What was really crazy was that in each game I was using nine sticks, three sets of gloves, and three or four different helmets. In a record-setting situation, everybody wants something when the big goal is scored. The Hall of Fame wanted something, the NHL wanted something, the team wanted something, and on it goes.
We were at home on March 23, 1994, when Vancouver came in. The Canucks played a big game and were a good skating club, so it was always tough to go up against them. But at 14:47 of the second period on our power play, the right guys were on the ice—Marty McSorley, Luc Robitaille, and Jari Kurri.
Luc made a drop pass to me just inside the blue line and I gave it to Marty, who returned it cross-ice. I picked it out of the air past the middle of the right circle and put it in past Kirk McLean. Of all the goals I scored in my career, that goal means the most because of the connection to Gordie Howe, the greatest of them all.
Fifteen
WILLIE O’REE
Willie O’Ree is one of those great characters in hockey. Born in 1935, he was the first black player in the NHL and paved the way for guys like Tony McKegney, Grant Fuhr, Anson Carter, Jarome Iginla, and P.K. Subban.
Although his parents were born in Canada and he grew up in Fredericton, his great-grandparents had been slaves who came through the Underground Railroad to Nova Scotia and from there to New Brunswick. But O’Ree’s childhood story isn’t just about race. He was a lot like any other Canadian kid who fell in love with hockey. When he was only three years old his dad gave him his first pair of skates. They were basically blocks of wood with double blades on the bottom and straps that went over your shoes. With the two blades on each foot, they worked like training wheels. O’Ree would lean on a chair and push himself back and forth across the backyard rink.
When O’Ree was a kid, there were only two black families in Fredericton, so all his friends were white. Still, he later said that he could have been purple for all the difference it made. He wouldn’t learn about racial discrimination, in hockey or in life, until later. As he saw it, in those early days, black meant puck and white meant ice.
As O’Ree grew older he became aware that there were things he couldn’t do and places he couldn’t go. When he was a teenager, it was pretty much impossible to have a girlfriend. There were no black girls his age at school. It was an unwritten rule, but very much understood by everyone, that white girls were off-limits for a black man. O’Ree would have secret crushes on girls, but that’s as far as it went.
He also couldn’t go into the barbershop. There were no signs, but it was understood that it was a white barbershop. O’Ree was good friends with the barber’s son, Joe McQuade, so he asked him what would happen if he went in for a haircut. Joe said he didn’t know. So one afternoon, O’Ree walked in and sat down and Mr. McQuade cut his hair. Joe’s father was criticized for it, but he always took care of O’Ree. O’Ree made up his mind then and there that he wasn’t going to let prejudice stand in his way.
He played every sport—baseball, basketball, tennis, volleyball, soccer—but mostly he loved hockey. He’d listen to Foster Hewitt’s play-by-play on Hockey Night in Canada on the radio every Saturday night. His favorite players were Rocket Richard and Gordie Howe. (When O’Ree finally made the NHL, he once found himself in the corner with Gordie and got a faceful of the famous Howe elbow. As Gordie skated away with the puck he called back to O’Ree, “Keep your head up, rookie.”)
In his first year in high school, O’Ree was good enough to make the Fredericton Junior Capitals. A year later, he moved up to the Senior Capitals. When he turned nineteen he moved on to major junior with the Quebec Frontenacs, where he made sixty dollars a week. That was great money for a kid in those days and it was enough to help his family buy their first house for $3,000. His family had always been renters, so that was a big day.
O’Ree’s coach in Quebec was Phil Watson, who’d played thirteen years in the NHL with the Rangers and Canadiens. Phil told O’Ree that he had the skills to play in the NHL but that people might not accept him because he was black. The next year O’Ree went to play for the Kitchener-Waterloo Canucks in Ontario, coached by Hall of Famer “Black Jack” Stewart—the teammate Gordie Howe had got tangled up with the night of his dangerous head injury.
Then something happened that threatened O’Ree’s NHL dream. A shot from the point deflected off Willie’s stick and struck him in the right eye, breaking his nose and his cheek.
After the operation on his eye, the surgeon, Dr. Henry Soon, came into the recovery room. “Mr. O’Ree,” he said, “the impact of the puck completely shattered the retina in your right eye. You’re going to be blind in that eye, and you’ll never play hockey again.” Ten days later the twenty-year-old was back on his skates. He kept the news about being blind in one eye to himself. Instead, as a left-handed left-winger, he learned to compensate by turning his head all the way around to the right to pick the puck up. At first he was overskating the puck and missing the net, and then he told himself, “Forget about what you can’t see and just concentrate on what you can see.” So his game started to improve. He scored a few goals, and then the season ended. That’s when Punch Imlach, who was with the Quebec Aces, asked him to come to training camp. Imlach signed O’Ree for $3,500 plus a $500 signing bonus and another bonus if he scored twenty goals.
In 1949, O’Ree’s baseball team in Fredericton won a league championship and was rewarded with a trip to New York that included a Dodgers game at Ebbets Field to meet the great Jackie Robinson, who’d broken baseball’s color barrier with the Dodgers two years earlier. The kids lined up after the game and Jackie shook their hands. He was about to move on when O’Ree told him that he was a hockey player. Jackie stopped and said, “I didn’t realize there were any black kids playing hockey.” And O’Ree said, “Yeah, there’s a few.”
Herb Carnegie—a center who played senior hockey in the 1940s and 50s—had come close. Conn Smythe would say of him, “Somebody get me a paintbrush. If I could paint him white, he’d make the team.” Carnegie played in the Quebec Senior League with Jean Béliveau, who saw him as “a super hockey player [with] a beautiful style, a beautiful skater, a great playmaker. In those days, the younger ones learned from the older ones. I learned from Herbie.” Carnegie was also part of the first all-black line in the Quebec Provincial League, known as the Black Aces—he played center while his brother Ossie and Manny McIntyre were wingers. Named most valuable player in 1946, 1947, and 1948, he tried out for the New York Rangers in 1948, but there were some racial problems there too. Although he was among the best players at camp, he was only offered a contract to play in the minors. Carnegie decided to stay in Quebec, where the money was better.
O’Ree, too, spent time in an American training camp when the Milwaukee Braves of baseball’s National League brought him down to Georgia. It was his first time in the Deep South and he was shocked. He had to stay in a blacks-only hotel, and for the first time in his life he was told to sit at the back of the bus. But at the end of the tryout, he too headed back to Canada to play hockey. After all, O’Ree liked playing with the Aces. (For a short time in 1958–59, O’Ree played on an all-black line with Stan Maxwell and twenty-year-old John Utendale, who had earlier played with Mark Messier’s father, Doug, on the junior Edmonton Oil Kings.)
O’Ree’s teammates and their hometown fans in Quebec treated him well, but when the Aces went on the road, fans in other rinks would call him names. There was no glass between the stands and penalty box, and sometimes they’d spit and throw drinks on him. Opposition players went after him too—there was a lot of name-calling, stick work, elbows, and hits from behind—but O’Ree gave as good as he got. He had to let them know he wasn’t an easy mark or they’d run all over him.
• • •
In August 1957, Lynn Patrick, the Bruins’ GM, invited O’Ree to the Bruins’ training camp. O’Ree framed the letter and still has it today. On January 18, 1958, he was
called up to replace Leo Labine, who had the flu. It was a Saturday night, so the game was broadcast on Hockey Night in Canada. O’Ree played on a line with Don McKenney and Jerry Toppazzini against his heroes Jean Béliveau, Doug Harvey, and Jacques Plante. The Bruins beat the Canadiens 3–0 that night.
O’Ree had no idea of the game’s significance until he opened the newspaper the next morning to search for his name in the box scores, and to his surprise he found a couple of lines in the third paragraph saying that he was the “first Negro ever to play in the N.H.L., at left wing for the Bruins.”
Once O’Ree was in the league, the name-calling escalated—not so much in Canada, where he was known from his junior days, but in Detroit, Chicago, and New York. If O’Ree told the refs, they’d brush him off.
Eric Nesterenko, a winger with the Black Hawks who finished his career with over a thousand penalty minutes, once skated up to O’Ree and made racial comments during the warm-up. He knew then that he would have to fight Nesterenko that night.
Seven minutes in, Nesterenko butt-ended him in the mouth. He broke O’Ree’s nose, split his lip, and knocked out his two front teeth. Then he stood over him, calling him the N-word several times. But that wasn’t what set O’Ree off. As Nesterenko stood there and laughed at him, daring him to do something about it, O’Ree thought, “You have to do something now or he’ll be chasing you the rest of the year.” So O’Ree clubbed him over the head with his stick. Nesterenko needed fifteen stitches.
O’Ree was traded to Montreal a year after they won five Stanley Cups in a row. Montreal was so deep that he was sent to the minors in Hull-Ottawa, and then traded to the WHL’s Los Angeles Blades, where he was moved to right wing. That meant the passes and the checks came at him from the left where he could see them, so his totals jumped to twenty-eight goals and twenty-six assists in 1961–62, and he won the goal-scoring title in 1964–65.
In Los Angeles, 1962, O’Ree was at an NAACP luncheon in Jackie Robinson’s honor. Robinson was standing over in the corner when O’Ree’s coach brought O’Ree and a couple of other players over to meet him. He said, “Mr. Robinson, I’d like to introduce you to a couple of players. This is Willie O’Ree, newly acquired from Canada to join our team.” And Robinson looked O’Ree in the eye and said, “Willie O’Ree. You’re the young fellow I met in Brooklyn.” It just goes to show, you don’t forget a guy like Willie O’Ree.
Sixteen
STAND FIRM
No one is exactly sure where the game of hockey started. Some people think it is a Canadian adaptation of the traditional Irish sport of hurling. Others claim it was an invention of students at McGill University in Montreal. But there is a solid claim that a sport not unlike hockey was played by Native North Americans before Europeans ever arrived. Certainly, some of the first hockey sticks were made by the Mi’kmaq First Nation in Nova Scotia. In fact, the “Mic Mac” stick was the most popular stick in the game in the first decades of the twentieth century (and was used by Lord Stanley’s sons).
Even though the First Nations were part of the evolution of the game from the very beginning, it wasn’t until 1954 that Fred Sasakamoose, a short, speedy center with great skills, became the very first Native Canadian player with treaty status to make the NHL. Born on Christmas Day 1933, Sasakamoose grew up on the Ahtahkakoop reserve in Sandy Lake, Saskatchewan, and began playing hockey at a residential school in Duck Lake. His Aboriginal name, pronounced tah-saw, means “stand firm,” and that is the man he became.
When Sasakamoose was very young, his grandfather, who was deaf and mute, would put him in a sleigh and take him to the slough near their cabin to play hockey. He would scrape off a bit of the ice and help Sasakamoose pull on three or four pairs of socks and a pair of moccasins, and then he’d slide a little pair of box skates over the boy’s feet. Next, his grandfather would hand him a little hockey stick that he’d whittled from a willow branch.
Sasakamoose’s grandfather would stand him up and let him go, and then turn his own attention to chopping a hole in the ice to fish. Sasakamoose would rush around pushing a chunk of frozen horse manure all over with his stick. When he fell down, his grandfather would pull himself up off his seat on an upside-down five-gallon pail, pick Sasakamoose up, and make him try again.
Later in the day, when it got too cold, his grandfather would pack up and take Sasakamoose home. He would hold the boy on his knee in front of the stove, warming him up by rubbing his back while he peeled off the frozen layers of his outer clothing.
All six members of Sasakamoose’s family lived in a tiny, mud-daubed log house. His mother used to braid Fred’s and his brother Frank’s hair every day. There was no such thing as welfare in those days. If you didn’t work, you starved. The closest hospital was eighty miles away in Prince Albert. The family used traditional medicine—roots, leaves, grass, whatever was taught—and that’s how they survived. They lived off the land and they were happy.
In 1940, when Sasakamoose was six years old, an RCMP officer, a government agent, and a Catholic priest came for him and his brother. They pulled into the yard in a three-ton truck already filled with crying children. His grandfather tried to pull Sasakamoose close to protect him. Sasakamoose could see the tears dropping down his cheeks. But the government agent shoved the old man back. It was the last time Sasakamoose ever saw his grandfather. He died that winter.
It took about five hours to get to Duck Lake Residential School. The first thing the priests did when the boys arrived was cut off their braids. Then they poured coal oil, which is like kerosene, over their heads. Next, they threw the boys into a large steam bath, about thirty or forty kids at a time. Sasakamoose remembers how he sweated in that steam bath and how the coal oil burned his eyes. His parents were only 120 miles away, but they were not allowed to see their boys for two years. Terrible things happened to him at Duck Lake.
In the spring of 1943, when Sasakamoose was nine years old, he and a friend named Charlie ran away. They made it to the banks of the Saskatchewan River, about ten miles from the school. The river was a couple of hundred yards wide—a long way across. But Sasakamoose was too ashamed to go back and face the teasing from the other kids, so he and Charlie waded in. They’d made it about five or six feet when they got caught in the current. Later, Sasakamoose would say that river didn’t want them to drown, so it swept them back to the shoreline.
The priests eventually found them and brought them back. But first they took their shoes. They made the boys walk all the way back in bare feet on gravel.
Fred was eleven years old when Father Georges Roussel came to Duck Lake from Quebec. Father Roussel was an athlete and a sportsman. He played basketball, baseball, and soccer. In the winter, he ran a hockey team. When Fred had milked enough cows, made enough beds, and cleaned enough toilets, he earned a pair of secondhand skates and was able to join the Duck Lake team.
Father Roussel would turn on the radio on Saturday nights at six o’clock so he and the boys could listen to Hockey Night in Canada. Foster Hewitt was so good at play-by-play that the boys didn’t need to watch TV to “see” the games. Hewitt took them by the hand and gave them front-row seats.
When Sasakamoose was fourteen, Father Roussel came to him and said, “Freddie, you’re going to hate my guts, but I’m going to make you skate for four hours every day in the cold. I’m going to make a champion out of you.” But Sasakamoose didn’t hate it. He loved the four-hour outside practices. It didn’t matter how cold it was—it didn’t matter that his hands and feet were stiff and numb—because when he was in his skates with a stick in his hand, he was back home on the slough with his grandfather.
Father Roussel noticed that Sasakamoose seemed much stronger on his right than his left. So he nailed tobacco cans on top of the boards and had Sasakamoose shoot left and then right for hours and hours until he was accurate on both sides. That old priest was determined. He made Sasakamoose into a left-handed shooter just like G
ordie Howe.
In 1949–50, the Duck Lake team led by Sasakamoose won the Saskatchewan midget championship, and although he didn’t know it, Sasakamoose had been scouted.
He was sixteen and finally free to go home for good. He had been away for almost ten years. All he could think about was having his mom and dad hug him and kiss him and care for him. He had been without the love of another human being for too long.
That summer, Sasakamoose, Frank, and their parents were piling grain for a local farmer. Each of them made fifty cents an acre. Sasakamoose was in the middle of a field when he saw a car pull up and two people get out. As they got closer, Sasakamoose recognized Father Roussel. The other person was a big white man, wearing a long coat. Sasakamoose hid behind a stack of grain. No way was he going back to Duck Lake.
A little while later, he heard his mother calling. His parents had been talking to the priest. Sasakamoose couldn’t ignore her, so he put his head down and went over with tears in his eyes. She said, “They want you to play hockey.” George Vogan, the man with Father Roussel, put out his hand and said, “Come with me to Moose Jaw.” Sasakamoose’s father put his arm around his son and whispered in Cree, “Go now, but come back in two weeks.”
In early September, Sasakamoose moved in with Vogan and his family. There was a lot to get used to—a bathroom inside and running water. Back home when he wanted to clean up, he went to the lake.
Sasakamoose thrilled the Vogans with his fast hands. He would take four quarters and throw them up high in the air, catching them one at a time on each knuckle of his left hand. He also liked to open the birdcage so the family’s budgie could fly around the room. Sasakamoose would stand very still, watching it go, and then reach out and snatch the bird right out of the air.
Sasakamoose went to the training camp of the Moose Jaw Canucks, and on the morning of the second week, he headed to the highway and started the five-hundred-mile walk home. He picked dried Saskatoon berries and chokecherries from bushes that grew along the ditch and drank water from nearby creeks when he got thirsty. Late that afternoon, having walked for eight hours, he sat down to rest. A car pulled up—it was Vogan. He said, “Where are you going?” Sasakamoose replied, “George, it’s been two weeks. I’m going home to my reservation, where I belong.”
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