by Willie O'Ree
But when I called Stan to tell him my news, he had some of his own: he’d received a letter from Lynn Patrick as well. We were both going to the Bruins training camp, and with Punch’s blessing. The wily coach knew that if the Bruins were asking for two of his players, the NHL had their eyes on him as well.
* * *
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So Stan and I took the train down to Boston. I’d never been before, but I’d heard things: that it was home to some of the country’s finest universities and was known for its progressive politics. It was also known for being a nakedly racist city.
And yet, back in 1950, it was the Boston Celtics owner, Walter Brown, who’d drafted Chuck Cooper, the NBA’s first black player. But a year later, in 1951, it was also Brown who refused to let Korean runners enter the famous Boston Marathon. At the time the United States was at war in Korea, joining forces with the south against the communist north. “While American soldiers are fighting and dying in Korea,” Brown said, “every Korean should be fighting to protect his country instead of training for marathons.” He made no comment on why American runners were entering the marathon that year when other Americans were off fighting the communists. In this Brown seemed to represent Boston’s strange contradictions: progressive on the one hand, but highly, shall we say, conservative on the other.
Which is to say that I went into Boston prepared for anything. At least it wasn’t the Deep South, where racism underpinned the structure of society and the ghosts of slavery were everywhere.
I immediately liked the city. It had been the active center before, during, and after the American War of Independence, so it was rich in history. And with its brick buildings and green public spaces, it also had a European feel to it. I hadn’t yet been to Europe, but I’d seen photographs and films of its great cities, and Boston reminded me of them. I thought I could be happy playing here.
But first I had to get through training camp. Although I’d managed to keep my blindness hidden from the Quebec Aces, now I was taking a major step up to the best league in the world. Could I pull it off?
For Stan and me, just stepping onto the ice at Boston Garden was like making the NHL. There we were, two black guys, skating for our lives to join one of the league’s great teams. And to see its pedigree, all we had to do was look up: for there on the Garden’s rafters hung the three Stanley Cup banners from 1929, 1939, and 1941. Would the 1957–58 season bring another? Would my name be etched on that Cup?
At the time, though, I was thinking more about the current Bruins lineup than the glory teams of yesteryear or what might happen come the playoffs. Some NHL teams had one training camp for rookies and another for veteran players, but not Boston. We were all there together, new guys like me and established stars like Doug Mohns, Don McKenney (the nicest guy I ever played with, always giving me encouragement), Fleming Mackell, Fern Flaman, Allan Stanley, Leo Boivin, Vic Stasiuk, Johnny Bucyk, and Jerry Toppazzini. Stanley, Boivin, Flaman, and Bucyk would all make it to the Hockey Hall of Fame. It was that kind of team.
The veteran Bruins treated Stan and me as if we belonged. That was such a bonus, since it meant we could relax and play our best game. Now, at some NHL training camps, rookies are seen as a target. They’re younger than the veterans and thought to be after their jobs, so the older guys will do everything they can to make their life difficult. But it wasn’t like that in Boston in 1957. We were like brothers.
They’d booked the entire team at the same hotel, the Hotel Manger. I’d never seen so much marble in my life. It was first class, and just staying there made me feel as if I were already a full-fledged member of the Bruins. Of course, Milt Schmidt, the Bruins coach, had us living at that grand old hotel for another reason: to start team bonding right out of the gate. And he moved in himself so that he could prowl the halls to enforce our eleven p.m. curfew.
We all had to be up by seven a.m. and we all had to show up for breakfast, too: necessary fuel for the demanding practices Schmidt ran. The Bruins weren’t loaded with superstars—at least, guys who were superstars yet, though Johnny Bucyk would sure become one—so hard work was the order of the day. I was fine with that. It had always been my order of the day, every day.
Bucyk, whose heritage was Ukrainian, was nicknamed the “Chief” because a Boston cartoonist thought he looked Native American. He and Vic Stasiuk and Bronco Horvath formed Boston’s “Uke Line,” back in the day when it was acceptable to identify players by their ethnicity. (In the 1970s, the New York Rangers even had the “Mafia Line”: Phil Esposito, who is of Italian ancestry and whom they called the Godfather, along with Don Maloney and Don Murdoch. The Godfather and two Dons.) And of course, Schmidt himself, once a league-leading scorer, had been part of the most famous “ethnic” line of all time: the Bruins’ “Kraut Line,” so named because all three forwards were German Canadians. This was right before the Second World War. The three “Krauts” would soon join the Royal Canadian Air Force and ship out to fight the Nazis, but not before Boston fans carried them off the ice on their shoulders after their final game. (They all returned, and Schmidt resumed his All Star-level play when the war was over.)
He was also an All-Star coach. If you played for a Milt Schmidt Bruins team in the late 1950s, you knew that what you lacked in firepower, you’d make up for in conditioning. When we weren’t practicing on the ice, we were working out twice a day in the gym.
Today, NHL teams have state-of-the-art weight-training rooms. In addition to the weights themselves, these rooms feature strength-testing machines, elliptical trainers, and stationary bikes that you can program as if you’re riding up and down the Rocky Mountains. They have sound systems playing whatever music you want. They have TVs so that you can watch any game anywhere. They have hot tubs and cold tubs and they even have oxygen chambers to speed up the healing of injuries. In fact, some of their injury rooms are so well stocked they’d make hospitals jealous. And today guys work out even after games, with a set list of exercises designed to maintain conditioning and strength throughout the NHL’s grueling eighty-two-game season (and maybe another twenty- eight games, if you were to play the four seven- game playoff series to get the sixteen wins you need to get your name etched on the Stanley Cup).
Back in 1957, though, let’s just say the concept of the weight room was simpler. There was a set of scales, a couple of whirlpool tubs that looked like giant bathtubs, a couple of stationary bikes, and a table for you to lie on when you got a rubdown. Training for us back then was made up of a lot of skating and a lot of calisthenics. We’d do sit-ups and push-ups on the ice. Our conditioning came only from skating and those exercises. So at the Bruins camp I just had to work on getting my lungs used to the strain of skating fast and hard for short periods of time. It’s true—players are that much faster in the NHL, and although I was pretty fast myself, now I was skating with guys who could keep up.
We also played exhibition games—and as a result, the United Press actually noticed that Stan and I were making history. That September a short item appeared in the papers headlined “Two Negroes Play for Bruins Tonight,” about a game against Springfield. The report identifies me and Stan Maxwell as the “Negroes,” and points out that a Swede would also be part of this exotic debut—the Swede being Sven “Tumba” Johansson, a centerman who wound up playing five games with us as a Quebec Ace in the 1957–58 season.
Camp lasted a couple of weeks, and at the end of it I was so hoping that Milt Schmidt and Lynn Patrick would say, “Willie O’Ree, you’re the missing link that will lead Boston to the Stanley Cup championship.” Instead, Schmidt and Patrick told both me and Stan that we needed “more seasoning.” That makes players sound like steaks, but it’s sports talk for returning to the league below and getting a few more knocks or a bit more maturity.
I was disappointed. I felt I’d shown the Bruins what I could do, and that my blind eye hadn’t been an issue at all. Stan had been outstanding as well. So we f
elt confident that, if we returned to the minor pro league and worked hard, we might just get the chance to come back. After all, coaches have always used the minors as a motivator. A guy who’s played a few games on the farm is going to be hungrier than a guy who’s made the big team straight out of camp. And a hungrier player is a better player. Now that I’d had a taste of the NHL, I knew I wanted to consume the entire meal.
9.
THE CALL, PART 1
My second season with the Quebec Aces began with a coaching change: Punch Imlach, riding our championship win in 1956–57, had moved on to the Springfield Indians in the American Hockey League. It was a big step up from the QHL, since the AHL was pretty much the most direct feeder to the NHL.
So out went the bald, profane, tumultuous guy that was Punch and in came Joe Crozier. Well, Joe was already there, as a defenseman for the Aces; I’d played with him the year before. In the 1957–58 season he also took on the “playing coach” role, which meant he was coaching us as he was also taking regular shifts on defense. (That can’t happen these days—the NHL’s collective bargaining agreement prohibits it—but back then it wasn’t unusual.)
I liked Joe, who’d come up the tough way from Winnipeg: poor and scrambling. He was a broad, six-foot-tall defenseman, smart and hardworking and just six years older than me. But we gave Joe our full attention. He was a good coach who understood the game in a way that he was able to explain to us—which is not a talent many players possess. In fact, I’ve found that the more talent you have on the ice, the less you have behind the bench. Players who’ve had to work at the game instead of being blessed with a raft of natural talents have also had to work at understanding how to maximize their potential, and that labor translates into knowledge they can share.
I started the season off strongly, still dreaming of getting back to Boston as soon as I could. When the call-up came, though, it was to Springfield, Massachusetts, where Punch was coaching. Eddie Shore—the fierce, legendary Boston Bruins defenseman, now owner and manager of the Springfield Indians—said he needed me as an emergency player, I’m sure on Punch’s recommendation. Even though it’s always disruptive to leave your team, being told that you’re riding to the rescue in an emergency is always a nice thing to hear.
So off I went to save the day in the American Hockey League. I’d last for six games. But the records don’t tell the whole story about that, nor about Eddie Shore.
Playing in Springfield was like being sent to hockey hell. And not because this Massachusetts town was a bad place, but rather because Eddie Shore was such a highly eccentric, curmudgeonly cur that you wondered what had happened in his childhood to make him that way. Was he dropped on his head one time too many? Did his mother not love him? Was he, in fact, a visitor from another planet pretending—and not very well—to be a human being?
For all his faults off the ice, he’d certainly been a champion on it. (He’d remind us of this whenever he thought we were slacking, which was pretty much all the time. “I won my first Stanley Cup before you were a gleam in your daddy’s eye,” he’d say. As if this was supposed to give him special insight into hockey, or into our fathers, for that matter.) Eddie had been good at sports as a kid in Cupar, Saskatchewan, a tiny place of about five hundred people just northeast of Regina. Actually, though, he started playing hockey only after being bullied into it by his older brother, who thought his relative lack of interest in the game made him some kind of alien. His teasing got to the point that, at the relatively old age of eighteen, Eddie flicked a switch in his head and went to work. Which may explain part of what made him tick.
For there was one thing that Eddie and I had in common: we’d compete with anything to win. In fact, Eddie got serious about hockey in a way that makes me look as if I were taking every other day off. He’d practice on frozen ponds when it was forty below with wind so fierce his nose, cheeks, and feet would freeze and frost would form on his shoulders. Nothing could stop Eddie from proving his brother wrong, although, in the end, he proved his brother right.
Eddie Shore was one good hockey player. But he’d played the game very much his own way: he wanted to win every second that he was on the ice. Here’s an example: back in 1924, when at the age of twenty-two he was playing for the Melville (Saskatchewan) Millionaires in a championship match against the Winnipeg Monarchs, Shore’s coach told him to stay out of the penalty box—just to give his team a fighting chance to win without actually fighting. For as bad as it would be to play for Shore years later, it was a lot worse to play against him. Eddie liked to hit guys hard, often with his fists. Still, he did what that Melville coach asked. Winnipeg took advantage and knocked him unconscious. Three times. He lost six teeth and broke both his nose and his jaw. But even then his team won the game, thanks, in part, to Eddie’s ferocious discipline.
Eddie had a total belief that he could do anything, and that he was always right. He didn’t yell it and scream it; he just insisted and got on with it. So, he thought of himself as a kind of medic, who would massage his hockey battle wounds so that he wouldn’t have scars, which he pretty much accomplished. He eventually made it to the NHL with the Boston Bruins. In the 1925–26 season, during a practice, Shore collided so violently with another player that his ear was nearly ripped off. The doctors he saw wanted to amputate it, but he finally found one who agreed to reattach it. He even rejected the anesthetic so that he could watch through a mirror as the doctor sewed his ear back on, Eddie directing the stitching.
He was also at the center of one of the most infamous incidents in the early years of the NHL. In Boston Garden on December 12, 1933, Shore hit Toronto Maple Leafs star Ace Bailey from behind, mistakenly thinking it had been Bailey who’d knocked him to the ice moments earlier. Bailey’s head hit the ice so hard he started to convulse, and he nearly died.
Ace Bailey had a fractured skull. After four hours of surgery, it was touch and go whether he would live. But he survived, and a few months later he even shook Shore’s hand at the benefit game the NHL held at Maple Leaf Gardens to raise money for Bailey and his family. It would represent the league’s first All-Star Game, something that wouldn’t be formally introduced for another thirteen years. Ace Bailey never played another game in the NHL.
Eddie Shore certainly did. And he was much more than a rough-and-tumble menace on the ice. He became one of the best defensemen in the game’s history, winning the Stanley Cup with the Bruins in 1929 and 1939 and the Hart Memorial Trophy as the NHL’s Most Valuable Player four times, in 1933, 1935, 1936, and 1938, which remains a record for a defenseman. He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in its first year of existence, 1947, and into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1975. In January 2017 Shore was named one of the “100 Greatest NHL Players” in history. So he certainly was a great talent on the ice.
By the time I caught up with him he was the fifty-six-year-old boss of the Springfield Indians. His reputation as a, shall we say, highly unorthodox owner was such that coaches used to threaten to send “problem” players to Eddie Shore to make them learn how to respect authority. Or just to drive them crazy.
Some of the things Shore did were bonkers. He called us all “Mister” and was very polite, but it only made his craziness louder. He’d act as a chiropractor, even though he wasn’t, and so would end up injuring the players he treated. He’d make us practice in the dark to save electricity. He’d make his goalies use skates that didn’t fit instead of buying them new ones. More than a few goalies lost their toenails as a result.
He insisted that players skate in a kind of “sitting” position, with your knees bent and exactly eleven inches apart. He’d open a training camp by ordering players to tap dance in the hotel lobby or do ballet steps on ice. He’d tape a player’s hands to his stick if he thought he was holding it the “wrong” way (i.e., not how Eddie would hold it).
When his players weren’t in the lineup he’d make them work the concessions: popping pop
corn, blowing up balloons, selling programs. He was so tight with a dollar that guys who had bonus clauses for scoring twenty goals would be benched when they got close. Once he even traded a player for a hockey net, then complained that the net was used.
So that was Eddie Shore. He sure didn’t think much of me, either. Not because of race; it was just Eddie.
Before my first game for the Indians, I warmed up, preparing to go in and save the day—and then sat on the bench for the rest of the game. Eddie had handed Punch the head coaching reins but was still calling a lot of the shots. And one of those shots kept me plastered to the bench.
It was the same thing for the next four games.
In the sixth game, at the fourteen-minute mark in the third period, one of our guys got hurt. Shore finally told Imlach to put me on. Not having played for five and two-thirds games, I wasn’t exactly in my best game-shape, but I was keen to show Shore what I could do. Plus I was just really annoyed with him.
So with anger fueling my jets I charged out there and sped after the puck—and promptly tripped on a piece of debris, tumbling to the ice. I guess Eddie thought that meant I couldn’t skate at all, so he had me pulled from the game. The next morning he told me I was going back to Quebec.
I was very happy to be getting out of Shore’s Springfield Lunatic Asylum, but I was also angry. He had insulted my professional pride. “What did you bring me down here for if you were just going to leave me on the bench?” I asked him.
His reply was classic Eddie Shore: “You can’t skate right, you can’t play with the puck, you can’t backcheck right. I thought you were a better hockey player.”