Few of the fans filling the Montreal Forum on the night of January 18, 1958, knew they were witnessing history. There was enough for the crowd to be excited about. This was Hockey Night in Canada, a nationally broadcast weekly confrontation; that night’s competition pitted the Montreal Canadiens, the most dominant team in the history of the sport, against their archrivals the Boston Bruins. Few noticed a dark-complexioned left winter playing his first game in a Bruins uniform. But the 23-year-old Willie O’Ree, recently brought up from the Quebec Aces, didn’t have a goal or an assist that night. All he did was break the color barrier of his sport.
Although he was called the Jackie Robinson of hockey years after the fact, Willie O’Ree has a different story from the one we are used to hearing. With the exception of an ugly, bench-clearing brawl in Chicago that left him with missing teeth and the guy who started it with a bloody head, his experience in the National Hockey League—which was composed of six teams, all of their members Canadian, though four of the teams were based in the United States—was without racial incident.
Born in 1935 in the coal-mining city of Fredericton, New Brunswick, he began playing a children’s league when he was five. He continued to play in high school and then in the minor leagues. He didn’t hesitate when given a shot with the Bruins. Known for his speed and agility on the ice, he was slated to paly just a few games in a kind of extended tryout. He wasn’t a great goal scorer; in the minor leagues, he had been called “the king of the near miss” because although his speed got him close to the net, his shots often went wide of the mark. What neither the minor-league fans nor the Boston Bruins knew, however, was the reason for his errant aim. Willie O’Ree was playing with only one eye.
Just two years before his NHL debut, in a minor-league game in Ontario, a stray rebound had sent the puck through the air and into O’Ree’s right eye.
He hid his handicap, even though in his position, left wing, half of the ice was invisible to him without twisting his head around. Still he played well enough to capture the attention of the Boston Bruins in 1957, and this despite his color. “Nothing was made of it in the papers or on the radio or TV. Nobody called me the Jackie Robinson of hockey then, but that’s how it felt,” he wrote in The Autobiography of Willie O’Ree, Hockey’s Black Pioneer, which was published in 2000.
Even with his injury, he played well enough to make the league not once but twice—the first time in 1958, for a year, and again in 1961. The high point came on New Year’s Day, 1961, when he scored the winning goal against the world champion Montreal Canadiens, the very team he had debuted against.
“There wasn’t a game back then,” he would remember many years later, “that there wasn’t an ugly racial remark directed at me.” Often it was more than words.
Overall, however, O’Ree’s experience in the NHL was a positive one. “From what I saw on the ice, he showed that he belonged,” said the Madison Square Garden network analyst Stan Fischler, a longtime observer of the game, in a 2005 interview for American Legacy magazine. Yet by 1961 the Boston Bruins were one of the worst teams in the NHL. They needed veteran help, not young players waiting to develop. They traded Willie O’Ree to—who else?—the Montreal Canadiens Organization. Although flattered by the trade, he saw this as the death knell for his hope of getting playing time. A team like the Canadiens, loaded with stars, would have no room for a 26-year-old with one eye. So that year he retired from the NHL.
O’Ree continued to earn a good living in professional hockey, through playing Los Angeles and San Diego in the minor Western Hockey League, and even scoring the record-setting number of 38 goals in 1964. His career lasted 21 years, but his success in crossing the color line didn’t bring a stampede of black players to the NHL; no other black athlete played for the league until the Washington Capitals picked Mike Marson in 1974.
Willie O’Ree is honored before a game between the Boston Bruins and the Montreal Canadiens on January 17, 2018, at TD Garden in Boston, Massachusetts. Credit: Fred Kfoury III/Icon Sportswire) (Icon Sportswire via AP Images
After retiring, O’Ree traveled around the United States teaching kids about the game and changing lives. At 82, he has been the NHL Diversity Ambassador since 1998. The young people O’Ree meets—recently boys and girls at the 2018 Willie O’Ree Invitational Tournament in Boston—look to him as living history, and a role model. “Playing in this tournament, it’s like I’m doing something bigger than I’m doing, something bigger than I am, making a difference,” said one youth to correspondent Matt Kalman in a January 2018 article on NHL.com. It’s an honor to play in it because he’s [O’Ree] has done so much for our sport.”
This article was adapted and excerpted from “Breaking the Ice” by Josh Ozersky, originally published in the Summer 2005 issue of American Legacy magazine.
