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I question why we keep celebrating Jackie Robinson and ignore Willie O'Ree.
It could not have been easy being the 1st black player in the NHL.
If that is racist..... Sign me up !
Well, now that you explain it that way...............LMAO. Your sick of celebrating Jackie Robinson, who was the first black athlete to break the color barrier in a team sport, and received the most harrasment by far. To reduce your stress level of having to bear witness to these celebrations, you would have the media also celebrate Willie O'Ree..................
Soul on Ice
The Willie O'Ree Story
by Mike Walsh
In 1958 a young man named Willie O'Ree made his debut in the National Hockey League. He was with the Boston Bruins for two games. In 1961, after two more years in the minors, O'Ree had a longer stay with the Bruins--41 games. O'Ree never played another game in the NHL.
This may not seem particularly significant, but O'Ree was different from every other NHL player who had come before him during the league's first 50 years. He was black, and there wouldn't be another black in the NHL for 25 years.
Hockey was about 10 years late when it came to integration. All the other professional sports, including tennis, bowling, golf, baseball, football, and boxing were racially integrated by 1950. Hockey was the holdout. It was the whitest sport. There were no black players, coaches, team owners, or sportswriters.
Boxing was the first to integrate with black champs Jack Johnson and Joe Louis dropping one Caucasian after another during the first half of the century.
Jackie Robinson integrated baseball to great fanfare in 1947, but O'Ree's breakthrough hardly merited a mention. O'Ree did not appear on the nightly news. The New York Times, for example, did not find it newsworthy. Since Canada didn't have the racial strife that plagued the U.S., no one called much attention to O'Ree.
O'Ree played successfully in the minors until the mid-1970s, and he won numerous scoring titles. To this day, he is regarded as a footnote in the world of sport. The hockey encyclopedias give him only passing reference, if any at all.
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