by Willie O'Ree
And yet.
I had proven myself in the NHL. I was fast and skilled and I was twenty-five years old, still young enough to get another shot at the NHL. But I wanted to know why the Bruins had done what they had done.
I waited for that call from them to explain, but no call ever came. Nor did I have a high-powered agent who could call the Bruins and demand an answer. (Actually, I didn’t have one because nobody did. All of that was just beginning—and a good thing, too, since in just a few years’ time, let alone today, the Bruins’ treatment of me would never happen.) And it just wasn’t done for a player to call management and ask hard questions. You’d be seen as a troublemaker, and that could create all kinds of professional problems. Look at what had happened to Ted Lindsay.
So I had to speculate, and to listen to other people’s theories about why I was a Bruin at the end of the season and six weeks later I was not. Pennington and Gray, the guys Boston had traded me for, went on to play more than a hundred games each in the NHL. In other words, they weren’t trading minor leaguers.
It came down to my blind eye, I reckon. Somehow the Bruins had found out, and instead of announcing it publicly, which would have ended my career, they just quietly dealt me to Montreal. And since they knew I’d have questions, they’d opted not to speak to me at all.
Had they known about my blind eye? Years later, Milt Schmidt said something that made me wonder. “He kept that secret as long as he could,” he remarked, “because it looked to me at first as if he was just too fast for his own good. He was a good team man, but no, he couldn’t have played for us if we had known he had only one eye.” When I heard that, I was sure they had found out.
That said, the Bruins weren’t about to get nothing in exchange for me. So although they might have privately worried about the legal consequences to them—or life consequences to me—if I were also to lose my left eye while playing for them, they certainly weren’t going to let Montreal know that.
Then came a letter from Sam Pollock, manager of Montreal’s farm team, the Hull-Ottawa Canadiens. Montreal had acquired my contract from Boston, he wrote, but they wanted me to report to Hull-Ottawa.
Just like that, I was back in the minor pros.
I’d taken a lot of knocks before, but this one was particularly painful. I would never have thought that my hard work and determination and perseverance against some pretty powerful odds would be undone so quickly, and so callously.
But getting stuck in my own past wasn’t going to do me any good. I resolved to join the Canadiens’ farm team and keep doing the thing that had gotten me into the NHL in the first place. I’d work harder than everyone else, and eventually I’d get my shot at pulling on the red, white, and blue jersey of the Montreal Canadiens. After all, they wouldn’t have traded for me if they’d thought what I’d done in the NHL wasn’t good enough.
* * *
—
In fact, going to play for the Hull-Ottawa Canadiens represented a bit of a homecoming for me. I’d played in Hull-Ottawa before. Indeed, I’d played quite well for them at the beginning of the 1960–61 season, scoring ten goals and adding nine assists in sixteen games. Until I’d gotten the call to report to the Bruins, I’d been on pace for more than a point a game.
The team practiced and played in Hull, the Quebec city that lies just across the river from Ottawa. The season before, when I was playing in Boston, the Hull-Ottawa Canadiens were the best team in the Eastern Professional Hockey League. They finished in first place, with ninety-one points, and won the league championship. It’s always nice to be playing for a winner, and a large part of that was due to the brains behind the operation, Sam Pollock.
Pollock was thirty-six when I went to play for him that second time. Before he guided Hull-Ottawa to their championship he’d led the Junior Canadiens to two Memorial Cups, the Stanley Cup of junior hockey. He’d been with the Montreal Canadiens organization since he was twenty-two and would stay with them until he was fifty-three, winning nine Stanley Cups as the team’s general manager.
The Montreal Canadiens have this reputation for class, poise, and success, and everyone thinks it was always thus, but back in the 1940s, the reality was anything but—especially for the city’s junior teams. Not only did they play fewer games than the other junior teams, they often played late at night in the Montreal Forum, when it was hard to attract fans and even harder for players, who were fighting off sleep, to bring their A-game.
Transformation came thanks to Toronto Maple Leafs owner Conn Smythe, whose bullying finally alienated his brilliant hockey lieutenant, Frank Selke, who left Toronto in disgust and came to Montreal. From a distance it looked like a first-rate franchise, but Selke soon saw that the Canadiens, while great on the ice, had a pretty bad farm system. So he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to build up that system and support the NHL club. At the time, Sam Pollock was the director of the Midget Canadiens—younger kids who played in the Canadiens’ system. But the Junior Canadiens’ coach, who was about to leave his post, told Selke that Pollock should get his job. Sam Pollock, he said, was the type of guy the Canadiens needed on their team.
Pollock was built like a bulldog and went after problems the same way. He was determined, he was great at motivating everyone else around him, and he was smart: he knew the value not just of his own players but of everyone playing in every other league.
So going to Hull-Ottawa wasn’t all bad. If Sam Pollock wanted me on his team, that was saying something.
* * *
—
When I suited up for the Hull-Ottawa Canadiens at the start of the 1961–62 season, I was determined to be called up to the NHL before Christmas. But I got the call much sooner than that, and it wasn’t to the NHL.
The season was only twelve games old when I showed up at the rink for a practice. It was about eight fifteen in the morning and our workout wasn’t scheduled till ten, but I liked to be early. It was a way to get my gear in order and prepare to fully engage with the practice.
As soon as the team’s trainer saw me he said, “Willie, Sammy wants to see you.” I told him I’d see Pollock after the practice, but the trainer was firm. “No, he wants to see you right now. He’s up in his office.”
When a general manager wants to see a player urgently, it could mean anything—maybe I was being called up to Montreal? When I got to Pollock’s office he was sitting at his desk, papers scattered all over the place. I asked him if he wanted to see me, and he said, “Yes, yes, come in.”
I stood in front of his desk for a full thirty seconds as Sam sat there with his head down. He didn’t look at me once. I began to fear that something bad had happened to my parents or one of my brothers or sisters. Finally, I coughed and reminded him I had a practice to get ready for. “Oh, yes, Willie,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here.”
He stood up, walked around to the front of his desk, and put his arm around my shoulders. I noticed that he had an envelope in his hand. “Willie,” he said, “from time to time the Montreal organization has to make changes in their player personnel.” He smiled at me in a kind of fatherly fashion, even though he was only ten years older. “We’ve been impressed with your play, but we’ve traded you to…”
It was as if I were suddenly in slow motion. I’d been traded again, but I didn’t want to know where, and yet I did, if it was to an NHL club. It was one of those moments where what happens next can totally change your life.
And so it did. Sam Pollock told me I’d been traded to the Los Angeles Blades of the Western Hockey League.
There was an immediate conflict in my mind as I tried to connect “hockey” with “Los Angeles.” L.A. was home to the Dodgers and the Rams and the Lakers. It was hot and had palm trees and sandy beaches and no winter at all. What kind of hockey could possibly exist in Los Angeles?
I was about to find out. Pollock then handed me the envelope he’d been holding. In
side it was an airplane ticket.
“Your flight to Los Angeles leaves at twelve fifty,” he said. “Today.” I had just over four hours to pack up my gear, and my apartment, and my life, and catch that plane out west.
I returned to the dressing room and told the trainer the news. He was pleased for me. “You’ll be having fun out there with all those movie stars,” he said. I wasn’t at all convinced of that as I gathered up my two pairs of skates and the couple dozen hockey sticks that I had just ordered. I hadn’t even taken them out of their cellophane wrapping.
Then, back at my apartment, I got my things together. I wasn’t married, didn’t have a serious girlfriend, and the apartment had been rented to me fully furnished, so I had only to pack my clothes and personal items. And being a few more time zones further from my parents just meant calling them earlier in my day. It was as clean a getaway from Hull as these things can be. I went to the bank, took out some money, and then headed off to the airport to my new life.
* * *
—
I’d never been to the West Coast, and had certainly never imagined playing there. And now I’d have to work my way back up to the NHL from as far away from the action as one could possibly get. The closest NHL team to California was in Chicago, nearly two thousand miles away. In other words, I got on that plane to L.A. wondering if I’d ever be back. Part of me was excited by this West Coast adventure, and part of me was hurting at the sheer distance that would separate me from my parents and my brother. Sure, I could go back to Fredericton in the off-season; it would just be a longer plane ride. But my parents and Coot and my pals wouldn’t be coming to L.A. to watch me play—and that marked the end of a ritual that had been part of my life since I played my first game.
When I’d left Hull-Ottawa it was freezing, but when I stepped out of the airplane in Los Angeles on November 12, 1961, it had to have been at least seventy-five degrees. So I took off my heavy topcoat, walked down the steps of the plane, and looked around at the palm trees rippling in the Pacific breeze under that California sunshine. I still couldn’t quite grasp that hockey was played in this tropical paradise.
I caught a taxi to the Coliseum Hotel and signed in. The hotel was across the street from where the Blades played, the L.A. Memorial Sports Arena. It was new, finished in 1959—a round, very contemporary looking building. Most, if not all, arenas I’d played in had been built like boxes, rectangular in shape, but this rink suggested the future.
As I was walking to the elevator, I noticed this guy reading a newspaper. I had only a side view of him but I knew I’d seen him before, and not in the movies. He shifted the paper and turned his head, and then I realized who it was: Jean-Marc Picard. We’d played together on the Quebec Aces in the 1956–57 season.
“Pic!” I called out.
“Hey, Willie,” he said, a big smile on his face as if we’d planned to meet here. “So you’ve been traded, too?”
Jean-Marc, it turned out, had been traded from the San Francisco Seals to the Los Angeles Blades. We had a laugh at the coincidence. And instead of going to my room I asked the bell captain to take my gear upstairs—I was so happy to find a familiar face and to be invited out to see the sights of L.A.
That evening Jean-Marc and I wound up at a Hollywood bar, having a great time listening to Sam & Dave, who would go on to become a very popular singing group in the 1960s. I told Jean-Marc about my time playing in the NHL and he told me about his time playing in San Francisco, where he’d put in only nine games after being traded there by Winnipeg, who’d now traded him again to Los Angeles.
We had a beer or two or maybe three, and I didn’t get back to my hotel room until two a.m., meaning five a.m. in Hull-Ottawa, meaning I’d been awake for nearly twenty-four hours. And during that time I’d crossed the continent and been a member of two different hockey teams.
The next morning Jean-Marc and I had a meeting at the Sports Arena. The Blades hadn’t been playing there for long, having been transferred to Los Angeles the past summer from Victoria, where they’d been called the Cougars.
We were welcomed onto the team by the coach, George “Bus” Agar, a veteran of the minor leagues as both a player and coach, and given our Blades uniforms, which happened to be black and gold, just like the Boston Bruins. Then we had a practice, and that night we were playing the Calgary Stampeders.
In hockey, you may have new teammates and you may be playing in a new rink, but at least the game is the same. California and I hit it off right from the start, because in that first game I was able to score two goals. The fans cheered me on as if I’d always been there, and the papers said something like “The addition of Willie O’Ree is a good one.” There’s nothing like scoring a couple of goals and getting a win to make you feel at home.
* * *
—
Months later, in 1962, I even had a homecoming of sorts in Los Angeles when I was invited to an NAACP luncheon held to honor Jackie Robinson, who, as I have mentioned, I met back in 1949, when I was a thirteen-year-old baseball player with my heart set on hockey.
When I arrived at the luncheon with my coach and a couple of teammates, Robinson was finishing an interview with the media. So we hung back until he was done, and then went over to say hello. “Willie O’Ree!” he said, remembering me, to my great surprise. “I met you back in Brooklyn and you told me you were going to be a hockey player. And so you are.”
He knew all about me. It was one of those electric moments life gives you when things come full circle in an almost magical way. There we were, together again, me and Jackie Robinson, both of us having made history.
And although Jackie Robinson was an All-Star baseball player who’d lit up major league baseball with his talent and I was a one-eyed hockey player hiding my blind eye from every league I played in just so I could keep playing, at this moment we were equals. We’d changed the sports we loved simply by being allowed to play them at the highest level. The history we made was by virtue of our athletic talent that vaulted us over the color barrier, which says a lot about how history works. Had there not been that racial barrier, there would have been no history to make. But as I stood there with Jackie Robinson, I knew we’d be joined together forever because of this history, and I could not have been prouder of what we’d done.
* * *
—
In my second season in L.A., my old friend Stan Maxwell came to play for the Blades. Once more we were the only two black guys and on the same team, this time in the WHL. The league was a very good one, too. The more we played, the more I loved it. For one thing, L.A. had a huge Canadian population, which fueled the demand to see hockey; we’d get eight thousand people out for a game. (In Hull-Ottawa, we’d average only two thousand.) The fans were great. And they sure knew their hockey, which, as I came to learn, had been with them for quite a while.
It was a testament to the power of the game, really, to learn how long Los Angeles had been home to hockey. The city’s first game was held on February 1, 1917, at the Ice Palace, where a bunch of Canadians—no surprise—playing for the Los Angeles Athletic Club beat the University Club 7–0. The Los Angeles Times’ report of the game let readers know that “no one was killed outright.” Amateur and club hockey teams also played their games in the Palais de Glace. And by the mid-1920s hockey had made it into the universities, with USC, UCLA, and Loyola all icing teams.
Then, in April 1926, the NHL came to town when New York City’s first NHL team, the New York Americans, played a series of games against an L.A. All-Star squad. A year later, the NHL’s Chicago Black Hawks and Pittsburgh Pirates played games against local teams before meeting each other at the Winter Garden. The Hawks returned to L.A. in 1930 to play the Boston Bruins.
And in 1949, Frank Zamboni, who’d honed his expertise building plants for block ice, found a better way to restore arena ice at his Iceland Skating Rink in Paramount, California, just north
of Long Beach, by creating the machine that’s famous around the world and that bears his name.
So Los Angeles knew hockey. But the thing that really made me fall in love with L.A. was falling in love.
* * *
—
Berna Deanne Deberry was going to university in Portland, Oregon, where she was from, and so she was also a fan of the city’s WHL team, the Portland Buckaroos (which I was not, but more on that later). I met her in the city when I was playing there (and where I nearly got traded until they found out about my eye). She was very attractive and very stylish. I was drawn to both—I’ve always liked style, and I’m not opposed to beauty, either. Berna Deanne’s grandmother lived in Pasadena, so moving down to Los Angeles wasn’t too much of a shock for her.
We were married in the summer of 1962, back home in Fredericton. My parents were happy about our marriage, partly because Berna Deanne was black; they thought this would give our children a clear identity and save us from bigots—well, from a strand of bigot who didn’t like interracial marriage.
Berna Deanne wasn’t too happy about my fishing adventures with Coot and Junior and Bubsy, which I managed to sneak into our honeymoon. I can imagine now how she felt spending time with her brand-new in-laws while her new husband was up at Island Lake with his pals. I think it set the tone for how she would think of her place in our marriage.
We set up house in Redondo Beach, Los Angeles, about five blocks from the water. It was paradise being so close to the Pacific—I used to go down to sit on the beach and look at the ocean and just think about the big wide world. We had great neighbors, too, friendly and diverse, so it was a fine place to start a family. And before I knew it I was a father. Our son Kevin was born in 1963, making me the happiest man on earth, followed by Darren a year later. Just like that, I’d gone from carefree hockey player to family man with two young boys and a lot of responsibility.
