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Those memories weren’t his only uncomfortable reminders. In one arena, fans threw a black cat on the ice; in others, cotton balls.
“They’d yell things like, ’You should be picking cotton,”’ O’Ree said.
“I wasn’t going to yell back it was way too cold for cotton to grow where I was from. But that would have been a waste of breath.”
What O’Ree did instead was concentrate on the things he could control. He played long and well in several minor-league circuits and when the game’s expansion took him to the West Coast, he wound up settling in San Diego. Ten years ago, O’Ree came out of semiretirement to become director of youth development for NHL Diversity.
The job puts him on the road a week each month teaching kids in three dozen locales how to play. The life lessons deftly included are O’Ree’s. The program already claims one NHL graduate, goalkeeper Gerald Coleman. While there are still less than two dozen players of color, in one sense, hockey is the most diverse big-time sport; players from 20 different countries make up a third of the NHL.
That tells O’Ree the odds of making it to the big time are long enough, no matter where you come from. In some ways, that’s why his words resonate even stronger now than they did 50 years ago.
“Just think about Willie’s story,” commissioner Gary Bettman said from his office Thursday afternoon. He’d just returned from Fredericton where a rink honoring O’Ree was dedicated.
“First, he breaks a sport’s color barrier, then plays pro hockey for 21 years with one eye, then he sort of fades from people’s consciousness, then he’s rediscovered. And now, he’s using the game he’s so passionate about and all that perseverance to touch 40,000 kids.
“Now that,” the commissioner said, “is an incredible story.”
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