“I broke the ice a little bit,” is what Larry Kwong said, looking back on the trail he blazed in 1948 to hockey’s big league. “Maybe being the first Chinese player in the NHL gave more of a chance for other Chinese boys that play hockey,” he told David Davis of the New York Times in 2013. 

Born in 1923 on a Sunday of this date in Vernon, B.C., Kwong was the first player of Asian descent to play in the NHL. For all that he achieved in a long and productive minor-league career, his hockey history is framed by the discrimination and outright racism he faced as a Chinese-Canadian, as well as by the lingering disappointment associated with his call-up to the NHL.

Summoned by the New York Rangers in March of 1942 for an end-of-season game against the Montreal Canadiens at Madison Square Garden, Kwong watched the first two periods of the game from the New York. Finally, late in the third, coach Frank Boucher sent him out. “He had the puck briefly,” Tom Hawthorn narrated it in the pages of the Globe and Mail a couple of years ago, “made a pass and then just as quickly was back on the bench.” 

Kwong’s NHL career lasted less than a minute. The next day, he was back with the EAHL’s New York Rovers. “I didn’t get a real chance to show what I can do,” he told the Times. 

He signed the following year for the Valleyfield Braves of the QSHL, where coach Toe Blake would deem him indispensable. He later played in the IHL and, at the end of his career, in the early 1960s , in Switzerland. Larry Kwong died on March 15, 2018. He was 94. 

The glimpses here from Kwong’s career are from a 2018 biographical comic by Richmond, Virginia, artist Robert Ullman. You can find more of his work at robullman.com. 

(Images courtesy of Robert Ullman)