BOSTON – When Willie O’Ree made his debut with the Boston Bruins, becoming the NHL’s first black player, fans told him to go back to picking cotton. Never mind there was no cotton to be picked in his chilly Canadian hometown.
“I guess they were trying to get me off my game,” O’Ree said Tuesday. “I just turned my ears off to that.”
Forty-five years after he broke the league’s color barrier, O’Ree was given the Lester Patrick Award for a lifetime of service to hockey in the United States. Also honored Tuesday were longtime Bruins defenseman Ray Bourque and USA Hockey vice president Ron DeGregorio.
On Jan. 18, 1958, O’Ree played his first game for the Bruins, a 3-0 Boston victory over archrival Montreal. At the time, he didn’t really think about his role in integrating the sport, nor did the next day’s papers mention anything about his place in history.
“It really didn’t matter to me. I was too excited about beating the Canadiens in the Forum,” he said. “I was just a kid trying to make a team.”
By the time he was called back up to the Bruins in 1961, though, he was known as “the Jackie Robinson of hockey.” In all, O’Ree played just 45 games in the NHL, scoring four goals.
In many ways, he was the typical kid growing up in Fredericton, New Brunswick. He first skated at 5 years old and, when he was 13, he decided he wanted to play professional hockey.
“I had a burning desire within me to play hockey,” he said. “I was obsessed with the game.”
Of course, O’Ree knew that no black player had ever suited up in the NHL. But he had become accustomed to being the only minority on his team in the town of 35,000. And after starring for the Quebec Aces minor league team, O’Ree got the call from the Bruins.
General manager Lynn Patrick and coach Milt Schmidt took O’Ree aside, put an arm around him and said, “Willie, you’re probably going to experience some personal racial remarks. Don’t let it bother you. The Bruins organization is behind you 100 percent.”
“That gave me a big boost,” O’Ree said. “They went out on a limb for me.”
Although they’re linked as pioneers, O’Ree didn’t have to fight the same battles as Robinson – at least not to the same extent. Playing in Canada and the northern United States, a bit player instead of a star, O’Ree was seen more as an afterthought than a threat to a bigoted way of life.
It was also 10 years later, society was different and all the other major sports had been integrated. And unlike Robinson’s Brooklyn Dodgers, there was no resistance from within O’Ree’s team; it was from opposing fans who were trying to goad him into a mistake.
Once, fans threw a black cat onto the ice. Others tossed cotton balls at him, saying, “Why aren’t you in the cotton fields? What are you doing in a white man’s sport?”
O’Ree and Robinson have something else in common, though: The NHL pioneer was a baseball prospect as well. He tried out for the Milwaukee Braves in 1956.
When he arrived at spring training in Georgia that year, he saw for the first time segregated water fountains, segregated buses and segregated hotels. He was cut after two weeks, but he said, “even if they’d offered me a contract, I would have turned it down.”
O’Ree took the bus back to Canada, a five-day trip.
“As I got closer to the Canadian border, I moved up in the bus,” O’Ree said. “When I got there, I was right up front.”
O’Ree is right up front in the NHL now, running a program called NHL Diversity that helps children from disadvantaged backgrounds learn about the game and how to play it. The program’s motto: “Hockey is for everyone.”
“It’s about hockey, but it’s not just about hockey,” said NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, who also announced that the league would fund a scholarship named for O’Ree.
O’Ree said it was his dream that someday a graduate of the program would receive the Lester Patrick Award.
If they do, they will have him to thank.
AP-ES-03-25-03 1919EST
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