by Willie O'Ree
Getting to Island Lake was not for the faint of heart. Today you can stay at a resort and just walk out the door, but back then it meant a serious hike through the forest. I remember one time Richard built a lean-to with branches over our tents, a process we called “bowering.” There was a storm that night, and Junior and I woke up to see Coot out of his sleeping bag, thrashing around: the bower had failed and he had to repair it as the rain pounded down. To this day we still get a laugh out of that night. When something needs to be fixed, we’ll still say, “Better bower that” or “That’s going to need some bowering.”
At Island Lake I learned how to look after myself in the most basic way. If you didn’t catch any fish, you were going to go hungry. If you didn’t find fresh water, you were going to be thirsty. And if you didn’t bower your camp properly, you were going to be dinner for the insects, not to mention at the mercy of the wind and the rain and the jokes for decades afterward.
The reality of having to rely on your own resources is something that stuck with me. Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts had taught me a few things about how to survive in the wilderness, but out there on Island Lake I learned a different kind of teamwork by looking out for my companions as much as they were looking out for me. We were all in this great adventure, and what was good for one was good for all.
I’ve noted that I’m competitive, and so I loved the fishing contests we’d have to see who could catch the biggest trout. We’d always throw back the little ones, and I’d always try to win. I usually did, just because I wouldn’t give up until I got that big trout hooked. The sun might be setting, but I was determined it would be me who provided the biggest fish for dinner.
At the end of the day we’d build a campfire, then fry up the trout in a bit of butter and roast the potatoes we’d brought. Along with a couple of beers (not for Coot, who never drank or smoked), it would be a regular feast. Then, as night fell, we’d talk about life.
* * *
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That summer of 1956, I talked to Richard and Junior about my upcoming season as a pro hockey player. They were happy for me, of course, and Richard, who’d never made it to the ranks himself, was proud that I’d made it this far. But out on Island Lake I dared to tell them that I planned to go even further. I just didn’t tell them about my eye. I wasn’t even tempted: I’d buried that secret so deep within me that I almost forgot about it. Almost.
At night, with a million stars twinkling off into the forever of that black sky, it didn’t seem as if there were any limits to what we wanted to do down here on earth, and that we should be aiming higher. The vastness of the heavens also made human cruelties to each other seem even smaller and sadder than they are. But I looked to the positive side of things, imagining what I wanted to do when I got to the Quebec Aces and pulled on their storied jersey.
“You’ll be a great one, Willie,” Richard said. Junior joked that I’d better make the team, given how much he loved going to Quebec City, with its pretty women and fine food, and how he wanted to make the most of both while he could.
Richard and Dougie are both dead now, leaving me and Junior to keep the fishing flame alive. But before Richard died of heart problems he asked me to return to Island Lake one more time for him. I did, and it was emotional. I fished, just as he’d wanted me to. And as the moose, deer, and beaver watched me reel in trout, I felt at peace. Island Lake puts life in perspective.
Looking back on that summer now, it seems, like so many things do, as if it was just yesterday, although don’t ask me what I had for breakfast because I might not remember that. In my mind’s eye I can still see me and Richard and Dougie and Junior, sitting around the campfire, the trout on the fry pan. We’re laughing about some joke, all of life before us. And the best days of my hockey life just around the corner.
7.
THE QUEBEC ACES
When we think of professional hockey today, the NHL rightly pops into mind first. It did when I was just starting out as well. But in those days we had lots of professional opportunities, and in the interest of job security, many players would choose to stay in a “minor” professional league. After all, you could remain there for the rest of your playing days, into your thirties and beyond, and earn about $4,000 a year. Or you could risk everything in the NHL, which, at the time, had only six teams, with each team dressing about twenty-two players, give or take. So you could say that, in total, there were 132 or so jobs in the NHL. Compare that to the five minor pro leagues, and you can see where a player had a better chance of catching on and staying put.
Still, if you shone in the minor pro leagues, the NHL might notice. It was just a matter of getting a pro contract. And so when I got my shot with the Quebec Aces, I considered myself the luckiest man in hockey.
The Aces played in the Quebec Hockey League, a postwar creation that had teams across the province (as well as the Hull-Ottawa Junior Canadiens). “Aces” sounds like a great name for a team, but it was actually an acronym (with some shifting around of vowels) for the firm that owned it—the Anglo-Canadian Pulp and Paper Company. In French, the team was known as Les As.
And the Aces, although a fairly recent team, were rich in history. Three seasons before I pulled on their green, red, and white jersey with the four ace cards in the middle of its crest, Jean Béliveau himself played for the As. As a center he was without equal, stickhandling the puck as if his brain were connected directly to it, then dishing it off to teammates right in the middle of their tape. He was also your classic tall, dark, and handsome guy, and the women loved him. Actually, everybody loved Béliveau. Quebec City businesses showered him with suits and hats and shirts and free steak lunches every time he scored three goals.
The Aces gave Béliveau a contract for $20,000 a year, along with two cars. One of them was a stylish convertible with the license plate “2B.” Given that the premier of Quebec, the powerful conservative Maurice Duplessis, had the license plate “1B,” it would be like giving an NHL superstar his own private jet and calling it Air Force Two. And Béliveau wasn’t even in the NHL yet.
The Montreal Canadiens owned his NHL rights and very much wanted him to suit up for them, a chance that any of us would have jumped at. Béliveau, however, was happy in Quebec City. He kept saying no—he was going to keep playing for the Aces and enjoy life. He, too, knew that life in the minor pros was much more secure than in the NHL, and at age twenty-two, he was making a fortune.
In desperation, the Canadiens finally did something that would be extraordinary in any era: they bought the entire Quebec Senior Hockey League. So now they owned the Aces, and they owned Jean Béliveau. But Béliveau, who always took the high road, decided this was a signal that the time had come to play in the NHL. And so, before any kind of ugly battle could become public, he signed with the Canadiens.
There was actually another guy who’d played for the Aces who was just as great. But he never made it to the NHL for a very different reason, one directly connected to me.
Herb Carnegie had grown up in Toronto and played pond hockey there. In the 1940s he made his name playing for Sherbrooke, another Quebec League team. Herbie was black, and played on an all-black line with his brother Ossie and Manny McIntyre. Like Béliveau, he was a magician with the puck and a creative, beautiful player. His passes to his brother and to McIntyre were what we called “lamp lighters.” After you got one, in full flight, right on your tape, all you had to do was tap the puck into the net and light the goal lamp. Playing alongside Herbie made good players better.
Herb Carnegie won three Most Valuable Player awards when he played with Sherbrooke, plus a championship trophy. In the early 1950s he was playing on the Quebec Aces with Jean Béliveau, who thought the world of him. It made the hair on my neck stand up to sit in the same dressing room those giants had sat in.
But the difference between these two giants is that the white one made the NHL and the black one didn’t. How could a guy wh
o’d won not one but three MVP awards not be in the NHL?
Carnegie’s Jamaican-born father had warned him of this when he was a kid, telling him, “They won’t let any black boys in the National Hockey League.” Years later, those terrible words would ring true. In 1938, while playing for the Toronto Junior Rangers under coach Ed Wildey, the eighteen-year-old Carnegie began attracting NHL attention. His junior team was practicing in Maple Leaf Gardens, home to the Toronto Maple Leafs, when he was spotted by Conn Smythe—an epic, eccentric character. Smythe had had success as an athlete, had fought in the First World War, and had gambled a small fortune to create the Leafs. He was a vocal and public patriot: hence the name of his team, derived from the badges Canadian soldiers wore on their uniforms.
Smythe was also a bigot. He pretty much didn’t trust anyone who wasn’t white and Protestant. In fact, his Leafs, like Toronto itself at the time, were segregated—not along black–white lines, but Catholic–Protestant. Catholic prospects went to the “dogan” school, which is what he called St. Michael’s College School. He wanted to keep them from polluting the Protestant kids on the Leafs for as long as he could.
It was Carnegie’s coach, Ed Wildey, who told him that Smythe had seen how talented a player he was and said he’d sign him for the Leafs the next day, but for one thing: “I’ll give any man $10,000 who can turn Herb Carnegie white.”
It was a cruel, terrible thing to say to a kid, especially one who’d grown up idolizing the Toronto Maple Leafs. It haunted Herb Carnegie for the rest of his long life.
There is some doubt today whether Smythe actually said those words—whether Wildey had just given voice to the prejudice of the team—but Smythe did see Carnegie play, and he knew how good he was. He could have signed him for the Leafs. So he kept him out of the NHL, if not by word then by deed, or lack thereof, one that rippled throughout the league because Conn Smythe was a powerful man in that kingdom. Professional hockey could have beaten baseball at breaking the color barrier if the Leafs had signed Carnegie, but they didn’t.
Things looked like they might change in 1948. Herb Carnegie finally got his shot at the NHL when he was invited to the New York Rangers’ training camp. Even though Carnegie was as good as—if not better than—the best players, the Rangers still wanted him to spend a season on one of their farm teams. This is what the Brooklyn Dodgers had done with Jackie Robinson.
The Rangers would give Carnegie $2,700 to play for their lowest-level minor league team in Tacoma, Washington. Carnegie was already making $5,100 playing for Sherbrooke and supplementing that with outside work in Quebec, so he said no thanks. The next day the Rangers increased their offer to $4,700 and a place on their St. Paul United States Hockey League team, which was a higher league, but Carnegie again said no. Finally, after a week of training camp, the Rangers upped the placement to the New Haven Ramblers, their top farm team. But Carnegie had a wife and three children to support, and he couldn’t afford to say yes.
So while some people have said it was Herb Carnegie who turned down the NHL, you have to look at it from his point of view. He’d get to play on a farm team for less money than he was making in Quebec and with no guarantee that he’d ever make the NHL. And maybe the Rangers would have brought Carnegie to the NHL in a year or so, or maybe they wouldn’t have. They certainly didn’t call him up when four of their players were injured in a car crash just before that season started, including their two top centers, Buddy O’Connor and Edgar Laprade. But Carnegie never got a call from the Rangers again. I think that tells us all we need to know.
One person of color who did play for the Rangers, for one shift in one game, was Chinese Canadian Larry Kwong. On March 13, 1948, at the Montreal Forum, Kwong made his NHL debut with the Blueshirts, wearing number 11, against the Montreal Canadiens. Kwong had to watch from the bench until late in the third period before seeing the ice for his only shift of the night. Playing for only about a minute, he tallied no points in what would be his only big league game.
Kwong was the top scorer on the New York Rovers, a Rangers farm team in the Quebec Senior Hockey League. Yet Kwong watched as less productive white players got called up to the NHL team. Figuring he never would get that magical phone call, Kwong, too, did the smart thing and in the off-season accepted a more lucrative offer to play for the rival Valleyfield Braves, also of the Quebec League.
You can say, then, that Larry Kwong was the first player to break the color barrier, and that I was the first black player. And yet people see me more as the pioneer—because of racism against black people in pro sport at the time, because my career in the NHL was longer, and because I echoed Jackie Robinson’s triumph in being the first black player to crack the premier league. Let’s just say that what Herb Carnegie and Larry Kwong experienced didn’t go away when I made the NHL.
* * *
—
In my first season with Quebec, although Carnegie and Béliveau were gone from the Aces, their presence could still be felt in the locker room. It was Béliveau who’d said that the young players learn from the older ones, and we were learning from the stories of legends. I was going to do everything I could to live up to the level of excellence they had established.
Meanwhile, I would enjoy the city. I’d played there as a junior with the Frontenacs, and I loved the place. At the time it had about a quarter of a million people, and its long, cold, snowy winters were great for hockey. Also, I had no problem going into any of the great restaurants in “Vieux-Quebec,” the old town, and ordering whatever I wanted in French. Not only had I lived in the city before, but I’d lived with both English and French in Fredericton. I could talk to the fans and read what the papers said about us. Some athletes avoid this at all costs, but I found the sports coverage entertaining, since the reports were sometimes so far from what I’d seen on the ice—in the game in which I’d actually played—that it seemed as if I were reading fiction. Still, in Quebec they knew their hockey, so the sports pages in the province’s papers were pretty accurate and very opinionated.
I even took a business course in French at O’Sullivan Business College. I’ve always wished I’d learned more languages. Today I can still get by in French, although I can write it much better than I speak it. And since I live in San Diego, I know a bit of Spanish, too.
So I was very happy to roll back into Quebec for training camp in September of 1956. I was also as nervous as I could be. Not only was this my first time in the pros; it was also the first time I’d be playing with only one good eye.
The first thing I had to do was pass the physical, which was nothing like pro sport physicals today. NHL teams now test everything about a player, including his mind and his social media profile. But in my day we went into the training room, and there was a doctor with a nurse. We’d get weighed and have our reflexes tested. They’d check our breathing and our heart rate, and ask if we had any other issues we wanted to bring up. I said nothing, figuring that, “Yes, I think you should know I’m blind in my right eye” wouldn’t be a winning play to make. I was just grateful that no one thought to give us an eye test—not then or at any other time in my twenty-one-year professional career.
* * *
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My first training camp with the Aces gave me a taste of what the championship season was going to be like. Punch Imlach was huge as a coach. Like almost all hockey coaches, he’d been a player, meaning he came to coaching from the inside, as it were. He played some of his early hockey in Toronto’s Bank Leagues (teams sponsored by banks and companies), and then moved up to the senior leagues. It was while he was playing for the Toronto Goodyears in a game in Windsor, Ontario, that he got his nickname.
At one point he was tripped, and when he fell and whacked his head on the ice, he was knocked out cold. The Goodyears’ trainer skidded out onto the ice to try to revive the fallen Imlach with smelling salts. Now, Punch was a shifty centerman with a fierce temper that could roar to life
at anything, really. So when he regained consciousness, he was furious at having been tripped and threw a punch at the first guy he saw—who happened to be the trainer of his own team.
Some sportswriter in Toronto wrote that Imlach, who was likely concussed, was “punch drunk,” a term from boxing that’s more serious than it sounds. It describes the unsteadiness that comes from taking too many blows to the head, which is a very real problem these days in all contact sports. The writer kept calling him Punchy Imlach. Then it just got shortened to Punch, and it stuck.
Imlach had played for the Aces himself, and was a pretty good centerman, notching twenty-six goals in his final season, 1948–49, while he was also coaching the team.
His first coaching job was with the Cornwall Flyers, a Second World War army hockey team. After a number of players had died in combat during the First World War, the league had changed its patriotism policy so that players drafted into the armed forces would wind up playing hockey on a military team rather than actually fighting. There weren’t going to be any more headlines about yet another star hockey player who died young in battle.
There were, however, exceptions to this: Conn Smythe, owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs, took a Sportsman’s Battery off to war—and although no NHL regulars were killed, Smythe himself was nearly finished off during a Luftwaffe bombing raid. Still, it was much safer to be playing hockey in the army than fighting the Nazis.
When the war ended, Imlach had survived, but at a cost. He was twenty-seven years old, which, then and now, was a little long in the tooth to be trying for your first shot at the NHL. Even so, when Imlach was discharged in 1945, he got a tryout with the Detroit Red Wings—and arrived at training camp at the same time as a seventeen-year-old prospect named Gordie Howe. Imlach had also just married, and saw reality staring him in the face: a family to support, and “Mr. Hockey” ahead of him on the depth chart. So he went back to Quebec City and got an accountant’s job, as well as a job playing for the Aces.
