Willie

by Willie O'Ree

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  So in the summer of 1967 I waited for a phone call or a letter inviting me to play for another team. I just knew it wasn’t going to be an NHL team.

  Finally, the phone rang. On the other end was Max McNab, general manager of the San Diego Gulls. The Gulls, who’d come into the Western Hockey League in the 1966–67 season, hadn’t done very well, finishing just after us, in last place. They needed help.

  In the late 1940s Max had played three seasons for the Detroit Red Wings on teams boasting such talents as Gordie Howe, Ted Lindsay, and Red Kelly. He was a six-foot-two, left-hand-shooting centerman whose NHL career had been cut short because of back surgery. He’d since turned to coaching and had joined the Gulls in the previous season.

  And now Max McNab was asking me what I was going to do about my career.

  “Willie,” he said, “are you planning on playing hockey this year?”

  I was now thirty-two, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t know. Max said he’d help me make a decision. He wanted me to play for him.

  I was in a pretty grim place that summer. My marriage had broken up the year before, and Berna Deanne was gone. She’d seen my long absences as a statement of my attitude toward family life and I’d seen them as doing my job to provide food and shelter for my family, but it was clear she was never going to accept that. Nor was I going to give up hockey. I mean, it was my life, and my family was my family. But Berna Deanne thought hockey was more important to me, and I could not convince her otherwise.

  So she left, taking my sons with her, to live in Portland. Kevin and Darren, even though they were still little guys, hadn’t yet shown any interest in hockey. I’d been looking forward to teaching them the game I loved, but I didn’t see them very much except when we played in Portland, which wasn’t often enough. It was tough.

  Over the years to come Berna Deanne moved around a lot, which meant it was difficult to keep up with the boys. They’d started playing hockey after they moved away from me, and played until they were fifteen or sixteen. I told them, “Don’t think that because your name is O’Ree it’s going to be easy.” I didn’t mean that ironically, either. I was proud of what I’d accomplished, but they were on their own, and it’s one of my regrets that we were separated for so long. It’s a hard thing to recover from, lost time, and I’ve done better at it with Kevin than with Darren.

  All of which is to say that when Max McNab called me, I was single again and free to pick up and move to any team that wanted me, just as I’d done when I got traded to L.A. six years earlier. I loved living in Southern California, where I could play a winter game in endless summer, and playing San Diego would allow me to remain there. Also, by now I’d put in six good seasons with Los Angeles. Maybe it was time for a change of cities to help me move forward with my life.

  So I drove down to San Diego, which is about a three-hour trip from L.A., almost as far as the Mexican border. I used to think it strange to be playing hockey in Los Angeles, but playing in Mexico’s backyard? Could hockey even exist there?

  The first thing I did was meet with Max McNab, who struck me as a good guy. He even had a Maritime connection: McNab’s Island in Nova Scotia is named after his family, who settled there in the late eighteenth century, about the same time as my ancestor Paris O’Ree was making his way to freedom in New Brunswick.

  I liked San Diego as well. It was a much smaller city than Los Angeles, with just over 600,000 people (it’s more than doubled since) and an even better climate, since it doesn’t get as scorching in the summer. Mild winters, warm summers, and a very easy place on the eyes, with the Pacific breeze keeping the palm trees swaying and generating some serious surf if you like to ride the waves. (I prefer to fish in the water, not surf on it.)

  When the Spanish settled in California in the eighteenth century, San Diego was their first encampment, and so there’s a Spanish feel to its architecture and a Mexican feel to its city life. This isn’t surprising, of course, since Mexico is about a fifteen-minute drive south. (And I’m happy to report that today Mexico has a national ice hockey team and is a member of the International Ice Hockey Federation—which again proves my point that hockey is for everyone.)

  So now I had a decision to make. By that time I’d been away from Canada for six years, and I had the feeling that if I stayed in the U.S., I might be there for a long time. I was still going home after the season, spending the summers fishing and hanging out with Coot and my friends. And when I lived in L.A. my mom would come and visit; she liked it for the weather and the beach, but mainly because I was playing there. My dad, though, had never come to see me out west, always saying, “Let your mom go.” Of the two, she was the traveler.

  But if I wanted to keep playing, I had to stay where I was wanted. I had a few good years of pro hockey still in me, and deep down I still hoped that an NHL expansion team might call me up for my experience and my ability to score, now that I’d switched wings and could see so much more of the ice.

  So I signed with the Gulls, as did my old center iceman from L.A., Warren Hynes. We picked up where we’d left off. I was still playing right wing and having a great time on the ice. In my first three seasons with the Gulls, I scored eighty-three goals and helped on ninety-six others. I won the scoring title again in 1968–69, with another thirty-eight-goal season and forty-one assists. I was as good as I’d ever been. And the NHL went on without me.

  There was even more NHL expansion, with a team finally in Vancouver and another in Buffalo in 1970, but by then I knew I wouldn’t make it back in. I have no idea how they found out, but the NHL had learned about my blind right eye and had underlined their rule that forbade anyone who was blind in one eye from playing in the league. I’d be playing the rest of my professional career in the WHL, which was fine with me.

  I made guest appearances at sports dinners and on radio shows in San Diego. I was paid well for what I was doing, and I loved hockey more than ever. I had done what I said I would do, and had made this wonderful game my professional career.

  Hockey had taken me all across this great continent of North America, but after a couple of seasons with the Gulls, I finally felt I had found my home. I loved the city, and was a star on the Gulls—not because I was a black player, but because I could play hockey at a pretty fine level. And I was going to keep playing for as long as I could.

  13.

  ALL GOOD THINGS…

  There’s an expression in hockey that translates out in the wider world because of its plain poetry: “hanging up your skates.” It means retiring, and while some people are lucky to have jobs they love waking up to until their last breath on earth, being a professional athlete isn’t one of them.

  I’d kept myself in great shape, and still do, but after playing a demanding sport at the highest levels for such a long time, eventually there comes a day when you’re no longer your fastest, or your best.

  I played for the San Diego Gulls until the end of the 1973–74 season. I was nearly forty years old, and had played hockey for a long time—since I was five. I’d had some wonderful teammates, I’d played in the NHL, and I’d seen so many great places and met such fine people that I considered myself as having had a very good career. But every hockey player dreads the day you know is coming: the day when you have to hang up your skates, the day when you say goodbye to the game that has been your life.

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  A few things helped me decide that the time to hang them up was right. One of them was love. I’d been divorced for a few years and hadn’t really been serious about anyone since. Little did I know, but that was about to change—and again because of hockey.

  When I was on the road with the Gulls in Victoria, British Columbia, I met a beautiful Indo-Canadian woman, named Deljeet, who worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company. I didn’t meet her in that famous Canadian department store, though. A guy who wa
s writing about hockey in Victoria invited me to dinner with her, as she was a fan. She had three hockey- nut brothers, so it went with the family territory, but she also really loved the game and was knowledgeable about it. I was impressed. We got to talking, and found that we had a lot in common. After that we spoke on the phone a lot. A bit later she drove down to San Diego with a couple of her friends; I got them tickets to the game. And pretty soon we fell in love.

  In one of those unexpected ironies, her parents were against our relationship—not because I was black but because I wasn’t Indian. If Deljeet married me, she’d be marrying outside her race. But the 1960s had done so much to change cultural boundaries that interracial marriage had become much less of a threat to society than it had been a decade earlier. In fact, at the 1968 Academy Awards, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—about a white woman bringing her black fiancé home to meet her liberal parents—won two Oscars and was nominated for several more. Interracial marriage had become part of the cultural mainstream.

  But I was getting married not because Hollywood said it was okay, but because I was in love. So, on November 6, 1969, Deljeet and I joined that cultural mainstream when we got married in a small church in San Diego. My teammates Warren Hynes, Freddy Hilts, and Bobby Champoux were in attendance, but no one from Fredericton or from Deljeet’s family. After the wedding we went to visit Deljeet’s parents in Duncan, B.C., and it was then that they accepted me. So did her uncles and cousins and nephews and nieces. They knew of my career and were hockey fans, but they soon became Willie fans, too.

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  A few years after that, in 1972, I had a bit of a personality clash with Jack Evans, the Gulls coach, with the result that although I still practiced with the team—I mean, I was still officially a Gull—I was no longer actually playing for them. That’s when Parker McDonald came to the rescue. Parker had had a long NHL career; I’d played against him back in the 1960–61 season when he was a left-winger for the Detroit Red Wings. And now, as coach of the American Hockey League’s New Haven Nighthawks, he invited me to come join the team for part of the 1972–73 season.

  I was happy living in San Diego but feeling sour about the Gulls, so I didn’t object too much to disrupting our life in California to go and play in Connecticut. At least I’d be playing hockey.

  The Nighthawks had just entered the AHL and were an NHL affiliate as well, with connections to the Minnesota North Stars and the New York Islanders. But as I said, the NHL was done with me because of my eye, so I went to New Haven with no objective other than to do my best for the team.

  New Haven is an interesting place, to put it mildly. It’s home to Yale, one of the world’s great universities, and so there are museums and galleries and libraries and bookshops and restaurants that go with this great institution. But the city was also home to poverty and blight and crime waves, made stark by the grandness of the university. It was a long way from San Diego in many ways. Still, I resolved to play my game, put in my time, and then, with any luck, return to the Gulls without any trouble. But trouble came right at the start, when I tried to rent a place for us to live.

  I called the rental agent, told her my name and that I’d be playing for the New Haven hockey club, and said I’d like to rent her lakeside cottage—that it reminded me of my trips to Island Lake in New Brunswick. It was pretty and peaceful, and I love being near the water. When the agent said she’d need a deposit, I told her I’d be happy to deliver it that afternoon at the cottage. I got there early and saw her car pull up. When she started to walk toward me, I got out of my car—and when she saw me she slowed down. I knew exactly what was going to happen. She gave me a fake smile and said, “Oh, Mr. O’Ree, I tried to call you earlier. The cottage has been rented.” She was lying through her teeth.

  By that point in my life I could tell in a heartbeat when someone was a racist. Already I wanted to get out of Connecticut—and sure enough, the theme that had raised its ugly head at that cottage by the lake continued in the American Hockey League.

  Now, I’d been called nasty names in the Western Hockey League. And in some places fans had booed me—whether that was because I was black or maybe because I was scoring on their goalies. A couple of times I got into it when I was in the penalty box: if fans were particularly obnoxious I’d shout back at them, and on a couple of occasions, after some idiot had spat on me, I even went up into the stands (security quickly got between us and took the offender away before it got ugly). But on the whole, it wasn’t too bad.

  When I joined the AHL, though, some of the teams we played were in the South, a place I had no desire to visit again after my time in Waycross, Georgia. But now I was playing hockey games in Virginia, which, of course, had two teams in the league.

  When we’d play in Virginia, fans—or so-called fans—would yell at me, “Why aren’t you out pickin’ cotton?” They’d shout out the N-word, too. But the worst thing they did was something that even now takes my breath away in its cruelty.

  They threw a live black cat out onto the ice while I was playing. Just consider the effort that must have gone into that insane act: you’d have to smuggle a live cat from wherever into a noisy, crowded hockey arena, keep it under wraps until you saw me on the ice, and then throw that terrified animal with sufficient force so that it would clear the glass barrier and land on the ice. It’s so crazy on so many levels that it boggles the mind.

  That poor cat used up one of its nine lives when it landed. It must have been as stunned as I was because it didn’t move as I skated over, picked it up, and gave it to the trainer, the fans shouting and name-calling all the while. All I can say is that the cat and I were both happy to get out of that rink (although the cat was still stuck in Virginia with those redneck racists).

  I had another bad experience, this time while playing against the Clippers in Baltimore. We’d won our game—which was rare in that season; out of seventy-six games we ended up winning only sixteen—so a bunch of us went out for dinner to celebrate. Baltimore is famous for its seafood, and we were going to enjoy the cuisine of Charm City.

  A couple of the New Haven players were already in the restaurant when the rest of us arrived. But when the doorman, who was supposed to welcome guests, saw me he wouldn’t let me in. “No blacks allowed” is what he said. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was now 1973 and we had moved on, or so I thought. But it was clear that, in the United States, if you lived south of a certain line of latitude and east of a certain line of longitude, you’d meet people stuck in the nineteenth century.

  The players with me, all Canadian guys, looked at this doorman as if he were from another planet. But he refused to budge. So one of the guys went into the restaurant, got the other players out, and we all ate somewhere more civilized that night.

  I stayed with the Nighthawks for fifty games, contributing twenty-one goals and twenty-four assists. But I was very happy to return to the Gulls: they were aiming to make the playoffs, Jack Evans needed me, and they called me back. So I got the last word.

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  I closed out the season with another six goals and five assists in eighteen games. We made the playoffs that year, taking on the Phoenix Roadrunners in the first round of a best-of-seven series. The Roadrunners won in six games before going on to win the league championship. I hate losing, but it stings a little less when the team that beats you is the best in the league.

  We played them again in the playoffs the following season, when I scored thirty goals (in the process racking up my highest penalty total ever, eighty-nine minutes). This time the Roadrunners beat us in four games straight.

  One of my favorite games in that 1973–74 season came on January 3, 1974, when we took on the Russian national team before a standing-room-only crowd of 13,431—the largest in our past three seasons and the fourth largest in San Diego’s hockey history.

  The Russians had come to
town the year before (when I was with New Haven) and beat us 8–2. Still, I was excited about getting in this game, particularly since the Russians had nearly beaten Team Canada—a team of star NHL players—in an eight-game series in 1972. Everyone wanted to take their measure.

  Well, they certainly gave it to us, winning 11–3. I was astonished by their speed and skill. I mean, in my younger days I was maybe the fastest player in every league I played in. But the Russians kicked it all up a notch. In fact, they were so talented that they didn’t need to use their excellent goalie Vladislav Tretiak that night, nor their skilled and elegant forward Valeri Kharlamov. I was impressed by how good they were and by how they changed the game.

  I was also happy just to be able to skate with them. For one thing, the language barrier meant there was no trash talk. They played a clean game, too—it was great hockey. And although the fans hated them—the Cold War was still going on, America and the U.S.S.R. staring each other down on the global stage—out there on the ice we were all just hockey players playing the game we all loved. You know I hate losing, but just seeing how good those guys were up close made playing against them a lot of fun.

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  At the end of the 1973–74 season, the Gulls folded. It wasn’t exactly news to us. In May the owner of our arena had told us to get out by the end of the month in order to make way for the New Jersey Knights, who were relocating to San Diego as the Mariners.

  The team was part of the World Hockey Association, an upstart professional league that was challenging the NHL. So, in an attempt to ward them off, the NHL granted two expansion franchises for the 1975–76 season. The Gulls president, Bob Breitbard, had tried to get one of these but was blocked by the fact that the Mariners’ contract with the Sports Arena left no room for playing dates.