Five days later, when the Braves told him they thought he needed more seasoning, he couldn’t have been happier. When he started on his five-day journey home, he remembers he was told he had to go to the back of the bus. “As we got closer to home, I got to move up,” O’Ree says. “Even if they had offered me a contract, I would not have taken it. I might have been killed if I stayed down there.”
Little fanfare for milestone
Believing he wanted to stay in Fredericton, O’Ree almost turned down a chance at pro hockey with the Quebec Aces minor league team the next fall. But Punch Imlach, the team’s manager, talked him into coming. The Aces won the league title. The Bruins spotted O’Ree and gave the wing a chance to play two games in 1957-58.
His first game was in Montreal. Although he broke the color barrier, it barely registered with the local media. “The big news was that the Bruins shut out the Habs 3-0 in the Montreal Forum,” O’Ree says, laughing. “To shut them out in Montreal was a big deal. We were in fifth or sixth place. They had won a lot of Stanley Cups.”
He played the next night in Boston, again without much fanfare, again without scoring. “But Boston fans loved him because he worked hard,” former Boston teammate Bronco Horvath says. “And the fans in Boston knew hockey.”
His teammates also admired him, Horvath says. “He never complained, and I was always complaining. Not Willie. A real team man,” Horvath says.
Milt Schmidt, O’Ree’s former coach, now 89, says, “He always had a smile, no matter what was happening, and he was a very brainy player, always highly regarded by his teammates and the higher-ups.”
The difficulty didn’t begin until O’Ree made it back to the NHL from the minors in 1960-61, when he was still the league’s only black player. He played 43 games that season for the Bruins. “I had a terrible time in Chicago, and I heard racial slurs in Detroit,” O’Ree says.
In his first game in Chicago Stadium, playing his second shift, O’Ree took the butt end of the stick from Eric Nesterenko and lost his two front teeth and a lot of blood from a split lip and nose. He responded by clubbing Nesterenko over the head with his stick.
O’Ree says there was a racial overtone to the language on the ice and from the stands. Both benches emptied.
“If there were slurs about him, we had guys on our Bruins, guys like Fern Flaman and Leo Labine, that would go right after them,” Horvath says.
O’Ree and Nesterenko were ejected. After getting stitched up, O’Ree wanted to sit on the bench with his team. But he says Schmidt told him “they were worried about my life if I went back out there.” Two police officers were posted at the door of the dressing room.
“I turned out the lights and meditated for a while,” O’Ree says, “and I remember saying, ‘Willie, you don’t need this. You can go back to your hometown and play and not go through all of this.’
“And then right there and then I made a decision: No, I’m not quitting. If I am going to leave this league, it will be because my skills aren’t good enough. I’m not to leave because someone is trying to drive me out of the league.”
It was, however, his final season in the NHL. O’Ree played pro hockey through 1979, mostly for the Los Angeles Blades and San Diego Gulls of the Western Hockey League. The NHL did not have another black player until the Washington Capitals’ Mike Marson in 1974.
Inspiring generations of players
Today, O’Ree’s message of perseverance is made to children all over the country through clinics and speeches. “His message has nothing to do with color,” McCants says. “His message is about education and following your dreams.” He says players get inspired when they see O’Ree and hear his story: “It doesn’t just inspire kids. It inspires program directors.”
Calgary Flames captain Jarome Iginla, the NHL’s highest-profile black player, says, “It rubs off on you when you meet him and see how much energy he has. It’s inspiring to see how much he gives back to the game and to the kids. I’m in awe knowing what he went through. There is a lot of trash-talking going on, and I can’t imagine what he must have gone through.”
McCants says, “I coach kids and I can’t get them to listen for 10 minutes or even 10 seconds, but they listen to Willie. People are naturally attracted to him.”
The diversity program has grown significantly since O’Ree began working for the NHL. Goalie Gerald Coleman, who played in the Chicago program and O’Ree’s All-Star Game, was drafted by Tampa Bay and has played two games in the NHL, in 2005-06.
“It was Willie who pushed me,” says Coleman, with the Anaheim Ducks’ farm team in Portland, Maine. “He came from nothing to do something no one else had done. My thought was, ‘Why can’t I do that?’ He’s making a difference. To me, if we are getting one, two or three kids in every city to play, we are accomplishing something. It may take 12 years to get five more black guys, but that’s a start.”
McCants says minority players still face racial issues when they play and what they hear from O’Ree helps them deal with it. O’Ree reminds them not to let insults get in the way of their dreams: “If you speared me or butt-ended me, I went after you. But when it came to racial remarks, I let it go in one ear and out the other. If I responded to every word that was said to me, I would have been in the penalty box all the time.”
O’Ree says there is still much to be done, that race or cultural issues don’t hold back minority players as much as facilities: “Hockey is a unique sport. You can bounce a basketball around in many places, and you can always throw a baseball or football around or kick a soccer ball anywhere. But to play hockey, you need to get on the ice. … We need facilities for these kids.”
Fifty years after making history, O’Ree is still working to change the complexion of the game.