Quebec Hockey League, which was minor pro. How would my one-eyed-self do on a bigger stage?

  Of course, Thelma didn’t know about my blind right eye; for years and years no one except my sister Betty ever knew. But since I’d made it through baseball camp without it being an issue, it wasn’t going to be an issue now. So I listened as Punch laid out his offer: $3,500 for the year and a $500 signing bonus.

  Now, in 1956, $4,000 a year was very good money. But I figured he hadn’t come all this way without being willing to give a little more. So I said, “Punch, if you’re putting together a championship team, that means we’re going to the playoffs. I’d like another $300 if we make the playoffs and another bonus of $300 if I score twenty goals.”

  It was pretty bold of me, but Punch didn’t run out of the room screaming obscenities. I didn’t know it at the time, but he did not like to part with money, not even a penny. And yet on this day he thought about it for a moment and then agreed to my terms. He really wanted me on his team.

  Now all I had to do was make the Quebec Aces, score twenty goals, and keep my blind eye a secret. Then I would truly have a shot at the NHL. You might think I was crazy, but I believed I could do it. And now I finally had my best chance yet to transform that belief into reality.

  6.

  ISLAND LAKE

  I had a lot to think about in that summer of 1956. And not just about my life in hockey, once summer was over. These were exciting times the world over. Elvis Presley made his first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, thrilling everyone with his voice, his moves, and this new thing called rock and roll. As it happened, on the day of Presley’s debut, Ed Sullivan—who’d been opposed to having Presley on until he learned how he’d boosted a rival’s ratings—was in hospital recuperating from a car accident. And Elvis wasn’t there either: he performed from a CBS studio in Hollywood, where he was filming his first movie. So substitute host Charles Laughton, the star of Mutiny on the Bounty in the year I was born, announced from the New York stage, “Away to Hollywood to meet Elvis Presley!” More than sixty million people heard Elvis sing “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Love Me Tender,” “Hound Dog,” and a Little Richard song, �
�Ready Teddy.”

  It was a wonderful time for sports in Canada as well: the Montreal Canadiens had won their eighth Stanley Cup by defeating the Detroit Red Wings in five games, and William John Potts, the guy with the golden heart and fists of iron, known as “Whipper Billy Watson,” was the first Canadian to win the World Heavyweight Wrestling Championship, defeating the American champ, Lou Thesz, in Toronto. Meanwhile, I’d been to the Deep South and survived.

  Training camp with the Aces was more than a month away when I made my annual pilgrimage to a place that still provides me with all those benefits you get when you meditate. I went to Island Lake to think about it all.

  I’d been going to the lake, which is more than a hundred miles north of Fredericton, with my brother Richard since I was a boy. So in the summer of 1956 I drove up there with Coot, his son Dougie, and my pal Junior Doherty to do what I loved almost as much as I loved hockey: go fishing. The lake, a little bigger than a half square mile, is fed by springs that ripple out from its bed, which is just over forty feet down at its deepest point. And at fifteen hundred feet above sea level, even if it’s scorching hot in August, the water is cool. Plus it’s set in the pristine New Brunswick wilderness, with its crisp clean air, vast forests, and a lot of trout. In fact, Island Lake is home to New Brunswick brook trout. They’re the only species in the lake (aside from the baitfish), and have been so since the Ice Age ended. Fishing there is like fishing history.

  When I first started going, the place didn’t have the “modern” conveniences it has now: no grocery shops, no hotels, and not even any electricity or plumbing. There was just you, your wits, and the great outdoors. We’d bring camping gear and fishing rods and would set up camp over a weekend or longer in summer. In the summer of 1956, we were there for a week.