by Willie O'Ree
Robinson had played in Montreal for the Royals, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ farm team. People in Montreal loved him, but when he made it to the major leagues in 1947, it was very much the case that, because he was black, players in the league did not. Pitchers threw balls at his head. Fans lobbed other things at him. One of his own Brooklyn Dodgers teammates started a petition demanding that he be kicked off the team. And when he played against Southern teams, the Ku Klux Klan issued death threats from behind their white hoods.
Jackie Robinson just played ball, and he was the best. Such was his greatness as a man and as a player that MLB retired his number, 42, across the entire league, forever. The only other time that honor has been given to a player by any major league sport was in 2000, when the NHL retired the jersey of a skinny kid from Brampton, Ontario, by the name of Gretzky.
In one of those coincidences that we could also call fate, I met Jackie Robinson in 1949, when I was thirteen years old. My baseball team, the West Enders, had won Fredericton’s bantam city championship, and were rewarded with a trip to New York City to see the Brooklyn Dodgers play.
We drove down in five or six cars with our sponsors and became tourists. After the Empire State Building—which hurt my neck to look at, I had to lean so far back—we saw Radio City Music Hall. Then we crossed over the Brooklyn Bridge to Ebbets Field to watch Robinson work his magic. I don’t remember who they played or even if the Dodgers won that day. All I remember is the greatness of Jackie Robinson. He was fast, he was calm, and his every play was as if he’d invented baseball.
After the game we gathered in the Dodgers’ dugout and met Robinson himself. He could not have been nicer, asking each of us our name and whether we liked baseball. When my turn came, I told him that I liked baseball a lot but that I liked hockey more. He looked surprised and said that hockey didn’t have any black players. I told him he was looking at one, and that he’d see me make my mark on the game the way he’d made his on baseball.
Sure, one might think, here’s a kid who doesn’t know anything of the world, dreaming big dreams that’ll just vanish in the ether of adulthood. But I knew I was good.
* * *
—
It wasn’t just Phil Watson who’d told me I was NHL material. So too did my next coach, Black Jack Stewart, when I moved west to play for the Junior A Kitchener Canucks in 1955–56. I’d since become the property of the Montreal Canadiens as in those days, teams just moved players around like checkers on a board and you had no say in it whatsoever, so one day Watson told me that the Habs had moved me to their team in Kitchener. If you didn’t go you wouldn’t play, and so I went—and made the same impression on Stewart as I had on Watson. “You’re good enough to make the NHL, Willie” is what he told me, and I was sure that his twelve seasons in the NHL and his two Stanley Cup rings couldn’t be wrong either.
In Kitchener I was having one of those seasons that players dream about. We had a forty-eight-game schedule, and by game 41 I’d already scored thirty goals and added twenty-eight assists to give me fifty-eight points. I was tenth in the league when it came to goal scoring that season. So in November, when we played away against the Guelph Biltmores, our rivals in the Ontario Hockey Association, I was looking to add to that number to get the attention of NHL scouts.
But it was on that night that I had to begin everything all over again.
4.
THE INJURY
Every athlete knows that one injury can spell the end of a career, and every athlete does their best to prevent that injury from happening. You train hard, you take care to warm up and cool down, and you treat your body with the utmost respect because it’s the vehicle through which you play your sport. But there are some things you can’t control, and on November 22, 1955, I was going to literally come face to face with one of them when we played against the Guelph Biltmores.
Guelph and Kitchener-Waterloo are close, separated by just twenty-five miles. Guelph is an old city in southwestern Ontario, always known to be a clean, safe place where a steady flow of manufacturing jobs maintained its good reputation and grew hockey fans. Kitchener and Waterloo are even older twin cities, with Kitchener’s name having been changed from Berlin in 1916 on account of the anti-German feeling that spread through Canada during the First World War.
Their two teams were pretty equal as well, jockeying in the standings to eventually finish the season tied with fifty-three points. I knew it was going to be a tough game, especially with the playoffs coming up fast. Only seven games were left in our season.
We got a power play early in the first period. I was on the ice, trying to add to my goal total and get our team out front. I skated the puck deep into the Guelph zone along the left wing, then passed it back to my teammate Kent Douglas on the blue line. Then I skated over to stand in front of the Guelph goalie, trying to screen him when Kent took his shot. Maybe I’d get the tip of my stick on the puck and deflect it into the net.
Kent, who’d go on to become one of the NHL’s fiercest shooters with the Toronto Maple Leafs, fired one of his thundering slapshots. Just when I heard the puck crack off his stick I was cross-checked from behind by a Guelph defenseman. Then, as my head spun toward Kent’s shot, the puck deflected off the stick of another player and right into my face.
That’s all I remember. The rest I had to read about in the newspapers, and it’s difficult to read it even today.
The puck struck my face with such force that it broke my nose, crushed my right cheekbone, and almost pulverized the retina in my right eye. NHLers can shoot the puck around a hundred miles per hour. I have no idea how hard Kent shot the puck that day, but it felt as though he’d hit me in the face with a baseball bat. I was down on the ice lying in a pool of my own blood.
The ambulance took me to Kitchener-Waterloo hospital. The next day the newspapers reported that my condition was “fair” and that the attending physician, Dr. H.R. Henderson Sr., an eye specialist, said that my right eye had “suffered some damage, but the full extent of the injury has not yet been determined.” And stitches had closed up a deep cut to my right eyelid.
From where I lay, things, shall we say, “looked” a lot worse. I couldn’t see out of my right eye because of the bandage covering it. But I couldn’t see out of my left eye, either, having blinked so hard and so fast in panic to relieve what in those days they called “hysterical blindness.” For a frightening while, my left eye had gone blind, too, in a kind of psychological sympathy with my right eye.
Dr. Henderson was more direct with me than he’d been with the newspapers. “Willie,” he said, “the puck has destroyed about 95 percent of your right eye. You will not ever be able to see out of it again, and you won’t be able to play hockey ever again either. I’m sorry.”
He was sorry. I was devastated, but I’ll always be grateful to Dr. Henderson for not telling anyone else what he told me. Because during the next four days I spent in the hospital, I made up my mind that I would play hockey again. I just wouldn’t tell anyone about my blind right eye.
Well, I wouldn’t tell anyone but my sister Betty, with whom I was very close in both age and temperament. When I came home from the hospital, she thought, as did our parents, that I was healed and fit to play. Instead I was learning how to fake it as a one-eyed nineteen-year-old hockey player.
I told Betty the truth because I felt that at least one other person had to know, and she was the one I trusted most. She was alarmed, but she promised to keep it a secret. Betty knew how much playing hockey meant to me, and she knew that if our parents found out, my hockey days would be over. And true to her word, she never told a soul. In fact, my friend Junior didn’t know about it until seven or eight years ago. When we O’Rees want to keep a secret, we can do it.
* * *
—
My bigger problem was the fact that I played left wing, which meant that when I was flying down the ice with the puck—my goo
d eye closest to the boards, my blind eye closest to the rink—I’d need to have my head on a complete swivel to see whether anyone was coming to hit me.
So I spent that winter in my own private rehab. And as I skated I began to get a feel for the ice as a one-eyed player. I knew I could adapt when I stepped back onto the ice for Kitchener the next season. My left eye wasn’t noticeably better in terms of compensating for my blind right eye, but I think it probably was, since to this day I’m still 20/20 in my left eye. Plus I was still fast, and I could still play the game. This was a huge relief to me, even though I knew that if a puck ever hit me in my left eye, that would be the end.
It was a chance I had to take to make my professional dream come true. You might say I wasn’t going to let a little thing like blindness stop me, but that makes it sound glib. I was scared, for sure, but I was also afraid of what my life would be like if I didn’t try to make the pros. I could live with the risk to my eye, but I couldn’t live with the “what ifs” if I didn’t go full steam ahead with my hockey dream.
As winter gave way to spring I got back into baseball—and found that my skills on the field hadn’t been affected by my blind right eye. Maybe, I thought, this could be the sport where I became a professional. I knew I was already good enough to play pro hockey in Fredericton. Could I play in a bigger league, on a grander stage? Or would I have to begin again and leave my hockey dreams on the baseball field? All those questions would be flooding my mind because, in the summer of 1956, major league baseball came calling for Willie O’Ree.
5.
THE SUMMER GAME
I’m very happy to be living in today’s world, as I believe that we’ve improved as a species and that more people on our planet are better off than they were when I was born more than eighty years ago. Of course, we have a long way to go, assuming we don’t destroy the planet on our journey toward perfection.
But there’s one thing that I do think was better when I was growing up: how we as kids played. Our games and sports were governed by the seasons, and not so much by associations and leagues and money. And we also just loved to play, as we didn’t have cell phones or computer games to turn our attention away from the field or rink. In autumn we played rugby and basketball and began the hockey season, which stretched into the winter and ended when the ice melted in spring. Then we began track and field, volleyball, tennis, and baseball, which I played onward into summer.
I played shortstop and second base because I liked to be in the hot spots—just as I played forward in hockey because I wanted to be up there in the other team’s zone, putting the puck in the net, getting in the goalie’s face, tussling with the opposing defensemen who were trying to get me out of there. I liked the action, and if you play shortstop or second base, you’re right in the middle of it.
As a shortstop, you have to be fast—able to blast from a standing start forward or laterally—because the chance of a ground ball being hit into your defensive area is higher than that for any other player on the field. And you have to cover for second and third base if those players are playing the ball, so you’re moving around a lot. As a second baseman, you have to be able to throw and to master the double play. And you have to keep your nerve as guys slide into second, trying to knock you over while you’re trying to throw to first base to make that double play. So I figured I was handling two of the toughest positions on the field.
And in 1956, in the spring after my eye injury, I was playing baseball for Fredericton. That way I was able to keep my five-ten, 175-pound self in shape for hockey. And I also made a few bucks. Not a lot, but it was good to get paid to play because that’s what I was: a professional athlete.
The question in my mind, though, was this: At which sport was I going to be a professional? I was playing minor pro hockey but had my eye (the left one) squarely on the NHL. Meanwhile I’d inherited my dad’s baseball talent to the point that other teams were showing interest in what I could do on the field.
Hockey is a game of constant motion, high speed, and violence; baseball is a game of long periods of waiting and short periods of motion. In hockey you can lose yourself totally in the moment because your shift is short and those three twenty-minute periods fly by, whereas in baseball you can contemplate eternity because those nine innings have no clock on them.
And since the movement in baseball is slower, I found that it was much easier than hockey to play it with one eye. You’re staring straight ahead when the batter is up, and if he hits the ball to you, then you turn your entire body in the direction in which you need to throw the ball—so once again you’re looking straight ahead, and not on a 180-degree swivel at some hockey player speeding in to smash you into the boards. In short, it’s a much gentler game—so I had no trouble playing it with only one eye.
Proof of this came during that 1956 season when the Marysville Royals asked if I’d like to suit up for them. Today Marysville is part of Fredericton, just a few miles from the city center on the north side of the Saint John River, but in those days it was pretty rural; to me, it felt as though I’d be literally going to the farm team. Even so, they had a pretty good roster, and had won the New Brunswick Senior League championship the season before. And when they said they’d pay me more than what I was making in Fredericton, I became a Marysville Royal.
In fact, the Royals were a very good team. And I wanted to play for the best, figuring it would test me, allowing me to make the clearest decision about what sport to dedicate my life to, now that I’d reached the ripe old age of twenty.
* * *
—
That decision came sooner than expected when two scouts from the National League’s Milwaukee Braves approached me in the dressing room after watching me play in a game. The Braves had moved to Milwaukee from Boston in 1953, after eight decades as the Boston Braves. Babe Ruth had returned to Boston to play at the end of his great career. And Milwaukee loved the Braves. The team had been invigorated by the move, finishing second in the National League to the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1955 season. They’d go on to win the World Series in 1957.
But now, in 1956, these two scouts had their eyes on me. “We like your prospects, Willie, and we’d like you to come down to our minor league club for a tryout,” they said.
“And where is that?” I asked.
“Waycross, Georgia.”
I knew how black people were treated in the southern United States, so I said, “I don’t think so.”
They looked surprised. They represented a very good team; I should have been flattered and thrilled by their invitation. But it was the first time in my professional sporting life that my skin color made a difference, and the difference was to me. I was very leery of doing anything in the state of Georgia, or in the American South in general.
The year before, a little league team made up of black kids in South Carolina won the state championship—because all fifty-five white teams had withdrawn rather than play against black kids. Of course, the state didn’t count the black kids as the champions in the end, but it was a pretty stark comment on how racism started early in the South. And just after New Year’s Day 1955, Georgia Tech threatened to pull out of the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans because their opponent, the University of Pittsburgh, had a black player, running back Bobby Grier. In the end sanity prevailed and Grier played. But those two instances of Southern racism paled when I thought about what had happened to Emmett Till.
Emmett Till had just turned fourteen in the summer of 1955 when he left his home in Chicago to spend the summer with relatives in rural Mississippi. His mother warned her “class clown” son that the kinds of things he could joke about in the North could get him into trouble in the South.
Emmett arrived in Money, Mississippi, on August 21, 1955, and stayed with his great uncle, Moses Wright, who was a sharecropper; Emmett helped him with the cotton harvest. Three days after his arrival, he and a group of other teens went to a loc
al grocery store after work. Emmett apparently joked with the white female cashier—maybe by whistling at her or flirting with her.
Then he went back to his uncle’s home, not mentioning it to him because there must have been, in his mind, nothing to mention. But in the middle of the night on August 28, the cashier’s husband and his half-brother broke into Moses Wright’s home, put a gun to the terrified Emmett Till’s head, and took him away.
They beat him something awful. They gouged out one of his eyes. Then they took this child to the banks of the Tallahatchie River and shot him in the head. Finally they tied his body to a large metal fan with some barbed wire and dumped poor Emmett into the river.
His uncle went to the police, and the two murderers were arrested the next day. Emmett’s body was found two days later, his face unrecognizable.
Tens of thousands of people lined the streets of Chicago to pay their respect to Emmett Till and his family. His mother kept Emmett’s casket open so that people could see what racists had done to her son. The black magazine Jet and the black newspaper The Chicago Defender published pictures of the boy in his casket, catching the attention of the world. Emmett’s murder was one of those terrible events that fueled the rising civil rights movement.
So did the trial of the men who killed Emmett Till. Despite the fact that Emmett’s uncle had identified the killers in court, an all-white male jury (black people and women couldn’t serve as jurors in Mississippi back then) deliberated for little more than an hour and acquitted the killers. The following year, the two men told Look magazine how they had tortured and murdered Emmett, and got paid for their story.