Willie by Willie O'Ree & Michael McKinley

Author:Willie O'Ree & Michael McKinley [O'Ree, Willie & McKinley, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2020-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

A little over two weeks later, Len Bramson wrote in The Hockey News that “the fact that there has never been a Negro player in the NHL before O’Ree must be blamed on the Negro race itself.”

Of course, there I would strongly beg to differ. As I said earlier in my story, Herb Carnegie could have broken through the so-called “color line” back in 1948, but the New York Rangers’ offer wasn’t better than the money he was making in the minors, nor did they assure him of a spot. And his brother Ossie and linemate Manny McIntyre were also good enough to crack the NHL. Stan Maxwell could have easily played in the league, too, but he was never offered a contract. It was one of the realities of the Original Six, where there were just so many good players who never got their shot.

There were also Art Dorrington and John Utendale, black players who’d both caught the NHL’s attention. Dorrington came from Truro, Nova Scotia, like Stan Maxwell. He played center in what was then the Eastern Amateur Hockey League and in the International Hockey League, suiting up for the Atlantic City Sea Gulls, Johnstown Jets, Washington Lions, and Philadelphia Ramblers. Dorrington notched 163 goals and 157 assists in 345 minor pro games, and he was so good that in 1950 the New York Rangers signed him to a professional contract. But like so many other talented players, he toiled in the minors until he was drafted into the army in 1956. He spent nearly two years in uniform before playing a few games for the Philadelphia Ramblers of the Eastern Hockey League. Then he broke his leg, which ended his career. He never did get called up to the Rangers.

John Utendale, a right-winger from Edmonton, began playing for the Edmonton Oil Kings during high school and then for another two years before signing a contract with the Detroit Red Wings. (I played with him on the Quebec Aces for five games in 1958–59.) Like Dorrington and Maxwell, John never got the call to actually play an NHL game.

So, within my lifetime, there had been at least seven black players good enough to get signed by NHL teams, and yet only one of us had made it to the Big Time. In 1950, Ebony magazine, which began life in 1945 for the African American market, ran a piece called “Can Negroes Crack Big League Hockey?” Clarence Campbell, the NHL’s president, responded that “the National Hockey League only has one policy: to get the best hockey players. There is no [policy], tacit or otherwise, which would restrict anyone because of color or race.”

Today that strikes me as, at best, corporate spin. Of course there were black players good enough to make the NHL at the time—they’d even been offered NHL contracts. And it took eight years from that misleading pronouncement for me to play two games with the Boston Bruins.

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