Willie

by Willie O'Ree

  I’d always loved kids and had spent a lot of time in my summers back home playing sports and hanging out with them. But now that I had my own I realized that it was a 24/7, rest-of-my-life kind of job. It’s not the easiest role when you’re a hockey player, having to be on the road so much of the year. And with Berna Deanne looking after two young children and me married to the game from September right through to April, it put a strain on things at home.

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  —

  The Blades’ schedule had us traveling quite far geographically compared to the Eastern teams, who were mostly all packed together in one small region. The joke in the East was that you could play an away game and sleep in your own bed that same night. Not so out West. We’d go up the coast and then into the Canadian prairies, from San Francisco, Portland, Spokane, Seattle, and Vancouver to Calgary and Edmonton. (Then, when Calgary and Edmonton folded, Denver and Victoria came into the league.) I liked traveling the coast and was knocked out by the beauty of the West. Everywhere you looked there was some postcard picture, from the crashing surf of San Francisco to the towering fir trees of B.C. and the Rocky Mountains of Alberta. It was all gorgeous—except for Portland, Oregon, that is.

  Now, I know that today Portland is one of the prettiest and most progressive cities in the United States, but I hated playing there, even though it’s where I met my wife. First off, the Buckaroos played in a rink that was smaller than NHL regulation (which is 200 feet long by 85 feet wide). Today NHL rinks are all the same size, but back then they varied. Portland’s rink was just 185 feet long and maybe 80 feet wide—and they used it to their advantage. For example, the Portland guys knew exactly how long it took the puck to get around the boards. Those of us used to the bigger rink thought it would take a second or two longer, so we’d be a step late. Then the Portland guys would run us into the boards hard. The blue lines were closer to center ice as well, which could mess with your timing; thanks to the shortened rink, you’d suddenly find yourself offside.

  But those things were just part of hockey in Portland back then, and I could deal with it. What I hated about the place was having to play against a Portland Buckaroo named Doug Messier.

  He’d always hit me from behind or spear me, and just like Eric Nesterenko, he’d use racial slurs against me, the N-word being his favorite. And yet when I’d heard enough and challenged him to show me just how superior he was, he’d never drop his gloves and fight me like a man. As a hockey guy, especially back then, you’re expected to back up your words and your actions. If you take a cheap shot, you have to pay your bill. If you say something the other guy doesn’t like, you’re going to be held to account. People may not like it, but that’s actually something that keeps players honest, and polite. So acting out and refusing to pay your bill—no one respects a player like that.

  In short, Messier and I did not like each other. When he refused to back up his words I figured I had to use my stick against him. We had terrible stick fights because he was such a coward. The guy’s son turned out to be one of the greatest NHL players ever, but this is one instance where “like father, like son” doesn’t apply.

  In my first season with Los Angeles—still playing left wing, still with a blind right eye—I scored twenty-eight goals and added twenty-six assists. In my next season I scored twenty-five and helped on twenty-six others. These numbers were some of my best ever, but things were going to get even better.

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  It was at the start of the 1963–64 season, my third in L.A., that Alf Pike came to coach the Blades. Pike not only had an excellent hockey pedigree; he was also a great coach. And he changed my game forever.

  Pike came from Winnipeg—he’d gone to a hockey school there run by Lester Patrick (father of Lynn in Boston), one of the greatest hockey men ever, who was then coaching the New York Rangers. Patrick signed Pike as a nineteen-year-old to play with the Rangers’ farm team. By 1940 Pike had moved up to the NHL: he was the Rangers’ twenty-two-year-old rookie center who scored a big goal against Toronto to win the 1940 Stanley Cup.

  It was Pike, nicknamed “The Embalmer” for working at a funeral home in the off-season, who singlehandedly shot a major dose of life back into my game. With seven left-wingers in Los Angeles and not enough right-wingers, he put me on right wing. Suddenly my good left eye was on the same side as the play and my blind right eye on the side of the boards as I skated down the right wing. I’d never thought of doing that. And yet, once Alf made the suggestion, it seemed an act of genius. And it changed my hockey life.

  By the end of that 1964–65 season I’d scored thirty-eight goals and added twenty-one assists, my highest goal total since I’d been a pro hockey player. And I won the WHL scoring title—the first time I’d won a scoring title as a pro, and with one blind eye. (If I’d switched to right wing in Boston, would I have stayed with the team?) So now, in the summer of 1966, I was daring to hope that my newfound touch on the ice might get me another shot at the NHL.

  There was another reason for hope: the NHL had decided to give Los Angeles a franchise when the league expanded in 1967. And there I was already, an NHL veteran and the leading scorer on the L.A. Blades. It looked like the Montreal Canadiens had done me a huge favor in sending me west. I’d once thought I’d gone as far away from the NHL as a man could get—but now that it was coming right to my own backyard, I knew I’d have another chance to play in the greatest hockey league on earth.

  12.

  A GULL IN SAN DIEGO

  In the summer of 1967 the United States was in tumult. Ten years earlier, when I went to Georgia to try out for baseball’s Milwaukee Braves, I’d experienced firsthand the ugliness of the Jim Crow South and had seen how starkly racist America remained. In the decade since then much had changed, and much was still changing, some for better, some for worse. But it felt at times as if my adopted country was about to explode.

  The U.S. was at war in Vietnam, and in 1967 public opinion against that war was growing loud and strong, with marches taking place across the country. But it was more than marching—it was a feeling that the war was wrong, and way too costly in lives lost. Every night on the evening news we’d see the casualty numbers: young Americans killed in battle so far from home and for reasons no one could quite explain.

  There was a war at home as well—one that directly affected me. In 1964 the U.S. government under President Lyndon Johnson had finally passed the Civil Rights Act, making any kind of discrimination or segregation based on race illegal. But reality hadn’t caught up with the ideal. People, African American people, were still very much discriminated against by white society. And while Los Angeles wasn’t the Deep South, it had serious issues.

  To be a professional hockey player in Los Angeles was unusual in itself back then, but as a black man I was part of a rising black population that had come to the city during the Second World War in what was known as the Second Great Migration. President Roosevelt had signed an executive order prohibiting defense companies, many based in Los Angeles, from discriminating on the basis of race, and so black people headed for Southern California to take up this opportunity. But despite laws and good intentions, the reality in Los Angeles was that black people couldn’t live in white neighborhoods, even after the Civil Rights Act was passed. So there were overwhelmingly black L.A. neighborhoods like Watts, which was about thirteen miles south of downtown and eighteen miles east of the Pacific. And it was in Watts where terrible rioting had erupted in the summer of 1965.

  The inciting incident was all too familiar: a white cop stopped a black motorist, and things quickly got out of hand. The driver was arrested for being drunk. His mother, angry at her son, blew up. Then she went after the police, who arrested them both. Word got out that a black woman had been roughed up by white cops, and it all went badly downhill from there.

  After six days of rioting, thirty-four people—twenty-five of them black—
were dead and more than a thousand were injured. At least six hundred buildings had been damaged or destroyed by fire and looting, most of them white-owned. Firefighters who tried to put out the fires were shot at by snipers. Eventually the National Guard was brought in to restore order. Armed soldiers patrolled the streets and erected blockades, warning that anyone who tried to pass through them would be shot, no questions asked. In a matter of days we’d gone from being a free-spirited city to a tense, occupied battleground.

  I noticed people looking at me differently. I was a Canadian hockey player living in L.A., but unless you saw me on the ice, all you saw was another black man who might be thinking of overthrowing the white power structure. It was a strange feeling, and it made me uncomfortable while it lasted—which, in many ways, you could say it still does. I mean, I still get people judging me because of my color. That’s the tragedy of us-versus-them thinking. People thought they knew me because of what I looked like. Sure, not many black men in Los Angeles are Canadian hockey players. But if the way you think makes you blind to the presence of someone like me when I’m on the sidewalk right beside you, then you’re missing out. That’s true for anyone who thinks they know another before they take the time to understand them.

  The damage to L.A. was terrible and long-lasting. The fact that today the week of death and destruction Los Angeles suffered is also known as the Watts Rebellion underlines the conflict between black people and white in America at the time.

  And I actually saw that damage myself. My Los Angeles Blades teammate Warren Hynes worked off-season for a business that had customers in Watts, and he needed to meet with them. The prospect scared him, though, so he asked me to go along, and I did.

  When we drove into Watts it was like driving into a war zone. And with soldiers on the streets looking at everything and everyone as a potential problem, we tried to seem harmless, which was hard to do at a time like that. I saw burned-out buildings and people who looked like me in a state of rage and despair. But despite the tension and the sorrow, we didn’t encounter any trouble, although we did get a couple of surprised looks—people must have wondered what this black man was doing in the neighborhood with a white guy.

  In the end Warren met with his customers and we drove back out. It had been surreal to see up close what I’d been seeing only on the television news, and it stayed with me. This was part of the city where I’d never lived myself, but now that I’d inhaled its air I could feel the anger that had sparked the rioting. I’m not saying that rioting is the right response—I’m just saying that I got the anger. And I understood that if justice isn’t done, that anger will do damage.

  By then, with a two-year-old and a newborn, Berna Deanne wondered if we should return to Canada. But I was committed to my career in Los Angeles, and we weren’t living in Watts. So we stayed, hoping that the riots would mark the beginning of social change.

  Not long after that, Dr. Martin Luther King came to Los Angeles. And although he strongly condemned the violence and destruction that had been unleashed upon the city, his views on the event spoke powerfully to me. The cause of the riot, King said, was “environmental and not racial. The economic deprivation, social isolation, inadequate housing, and general despair of thousands of Negroes teeming in Northern and Western ghettos are the ready seeds which give birth to tragic expressions of violence.”

  King went on to say that, until everyone was treated with dignity, and until equality and justice ruled the land, these flashpoints were still in danger of exploding, especially since some black leaders believed that the only way to get white America to notice the inequality and injustice was to burn things down.

  * * *

  —

  Those flashpoints went off again in that summer of 1967, when the NHL was about to come to Los Angeles. Race riots began in Buffalo in June. Then, in July, race riots flared in Minneapolis, Newark, Milwaukee, and Detroit. In August they lit up Washington, D.C. Many people were killed, and many inner-city neighborhoods and businesses were destroyed.

  I would also like to note that, in the middle of all that destruction and violence, something good happened in that August of 1967: Thurgood Marshall was confirmed as the first African American justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. It had been a long time coming, but perhaps it was a sign that this cauldron in which we were living would produce real and lasting change.

  As a black Canadian living in the United States, I was in the middle of it all. I wasn’t political, and I hadn’t grown up with the same kind of discrimination these rioters were violently opposing, but my very color put me on one side of the battle. To be sure, as I played the game I loved so much I’d always had to fight a silent battle against those who thought my color was somehow a problem. I’d since made it to the NHL. My color was no longer an issue for me. But everywhere I turned it was the dominant issue of the day. More than ever now I was a “black” hockey player in the States, with all the political baggage that entailed, when all I wanted to do was win another scoring title and a league championship. In the NHL. And whenever anyone mentioned that I was the first African American to play in the NHL, I would gently remind them that I was a Canadian, of African ancestry.

  I had never defined my game by my color, but only by how I played it. And yet, just as leaving home for the American South had taught me a great deal about racism, my life in Los Angeles was showing me a subtler, creeping kind of racism that isn’t necessarily degrading or deliberately insulting. It may even be friendly in its own way, I suppose. But it’s still a constraint on freedom. Unlike others who came before me, I was allowed to play hockey. But I wasn’t allowed to only play hockey. That was impossible. I was always seen as a black player before I was seen as a hockey player. I would never complain. Part of being first means going through difficulties. I accept that. And I know that even today, black NHLers are never just hockey players.

  What I want for young people today is what I wanted for myself back then. I was looking forward to the upcoming season, just like other players. There was big excitement about the Kings coming to L.A., and I was as eager for the big time as anyone else.

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  —

  Oddly enough, it was my old Hull-Ottawa general manager, Sam Pollock, who had a hand in the NHL coming to Southern California. Sam had moved up to the Canadiens in 1964—and his hockey smarts weren’t lost on the NHL, who asked him to head up a committee looking at putting a few new teams into the NHL mix.

  Now, this was an exciting time for pro sports in the States. Television had discovered just how profitable it could be, and as a result TV networks were giving fat contracts to pro sports leagues. Two years before, in 1965, NBC had paid more than $30 million for TV rights to Major League Baseball—and the NHL wanted some of that money. In order to get it, though, they needed teams in American markets that would attract American viewers and TV network attention.

  So Sam Pollock and his committee recommended that the NHL expand from the so-called Original Six to a twelve-team NHL, with a whole new division created from the new teams in Minnesota, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Oakland, and Los Angeles. (To show you the power of the money, Vancouver had been promised a franchise in the expansion, but the ownership in Toronto and Montreal didn’t want to divvy up TV revenues three ways. So much for Canada’s game when it came to profits.)

  Blades owner Dan Reeves had taken a shot at becoming the NHL’s L.A. franchise, but he had company: Los Angeles Lakers owner Jack Kent Cooke, a transplanted Canadian like me; Buffalo Bills owner Ralph Wilson; TV producer Tony Owen, who’d created The Donna Reed Show and had been a vice-president of the Detroit Lions football team; and a media group called Metromedia.

  The Blades were considered the favorites. Not only had we been playing pro hockey in the city since 1961, we also had our own Sports Arena (or rather, we were the first choice of the city’s Coliseum Commission, who owned the arena). And an ace card seemed to be tha
t our owner, Dan Reeves, also co-owned the Los Angeles Rams, so his sporting footprint was significant. And since the NHL had promised the Blades NHL expansion rights, Reeves was going to do a very American thing and sue them if the Blades didn’t get the franchise.

  Jack Kent Cooke, meanwhile, told the NHL that if he got the franchise he’d build a larger, brand-new arena out of his own pocket. Cities always love to hear from deep-pocketed people who’ll build shiny new arenas at their own expense, but no one thought he could do it—a new arena cost a lot of money, and he didn’t have a lot of time.

  But then, neither did we. If we didn’t change our fortunes in the 1966–67 season and show the NHL that we were L.A.’s hockey club, our chances of landing the franchise were slim. In the two previous seasons we’d finished bottom of the league. Attendance was down as well. But I’d given my best, as I always did—thirty-four goals, twenty-six assists—and it had helped the Blades finish second from last in the WHL that season.

  When the NHL awarded the new L.A. franchise to Jack Kent Cooke, who was building his new arena for $16 million in Inglewood, the game was over for the Blades. With the new Los Angeles Kings not wanting to compete with another pro team in the city, we played our last game in April 1967.

  The other blow to me was the nature of the June 1967 NHL expansion draft. It allowed the new teams to take twenty players each from the existing Original Six, who could also put their best players on a “protected list,” meaning they were excluded from the draft. Also on that protected list were junior players, and any player who’d been sold to the Western Hockey League before June 1966. And that meant me.