by Willie O'Ree
But in his years playing and coaching for the Aces, the championship trophy had eluded him. Punch also had his sights on the NHL, so he wanted to build a team that would give him—and us—our best shot at the top rung on the professional ladder. In fact, thirteen of the players on the Aces in that 1956–57 season had, or would have, NHL experience. And we all wanted to go there for the first time—or go back there for a reprise—Punch included.
I learned a lot from him in Quebec, but it was at my first Aces training camp that I learned that if a player didn’t have a strong work ethic, there was no room for him on Imlach’s Quebec Aces. So I worked twice as hard as I ever had. In drills I could cheat a bit, moving in a way that I could see the puck, but when we had scrimmages and I played on left wing, I had to rely on my speed to keep me from being stapled to the boards by a bodycheck I didn’t see coming. Meanwhile, off the ice, I ran and lifted weights, doing everything I could to show Imlach that the $4,000 he was paying me (he’d become part owner of the Aces) was not going to be wasted.
* * *
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I got a nice, inexpensive apartment in Quebec City and made that money go far. In fact, I’d send a bit home to my parents each payday. Hockey actually changed their lives: Harry and Rosebud had been renting on Charlotte Street, but now, thanks to hockey, they could own a place, and so they did.
The mother of the other black family in town, Mrs. Isabell Lawrence, was great friends with my mom. My mother had always loved her house, and one day, after her boys had moved away, Mrs. Lawrence told my mom that it was up for sale. There was money in the bank to buy the house, so I said to my parents, “Go get a real estate agent and let’s do it.”
Mrs. Lawrence must have felt her life was coming to a close, because by the time we moved in, she was dead. I don’t know why she didn’t leave the house to her sons. But she just loved my mother, Rosebud, who used to cook for her, and I used to shovel her driveway and clean snow off her steps, so maybe she just wanted us to have a home of our own.
Once we’d moved in we fixed up the house, which was smaller than the one we’d been living in across the street. But there was a cellar downstairs, dark and cool, where my mom could can and store our vegetables. It was such a relief to my parents to know they were in their own place and that it was all paid for.
That’s one of the things I was proudest of: hockey had given me money to help them buy a house. They’d always made a home for me, a wonderful place I’d go back to in a second if I could time travel. And now I was able to help make a home for them. It makes me proud still.
* * *
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So did playing for Punch Imlach. He’s earned a reputation as being a hard guy to get along with, but I think he was the fairest coach I ever played for. He had a simple philosophy, which he would tell us all the time: “Play hard, dress like a pro, and have money in your pocket.”
He swore a lot, and he was very superstitious, especially when it came to buying new hats and suits before games. Some have even said that he was mean, but I can’t say enough good things about Punch. He’d stand at center ice, whistle in hand, and yell at us to work harder, to go after that puck. “I want you guys to get mad!” he’d shout, and we would get mad—at the puck, at each other, and sometimes at him.
Punch was the type of guy who liked a fast, aggressive hockey player, and that was me. If you worked hard, played both ends of the ice, and went full-out after the puck, he was the easiest coach in the world. If you didn’t, then in all likelihood you wouldn’t be playing on his team for very long.
That’s what made him a champion. He wanted to win, and sure enough, in my first pro season, the team finished in first place with eighty-seven points—thirteen points better than the second-place team, Chicoutimi. I myself had a good year, scoring twenty-two goals and adding twelve assists, so I got that $300 bonus. And since we made the playoffs, that other $300 kicked in as well. In the final series we beat the Brandon Manitoba Regals and won the championship for all the minor pro leagues: the Duke of Edinburgh’s Trophy. We were the best team in the country in a league that wasn’t the NHL.
* * *
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It was during that first year of pro hockey, though, that I realized getting to the NHL wouldn’t be any easier than getting to the Quebec Aces. In many ways, it was harder. I was starting to see how racism had stacked the cards against me. And no matter how much I let it roll off my back, sometimes I just couldn’t.
I heard my first racial insult at twelve, when two brothers at school used the N-word on me. At that age kids start to see the world with a harsher eye, and they can take on the worst traits of adults without realizing the damage they’re causing. Puzzled by such a sudden, unprovoked attack, I told Coot about it. He had a word with the brothers, and they never bothered me again. I wish I could say the same about adult fans in the province of Quebec, who treated me worse than in anyplace I’ve ever played.
Now, the fans in Quebec City were great, but I was a twenty-plus goal scorer on the home team. There was another black player on the roster, Stan Maxwell; we’d joined the Aces in the same season. Not only was he was from Truro, Nova Scotia, and so a Maritimer like me; he also came from a big family, with even more kids than my own. Stan got his first pair of skates at a rummage sale, he told me, and scored his first five hundred goals between rocks on a frozen pond. That early training must have paid off: Stan was a silky centerman who could put a pass right on your tape in a hundred different ways. And outside of my brother Richard, Stan was my best buddy in hockey. As the only two black guys playing in the Quebec League, we were treated very well in Quebec City, as if we were princes in exile in this wonderful old hockey-mad town. The problems, for me and Stan, happened when we went on road trips, and the worst place of all was Chicoutimi.
Chicoutimi is a town about a hundred miles north of Quebec City, on the Saguenay River; its local team was called the Saguenéens. The place was almost entirely francophone, and had been for a very long time, so pretty much everyone who came into town was an “outsider.” And if you were black, well, you might as well have come from the moon.
As soon as I stepped onto the ice in the Chicoutimi barn I could hear the chants and the name-calling. “Maudit negre” was the most common one, which means something like “damned Negro.”
Sometimes I’d get a penalty for something or other, and off I’d go to the penalty box. In my first season with the Aces I racked up eighty minutes in penalties (my highest total until 1974, when I notched eighty-nine minutes in the sin bin). In those days there was no glass between the fans and the player sitting in the penalty box, so if someone wanted to, they could come right down from the stands and have a conversation with you face to face, as it were.
So there I was, sitting in the Chicoutimi penalty box. I’d just taken off my gloves to grab a drink of water when I heard the crowd chanting the usual unimaginative “maudit negre” refrain. But when the chanting got louder, I suspected they were cheering someone on—and that the someone was coming up behind me in the penalty box. Needless to say, the guy wasn’t likely coming by to say hello.
I didn’t turn around. I just waited, listening for the sound of a shoe stepping onto the floor of the penalty box. When I heard it, I turned fast (to my left, of course) and saw the guy who was about to jump me. I met him with one clean punch. He went flying backwards.
This did not make the Chicoutimi fans happy. Now they were screaming for blood, and some of them started to climb down toward me in the penalty box. But my teammates came to the rescue, and soon we had a real brawl, with guys duking it out all over the ice and my teammates trying to get me out of the box.
The guy who’d planned to attack me got up with a bloody nose, and although he tried to escape back up the stairs, he was blocked by screaming fans. I could have landed a couple more punches on him, but I’d made my point.
It was ugly, and i
t certainly wasn’t isolated.
Sometimes people would spit on me or throw drinks on me. My parents had always said that life in hockey would be difficult and that the world was filled with racists. I certainly knew that to be true during my time playing in Quebec, and I would know it again, but I wasn’t going to quit.
I told myself I’d quit only if my skills slowed down to the point where I couldn’t compete. I wasn’t about to let a bunch of stupid, ignorant people chase me out of pro hockey. I was going to show everyone that I could play with the best.
And I was just getting started.
8.
CAMP BIG LEAGUE
In the summer of 1957 I was feeling great, all things considered. I’d just come off my first professional hockey season, having scored more than twenty goals and with my name on a championship trophy. And I could still hear the words Phil Watson, my Quebec Frontenacs junior coach, had said: that if I applied myself, I had the skills to make the NHL. All I cared about was proving him right about my skills. But the world’s greatest hockey league was tough to get into, no matter what color you were.
The period between 1942 and 1967 has come down to us as the golden age of the NHL’s Original Six, but it wasn’t original, and it certainly wasn’t golden. The six teams that formed this mythic union were the Boston Bruins, Toronto Maple Leafs, Montreal Canadiens, Chicago Black Hawks, Detroit Red Wings, and New York Rangers. In 1917, when the NHL was formed, the only one of these that actually existed was Montreal. And in 1942, when the NHL’s New York/Brooklyn Americans folded, it was the Canadiens, along with the other five, that were the surviving clubs. Those six teams would make up the NHL until the league doubled in size in 1967.
But back in 1957 there were thirty-two teams in the minor pro leagues, each carrying twenty-three guys. So if you add those 736 minor league guys to the 132 or so in the NHL, there were roughly 862 guys already playing hockey at a high level who were after those 132 NHL jobs. That meant you had a one in six shot at making the NHL. But it was actually tougher than that, because guys like Jean Béliveau and Gordie Howe and Terry Sawchuk and Jacques Plante and Andy Bathgate and Bronco Horvath and a whole bunch of other stars were permanent NHL fixtures and not part of the equation. Their spots were taken. There weren’t really 132 spots available.
And the NHL was about to undergo a major business transformation. Hockey players, like baseball players, were trying to form a union. A few months earlier, in February 1957, Doug Harvey of Montreal and Ted Lindsay, captain of Detroit, had spearheaded the formation of the National Hockey League Players’ Association. The NHLPA sued the league over several issues: provision of player pensions, payment of salaries during training camp, meal allowances on the road, and payment for playing exhibition games. They also wanted to establish a “no trade” clause after a guy had spent six years in the league with a specific team.
It was a bold initiative, one that would eventually change the nature of professional sports. At the time, though, the league and the owners saw it as treason. And as a real threat to their power.
As a result, Ted Lindsay of Detroit was stripped of his captaincy. Then, most shocking of all, on July 23, 1957, while hockey writers were at the beach, Lindsay—one of the toughest, best players in the NHL—was traded to the lowly Chicago Black Hawks. The message was clear: no one was untouchable if he crossed the NHL’s powers that be.
I wasn’t looking for trouble, and to be honest, I was looking at the NHL’s labor stuff as a twenty-one-year-old guy trying to raise the level of his game. I knew guys wanted to hold on to whatever job they had, and sure, I’d made more money than ever before that past season in Quebec City. I wasn’t looking to lose my job. I was looking to get a better one.
* * *
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Back in those days, professional athletes—even NHL players—had to hold down jobs in the summer to make ends meet. So in the summer of 1957 I was back home working in a service station, pumping gas and changing oil and checking tire pressure and so on. I liked the job, as I liked meeting people. I knew a lot of them, and they knew me too as a hockey player, so I had fun talking about the game with my customers.
Coot was driving a three-ton truck for a produce company called Willett Food, delivering fruits and vegetables to small country stores. Sometimes I’d go with him on his rounds and he’d let me drive the truck along the dirt roads. So I learned to drive on this massive beast with a stick shift, but since I didn’t know any differently it was fine with me.
One August day I came home from the service station and my mother told me I had mail. The way she said it, though, with a hopeful smile and a twinkle in her eye, wasn’t because I was her favorite baby boy. She knew the letter was something I wanted.
So I picked up my letter and looked at the return address. It was postmarked from Boston. Better still, it was from the Boston Bruins. I felt my chest swell as I slowly opened the envelope, not wanting to jinx what I hoped was inside: my ticket to the NHL.
Now, the Boston Bruins didn’t have as deep a system of farm teams as other clubs did. Whereas the Montreal Canadiens, say, or Toronto Maple Leafs had layers of talent spread across several leagues, the Bruins had working agreements with professional teams like the Quebec Aces. This meant that Boston could invite players in the minor pro leagues to try out for them, and even have them sent up to fill a gap on the NHL squad.
The letter was from the team’s general manager, Lynn Patrick, who came from one of pro hockey’s pioneer families. In fact, to call them pioneers understates their influence on the game, which pretty much turned it into the game we love today. Back in 1912 Lynn’s dad, Lester, and his uncle, Frank, started a professional hockey league out on Canada’s West Coast, with teams in Vancouver, Victoria, and New Westminster. They built the biggest rink in the world: Vancouver’s Denman Arena could seat 10,500 hockey fans, 2,500 more than Madison Square Garden in New York. And since you don’t get much ice or snow out in the West Coast, the Patricks installed artificial ice in their arenas to make sure their teams could play when Mother Nature wasn’t cooperating.
They soon had teams in Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon. If you ever want to win a bar bet, ask someone who thinks they know hockey to name the first American team to win the Stanley Cup. If they’re pretty knowledgeable, they’ll say the New York Rangers in 1928, but they’d be wrong. It was the Seattle Metropolitans in 1917. They played in the Patricks’ league back when the Stanley Cup was a challenge trophy, meaning that teams finishing at the top of a recognized league could challenge the current holder of the Cup to play for it. In the early days of hockey there could be two or three challenges in a season, and in 1917 the Metropolitans of the Patricks’ Pacific Coast Hockey Association defeated the Montreal Canadiens of the National Hockey Association three games to one. (That’s the double-or-nothing bet, just in case they get the Metropolitans right in the first wager.)
I had a great fondness for the Patricks, responsible as they were for creating the game I was now playing, although I didn’t realize how much until years later when I started to learn more hockey history. (They don’t teach you that when you learn to skate.) For instance, the Patricks invented the blue line. In early hockey, you couldn’t pass the puck forward. You could only pass it sideways, the way they pass the ball in rugby. But with the invention of the blue line players could pass the puck forward between each team’s blue line—which made the game faster and more creative and more exciting.
The Patricks also invented line changes, the penalty shot, the farm team system, the playoff system, the power play, the ability of goalies to fall in making saves (before they had to stand upright, though there’s also evidence that the Maritimes’ Coloured League was first on this front), numbers on jerseys, and a few other things. Really, they pretty much invented the modern game.
Lynn Patrick himself had played ten seasons for the New York Rangers at center and left wing and had wo
n a Stanley Cup. So you could say that getting anything from Lynn Patrick was a big deal, even if he started his letter to me in a way that made me smile.
“Dear Bill,” it began—no one but strangers called me Bill.
The Boston Bruins will hold their training camp here in Boston at the Boston Garden. We will begin our training period on the afternoon of Sunday, September 15. We would like you to report to the Manger Hotel in Boston before noon on September 15.
I felt a wave of emotion flood over me. I was going to get my shot at the NHL—if I made it out of the Bruins training camp. But that didn’t matter then, because a door had opened, a very big door, to a place where I’d promised myself I’d go when I was just fourteen years old.
Then my mother brought me back to earth by asking me how many black players were in the NHL. It was one of those questions to which she already knew the answer, but that was the point.
“There’s none,” I told her. “I could be the first.”
She thought about this, and then very gently said, “We hope it happens, but you’ve got to think of the worst.”
That was just like them, worrying that Lynn Patrick had sent the letter to the wrong guy—that there’d been a mistake, that they wanted the white Willie O’Ree, not the black one. But I knew there was no mistake: there was only one Willie O’Ree, and he was going to the Bruins training camp. I framed that letter and I have it still.
Even though I’d been dreaming of the NHL for years, in that summer of 1957 I was thinking of the two-year contract I’d signed to play with the Quebec Aces. This invitation from the Bruins was unexpected, and while hugely welcome, I wondered how I was going to explain my good fortune to Stan Maxwell without making him feel forgotten, and how I would explain it to Punch.