PRESS COVERAGE: WILLIE O'REE

by E. Spencer Kyte, Bugs and Cranks

Anyone with a cursory knowledge of baseball or sports in general can tell you rather quickly that Jackie Robinson was the first to break the colour barrier on the baseball diamond. But how long would it take you to come up with the name of the man who broke the colour barrier on the ice of the NHL?

January 18th marked the 50th Anniversary of that event, the night Willie O'Ree suited up for the Boston Bruins to play one of the 45 games of his NHL career.

Sadly, in researching this piece - a piece I have known I was going to write since putting the finishing touches on last week's edition - little has come up in the way of articles about a man who is still to this day working to change the face of hockey.

LZ Granderson at ESPN Page 2 wrote a great piece about O'Ree, though that shouldn't be shocking as Granderson is both black and a hockey player.

As for the rest of the MSM, there hasn't been that much. A nice little article here and there, briefly tossing out all the usual cliches and comments to move on from the story the next day. Willie O'Ree deserves a lot more than that.

The story of Willie O'Ree is about more than the Cup of Coffee he managed in the NHL. It's more than a stat line that reads 4-10-14.

He played despite being legally blind in one eye. Think about that for a minute.

He kept playing despite death threats and on-ice incidents like getting a butt end in the mouth during his first game in historic Chicago Stadium which split his lip and left him short two chicklets.

But the story extends far beyond the ice of the 1950's and 60's. It goes beyond the end of O'Ree's playing career in 1979 with the San Diego Hawks nearly twenty years after he last skated in an NHL game.

There was never any fanfare of O'Ree's accomplishments, nor did he ever seek any. To this day, he still doesn't. He just goes about with his mission of opening the game of hockey up to anyone who wants to play, no matter what colour their skin may be.

Willie O'Ree is the Director of Youth Development for the NHL / USA Hockey Diversity Task Force, which has led to some 40,000 youngsters from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds discover and embrace hockey. He spreads a message not about colour, but about education and following your dreams.

Next year, the Willie O'Ree All-Star Game, featuring the best and brightest from the Diversity League, will return. The first graduate of the program, Gerald Coleman, was drafted in by the Tampa Bay Lightening and currently mans the net for the Anaheim Ducks AHL affiliate in Portland, Maine. Coleman acknowledges that it was the influence of O'Ree that pushed him to keep pursuing his NHL dreams.

Today, there are 12 black players in the NHL.

Fifty years ago there was only one, Willie O'Ree.

This is what we need to report on. These are the stories that need to be told and the lives that need to be looked at. This is worthy of Press Coverage...