Willie
Page 10
I was astonished. He hadn’t even seen me play. So I reminded him of that fact and then got on the train, vowing I’d do anything I could to avoid ever playing for Eddie Shore again.
* * *
—
I returned to the Aces with fire inside me, having been embarrassed by my lack of playing time in Springfield. But then a different emergency came up, and things changed very much for the better.
In January 1958 the Quebec Aces got a phone call from the Boston Bruins: one of their forwards had been injured and they needed a player for a back-to-back series against the Montreal Canadiens. And the player they needed was me.
I knew that the injured guy was soon to return and that I wouldn’t be needed for long, but that didn’t matter at all. I was going to the NHL for the very first time. And I believed that once they saw me play, I’d be back.
I was so excited I could hardly sleep the Friday night before the game, playing it in every possible way in my head. When I took the train the next morning from Quebec City to Montreal, I got a bit of rest on the way. Then I met the Bruins at the Mount Royal Hotel.
My first NHL game would be in the fabled Montreal Forum, which of course I knew well, having played in it for nearly two years with the Quebec Aces. Just the week before, we’d played there against the Montreal Royals. It was a handsome building—state-of-the-art when it went up in 1924—that had seen some of the game’s greatest players wearing the home colors, among them Georges Vezina, Howie Morenz, and my hero, Rocket Richard. And the Forum had its own Stanley Cup banners, nine of them hanging from the ceiling, the Canadiens’ most recent one from the preceding season when they beat the Bruins in the finals.
In fact, the Bruins hadn’t won the Stanley Cup since 1941. They had a talented lineup, but the Original Six NHL was tight, and one position could make or break a team. Even top goalies couldn’t always bring it home. For example, back in the 1940s Boston had Frankie Brimsek in goal—known as “Mister Zero” on account of his famous shutout game—and when I made my debut they had Harry Lumley. Now, Lumley had won the Hart Trophy as NHL MVP and the Vezina Trophy as the league’s top goalie, and yet the year before it still hadn’t been quite enough to get past the Montreal Canadiens for the Cup.
But tonight I was about to play against the Canadiens themselves, so I sure had butterflies in my stomach. The Bruins and I both knew I was just plugging a gap, but they treated me as if I were the team MVP. Don McKenney, a tall, elegant centerman and, as I’ve mentioned, the nicest guy—in 1960 he’d win the Lady Byng for his gentlemanly play—welcomed me into the dressing room, setting the tone for the rest of the guys. It felt as if I’d always been a Bruin.
And so I was, on January 18, 1958. And the game would be televised on Hockey Night in Canada, the broadcast that captured the attention of the entire country every Saturday night, the one I’d grown up listening to on the radio.
Plus, my parents and some of my friends had traveled to Montreal for the game and were as excited as I was. It took us all back to when I’d first played in an organized league as a five-year-old, Harry and Rosebud jumping up and down at rinkside to stay warm. Now they were jumping with joy, as were my pals Junior and Bubsy. I saw how much my achievement meant to them all, and it certainly meant the world to me.
As for the world itself, there was no mention in the news media that I was going to be doing something historic when I stepped out onto the ice of the Montreal Forum. It wasn’t the first thing in my mind either, to be honest. I was now an NHL player who happened to be black. History, of course, would make much more of it than we did on that night. All I wanted to do was play my best against the best team in the NHL.
Bruins coach Milt Schmidt told me that, even though I would attract attention, not to worry about it—to focus on playing the game they knew I could play so well, and not on “anything else.” I knew he meant fans yelling insults or the opposing players taking shots, but that hadn’t worried me in the minors and it wasn’t going to worry me now.
The Montreal Canadiens were in the middle of their five consecutive Stanley Cups run, and playing against them would be like playing against the Hockey Hall of Fame. There was Jean Béliveau, the former star of the Quebec Aces. To score a goal I’d have to get the puck past Jacques Plante, one of the greatest goalies of all time. After, of course, getting myself past Doug Harvey on defense, one of the finest d-men ever to play the game. Rocket Richard was out with injuries, so I didn’t get to share the ice with him, but I got to be on it with his younger brother Henri, known as the Pocket Rocket.
The Bruins, despite their middle-of-the-pack record, had talent too. Fernie Flaman was a wonderful defenseman—he wasn’t big but he had speed and a very good hockey brain, and he was our captain. Fleming Mackell was a fast center. Leo Boivin was a defenseman you could always count on to make the smart play.
It’s funny how quickly what once had seemed a faraway dream can become ordinary, and by “ordinary” I mean something you’re just supposed to do. So I wasn’t sitting in the dressing room all starry-eyed about my teammates. I was sitting in the dressing room as a part of a team. Even so, there were guys sitting next to me whom I’d admired for a while now. I smiled to myself at being in the same room with Johnny Bucyk, Leo Boivin, and Allan Stanley, players who would make it to the Hall of Fame. They all knew me from training camp because I’d played with them in the pre-season. It was Bucyk who said, “We’ve got your back, and just play your game. You’re a Bruin now.” I felt very good. These guys were sincere and wanted me to do well.
And near the end of the first period, it was Bucyk—a talented left-winger who’d joined the Bruins the previous year in a trade with Detroit for Terry Sawchuk, one of the greatest goalies of all time—who opened the scoring for us. Then, in the middle of the second, Larry Regan—a magical right-wing puck handler who, at twenty-seven, had joined the team as one of the oldest NHL rookies of 1956—put us up 2–0. Finally Bronco Horvath—in his first season with the Bruins, and a centerman who could find the back of the net in his sleep—got one of the thirty goals he would notch that season when he made it 3–0 for us in the third period.
I nearly got a goal as well in that period when Jerry Toppazzini—a popular, grinding right-winger and one of the best forecheckers I ever saw—put a beautiful pass on my stick as I cruised in on Jacques Plante. However, Montreal defenseman Tom Johnson hooked me and took the edge off my shot. Plante made a stick save and Johnson got a two- minute penalty. We didn’t need another goal that night, but it would have been great to stamp a big exclamation mark on my debut with one in the back of the Habs net.
Montreal lost only seventeen games that season and would go on to win the 1958 Stanley Cup, beating Boston again in the final. But they couldn’t solve the Bruins on the night I made history—not on the score sheet, yet, but in the story of the game.
A reporter from Montreal’s CFCF television station interviewed me. When he asked how it felt to play for the Boston Bruins, I told him it was the greatest thrill of my life. Neither of us mentioned the history I was making on that night. To be honest, I wasn’t even thinking of it. He must have been, as a reporter, but he never brought it up. Hockey Night in Canada didn’t mention it either, and instead focused on the prime minister of Laos, Prince Souvanna Phouma, who was on a state visit to Canada and was a guest at that game.
Afterward I met up with my parents and Junior and Bubsy. They were even more excited now as we talked about what it had been like to face the mighty Canadiens—it’s always better when you win—but we didn’t have much time together, since the Bruins had to make the train back to Boston for the Sunday rematch against Montreal. So it was hugs and handshakes and then I was on my way.
Not gone, though: my name had been forever etched in the story of the National Hockey League. Even if they hadn’t quite registered it yet.
* * *
—
The New Yo
rk Times, I found out later, had in fact announced my historic appearance, on page 20, in one short wire-service paragraph headlined “Negro Skater Will Debut as Bruins’ Wing”:
The Boston Bruins today called up a left wing, Billy O’Ree, from Quebec to bolster their sagging team for a week-end home-and-home series with the Montreal Canadiens. O’Ree will be the first Negro to play in a National Hockey League game.
A couple of days later I read about it in The Globe and Mail, Canada’s biggest newspaper, whose headline read “First Negro to Perform in the NHL, Willie O’Ree Thrilled, Nervous.”
Yes, I was thrilled to be playing in the NHL, and I’d certainly been nervous, especially in the first period when my adrenaline was pumping faster than ever, just as the game was faster than I’d ever played it. But my speed was as good as—if not better than—any skater on the ice, and I’d gotten used to playing left wing with a blind right eye. So I’d just gone out and played as I usually played: hard.
It was the last paragraph of that Globe and Mail piece, though, that gave me pause. It reads:
O’Ree is one of several Negroes to perform in minor league hockey, but his debut in the NHL marks the lowering of the last color line among major sports in North America. However, most hockey observers point out that the only reason a “color line” existed was the fact that there hasn’t been a Negro player qualified to make the National Hockey League. Several Negro hockey players have played in the minors, in fact. O’Ree has been a linemate of one—Stan Maxwell.
A little over two weeks later, Len Bramson wrote in The Hockey News that “the fact that there has never been a Negro player in the NHL before O’Ree must be blamed on the Negro race itself.”
Of course, there I would strongly beg to differ. As I said earlier in my story, Herb Carnegie could have broken through the so-called “color line” back in 1948, but the New York Rangers’ offer wasn’t better than the money he was making in the minors, nor did they assure him of a spot. And his brother Ossie and linemate Manny McIntyre were also good enough to crack the NHL. Stan Maxwell could have easily played in the league, too, but he was never offered a contract. It was one of the realities of the Original Six, where there were just so many good players who never got their shot.
There were also Art Dorrington and John Utendale, black players who’d both caught the NHL’s attention. Dorrington came from Truro, Nova Scotia, like Stan Maxwell. He played center in what was then the Eastern Amateur Hockey League and in the International Hockey League, suiting up for the Atlantic City Sea Gulls, Johnstown Jets, Washington Lions, and Philadelphia Ramblers. Dorrington notched 163 goals and 157 assists in 345 minor pro games, and he was so good that in 1950 the New York Rangers signed him to a professional contract. But like so many other talented players, he toiled in the minors until he was drafted into the army in 1956. He spent nearly two years in uniform before playing a few games for the Philadelphia Ramblers of the Eastern Hockey League. Then he broke his leg, which ended his career. He never did get called up to the Rangers.
John Utendale, a right-winger from Edmonton, began playing for the Edmonton Oil Kings during high school and then for another two years before signing a contract with the Detroit Red Wings. (I played with him on the Quebec Aces for five games in 1958–59.) Like Dorrington and Maxwell, John never got the call to actually play an NHL game.
So, within my lifetime, there had been at least seven black players good enough to get signed by NHL teams, and yet only one of us had made it to the Big Time. In 1950, Ebony magazine, which began life in 1945 for the African American market, ran a piece called “Can Negroes Crack Big League Hockey?” Clarence Campbell, the NHL’s president, responded that “the National Hockey League only has one policy: to get the best hockey players. There is no [policy], tacit or otherwise, which would restrict anyone because of color or race.”
Today that strikes me as, at best, corporate spin. Of course there were black players good enough to make the NHL at the time—they’d even been offered NHL contracts. And it took eight years from that misleading pronouncement for me to play two games with the Boston Bruins.
* * *
—
The second game, back in Boston, felt much different to me. I mean, it was the NHL, but I wasn’t as nervous this time. Now I was Willie O’Ree, NHL veteran. The fans were great, cheering us on just as Boston fans do, no matter what. No jeers were sent my way that night, or on any other night that I played in Boston.
We went into the third period tied at 1, but the Canadiens scored five on us and we lost 6–2. Béliveau got a couple and so did Bernie “Boom Boom” Geoffrion, who was one of the first players to turn the slapshot into a weapon. Montreal just outclassed us. But I didn’t feel as if all of a sudden I was in over my head. I played hard, did what I was supposed to do, and didn’t lose the game for the Bruins. The Canadiens beat us. That’s the nature of sports at any level, and in the six-team NHL, every loss was magnified. And now that I’d been given my shot with the NHL, this one-eyed left-winger knew he could belong there.
I returned to the minors after that night. The Aces ended up finishing in second-last place, with sixty-two points. But that didn’t mean we’d had a bad season—the second-place team, Shawinigan, had sixty-seven points. It was a tight league. Still, I’d gotten a taste of the best hockey league in the world, and that’s what I was thinking about as the season ended. I wanted to rejoin the Bruins. And deep inside my twenty-two-year-old-heart, I knew I’d be back.
10.
BECOMING A BRUIN
That summer I was home again in Fredericton when Junior and Bubsy and I got involved in what ended up to be a pretty funny incident. It started while we were on our way to my brother’s place to play some cards, each of us driving separately. Just as we were all going over the old Carleton Street Bridge, the car in front of Bubsy’s veered and sideswiped an oncoming car. Then it just kept on going.
So, while Bubsy went to find the police, Junior and I followed the guy. Not long after Bubsy was able to join us again, Junior finally managed to cut the guy off. Then, when the police arrived, the hit-and-run driver got out of his car and practically slid down the side of it. He was drunk.
We all had to go to court to testify. The guy had hired a pretty slick lawyer, who claimed that the police had smelled alcohol on his client only because he’d drunk “one beer” at the Air Force Club. (Which would have been a record for restraint at that club, known for its conviviality.) The lawyer also criticized the police for putting the guy in a jail cell instead of taking him to the hospital—a pretty impressive bit of fact fiddling, given that the guy hadn’t been injured.
When I was called to testify, I told the court that I’d followed the accused after he hit the other car, and that Junior had done the same. It was when they put Bubsy on the stand that things got interesting.
When the prosecutor asked him what he’d seen, Bubsy replied that the hit-and-run driver was clearly drunk. The defense lawyer objected—Bubsy couldn’t say that because he didn’t know it—and the judge agreed, telling Bubsy that since he wasn’t an expert he had to limit his testimony to what he’d seen. To which Bubsy replied, “Well, if he wasn’t drunk then he had an epileptic fit.”
The courtroom busted up laughing. The judge quieted everyone and the questions continued. Finally, the prosecutor asked Bubsy to show the court exactly what he’d seen when the hit-and-run driver got out of his car. So Bubsy opened the witness stand’s gate, took a step forward and fell on the floor, tried to pull himself up onto the stand, then finally slid back down. By this time the courtroom was howling.
The hit-and-run driver was convicted. It turned out that he was a big player in provincial politics: head of Fish and Game for the New Brunswick government. He lost his license for six months.
As we were leaving the courtroom, the policeman who’d arrested the driver told Bubsy that they could never have won the case with
out him. Then, when the court clerk gave us fifteen dollars each for our time, Bubsy exclaimed that this was as much as he made in a week—and that, if they could swing it, he’d come in every single day to testify on anything else they might want him to testify on.
We all had a great laugh over that. Junior and I still do. Bubsy, such a great friend and athlete but also a heavy smoker, died of lung cancer a few years ago. I can hear his laugh still.
* * *
—
In the middle of that summer of 1958 I got another letter from the Bruins, inviting me back to training camp. Stan Maxwell got a letter too—so again we dared to dream: maybe this time, once the 1958–59 hockey season had begun, we’d both catch on with the team. And I’d be coming in as a guy who’d managed to play in the NHL, not some wet-behind-the-ears rookie out of Quebec. I wasn’t quite a grizzled veteran, but I felt like a player who the team knew, someone they’d wanted back. And I understood what it took.
It was great to see Johnny Bucyk and Vic Stasiuk and Bronco Horvath and of course the always welcoming Don McKenney—guys I’d played with on the ice of the Boston Garden and the Montreal Forum. And it was great to be back there with my good friend Stan, who always had my back, just as I had his. It wasn’t because we were both black, either; it was more that we’d both come from large Maritime families and knew how lucky we were to be here. When I went to Boston for training camp in September 1958, I felt confident about making the team because the Bruins knew what I could do. Boston had lost four games to two against the Montreal Canadiens in that year’s finals, and I figured I could be the missing piece who’d get them next year’s Stanley Cup win.
But general manager Lynn Patrick felt differently: when camp was over, Stan and I once again got sent back to Quebec for more “seasoning.” I was really disappointed by this, especially since the guys on the team had made it seem as if I were there to stay. No one said that to me directly, but I just had a great feeling that I was one of them. Johnny and Don would always invite me to join them for a bite to eat and a beer or two, and I’d already imagined doing that as we made our way through the 1958–59 NHL season. Instead I was going back to Quebec.