by Willie O'Ree
That 1958–59 season with the Aces I got seasoned pretty good, scoring nine goals and adding twenty-one assists—all while racking up seventy-four minutes in penalties, what with everyone wanting to prove themselves against the guy who’d played in the NHL. Hockey players know who’s on the ice at all times. They know your résumé. They know your reputation. And the better your reputation, the harder they come after you. That goes for tough guys and skill guys and everyone in between. They don’t leave you alone until you’re a legend, and I was far from being a legend. But I was worth coming after, since anyone who could get the better of me could say he’d gotten the better of an NHLer. So I had to be ready. But that was fine by me. I was ready.
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Then, in July 1959, the Quebec Hockey League announced it would fold. The Quebec Aces and the Chicoutimi Saguenéens both said they would “suspend” operations, which meant they’d shut down, perhaps for good.
But the remaining two teams, the Montreal Royals and the Trois-Rivières Lions, joined up with two teams from the Ontario Hockey Association’s Senior Eastern division (the Hull-Ottawa Canadians and the Kingston Merchants, later renamed Frontenacs) and two teams from the OHA’s Senior Northern division (the Sudbury Wolves and the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds, later renamed Thunderbirds) to form the Eastern Professional Hockey League. In fact, the EPHL was created as the first farm league fully run and controlled by the NHL—and meant to be its primary development league. However, the Detroit Red Wings didn’t participate until 1963, which would be the EPHL’s final season, and the Toronto Maple Leafs never joined at all.
I wound up playing for the Frontenacs in Kingston, a pretty city on Lake Ontario, about halfway between Toronto and Montreal. At the time, the population was a little more than 400,000, most of them hockey fans. Kingston was, and remains, a first-class hockey town.
I had a great season there playing with Cal Gardner, who was also the coach and whom I’d met briefly in Springfield when he assisted Punch Imlach (and when he played for the team there as well, while keeping out of Eddie Shore’s way). Cal had also played for New York, Toronto, Chicago, and Boston. The fact that he’d had so much NHL experience made me think the EPHL really would be my launch pad to a permanent place in the NHL. And although the team finished in last place that 1959–60 season, with twenty-eight wins, thirty-nine losses, and three ties, I had my best year as a pro so far, scoring twenty-one goals and adding twenty-five assists for a total of forty-six points.
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Off the ice, my life took a turn I had not expected, but certainly welcomed. During that season, I roomed with the McDonald family. A frequent guest at their house was a pretty young woman named Lynn Campbell, who worked in the business office at Queen’s University. She lived about three blocks away and was friends with the McDonalds’ daughter. And then she was friends with me. Lynn, a dynamic brunette, was not only very attractive but also a great hockey fan. Before too long, we were dating. She was my first serious girlfriend. She was also white.
Now, my parents were of the old school, believing that you had to marry within your race, especially if you were black. “What would people say if they saw you with a white girl?” was how they viewed it, meaning I’d be letting myself in for abuse from racists. And while I told my parents a lot about my life (except for my blind eye, which they went to their graves none the wiser about), Lynn didn’t even mention me to her own, feeling that our relationship wasn’t their business anyway. I agreed. We weren’t living in the Deep South. Race relations weren’t perfect in Canada, but they certainly weren’t as terrible as they were in the USA. We were also adults and did not need permission to live or love from anyone.
At one point, when I was back home in Fredericton after my first season, I asked my mother if she’d like to come with me on my visit to Kingston to see Lynn. She agreed, and the three of us had a very pleasant time. But I could see that my mother was unhappy. It’s not what eventually ended my relationship with Lynn—that would be the fact that I left Kingston—but it certainly sat uneasily with me. I respected my parents, and although they’d raised me to live my own life, I knew that the bigotry they had experienced growing up was still with us. If Lynn and I were to get married and start a family, did I want to put our children into what I might have seen at the time as a disadvantage? Or worse, something that would cause them pain?
Lynn and I later broke up for a variety of reasons. We did meet again about forty years later, when she attended the screening of a film about my life and came to the party afterward. It was nice to see her. But I live my life going forward, and I had no regrets.
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During that summer of 1960 in Fredericton, I often wondered if I’d regret not getting the chance to play in the NHL again before I got too old. I was twenty-four, and it was getting to be now-or-never time.
I was out walking one day, thinking about my future, when I turned down George Street and saw that two boys, who looked to be around eight, had opened a lemonade stand. The street was so empty you could have fired a cannon down its length and maybe grazed a squirrel, but these boys had still gone to all this trouble to set up their stand. So I stopped and bought a glass, wanting to make them feel their work had been worth it. Also, I was thirsty.
Afterward, when I was walking away, I heard one boy say to the other, “Do you know who that was? That was Willie O’Ree. He plays for the Boston Bruins!”
Hearing the wonder in that boy’s voice, and his belief that I was still a Bruin, resonated with me more than any coach’s pep talk ever could. I felt it was a kind of omen, and that I would indeed be a Boston Bruin again soon.
The second call from Boston came in December. “Just bring your skates,” the Bruins told me. It meant they were going to provide me with equipment and sticks. It meant I’d be staying in Boston for a while.
It meant I was on the team.
So I took the train down to Boston. This time I’d be living with my mother’s cousin Edith out in the suburb of Roxbury, home at the time mainly to black people. I’d commute into the city on a train about three-quarters full of black people, practice with the team or play games, and then return to Roxbury. It was just how life was in Boston. And it seemed normal, since I was living with family. Roxbury’s large West Indian and Caribbean population meant that the local food was very much of the islands, as were the sports—they were mad about cricket and puzzled about hockey.
But I was about to get the chance to educate them. That’s because, one week before Christmas 1960, I got the best Christmas present ever: I was now back in the Bruins’ black and gold, and looked to be staying for good.
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I was now, officially, the first black player in the NHL—although, once again, the white media didn’t make a big deal of that fact. The black media, however, took notice. I hoped that if you were a black kid playing hockey, hearing about me would make you play harder so that you too could one day join the NHL. But again, I was a hockey player who happened to be black, and not, in my mind, a black hockey player.
My coach, Milt Schmidt, used to have a standard line when speaking to the media about my being a different shade of human from the other guys on the team. “He isn’t black,” Schmidt would say, “he’s a Bruin.”
Nice to hear, but I was still one of the few black people at Boston Garden—and I was playing! Not many black people went to games in those days. The Bruins were great about getting players tickets when we needed them, though, so I was able to increase the Garden’s black attendance by giving tickets to my cousin and her friends, along with people in Roxbury generally. Now all those cricket-mad West Indians could see what the blue line was, how you couldn’t cross it ahead of the puck, and so on. To me, hockey is far easier to grasp than cricket, and the good people of Roxbury soon caught on.
My parents
came to see me play, and so did my brother Richard. I was so proud when the guy who’d given me such rough-and-tumble hockey tutorials saw me wearing the black and gold, my number 22 on the back. All those dreams I’d told Richard about on Island Lake and on the ice rinks of Fredericton had come true.
I loved life in the NHL, pro hockey’s greatest realm, because I’d made my dream come true. They could have made us walk to away games and I’d still have been over the moon.
On the road I roomed with centerman Charlie Burns, easily the most popular player with the home crowd. In those days he was unique in being the NHL’s only American-born player (later, as a child, his family had moved to Toronto and he became a Canadian). Not only was he a great skater and playmaker, he could play a defensive as well as an offensive game. Charlie also had a great sense of humor and a fine mind for strategy. He could “see the ice,” as they say, and talk about how to get around opponents’ defenses in a way that made him sound like a coach—which is what he eventually became. In fact, with the Minnesota North Stars, he was the last to hold a dual player-coach role in the NHL.
He also wore a thickly padded helmet at a time when no one wore helmets at all. In junior hockey he’d suffered a head injury that nearly ended his career, but the doctors put a metal plate in his head and Charlie returned to the game. We were a pair: him with a plate in his head and me with one eye. Of course, no one on the Bruins knew about my blind eye. At least not yet.
We formed a line, with Charlie as centerman and Jerry Toppazzini on right wing, and we were friends off the ice as well. Topper, who came from Sudbury, had a nose for where to find good Italian food in all our away cities—and in his retirement he would start a Bruins-themed restaurant.
I loved traveling on the rails to New York and Chicago and Detroit and Toronto and Montreal. In those days teams would play back-to-back games in each other’s rinks, so we’d go back and forth on the train together. And since there were only six teams, rivalries were intense. I mean, imagine being on the same train with a guy you’d dropped the gloves with just a couple of hours earlier. We kept to our separate railcars, but you could bump into the other teams on the way to the dining car. It could get testy. Mostly, though, we had fun with the guys on our own team. We’d play cards—hearts, say, or rummy; we’d tell stories, many of them true; and we’d kid around with each other about shots we’d missed, as hockey players do.
The thing I loved most about being an NHLer was getting to play against some of the best guys in hockey. I remember being on the ice against Gordie Howe in Detroit. He was six one and just over two hundred pounds and he was a beast. Built like a heavyweight champion, he could fight like one, too. And on January 16, 1960, the guy you saw on the ice making plays happen out of nothing became the NHL’s career-scoring leader when he passed my hero Rocket Richard’s 946 points.
But Howe also had windshield-wiper elbows that he used like an artist—you didn’t want to get into corners with him, or get too close period, or those elbows would be right in your face, giving it a wash. He may have been nicknamed Mr. Hockey, but he was also called Mr. Elbows. (A “Gordie Howe hat trick” is a goal, an assist, and a fight all in the same game, which should give you a sense of the kind of mixture of skill and toughness he brought.)
I was on the third line and Gordie was on a line all his own, so we never really saw ice time against each other. I’d watch him from the bench, though, and marvel at what a complete hockey player he was—one who could skate and shoot and hit and dangle the puck as if it were on a string, and then put it in the net whenever he wanted to, so it seemed, without ever seeming to break a sweat. Some guys are always churning—you can see how hard they’re working. But Gordie just seemed to glide. Even when teams tried (unwisely) to play physically with Mr. Hockey, he’d just calmly shrug them off. He seemed unhurried and graceful, as though he were playing a slightly different game from the rest of us. When the Rocket retired, he said Gordie was better than he was. “He can do everything.” And that was saying something.
I also liked Terry Sawchuk, who played goal for the Red Wings. Most nights the puck looked like a beach ball to Sawchuk. He could stop everything. He was fearless. And he didn’t wear a mask, either.
It’s shocking to think how unprotected we were back then, with no helmets or visors, but goalies were even less protected. If you compare a photo of Terry Sawchuk in 1960 with any goalie today, the modern players look as though they’ve been pumped up with air like a balloon, they’re so padded and protected. And rightly so. The frozen piece of rubber that is a hockey puck, speeding toward your face at a hundred miles an hour, is a dangerous thing. Believe me, I know.
Sawchuk took a lot of pucks to the face, but he was a tough guy. And we had something in common. When he was eighteen a stick caught him in his right eye during a game. The doctor wanted to cut it out but then changed his mind, and a good thing, too; Terry later regained his sight. He went on to win four Vezina Trophies as the NHL’s best goalie. He also won four Stanley Cups and posted 103 shutouts in 971 regular-season games. The only goalie who’s posted more is Martin Brodeur, and he got his 125 shutouts over 1,266 games.
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The Bruins were paying me $9,000 for the season, more than twice what I’d been making in the minor pro leagues. And even though I knew Boston wanted to keep me, I played every game as if it were my last. But I still hadn’t put a puck past an NHL goalie.
On New Year’s Day, 1961, we were playing at home against Montreal. The Canadiens had won the Stanley Cup the year before (their fifth in a row), and some of the best players to ever play the game remained in their lineup. Boom Boom Geoffrion was smashing pucks into the net that left no doubt about his nickname; close behind him was Jean Béliveau. Rocket Richard had retired, but the Canadiens had a deep bench. They’d also developed a strong farm-team system. It looked as if they’d be unbeatable again that season.
Before that game against the Canadiens, my teammate Bronco Horvath saw me shooting on our goalie, Bruce Gamble, in the pre-game practice. Bronco played center, and the year before he’d come second in the scoring race with thirty-nine goals and forty-one assists in a seventy- game season. So he knew how to put the puck in the net. “O’Ree,” he said, “you’re shooting too high. You have to keep your shots low to be effective.”
I knew this, but I’d been up against Canadiens netminder Charlie Hodge before, when he’d been the goalie for the Montreal Royals and I played for the Quebec Aces. Charlie was a little guy, maybe five six and 150 pounds, so I’d always shoot high on him. I’d scored in Quebec by going upstairs on Charlie Hodge. I figured I’d do the same that night.
It was a tough game, with both sides fighting hard to kick off the new year and make a statement. Halfway through the third period we had a 2–1 lead. Both teams had a man in the penalty box, so there was quite a bit more space on the ice. I took a pass from Leo Boivin and turned on the speed. I’ve always been blessed with quick acceleration—a couple of steps and I’d be gone. Milt Schmidt, my coach, thought I was the fastest skater in the league. With open ice I had a lot of room to do my thing, though sometimes I went so fast that with my blind eye I left the puck behind.
But not on this night. I sped by Montreal defenseman Jean-Guy Talbot just inside the Canadiens’ blue line. Then Tom Johnson came after me, but he broke his stick trying to stop me. Suddenly I was all alone in front of Charlie Hodge.
I was about to shoot high out of habit when I heard Bronco Horvath’s words in my head. So instead I let the puck rip along the ice. It beat Hodge. That sweet red light that signals a goal flashed and nearly fourteen thousand people in Boston Garden were standing and cheering for me. I had finally scored my first NHL goal on the very first day of a new year. That couldn’t be anything but a good sign of things to come.
I dove into the net and grabbed the puck, then skated it over to the bench and gave it to Milt Schmidt, asking h
im to look after it for me. He smiled and promised that he would. I still have that puck at home.
For two minutes afterward, those fourteen thousand people in Boston Garden kept standing and cheering for me. After a while I didn’t know where to look. I’d known that the fans in Boston were on my side, but I hadn’t realized how much. Milt Schmidt later said that it was the longest ovation he’d ever heard in his twenty-five years being around the Bruins. And he’d been in the Garden on some pretty big nights. They were cheering because I’d scored my first NHL goal, but they were also cheering for history.
And not only was it my first goal, it also turned out to be the game winner. Henri Richard later scored for Montreal to make it 3–2 and a nail-biting finale. But my goal stood.
Back home in Fredericton, my parents heard the news of my goal and of Boston’s response. It looked as if their fear of my rejection by the white world of big-league pro hockey had been disproven. I’d been welcomed into the NHL. And I was going to stay welcome for a long time.
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In 1961 the civil rights movement was just getting going. The United States had begun to grapple with its original sin of slavery and its subsequent discrimination against black people and people of color generally. I’m sorry to say that the movement hadn’t yet reached the pro hockey world. I did get asked about it, though, when I finally made it on to Hockey Night in Canada and was interviewed by Ward Cornell.
