Living in New Orleans, it’s tough to follow hockey, a sport I love but that 1) people here in Deep South Louisiana don’t give two hoots about, and 2) has no NHL teams for 500 miles. In addition, my favorite NHL team, the Islanders – I came of age during the glory days of Bossy, Trottier, Smith and Potvin – has finished each of the past two regular seasons with such horrible slumps that they played their way right out of qualifying for the playoffs.

However, I attempt to keep track of the sport here and there, and the Stanley Cup finals between the Carolina Hurricanes and Vegas Golden Knights begins tonight.

In addition, I recently read “Willie,” an autobiography by Willie O’Ree, the Jackie Robinson of hockey who broke the NHL color barrier when he stepped onto the ice for the Boston Bruins on Jan. 18, 1958, nearly 11 years after Jackie made history as a Brooklyn Dodger. 

Many people might already know tht O’Ree broke the color barrier in the NHL, but fewer might know that he also passionately loved another sport while growing up in Fredericton, New Brunswick – baseball.

O’Ree wrote that there are parallels in the skills required for each sport.

“I played shortstop and second base,” he wrote in his book, “because I liked to be in the hot spots – just as I played forward in hockey because I wanted to be up there in the other team’s zone, putting the puck in the net, getting in the goalie’s face, tussling with the opposing defensemen who were trying to get me out of there. I liked the action, and if you play shortstop or second base, you’re right in the middle of it.”

In addition, he stated that “[a]s a shortstop, you have to be fast – able to blast from a standing start forward or laterally,” talents that are also extremely valuable in hockey.

Because O’Ree was an impressionable lad of 11 when Jackie broke the baseball color barrier, and because O’Ree grew up as one of the few Black kids in his hometown of Fredericton, he was quite aware of Robinson and Jackie’s athletic, social and cultural importance. As a result, Willie wrote, Jackie was an inspiration for him from an early age.

O’Ree wrote:

“Phil Watson [a childhood friend of O’Ree] also said I could be ‘the Jackie Robinson of hockey,’ another idea that filled my heart with hope and fueled my ambition. … There’d been Negro League baseball for decades, with some of the best players in the game to be found in their ranks. But they couldn’t break free from those ranks, which held them back just like the chains that had held back their ancestors. …

“Jackie Robinson just played ball, and he was the best. Such was his greatness as a man and as a player that MLB retired his number, 42, across the entire league, forever. The only other time that honor has been given to any player by any major league sport was in 2000, when the NHL retired the jersey of a skinny kid from Brampton, Ontario, by the name of Gretzky.”

Amazingly, a 13-year-old O’Ree actually got to meet Robinson, after the former’s youth baseball team won a local league championship and as such had the opportunity to travel to New York City to catch a Brooklyn Dodgers game in person in 1949.

After seeing some of the big-city sites like the Empire State Building and Radio City Music Hall, the kids from Fredericton headed over to see Dem Bums in action. It turned out to be a life-shaping event for Willie. He wrote:

“Then we crossed over the Brooklyn Bridge to Ebbets Field to watch Robinson work his magic. I don’t remember who they played or even if the Dodgers won that day. All I remember is the greatness of Jackie Robinson. He was fast, he was calm, and his every play was as if he’d invented baseball.

“After the game we gathered in the Dodgers’ dugout and met Robinson himself. He could not have been nicer, asking each of us our name and whether we liked baseball. When my turn came, I told him that I liked baseball a lot but that I liked hockey more. He looked surprised and said that hockey didn’t have any black players. I told him he was looking at one, and that he’d see me make my mark on the game the way he’d made his on baseball.

“Sure, one might think, here’s a kid who doesn’t know anything of the world, dreaming big dreams that’ll just vanish in the ether of adulthood. But I knew I was good.”

But even with his talent for hockey, O’Ree was also quite skilled on the diamond, so much so that at one point before his hockey career really took off, he caught the eye of a couple scouts, who offered him a tryout for the Milwaukee Braves in 1956 in Waycross.

As in Waycross, Ga. As in the Deep South. O’Ree balked at first.

“I knew how black people were treated in the southern United States, so I said, ‘I don’t think so.’

They looked surprised,” he wrote. “They represented a very good team; I should have been flattered and thrilled by their invitation. But it was the first time in my professional sporting life that my skin color made a difference, and the difference was to me. I was very leery of doing anything in the state of Georgia, or in the American South in general. …”

He noted that his family had escaped the Jim Crow South to come to a freer life in Canada, and the prospect of returning didn’t exactly excite him. But why did he go to Waycross despite that?

“Well, because I wanted to be a professional athlete,” he penned. “And here I was, being offered a shot at the big leagues of baseball. Was the benefit greater than the risk? …”

So south he went. He immediately started to regret his decision when he saw the segregated restrooms at the Atlanta airport:

“When I look in the mirror in the morning I don’t see color, I see me. I see a man. But at that very moment, I was endorsing segregation in the American South by walking into the Colored restroom. I didn’t want trouble as soon as I landed. And I had received the message loud and clear: I was very much a second-class person – and to some, not a person at all – in this part of the world. …”

During his first night at a segregated hotel, he stated, “I didn’t sleep too well. I was very uncomfortable with what this place was doing to me. For the first time in my life I was being segregated because of my color. I knew I’d come to the city to test my baseball skills against the best, but I was already getting a strong sense of what the cost of this was going to be to who I was. …”

Then he had to deal with bigotry on the diamond, he wrote:

“During the first three weeks we worked out in the morning and then played games in the afternoon, mostly against teams made up of guys in the camp, but sometimes against other teams training in Georgia. I played shortstop and second base, just as I did back home. The first week was all right. The next week we played an exhibition game and I got a couple of hits, but what was new to me were the racial jeers from the white players, both in the camp and on other teams. I let it go in one ear and out the other, but I’d never experienced anything like that from my hockey player teammates in Canada. …”

It ended up being too much, and hockey began beckoning even more for the 20-year-old. And Willie was good. Really good. Unfortunately, an on-ice injury resulted in him being blinded in one eye, which obviously hampered his rise through the hockey ranks. He managed to keep it a secret for many years, and the fact that he was able to adjust his vision and depth perception so adeptly that he still made it to the NHL is astounding.

But eventually, his secret was discovered, and, even though he could still play at a top level, the Bruins and other NHL teams, somewhat reluctantly, told him that he had no real future in the league with just one eye.

So his stays in the NHL were all too brief, but he still excelled at the minor league level, especially with the San Diego Gulls of Western Hockey League, where he had an All-Star career and saw his number retired by the Gulls.

But although his career in the NHL was brief, it still had a huge impact, both then and now, and for nearly seven decades, he’s been written about and interviewed countless times by countless media outlets, all of which spotlighted his status as a trailblazer and discussed the challenges he faced as well as his many achievements. They also frequently compared him to Jackie.

In late December 1960/early 1961, the Associated Negro Press issued an article cover O’Ree’s first appearance in Chicago as an NHL player as the Bruins faced the Blackhawks, and the article referred to Jackie Robinson when discussing the lad from Fredericton.

“Neither the stadium crowd not the face that he was the lone Negro competitor appeared to bother him, although he must have been conscious that he was the center of attention.

“To the opposing Hawks players and his own white teammates must go the credit for treating him as ‘just another player,’ with none of the animosity that confronted other Negro athletes, such as Jackie Robinson in his early attempts to crack the race barrier in baseball.”

In February 1965, United Press International produced a wire article about O’Ree and how, even though his hockey career certainly had its bumps racially, his experiences with hatred and bigotry paled in comparison to what Jackie endured.

“I’ve been called ‘the Jackie Robinson of hockey,’” O’Ree told the reporter, “but I didn’t have nearly the difficulties that faced Robinson when he broke into organized baseball.

“Jackie had it real rough. He was faced with segregation and playing in the South. I’ve had my differences with players, but they were nothing to compare to what he went through.”

The reporter then wrote, adding: “And O’Ree plays hockey like Jackie Robinson played baseball. He goes in for the hard, aggressive style and many experts consider him the fastest man on skates.”

An Aug. 5, 1979, article in the Boston Globe by Steve Marantz, Milt Schmidt, who was the Bruins’ coach when O’Ree broke in, said that Willie wasn’t affected by any racial abuse he received – at least outwardly.

“He had a good personality for it,” Schmidt told Marantz. “It didn’t take long for him to make friends. He wasn’t real quiet. Somebody could have called him all the names in the world and he could have accepted it. And he had the backing of [his Boston teammates]. I think he felt accepted.”

The Globe article, like many others, almost unavoidably compared Willie to Jackie, with Marantz writing that “O’Ree approached his teammates in much the manner Robinson did with the Dodgers, as an athlete and not a social crusader. …

“But unlike Robinson, O’Ree was apparently less preoccupied with maintaining an imperturbable exterior. He fought when he had to, when every player must, and laughed, which is not required but recommended for minorities of one.”

Ironically, though, while it’s by said by many, many people that so many legendary Negro Leaguers arrived to early, i.e. they played before the integration of organized baseball, he might have also been born a bit too late, in a way.

When he made the NHL in the late 1950s/early ’60s, the NHL only had its “Original Six” teams – the Bruins, the New York Rangers, the Detroit Red Wings, the Chicago Blackhawks, the Montreal Canadiens and the Toronto Maple Leafs. However, the league began massively expanding in 1967, which created many more lasting opportunities for all aspiring pro players.

As a result, Willie told Marantz, “At the time [when he made the NHL], I didn’t know if the NHL was ready for a [B]lack athlete. I think I got a fair shot. I only wish I had been born 10 or 15 years later. I think I could have stuck after expansion.”

In his “Sports of the Times” column from the April 28, 1999, issue of the New York Times, William C. Rhoden wrote that perhaps one big reason that O’Ree’s integration of hockey in January 1958 didn’t have nearly the attention paid to it at the time than Jackie’s did in ’47 was because in 1958, just about every player in the NHL – including O’Ree himself, obviously – was Canadian, from a country where race wasn’t as big a deal. The Black population of Canada was small, and, Rhoden added, “Canadian hockey’s divisions involved English vs. French …”.

Rhoden also wrote that a substantial reason that O’Ree’s stays in the NHL were relatively brief was his bad eye, in addition to racial friction.

Awareness of O’Ree’s impact, especially in historical context to other sports, continued to filter down through hockey’s younger generations, including former Calgary Flames All-Star Jarome Iginla, who was quoted by a January 2008 article in Jet Magazine.

“People ask me if I’ve faced a lot of challenges or discrimination because of my race,” said Iginla, who also wrote the forward to O’Ree’s book. “I haven’t. O’Ree is like the Jackie Robinson of hockey.”

Appropriately enough given his massive impact on hockey, O’Ree has continued to be feted and honored with assorted awards, especially over the last couple decades.

But I’ll wrap up with some quotes from O’Ree in a Jan. 19, 1998, article in the New York Times by Ed Willes. The article was published for the 40th anniversary of his debut with the Bruins; the NHL also honored him at its All-Star Game, and O’Ree was also beginning his new job as director of youth development for the NHL and its USA Diversity Task Force.

Some of Willie’s comments for the article:

• “I didn’t think of myself as a pioneer or a trailblazer. I was just there playing with the Bruins against the Canadiens. There was no big deal made about it. I was just another player, supposedly.”
• “I think it’s time. I would have liked to come in 20 years ago, but things happen when they happen. My feeling is that every boy or girl who wants to play hockey should have the opportunity to play.”
• “There were others who should have been in the NHL. They should have been there. It was only because they were [B]lack. I can see why they’d feel resentful and bitter. Maybe it wasn’t the time. I don’t know.”
• “When I broke into the National Hockey League, I got it every game and there was nothing done about it. I did a lot of fighting when I started because I had to, not because I wanted to. I wasn’t a great fighter, but I was determined not to let anybody run me out of the league.”
• “I see these other [B]lack players in the league and I can picture myself out there. It’s a nice feeling. I was very fortunate to be the first, but it’s a better feeling that other players have followed. The line has been continued. Ten years from now there might be 200 [B]lack players in the NHL. It’s a slow process, but sometimes things have a way of working out.”