Willie O’Ree

the centreman who never was: the true (untrue) story + nhl career of rainy drinkwater

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With Gotham’s Finest: René Boileau’s stint with the NHL’s New York Americans lasted seven regular-season games.

A version of the following post appeared online in January at TVOntario’s TVO Today.

René Boileau was fast on his skates, and a tricky stickhandler. In Montreal almost a century ago, a local newspaper deemed the 21-year-old centreman “one of the smartest of the younger amateurs in the district.” In 1926, he got the opportunity young hockey players dream of, and a chance that no Indigenous player had been offered before: a call and a contract to play in the NHL and in New York, no less.

For hockey, it’s a breakthrough story that might still be resonating today, proof positive that Canada’s beloved winter game has long been committed to ensuring that it truly is for everyone.

But Boileau didn’t break through — not because he didn’t last long or prosper in the NHL (though he didn’t), but because Boileau wasn’t, in fact, Indigenous. His was a case of appropriated identity; today, he might be termed a “pretendian.” For publicity purposes — to sell tickets — the now-defunct New York Americans made up the tale of Rainy Drinkwater.

In the winter of 1925, the NHL was preparing for its ninth season on ice. The previous year, the league had added its first U.S.-based team in the Boston Bruins. Now, it welcomed two more, the Pittsburgh Pirates and, in New York, the Americans. Like the Rangers, who arrived a year later, the Americans made their home at Madison Square Garden.

Tommy Gorman

As they settled in, hopes ran high in Manhattan. The new team was backed by some powerful men, including Tex Rickard, the boxing promoter who’d built the Garden; Montreal businessman Tom Duggan; and New York bootlegger Bill Dwyer, who was at that point still a silent partner in the enterprise. Running the team day to day as manager and coach was Tommy Gorman, a wily old hockey hand from Ottawa who’d help steer the original Senators to three Stanley Cup championships in four years to start the 1920s.

In New York, Gorman pulled off nothing short of a coup before the first puck dropped, putting Dwyer’s dollars to good use by buying up a readymade winning team.

The Hamilton Tigers had topped the NHL standings through the 1924-25 season and were on track for a spring run at the Stanley Cup. But when the players went on strike to secure payment for post-season games, the NHL refused to yield, cancelling the franchise outright. That allowed Gorman to swoop in and buy the contracts of the entire Tiger team, including a pair of future Hall of Famers in Shorty Green and Billy Burch.

“Many experts believe the pennant will be landed by New York,” the local Daily News told its readers as the new season approached, framing hockey prospects in helpful baseball terms. That was also part of the team’s strategy for selling Canada’s game to uninitiated fans in New York; both Burch, who was named team captain, and another big-name signing, Joe Simpson, were billed as “the Babe Ruth of hockey.”

The PR push to sell hockey to New York also included hiring the superstar speedskater Norval Baptie to entertain fans between periods with displays of “fancy skating.” In late January, the Americans contrived to have Joe LaFlamme, renowned as the “Wolf Man,” drive his dogsled team (seven dogs and four wolves) from Gogama, Ontario, to perform intermission turns around the ice at Madison Square. (It’s not clear that he actually mushed all 1,300 kilometres from the Sudbury area to Manhattan.)

For all the firepower in New York’s line-up, though, the hockey didn’t go quite according to plan.

If the season that ensued wasn’t an outright trainwreck — the Americans finished ahead of the Montreal Canadiens in the final seven-team standings — an actual railway accident did figure as one of many challenges the Americans faced.

There was, for example, a kerfuffle over the thermometer at the rink. The management at Madison Square insisted on keeping the temperature at a balmy 21 C to make sure their patrons didn’t get chilly. Gorman wanted it lowered to 4 C and eventually took the matter to court, arguing that the heat was ruining the “accuracy, neatness, and dispatch” of the players, causing them to be “sluggish and to lose weight,” and slowing down games, thereby souring would-be fans on the sport they should be learning to love. Eventually, Garden management turned down the temperature.

That same season, Gorman saw fit to suspend a pair of players, one of them Joe Simpson, on a charge of “breaking training rules,” a euphemism often used in those years to shroud alcoholic indiscretions.

And then there were the injuries. “Modified murder” was The New Yorker’s 1926 description of NHL hockey. But, even for that violent era, the Americans’ casualty list was notable. In the pre-season, Mickey Roach went down with appendicitis. Once the hockey had started taking its toll, Crutchy Morrison hurt his knee, and Shorty Green wrenched a leg. In a game against the Montreal Canadiens in early December, Green and goaltender Jakie Forbes were both knocked unconscious. “Sturdy souls, these boys,” was a local paper’s appraisal. “A dash of water and a little persuasion and they were on their feet again.”

And then came the railway accident. Just before Christmas, the team was returning from a game in Pittsburgh when their night train derailed near Altoona, Pennsylvania. A student was killed, and five passengers were seriously injured. The hockey players were commended for their efforts in helping in the aftermath. Ken Randall came away with a dislocated shoulder, and three of his teammates were reported to have been badly cut and bruised. Randall and Green each missed a game recovering from their injuries.

Still, by mid-January, the Americans were vying with Pittsburgh for fourth place in the seven-team league. That’s not to say they were playing particularly well: they started 1926 by losing seven of their 11 games and winning just one.

Walking Wounded: New York Americans (from left) Ed Bouchard, Red Green, Billy Burch, and goaltender Jakie Forbes show off their plasters in January of 1926.

They were victims of a prejudicial schedule, said the New York Times, and they were worn and torn. “New York has been so closely pursued by hard luck in the way of injuries that the players are confident that they are in for a period of better luck soon. They will not believe that a jinx will pursue them all season.”

But that conviction didn’t slow the setbacks that led to René Boileau’s visit to the NHL.

Playing Boston early in the new year, Shorty Green’s younger brother, Red, got a skate in the face and Ken Randall, a stick. Shorty was carried off the ice unconscious that night in what was shaping up to be an alarmingly concussive month for him: four times in January, the elder Green was knocked out — “colder than the ice the boys skated on,” according to one reporter — in on-ice falls and collisions. Each time, Green got back up and, as another reporter noted, “gamely continued.”

In January, Gorman tried to change his team’s luck by bringing in a new coach. Alf Smith was a legendary hockey sage who’d played with and coached the Ottawa Silver Seven when they won four Stanley Cup championships from 1902 through 1906.

February brought on-ice reinforcement: the New York Times announced the Americans’ imminent “shake-up” and the signing of “Rainy Boileau Drinkwater, a Caughnawaga Indian.”

“He has never played professional hockey but he has been something of a sensation upon the lakes of St. Louis, where he has been playing amateur hockey this Winter,” the Times wrote.

Outlets across the U.S. picked up the news. Never before had the name “Rainy Drinkwater” appeared in print, but now it spread across the continent as writers whose experience did not include having seen Boileau skate in person described this “full-blooded Indian” as a “bronzed maple leaf” from “the St. Louis Lakes region of the Province of Quebec.”

He was touted as being as fast on his skates as Canadiens superstar Howie Morenz. “Sturdily built” (Montreal Gazette) and “an accurate and lightning-like shooter of the puck” (Ottawa Journal) Boileau/Drinkwater was, according to the Pittsburgh Daily Post, “regarded as the most promising amateur to come to the fore within the past 10 years.”

Flipping the facts fully on their heads, the Ottawa Journal took pains to explain that it was Rainy Drinkwater’s childhood friends who’d coined the name René Boileau. “The latter means ‘drink water.’ The former is pronounced — nearly — ‘rainy.’”

The Montreal Star reports René Boileau’s migration to New York.

Back in Montreal, the Gazette initially reported the plain facts: Boileau had been turning out that winter for C.P. Verdun, an intermediate team, and for Columbus of the Quebec Senior League. In January, he’d joined the Bell Telephone team in the Montreal Railway-Telephone Hockey League, where he’d immediately made his presence felt, scoring four goals in a 6-4 win over Canadian Pacific at the Forum.

When, the following day, the Gazette picked up a wire report out of New York with the “Indian” angle, the Montreal paper published it with the editorial equivalent of a raised eyebrow: “It will be news to René Boileau to learn that he comes from the Caughnawaga Indian reservation.”

It’s worth noting that Boileau’s view of all this isn’t part of the historical record. As best we know, he had no part in the mythmaking, beyond going along with it for the extent of his stay in Manhattan. As he and the Gazette both well knew, he’d been born and raised in Pointe-Claire, Quebec, across the St. Lawrence from the Mohawk territory now known as Kahnawake. He was the son of non-Indigenous Catholic parents. His father was a construction foreman.

The legend expanded in later years. A 1966 column in the Montreal Gazette recounted that Rainy Drinkwater’s arrival in New York in early ’26 had included a parade, of sorts, down New York’s Broadway Avenue, with Boileau riding in an open car “outfitted in colourful Indian regalia, including an ornate headdress.”

Tickertape: A 1966 cartoon imagining Rainy Drinkwater’s arrival in New York.

On the ice, Boileau seems to have done what was asked of him — or at least given it his best, even as he fell short of rescuing the Americans and following Howie Morenz’s groove to stardom.

New York was trudging through an eight-game winless streak when Boileau first took the ice in February. His NHL career lasted just seven games after that, and in only one of those did the team eke out a win.

In his second game, against Pittsburgh, he put the puck in the net — only for the goal to be annulled for offside. In the end, he left next to no statistical mark on the NHL, registering not a single point and incurring no penalties. The Montreal Gazette reported that, in the Pittsburgh game, he “backchecked well” and “stickhandled his way into the hearts of the Gotham fans,” but in New York itself the initial fanfare faded fast, and his play garnered no further comment in the local press. Boileau did also take part in three exhibition games that New York played once their NHL season ended. (In the first of those, Morenz, making a guest appearance with the Americans, was a teammate.)

René Boileau’s son, Marc, coached the Penguins in the 1970s.

Boileau continued his career in the minor leagues, in New Haven and later in St. Louis. After a final year back in Montreal, he hung up his skates in 1934. In the late 1940s, the Rangers signed his 15-year-old son, Marc, a promising winger, to a minor-league contract. His long career included a year with the Detroit Red Wings. In the 1970s, Marc Boileau coached the Pittsburgh Penguins and, later, in the WHA, the Quebec Nordiques.

Gorman would subsequently insist that it had been his boss’s idea to invent an Indigenous identity for Boileau, not his. “So help me,” Gorman pleaded in 1952, “that was Tom Duggan’s baby.” Elsewhere, the scheme was attributed to an enthusiastic (unnamed) publicity man.

Whoever hatched it, this was a stunt that New York hadn’t quite finished with. The year after Boileau’s coming and going, the expansion Rangers joined the Americans as tenants at Madison Square Garden. They tried their own version of the Americans’ trick, inventing new heritages for two players on the team in hopes of stirring the interest of (and selling tickets to) ethnic communities in New York who’d yet to embrace hockey.

Thus the Montreal-born goaltender Lorne Chabot was transformed into Leopold Shabotsky, who was ostensibly pro hockey’s “first Jewish player,” and Ollie Reinikka, a centreman of Finnish descent from Shuswap, British Columbia, became Ollie Rocco, New York’s favourite Italian skater. Tex Rickard’s PR guru, Johnny Bruno, was behind those efforts, and it’s entirely possible that he conjured up the Rainy Drinkwater mirage, too.

The NHL, understandably enough, seems to prefer not to revisit these episodes today. When mentions of Drinkwater or Shabotsky or Rocco do surface, as sometimes happens in the hockey press, they’re mostly presented as harmless shenanigans.

It now seems likely that the league’s first Indigenous player was, in fact, Clarence “Taffy” Abel. Born in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and of Chippewa heritage, the 26-year-old defenceman was recruited to the New York Rangers roster in ’26 by Conn Smythe, who went on to launch the Maple Leafs. It’s only relatively recently that Abel has become part of the conversation about Indigenous NHLers. His background wasn’t widely known in his own day; it’s possible that he himself might have done his best to keep it quiet.

Smythe, who was briefly in charge of stocking the roster for the brand-new Rangers the year after René Boileau’s NHL cameo, also reportedly had his eye on Buddy Maracle, a talented 21-year-old Oneida Mohawk winger from southern Ontario who was playing for the Goodyear team in Toronto’s Mercantile League. We don’t know the details of why Maracle failed to make the NHL grade in 1926, only that it would be another six years before he got his fleeting chance to skate with the Rangers.

This past December, the federal government’s Historic Sites and Monuments Board commemorated the achievements of five hockey pioneers who broke racial barriers in the early decades of the National Hockey League. Paul Jacobs, Buddy Maracle, Larry Kwong, Fred Sasakamoose, and Willie O’Ree were pioneers who overcame the odds and prejudices that their own society had built up around the sport they loved and excelled at. At a ceremony in Toronto in early December, their achievements were enumerated and duly enshrined with the unveiling of a plaque that will find a permanent home in the Hockey Hall of the Fame, in Toronto.

That commemoration was sincere and heartfelt and overdue. It was not, however, a nuanced examination of the historical record concerning Indigenous players in the NHL. Jacobs, Maracle, and Sasakamoose all deserve their due, even as there’s some doubt that Jacobs, a Mohawk defenceman from Caughnawaga (Kahnawake), ever played an NHL game. But others from hockey’s early eras deserve recognition, too: Abel, for example, and Jim Jamieson, a Mohawk from Six Nations who played for the Rangers in the 1940s.

René Boileau’s story, mostly forgotten, and not exactly the proudest moment in NHL history, belongs out on its own, apart from the authentic achievements of hockey’s Indigenous pioneers. Still, it does reflect the attitudes that prevailed in the all too impermeably white hockey world as recently as the 1920s.

It also reveals an irony, too glaring to miss, the one that saw the management of an NHL team and the hockey press attending it spend more energy stirring up stereotypes and racist tropes in the effort to drum up fan interest than they could be bothered to channel into scouting or encouraging or providing opportunities for actual Indigenous players.

Afterlife: Post-NHL, René Boileau (third from the right) went on to play with the 1930 St. Louis Flyers of the AHA.

such a violent contact game: clarence campbell holds court at the statler hotel, 1951

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Hearing Room: Ted Lindsay, NHL President Clarence Campbell, and Bill Ezinicki in Campbell’s suite at Boston’s Statler Hotel on the afternoon of Saturday, January 27, 1951. (Image: Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection)

Reasons hockey players ended up in hotel rooms in the 1950s: they were on road trips, with hours to kill before the game, or recuperating after it was all over, maybe it was the old Bismarck Hotel in Chicago, or the Croydon, could be that they were living there, in the Kimberly in New York, where some Canadian Rangers used to shack up during up the season, or in the Belvedere on 48th, or the Roosevelt on 45th, in the Theatre District. The Montreal Canadiens often put up at the Piccadilly, also on 45th, that’s where, in 1951, Maurice Richard grabbed a referee by the name of Hugh McLean “by the throat or tie,” to quote one account of the fracas — though I think that was in the lobby.

In Toronto, Richard and his teammates used to stay at the Royal York. The Mount Royal Hotel on Peel Street was a haven for NHL teams visiting Montreal in those years. The Sheraton-Cadillac in Detroit was where the Red Wings threw a big testimonial bash for Jack Adams in 1952 on the occasion of his having devoted a quarter-century to the cause of the wingéd wheel.

And in Boston? For years, hotelwise, hockey central was the Manger (rhymes with clangour), neighbouring the old Garden, which was built atop the city’s busy North Station. “Who could forget Boston and the old Manger Hotel where we stayed?” Canadiens’ captain Butch Bouchard wondered, years later. The coming and going of trains below would tremor the hockey players all night in their beds, he recalled. The Bruins used to convene there, too, in 1956, for example, when coach Milt Schmidt ran his training camp at the Garden. Herbert Warren Wind wrote about it in Sports Illustrated:

To make sure that his players were thinking of hockey, hockey, hockey, Schmidt made it mandatory for every member of his squad to live in the Hotel Manger, which adjoins the Garden. He moved in himself, the better to enforce a strict curfew of 11 p.m. Furthermore, every man had to be up by 7 — there would be none of that lolling in bed and skipping breakfast and then trying to slide through morning practice without a good meal to fuel you.

In his 2020 memoir, Willie O’Ree remembered arriving at the Manger in the fall of 1957 for his first NHL camp. “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.”

The Manger is where Bruins legend Eddie Shore is supposed to have chased another player through the lobby waving a stick— I’m not clear on whether it was a teammate or rival. It’s where, in his refereeing years, King Clancy got into a fight with Black Hawks’ coach Charlie Conacher. And the Manger was the scene of another momentous moment in Bruins history in 1947, when another Boston hero, Bill Cowley, summarily quit the team and his hockey career in a dispute with Bruins’ supremo Art Ross at a post-season team banquet.

Could it be that it was due to this long record of ruckus that NHL President Clarence Campbell chose to stay away from the Manger’s fray? I don’t have good information on that.

What I can say is that, in January of 1951 — 71 years ago last week — Campbell checked himself into the calmer — more commodious? — confines of the Statler Hotel, which is where he and a couple of his (concussed) players posed for the photo above. The Statler is about a mile-and-a-half south of the Manger and the Garden, down by Boston Common. The latter was razed in 1983; the Statler is Boston’s Park Plaza today.

And how did Campbell come to be entertaining Ted Lindsay and Bill Ezinicki (while showing off the bathroom of his suite) on that long-ago Saturday afternoon?

It all started two days earlier, in Detroit, where Lindsay’s Red Wings had been hosting Ezinicki’s Bruins.

The Red Wings were leading the NHL, eight points ahead of second-place Toronto; the Bruins were 23 points back, fourth-placed in the six-team loop. Three of the league’s top six scorers wore Red-Wing red that season, names of Howe and Lindsay and Abel; Milt Schmidt was Boston’s leader, eighth in the league. The game ended as a 3-3 tie, with Howe and Abel adding assists to their collections.

Scoring wasn’t what this game would be remembered for. “At Detroit, there was more brawling than hockey playing.” That was the Canadian Press’ reporting next day. Enlivened was a word in the version The New York Times ran: an NHL game “enlivened by a bruising battle between Ted Lindsay and Bill Ezinicki.”

“Fist fighting has no honest place in hockey,” Marshall Dann of Detroit’s Free Press wrote while also allowing that, for those in the 10,618-strong crowd who enjoyed hockey’s violence, what ensued was “probably … the best battle at Olympia this season.”

Ezinicki was 26, Lindsay a year younger. They’d been teammates once, winning a Memorial Cup championship together with the (Charlie Conacher-coached) 1944 Oshawa Generals. In 1949, playing with the Toronto Maple Leafs, Ezinicki had led the NHL in penalty minutes, with Lindsay not far behind, in seventh place on the league list.

A year earlier, 1949-50, only Gus Kyle of the New York Rangers had compiled more penalty minutes than Ezinicki; Lindsay had finished third, a minute back of Ezinicki. Wild Bill the papers called him; the Associated Press identified Lindsay (a.k.a. Terrible Ted) as Detroit’s sparkplug. They’d clashed before in the NHL: in a 1948 game, in what the Boston Globe qualified as a “joust,” Lindsay freed four of Ezinicki’s teeth from his lower jaw.

In the January game in 1951, it was in the third period that things boiled over between the two malefactors. To start, they had exchanged (in Dann’s telling) “taps” with their sticks. “The whacks grew harder and finally they dropped sticks and gloves and went at it with fists.” Three times Lindsay seems to have knocked Ezinicki down: the third time the Boston winger’s head hit the ice, knocking him out.

Referee George Gravel assessed match penalties to both players for their deliberate efforts to injure each other. Both players were assessed automatic $100 fines.

In the aftermath, Red Wings physician Dr. C.L. Tomsu closed a cut from Lindsay’s stick on Ezinicki’s forehead with 11 stitches. He threaded another four into the side of Ezinicki’s head, where it had hit the ice, and four more inside his mouth. He also reported that Ezinicki had a tooth broken off in the violence.

Before departing Detroit, Ezinicki had his skull x-rayed; no serious injury was revealed, said his coach, Lynn Patrick. It took several days — and another x-ray — for Boston’s Dr. Tom Kelley to discover that Ezinicki’s nose was broken.

Lindsay took a stitch over one eye, and got treatment “for a scarred and bruised right hand.”

The Montreal Gazette’s Dink Carroll reported that Lindsay stopped by the Olympia clinic as Ezinicki was getting his stitching.

“Are you all right?” Lindsay asked. … The angry Ezinicki growled, “I’m all right,” and Lindsay left.

The Boston Daily Globe reported that the two had dropped their gloves and “slugged it out for more than a minute.” A Canadian Press dispatch timed the fighting at three minutes: “the length of a single round of a boxing match.”

None of the immediate (i.e. next-day) reports included the term stick-swingfest. That was a subsequent description, a few weeks after the fact, in February. Much of the reporting was couched in standard-issue hockey jovialese, as though the two men’s attempts to behead one another were purely pantomime.

The two teams were due to meet again in Boston two nights later, on the Saturday night, but before the two teams hit the ice, NHL President Clarence Campbell called for a hearing at the Statler to decide, hours before the puck dropped, on what today would be called supplemental discipline. The match penalties that referee Gravel had assessed came with automatic suspensions, but it was up to Campbell to decide how long the offenders would be out.

Campbell had been planning to be visiting Boston, as it turned out, on his way down from NHL HQ in Montreal to a meeting of club owners scheduled for Miami Beach. So that was convenient. NHL Referee-in-Chief Carl Voss would conduct the hearing into what had happened in Detroit, then Campbell would come to his decision.

We Three: Lindsay, Campbell, and Ezinicki. (Image: Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection)

And so the scales of what passed for NHL justice weighed the evidence. Ezinicki and Boston coach Lynn Patrick were scheduled to appear in Campbell’s suite at 11 a.m. Saturday morning, with Lindsay and Detroit coach Tommy Ivan following at 1 p.m. George Gravel was also on deck to report what he’d witnessed.

In the event, the teams were late arriving in Boston — their train from Detroit was delayed for five hours after hitting a car at an Ontario rail crossing — and proceedings had to be hurried along.

It would have been mid-afternoon when the scene above ensued. No-one else spoke to the reporters who assembled to hear the verdict: this was Clarence Campbell’s show.

“Everything has been said,” Ezinicki offered. Lindsay: “Nothing to say.”

“Neither of them had a whisper to offer in defence of their actions,” Campbell said.

The Boston Globe reminded readers that Campbell, himself a former NHL referee, had a lawyerly past, and that in 1945, just before assuming the NHL presidency, he’d been a Canadian Army prosecutor at the German war crime trials.

“There are three factors to be considered in settling a case of this kind,” he began. “First, the amount of incapacitation; second, provocation, and third, the past records of the players.”

“I don’t feel there was any real incapacitation in this instance,” Campbell continued. “I’m sure that Ezinicki would be able to play all right against the Wings if he were allowed.” (Ezinicki later concurred, for the record: he said he felt “all right.”)

“I don’t consider either of these men had provocation. They went at each other willfully.”

“These two fellows’ previous records are hard to exceed, not for one but for all seasons.”

His sentences? Campbell noted that the punishments he was handing down were the most severe of his five-year tenure as NHL president. Lindsay and Ezinicki were each fined $300 (including the original $100 match-penalty sanctions) and both were suspended (without pay) for the next three Boston-Detroit games. The fines were, in fact, more akin to peace bonds: so long as they behaved themselves, Lindsay and Ezinicki could each apply to have $200 of their fines returned to them.

“It depends upon their records the remainder of the season,” Campbell said, “if they’re not too proud to ask for it.”

Campbell did have some sharp words for the linesmen who’d been working the game in Detroit, Mush March and Bill Knott, who’d failed to quell the disturbance. “An order has been sent out reminding linesmen rules call for them to heed instructions in their rule books which say they ‘shall intervene immediately in fights,’” he said.

Campbell did, finally, have an important policy distinction to make before he concluded his sentencing session at the Statler Hotel. “I want to emphasize,” he told the writers gathered, “that I’m handing out these penalties entirely for the stick-swinging business and not for their fist-fighting.”

“In 1949, when there was a mild epidemic of match penalties, the board of governors instructed me to stiffen up on sticking incidents. I’m following that policy.”

“We want to stamp out the use of sticks. We’re not so concerned with fists . Fighting is not encouraged,” Campbell explained, “but it is tolerated as an outlet for the high spirits in such a violent contact game.”

It was the end of February by the time Ezinicki and Lindsay had served out their suspensions and were back on the ice to face one another in a game in Boston. They restrained themselves, I guess: neither of the antagonists featured in the penalty record or write-ups generated by the 1-1 tie that the Red Wings and Bruins shared in.

Campbell had a busy schedule all the same as February turned to March in ’51.

He took a suite at Toronto’s Royal York as the month got going and it was there that he decreed, after hearing from the parties involved (including referee Gravel, again), that Maple Leaf defenceman Gus Mortson would be suspended for two games and fined $200 for swinging his stick at Adam Brown of the Chicago Black Hawks.

“It appears to me as if he had a mental lapse,” Campbell said of Mortson.

Next up, a few days later, Campbell was back in his office in Montreal to adjudicate Maurice Richard’s New York hotel run-in with referee Hugh McLean.

During a game with the Rangers at Madison Square Garden that week, the Rocket had objected to a penalty he’d been assessed. For his protestations, he’d found himself with a misconduct and a $50 fine.

Later, when Richard happened to run into McLean in the lobby of the Piccadilly Hotel on 45th, just west of Broadway, he’d accosted him.

Campbell fined Richard $500 on a charge of “conduct detrimental to the welfare of hockey.”

Yes, he decided, Richard had appl wrote in rendering his decision, “that Richard did get McLean by the throat or tie …. Richard’s action in grabbing McLean was accompanied by a lot of foul and abusive language at the official which was continued through the entire incident lasting several minutes, and during which several women were present.”

Campbell did chide press coverage of the incident, which had been, he found, “exaggerated” the situation, since no blows had actually been landed in the fracas.

Campbell did say a word in defence of his referee, saying that Richard’s conduct was “completely unjustifiable.” His fine, Campbell insisted, would serve both as punishment for his bad behaviour and as a warning to other hockey players not to attack referees on the ice, or in hotels — or anywhere, really, at any time.

Justice League: Back row, from left, that’s Detroit coach Tommy Ivan, NHL Referee-in-Chief Carl Voss, referee George Gravel, Boston coach Lynn Patrick. Up front: Ted Lindsay, Clarence Campbell, Bill Ezinicki. Lindsay, Campbell, and Ezinicki. (Image: Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection)

 

 

22

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The Boston Bruins had a notion to honour Willie O’Ree last year, but a pandemic got in the way. And so it’s tonight that the team will retire the hockey pioneer’s number, which works out well enough, despite the delay: it was, after all, on a Saturday night 64 years ago to the day that O’Ree made his NHL debut, becoming the first Black player to skate in the league.

The Fredericton-born O’Ree was playing for the Quebec Aces that season when the Bruins summoned him to Montreal to fill in for an indisposed Leo Labine. On January 18, 1958, a 22-year-old O’Ree played his first game at the Forum, aiding in Boston’s 3-0 win. The next day, back in Boston, he skated as the two teams played again. Montreal won that one, 6-2. Playing on a line with Don McKenney and Jerry Toppazzini, O’Ree didn’t see much ice-time in either game. By the Boston Globe’s calculation, he had one good scoring chance in each one, only to be stymied by Canadiens’ stymier Jacques Plante.

A sweater note: O’Ree wore number 18 for his initial weekend in the NHL. He took up 22 when he returned to the Bruins’ line-up in the fall of 1960. O’Ree scored his first NHL goal, against Montreal, in January of 1961.

O’Ree, who’s 86 now and lives in San Diego, will attend tonight’s ceremony at the TDGarden virtually, as they say, because … pandemic, still. His number is the 12th to be honoured by the Bruins, joining those worn by Lionel Hitchman, Eddie Shore, Dit Clapper, Bobby Orr, Milt Schmidt, Phil Esposito, Cam Neely, Johnny Bucyk, Rick Middleton, Terry O’Reilly, and Ray Bourque.

Also this week: the U.S. House of Representatives has a bill ready to be voted that will award O’Ree the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest U.S. civilian honour. Once it’s passed by the House, the Willie O’Ree Congressional Gold Medal Act will make its way to the White House for President Joe Biden to sign.

 

 

number 22, willie o’ree

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Beantowners: The 1960-61 Bruins line up for picture day. Back row, from left: Murray Oliver, Andre Pronovost, Dallas Smith, Charlie Burns, Willie O’Ree, Jim Bartlett, Gerry Ouellette. Middle row, from left: Trainer Win Green, Aut Erickson, Jerry Toppazzini, Gary Aldcorn, Tom McCarthy, Bob Armstrong, Don McKenney, Doug Mohns, Bronco Horvath, trainer Hammy Moore. Up front, from left: Bruce Gamble, Leo Boivin, GM Lynn Patrick, coach Milt Schmidt, president Walter Brown, captain Fern Flaman, Johnny Bucyk.

The Boston Bruins had a plan to raise Willie O’Ree’s number 22 to the upper reaches of the TD Garden tonight, in honour of his “trailblazing impact on and off the ice” — but then, you know, there’s this pandemic. Now, instead of a ceremony ahead of tonight’s fan-free game between the Bruins and New Jersey’s Devils, they’ll plan to do it (with full attendance, everybody hopes) on January 18, 2022 — 64 years to the day that O’Ree made his NHL debut. Of course, he wore 18 that particular night, and the next, when he and the Bruins tangled in a home-and-home series with the Montreal Canadiens. O’Ree took 22 when he returned to the Bruins’ line-up in the fall of 1960, the one seen here, with whom he played a more regular role over the course of 43 games. The first Bruin to wear 22? That would be defenceman Ed Kryzanowski, starting in 1948. Others to have borne it include Joe Klukay, Larry Hillman, Brad Park, and Brian Leetch. Shawn Thornton was the last Bruin to wear 22: it’s been out of circulation since he relinquished it in 2014.

must be some misunderstanding

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Twenty-Two: The Boston Bruins will retire Willie O’Ree’s number 22 on February 18.

“Sure, I was nervous,” said the 23-year-old rookie, “but it was the greatest thrill of my life.”

It was on a Saturday night in Montreal, January 18, 1958, that Fredericton, New Brunswick’s own Willie O’Ree made his NHL debut at the Forum, manning the left wing for the Boston Bruins and becoming, as he did so, the first Black player in the league’s then-40-year-old history.

The NHL observed the anniversary of O’Ree’s historic breakthrough this January past with decals on helmets that players across the league started wearing on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the U.S. “Celebrating Equality,” they read; they’ll be on display through the end of February, which is Black History Month across North America.

O’Ree, who’s now 85, will be further honoured on February 18, when the Bruins plan to raise his number, 22, to the rafters of TD Garden ahead of a game with the New Jersey Devils.

That was the number he eventually wore. For his debut in January of ’58, O’Ree was on call-up duty, summoned from the QHL Quebec Aces to replace a flu-bitten Leo Labine in the Boston line-up for a home-and-home weekend series.

For those games, O’Ree sported number 18.

At the Forum, he skated on a line with Don McKenney and Jerry Toppazzini. The Bruins won that first of them 3-0, with Johnny Bucyk putting the winner past Jacques Plante. Sunday night in Boston, Bernie Geoffrion collected a pair of goals and a brace of assists as Montreal roared back with a 6-2 win.

O’Ree had a respectable 13 goals and 32 points that year with Quebec, but this initial stint of his in the NHL yielded nothing in the way of statistics. It would be another few years before he got a steady chance to play in the NHL, 1960-61, during which he donned number 22 in 43 games for Boston, notching four goals and 14 points.

Can we talk about this? Not the numbers O’Ree wore on his various sweaters, or the stats he registered, but his debut, how it was received, the idea of a “colour line” in hockey, and the fictions by which the sport’s establishment (including the press) deluded itself? Also, for good measure, maybe we’d continue a little further along, back a few years before 1958, and consider the odd instance of Herb Carnegie’s not-quite chance at playing in the NHL.

When Willie O’Ree first skated for the Bruins 63 years ago, note was taken, though the debut wasn’t universally hailed as a long-due turning point.

Many press reports noted the occasion as they did most matters of movements of NHL personnel, which is to say, in passing. Bill O’Ree, a couple of them called him; a United Press dispatch helpfully noted that he went by both names, Willie and Bill, and that his christened name was William Eldon O’Ree.

Montreal’s La Presse rolled out an eight-column headline across its sports page:

Pour La Première Fois, Un Joueur Noir Évoluera Dans La NHL Ce Soir

The English-language Gazette wasn’t so certain — they only “believed” that O’Ree was the first Black player in the NHL, reminding readers (in case they hadn’t noticed) that there had been, to date, “comparatively few” Black players in hockey.

Toronto’s Globe and Mail and Star both headlined O’Ree’s achievement in their sports sections.

The Boston Globe’s coverage was initially more muted: a United Press game report that ran on Sunday, January 19 highlighted O’Ree’s historic debut while rating his performance “undistinguished, as Boston coach played him only half a turn a time, alternating him with veteran Johnny Peirson.”

Columnist Tom Fitzgerald followed after Sunday’s game with a friendly, first-hand piece. “Boston fans constantly shouted encouragement to O’Ree on his appearances last night,” he wrote, “although he did not see much action in the later stages.”

“He’s a very fast skater,” Bruins GM Lynn Patrick observed, “but there are some things he naturally has to learn yet.”

Fitzgerald noted that the Bruins were hoping that Stan Maxwell, a centre from Truro, Nova Scotia, who was a teammate of O’Ree’s in Quebec and also Black, would soon be making his NHL debut. (Update: he never did.)

If this was a time, the opportunity ripe, for the NHL and the hockey establishment supporting it to reckon with questions of race, accessibility, systemic racism … well, no, there’s no evidence that any such discussion (let alone introspection) occurred.

It was ever thus. Those subjects just don’t figure in the recorded history of the early NHL. A 1928 comment attributed to Frank Calder, the NHL’s first president, qualifies an outright rarity:  unlike major-league baseball, he was indirectly said to have suggested,  his league drew no colour line, nor was it  likely to do so.

True: no such prohibition appeared in the NHL’s Constitution or By-Laws. But: it was also one of Calder’s owners, Conn Smythe of Toronto Maple Leafs, who’s alleged to have watched 19-year-old junior star Herb Carnegie (who was Black) skate at Maple Leafs Gardens in 1938, telling Carnegie’s coach that he, Smythe, would sign Carnegie in a minute for the NHL — if only he were white. (In another version, Smythe is supposed to have said he would pay $10,000 to anyone who could “turn Carnegie white.”)

No-one was talking about that in 1958. Another United Press wire story out of Montreal that January weekend did venture to mention Willie O’Ree debut in the context of “the lowering of the last colour line among major sports in North America” … even as reporter Dick Bacon ramped up to a ready rationale that the problem actually resided with Black players themselves: they just weren’t good enough.

“Most hockey observers point out,” he blithely concluded, “that the only reason a ‘colour line’ existed was that there hasn’t been a Negro player qualified to make the National Hockey League.”

Lest anyone have trouble interpreting that view, The Hockey News made sure to boost the signal a couple of weeks later. In the edition dated February 1, 1958, writer Len Bramson kicked off THN’s coverage of Willie O’Ree’s arrival in the NHL with this astonishing take:

Willie O’Ree became the first Negro to play in the National Hockey League, but his presence on the NHL scene didn’t mean that a barrier had been broken, as was the case of Jackie Robinson, the first Negro ever to break into the major leagues. The fact that there has never been a Negro in the NHL prior to O’Ree must be blamed on the Negro race itself. No Negro, until O’Ree came along had the ability to play in the big time.

NHL owners have never discriminated against race colour or creed. All they have ever asked for was ability on skates.

Just in case he wasn’t clear enough with this, Bramson saw fit, midway through this THN piece, to fold in Dick Bacon and his previous United Press reporting on O’Ree — including, verbatim, Bacon’s own observation about the mysterious lack of Black players of NHL quality.

Otherwise, following his own mention of ability on skates, Bramson went on to cite Herb Carnegie and his older brother, Ossie, from Toronto, both of whom had retired in the mid-1950s after long minor-league careers.

Of course, neither of them ever did play on NHL ice — while Herb was invited to attend the New York Rangers’ training camp in 1948, he turned down several of the team’s offers for minor-league contracts, opting to return to play for the Sherbrooke Saints of the Quebec Provincial Senior League.

“There was no doubt in my mind, then or now,” Carnegie wrote in his 1997 memoir, “that I was every bit as good as the most talented player on that team. Except that I had once more been stopped by the colour barrier. The Rangers and its [sic] management were unable to look beyond the colour of my skin.”

Which gets us back to the matter, mentioned a little way back, of a slightly earlier time in the younger Carnegie’s career, another chance at breaking through to the NHL that actually seems to have been … an illusion?

It’s a decidedly odd episode that I haven’t seen mentioned before: it’s not in that memoir of Carnegie’s, A Fly In A Pail of Milk (which appeared in a new edition in 2019), nor does it surface in Cecil Harris’ Breaking the Ice: The Black Experience in Professional Hockey (2007).

March of 1947 this was. As a point of pertinent context, 28-year-old Jackie Robinson made his big-league baseball debut for the Brooklyn Dodgers in April of that year, having spent the previous season with the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers’ International League affiliate.

Herb Carnegie was 27 that spring. He and Ossie, who was 29, were both playing in the QPSHL for the Sherbrooke Saint-François (as they were called that year), playing on a line with Manny McIntyre, from Gagetown, New Brunswick, who was also Black. Herb would lead the team in scoring that season, collecting 33 goals and 83 points, and for the second year in a row he’d be named league MVP.

So it’s not so surprising that the Montreal Canadiens wanted to sign him — if they did.

Did they?

Herb Carnegie and his imminent NHL debut make the news in Muncie, Indiana, in March of 1947.

As March was winding down, so too was the NHL’s regular season. Looking forward to defending the Stanley Cup they’d won in 1946, Montreal was cruising towards the playoffs in first place, ten points up on the Toronto Maple Leafs.

But. Injuries were starting to mount. Star centre Elmer Lach had been out three months with a broken cheek-bone. In mid-March, they lost the man who’d taken his place on the first-line, Buddy O’Connor: he broke his cheek in a particularly raucous game against the Rangers in New York. Defenceman Ken Reardon and winger George Allen were also banged up, and while it looked like they would be ready for the post-season, O’Connor’s status remained iffy.

And so, according to Montreal broadcaster Larry O’Brien, Canadiens coach Dick Irvin was looking to call in Herb Carnegie. He’d discussed it with club officials, declaring himself “most impressed” by the Sherbrooke centre’s skills.

O’Brien is an interesting figure. He was a crime reporter for The Montreal Star as well as a broadcaster, calling Canadiens hockey on the radio and Royals ballgames, too. He also stood in as a regular batting-practice pitcher for the Royals, and as such had thrown to Jackie Robinson in ’46. That was one of O’Brien’s proudest memories, he later said. He also ended up helping Robinson and his wife, Rachel, find an apartment. O’Brien would call the first TV broadcast of a sporting event in Canada, a Royals game in 1952, and later worked Grey Cup games and Stanley Cup finals. He went on to run the Canadian Open golf tournament for a decade, and spent years, subsequently, as Jack Nicklaus’ publicist.

In March of ’47, O’Brien seems to have been in New York for the CBC in his role as Canadiens broadcaster. The NHL’s board of governor’s was meeting in Manhattan, too, on Monday, March 17, and that’s where O’Brien said he got his scoop that Carnegie and the Canadiens were about to make history.

The news rippled across North America. Most of the headlines, it’s true, were tentative, touting Carnegie’s promotion to the NHL as a possibility. Someone saw fit to ask Boston Bruins president Weston Adams about the whole situation — I guess because Montreal was due to meet Boston in the playoffs? Anyway, Adams’ strange sign-off, declaration of permission, blessing — whatever it was, it was duly broadcast around the continent as well.

“It makes no difference to us what race or creed a player is,” Adams said. “If he’s a good player and can help the Canadiens that’s all the interest we have in the matter.”

Montreal’s interest, as it turned out, was not so much. Dick Irvin was quickly on record saying that the whole thing was a “misunderstanding.” How so? He made clear that there would be no other comment: it was just a misunderstanding.

O’Brien, for his part, stood fast, insisting that his information was correct.

And Carnegie … stayed where he was. Instead of joining Montreal for their Wednesday loss in Toronto or the following Saturday’s defeat at the hands of Chicago, Carnegie suited up for Sherbrooke as they launched into the provincial-league finals against the Lachine Rapides. On Thursday, March 20, he scored a pair of goals in his team’s 7-2 win. Going on to win the title in six games, Sherbrooke carried on to the Allan Cup playoffs, which they departed in April, losing out to the Montreal (hockey) Royals.

Making do without Carnegie, meanwhile, Canadiens called on utility forwards Hub Macey and Bobby Fillion to fill the holes in their line-up, along with rookie Leo Gravelle. Buddy O’Connor made it back to the ice for the end of Montreal’s successful first-round series against Boston and played in the finals, too, which saw the Canadiens surrender the Cup to the Toronto Maple Leafs.

What exactly happened with Carnegie’s call-up-that-never-was? Why wasn’t he the NHL’s first Black player, eleven years before Willie O’Ree, a month ahead of Jackie Robinson’s breakthrough in baseball?

It’s not entirely clear. Since the principals of the piece — Carnegie, Irvin, O’Brien — are all now gone, we only have what’s on paper. Montreal’s French-language dailies were pretty categorical: Irvin was joking, O’Brien took him seriously. As Le Canada put it (translation Google’s):

Dick Irvin didn’t believe Larry O’Brien would take him seriously when he asked him if black player Herb Carnegie would be as strong a draw in hockey as Jackie Robinson in baseball.

What Toronto Daily Star sports editor Andy Lytle put on the page at the tail of one of his columns that week in March of ’47 might be as detailed an explanation as we’re ever going to get on the whole sorry business.

Lafayette, Indiana, gets news of Carnegie and the Canadiens in March of 1947, before Dick Irvin gets  a chance to explain.

Lytle and his departmental copy editors got a few basics wrong — naming Ossiewhen he meant Herb, calling Larry O’Brien Andy — but Canadiens GM Frank Selke was Lytle’s source, so his information is worth weighing.

“It’s the Robinson thing which stirs up Montreal writers,” Selke told Lytle. “Dick [Irvin] happened to say to [Larry] O’Brien if Robinson was only a hockey player, that would solve our troubles. That was enough. O’Brien decided we should use Carnegie and we weren’t even consulted. The idea, of course, is ridiculous.”

If only Lytle had pressed there — ridiculous? what, exactly, was ridiculous? — but Lytle didn’t press. Selke trundled on.

“We’re not too bad,” he said. “We finished on top and we have some hockey players left.”

Getting to the end of that update in the Star, readers might have let their attention drift to the top of the page, which featured a photograph of Jackie Robinson, his wife, and their baby, Jackie Jr.

The baseball pioneer’s future was still not decided. In that baseball pre-season, he remained a Montreal Royal, with Brooklyn GM Branch Rickey telling reporters that he hadn’t yet decided whether or not Robinson had earned a spot with the Dodgers. Rickey had a couple of weeks before the season got underway to make his mind up, the Starstory said, and Rickey suggested he’d make full use of that time.

“Robinson’s record with Montreal Royals last season would have automatically sent him to the Dodgers,” the Star piously opined on the very day that the possibility of Carnegie’s NHL debut tagged as a jest, “except for that unadmitted bar, the old American one of prejudice against colour.”

Note: While press style of the 1940s and ’50s consistently has newspapers Canadian and otherwise going with the American spelling of color, it has been rendered here throughout as colour.

game changer

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NB: Born in Fredericton, on a Tuesday of this date in 1935, Willie O’Ree turns 85 today. In 1958, he became the first Black player to skate in the NHL when he turned out for the Boston Bruins in a game at Montreal’s Forum against the Canadiens. In 2018, he was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame as a builder.

alton white: blazing a trail in the wha

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Willie O’Ree was 37 in the fall of 1972, lacing up for his 17th season in professional hockey with the WHL San Diego Gulls. Eleven years after O’Ree skated the right wing for the Boston Bruins, the first black player to play in the NHL, the league was still waiting for a second. Alton White, 27, wasn’t focussed on that: he just wanted his chance to play. Born in Amherst, Nova Scotia, he’d grown up in Winnipeg. A right winger like O’Ree, he could score, and did aplenty, in the IHL and AHL. He attended the New York Rangers’ training camp in 1966; in 1970, he tried his luck with the Oakland Seals.

“I think speed is one of my strong points,” he said then. “I’m a pretty good skater, and I try to be a hustling type, two-way player.” When it didn’t work out in California, or any other NHL territory, White signed, in ’72, with the New York Raiders of the upstart WHA. He played four seasons in the WHA for four different franchises. He finished the ’72-72 season with the Los Angeles Sharks, for whom he scored 20 goals and 37 points. He ended his hockey career in 1976 playing senior hockey in British Columbia for a team fantastically named the North Shore Hurry Kings.

Newspaper profiles from those WHA years often focussed on the fact that he was the WHA’s only black player.

“I don’t consider myself the Jackie Robinson of hockey,” he told one writer in 1972. “He really had a lot of hardships. I have no problems.”

Of his early years, he recalled moving to Manitoba at the age of eight. “Nova Scotia was 90 per cent white and Winnipeg was probably 95 per cent. It was hockey country and I just naturally played hockey. My older brothers played peewee hockey and junior, but there was no other black that I played with or against in Canada.”

He had his hopes for the future. “In the future, there will be a lot more black hockey players. As I travel from city to city, I see some of the junior hockey programs, and I see more and more blacks participating. Ten years ago, you wouldn’t see any.”

a player to be named later

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Maybe the editors on sports desk got distracted that weekend in November of 1950, let their attention wander as they composed the last page of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle’s sporting newses and notes. But maybe that’s naïve, or overly charitable. Maybe when they sent the item above — that’s it, the whole entire thing — into print, those editors were, instead, looking to sum up the whole history of black players in hockey’s big leagues in as succinct a fashion as possible, erasing him from his own story — and doing it, what’s more, under an erroneous headline, and with minimal punctuation.

Art Dorrington was the player who went unmentioned that day. A son of Truro, Nova Scotia, he was 20 in 1950, a high-scoring centreman coming off a stand-out season with the Stellarton Royals of the Nova Scotia Antigonish-Pictou County Hockey League. Scouted and signed by the New York Rangers, he was assigned to the Atlantic City Sea Gulls of the Eastern Amateur Hockey League, and did indeed make his debut at Madison Square Garden that November night, when the Rovers downed the Gulls 7-3. Dorrington didn’t score in that game, but he finished the season with 18 goals and 34 points in 49 games. The call-up to the NHL never came, He played six further seasons in the minor leagues before his career was ended in 1958 by a leg broken badly while he was playing for the EHL’s Philadelphia Ramblers. As Tom Hawthorn pointed out in a Globe and Mail obituary published after Dorrington’s death in 2017, his injury in 1958 occurred a week after Willie O’Ree made his debut with the Boston Bruins, becoming the first Black player to take the NHL ice in the league’s 41-year history.

mike marson goes to washington

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Capital M: Mike Marson featured on the cover of the NHL’s Goal magazine in October of 1975.

Mike Marson was a high-scoring 18-year-old left winger for the Sudbury Wolves when the expansion Washington Capitals selected him in the second round of the 1974 NHL Amateur Draft, three spots ahead of future Hall-of-Famer Bryan Trottier. When Marson, born and raised in Scarborough, Ontario, made his debut as a 19-year-old with the Capitals that October, he became just the second black player to take the ice in the league’s 57-year history, the first since Willie O’Ree played for the Boston Bruins between 1957 and 1961. When, in December of ’74, Washington called up Amherst, Nova Scotia-born winger Bill Riley, it was, as the Associated Press noted at the time, “the first time in the NHL that two black players played in one game.”

“Yeah, I heard of Willie O’Ree,” Marson told a writer for The New York Times that fall, “but I never saw him play. That was way before my time. But I think it’s time to end all this ridiculousness: the first to do this, the second to do that. No only for blacks, but for a Russian going to the moon or a Chinese pole-vaulter or whatever. It’s childishness.”

The ridiculousness persisted, and (of course) worse, too. As much as Marson tried to focus on playing hockey in his rookie season and beyond, much of the media’s attention continued to focus on his race, how he’d ended up in hockey, why. Mostly they didn’t talk about the racist abuse he faced, on the ice and off, from opponents, teammates,  so-called fans, total strangers, but all that is specified in dispiriting detail in Cecil Harris’ 2007 book Breaking the Ice: The Black Experience in Professional Hockey.

Mike Marson played parts of five seasons for Washington and one final year with the Los Angeles before departing the NHL in 1980.

called to the hall or not, buddy maracle deserves his due

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Blueshirt Buddy: Ceremonies celebrating yesterday’s National Indigenous Peoples Day on the Six Nations of the Grand River territory at Ohsweken, Ontario, included a tribute to the proud legacy of local NHL and WHA heroes, including Buddy Maracle, Jimmy Jamieson, Guy Smith, Stan Jonathan, and Brandon Montour. Above, local youth goaltender Ashlee LaForme represents for Maracle in a modern-day New York Rangers sweater emblazoned with the number 14 he wore in 1931.

It’s possible (if not probable) that when the Hockey Hall of Fame proclaims a new class of inductees on Tuesday of next week, Buddy Maracle will be among them. Maracle, you’ll maybe recall, was Mohawk, from Ayr, Ontario, and seems to have been the first Indigenous player to have skated in the NHL. His stint with the New York Rangers in 1931 was short (just 15 games), and he died in 1958, facts that would appear to argue against his recognition by an institution that favours prolonged NHL service and doesn’t, these days, tend toward posthumous choices. It’s the case, too, that while Maracle seems to have been a very good player, he wasn’t a great or generational talent. His claim, should it succeed, would be akin to Willie O’Ree’s: if Maracle were to be honoured, it would be as a hockey pioneer.

It could happen. A comprehensive nomination package did go to the Hall in Maracle’s name earlier this year (brief disclosure: I contributed a supporting letter). And Maracle’s story has been gaining more and more attention across the hockey world and beyond. If it wasn’t exactly a secret before 2017, it was fairly obscure and threadbare.

That started to change when Fred Sasakamoose was named a member of the Order of Canada as that year ended. Deserving as that vice-regal acknowledgment was (and by no fault of Sasakamoose’s), the messaging that went along with it was insistently erroneous as institutions that should have known better — looking at you, Rideau Hall and the NHL — blithely identified Sasakamoose as having blazed a trail that, in fact, Maracle had already blazed two decades earlier.

As a matter of history, the oversight wasn’t a good look for the NHL. The league might have attended to their lapse quickly and unobtrusively — maybe as part of the Hockey Is For Everyone initiative they launched in February of 2018 to promote diversity and inclusion in the game.

If nothing else, Maracle’s story is a fascinating one that highlights just how hard it was for an Indigenous athlete to make his way to the top of his sport in the 1920s and ’30s. Instead, the league continued to ignore Maracle. Over at their editorial department, a February, 2018 profile of Fred Sasakamoose on NHL.com re-upped the notion that the distinguished former Chicago Black Hawk is “the NHL’s first Indigenous player.” I guess that’s still the official line: more than a year later, the story hasn’t been corrected.

The fact that at least four other Indigenous players would seem to have preceded Sasakamoose onto NHL ice (Maracle, Joe Benoit, Jimmy Jamieson, Johnny Harms) isn’t any slight on him or the remarkable things that he’s achieved in his life. It’s possible that the NHL believes that by highlighting — or even acknowledging? — Maracle’s story they might discomfit or embarrass Sasakamoose, and that’s why they’ve kept quiet.

If that’s the case, I don’t think it really makes sense. Facts are facts and flouting them does no-one any good. Media mentions of Fred Sasakamoose don’t always, now, automatically identify him as the first Indigenous NHLer. But it’s also true that the word on Maracle isn’t widespread, and keeps not showing up in newspapers and magazines and online. Assuming that the NHL knows and is assiduously interested in being true to its own history, many in the media do still take the league’s lead in ignoring Buddy Maracle.

Exhibit A: in March, when the NHL’s Canadian media partners from Sportsnet took their Hometown Hockey show on the road to Enoch Cree Nation in Alberta, Maracle was left, unaccountable, out of the picture. It was a remarkable day and an historic one: the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network’s broadcast in Plains Cree of the game between the Montreal Canadiens and Carolina Hurricanes marked the first time that an NHL game went to air in an Indigenous language.

And on an occasion so fully focussed on the future, present, and past of Indigenous hockey, the man who blazed such a crucial trail was entirely, inexplicably absent. Buddy Maracle didn’t rate so much a mention during Hometown Hockey’s extensive coverage that day.

No Show: First in a series of between-periods boards from Hometown Hockey’s March 24, 2019 broadcast from Enoch Cree Nation in Alberta that somehow forgot Buddy Maracle.

It may be that when the Hockey Hall announces its 2019 class on Tuesday we’ll learn that Buddy Maracle’s time has come, along with — who else’s? Maybe will Reggie Leach, the first Indigenous superstar, finally get his due? Or Rick Middleton? I might bet on Vincent Lecavalier and Brad Richards making the cut, if I were betting. And, no question: Hayley Wickenheiser. Is this the year Andy Moog gets the call, or Tom Barrasso? What about Seth Martin, J.C. Tremblay, Claude Provost, Lorne Chabot? And then, of course, there’s the perennial clamour for Paul Henderson.

It’s worth saying that the Hockey Hall of Fame is a sovereign state, independent of the NHL, and that it (in theory) thinks and acts for itself, makes its own choices, follows its own stars. I’m not suggesting that if Maracle and his story don’t break through next week it should be seen in a nefarious light. What it will mean is exactly this: his nomination didn’t get enough votes.

Whatever happens, the Hall has quietly shifted its narrative in the past year. Pre-2018, if you’d steered your way over to the Hall’s extensive online biographical dictionary of all-time NHLers, here’s what you would have read for Fred Sasakamoose:

and Buddy Maracle:

I can’t say just when the change was made, but it’s been several months now since the Hockey Hall of Fame adopted a new line and started informing visitors on their respective player pages (Sasakamoose’s here and Maracle’s here) that while “Fred Sasakamoose is among the first Indigenous people to appear in an NHL game,” “Henry Elmer ‘Buddy’ Maracle holds the distinction of being the first Indigenous person to appear in an NHL game.” So that’s some kind of progress.

Update, October, 2020: The Hall of Fame has now done away entirely with the player biographies that used to appear on the site. Not sure when that excising happened, exactly, but if you click on those links above they’ll show you statistics only. 

Family Dues: Members of Buddy Maracle’s extended family gathered during yesterday’s celebrations at the Gaylord Powless Arena in Ohsweken, Ontario.

hall-passed: reggie leach

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With the Hockey Hall of Fame announcing its 2018 class this afternoon, Martin Brodeur is the name that fans and pundits alike seem to be settling on as a sure bet. Other candidates thought to be up at the front of the pack include Martin St. Louis and Daniel Alfredsson. There’s talk that hockey trailblazer Willie O’Ree, 82, might be in, too — maybe, the word was yesterday at NHL.com, he could be inducted as a builder for his quiet energy and devotion he’s put in as an ambassador for inclusion and diversity with the NHL’s Hockey is for Everyone initiative.

For a piece that went up yesterday at The New York Times, I’ve been talking to and writing about Indigenous hockey players recently.  Fred Sasakamoose was one of the first to play in the NHL, and I don’t know why he wouldn’t be in the conversation, too. I’m not sure whether Sasakamoose, who’s 84, has even been nominated, but I hope so: given his tireless work with and advocacy for Indigenous youth over the years, he’s as worthy a candidate as O’Ree.

Then there’s Reggie Leach. You’ll recall, maybe, the effort that the great John K. Samson organized to press the case for the Riverton Rifle to be welcomed into the Hall. In 2010, there was the song Samson recorded that doubled as a petition, both of which went by the name http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/rivertonrifle/.

In 2013, Samson put together a well-argued application supported by a very complete statistical package and accompanied by endorsements from, among others, novelist Joseph Boyden, Ian Campeau (a.k.a. DJ NDN) of A Tribe Called Red, writer Stephen Brunt, and Wab Kinew, who was then Director of Indigenous Inclusion at the University of Winnipeg. Samson and some of his friends would eventually go in person to deliver the whole bundle, song and stats and supplications, to the Hall’s very doors.

That’s worth watching, which you can do below, even if the whole enterprise was in vain: as of this hour, Reggie Leach still isn’t an Honoured Member of hockey’s Hall of Fame.

Talking to Leach, who’s 68 now, this past January, I asked him about that. He said that he was aware of continued efforts by friends and fans of his across the country who are still intent on convincing the Hall that the time is now, but that he doesn’t worry much about whether the call comes or not.

“I don’t get involved with it,” he told me from his home Aundeck Omni Kaning First Nation, near Little Current, Ontario, on Manitoulin Island. “I’m just happy that there are people who think that I should be in there. To me, that’s a great honour. They’re my Hall of Famers, those people. If I don’t get in, I really don’t care, because I think it’s mainly where you come from and who you played for that matters — stuff like that.”

(Top image: cover of John K. Samson’s 2010 ANTI- EP “Provincial Road 222”)

 

 

willie o’ree, 1961: scored that one for the whole town of fredericton

/ puckstruck

Like Bronco Advised: With Montreal defenceman Jean-Guy-Talbot looking on, Willie O’Ree scores his first NHL goal, a game-winner, on Charlie Hodge, January 1, 1961.

Sixty years ago today, Montreal was minus-nine and snowed under, cloudy overhead, with light flurries expected and a risk of freezing drizzle. Normal, then, for a Saturday in January. Marlon Brando’s new movie, Sayonara, was playing at Loew’s downtown. In Ottawa, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker was feeling better. Having spent the week confined to his bed with a strained back, he was up and out for a short walk. All was well in the local hockey cosmos: the Montreal Canadiens, Stanley Cup champions for two years running, were once again a top the NHL standings. Coming off a 5-2 Thursday-night win over the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Habs were preparing to host the Boston Bruins and their newly promoted winger, 22-year-old Fredericton, New Brunswick-born Willie O’Ree.

This week, the NHL is remembering that 1958 night, the first to see a Black player play in the league. O’Ree, who’s 82 now, was honoured last night and roundly cheered at Boston’s TD Garden when the modern-day Canadiens played (and lost to) the Bruins. Earlier in the day, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh had proclaimed today Willie O’Ree Day across the city. That was at a press conference dedicating a new street hockey rink in O’Ree’s honour.

Called up in a manpower emergency, O’Ree played only a pair of games during his first NHL stay. It would be three more years before he returned to score his first goal.

Back in ’58, the Bruins and Canadiens were spending all weekend together. Following Saturday’s game, they’d meet again Sunday in Boston. The then-dominant Canadiens were, as mentioned, cruising atop the six-team NHL, 18 points ahead of second-place Detroit, 24 clear of the languishing fifth-place Bruins.

With Leo Labine out with the flu, Boston GM Lynn Patrick summoned 22-year-old O’Ree from the Quebec Aces of the minor-league QHL. In 32 games there, he’d scored 7 goals and 18 points.

“It is believed that O’Ree is the first Negro to ever perform in the National Hockey League,” Montreal’s Gazette ventured, with nods to other black hockey talents, including Herb and Ossie Carnegie and Manny McIntyre, star Aces of the early 1950s, as well as to O’Ree’s teammate in Quebec, centre Stan Maxwell.

Elsewhere, across North America, the headlines were bolder. “Young Negro Star Makes NHL History,” a California paper headlined a United Press story in its pages, noting “the lowering of the last color line among major sports” while also deferring to “most hockey observers” who were said to agree that the only reason there had been such a line was “the fact that there hasn’t been a Negro player qualified to make” the NHL.

O’Ree wore number 18 playing the left wing on Boston’s third line alongside Don McKenney and Jerry Toppazzini.

“His debut was undistinguished as Boston coach Milt Schmidt played him only half a turn at a time,” The Boston Globe recounted, “alternating him with veteran Johnny Pierson.” The thinking there? GM Patrick explained that Schmidt wanted to “ease the pressure” on O’Ree and “reduce the margin of errors for the youngster.”

Dink Carroll of Montreal’s Gazette paid most of his attention on the night to Boston’s new signing, the veteran Harry Lumley, “chubby goalkeeper who looks like a chipmunk with a nut in each cheek.” O’Ree he recognized as “a fleet skater” who had one good scoring chance in the third period in combination with Toppazzini. “He lost it when he was hooked from behind by Tom Johnson.”

Lumley’s revenge was registered in a 3-0 Bruins’ win. “I was really nervous in the first period,” O’Ree said, “but it was much better as the game went on.”

“It’s a day I’ll never forget as long as I live. It’s the greatest thrill of my life.”

Also making an NHL debut at the Forum that night: Prince Souvanna Phouma, the prime minister of Laos, was on hand to see the hockey sights at the end of a North American visit.

Sunday night at the Garden, O’Ree got one opening, early on, when Don McKenney fed him a leading pass. This time, O’Ree shot into Jacques Plante’s pads. With Canadiens re-asserting themselves as league-leaders with a 6-2 win, O’Ree didn’t play much in the game’s latter stages.

So that was that. Afterwards, O’Ree was reported to be grinning, sitting amid a stack of telegrams from well-wishers back home. He described himself as a “little shaky.” “I’m just happy to get a chance up here, that’s about all I can say.” Leo Labine was back at practice next day, along with another forward who’d been injured, Real Chevrefils, so after another practice or two, O’Ree returned to Quebec.

As a Hull-Ottawa Canadian, 1960.

It was three years before he got back to the NHL and scored his first goal. Canadiens figured prominently again, starting in the summer of 1960, when the Bruins agreed to loan the winger to Montreal. O’Ree was duly assigned to the Hull-Ottawa edition of the Canadiens, in the Eastern Professional Hockey League, where Glen Skov was the coach. The team had a good autumn, but as happens with farm teams, they paid the price in having their best talents stripped away. In November, Canadiens called up Bobby Rousseau and Gilles Tremblay while Boston beckoned O’Ree, now 25, back to the fold. The Bruins were still down at the wrong end of the standings, just a point out of last place, while also suffering adjectivally in the papers where, if they weren’t “listless” they were “punchless.”

Starting off his second stint as a Bruin, he was numbered 22, assigned to a line with Charlie Burns and Gerry Ouellette. As in 1958, newspapers (like Pittsburgh’s Courier) took due note that the “fast, aggressive forward” was “the first of his race to play in the National Hockey League.”

“The Speedy O’Ree” The New York Times annotated him when he made his Garden debut; in Chicago, the Tribune’s Ted Damata was particularly attentive. “The first Negro” was “on the ice four times, three times as a left winger and once as a right winger. He touched the puck twice, losing it each time, once on a hefty body check by Jack Evans of the Hawks.” Continue reading →