WILLIE ELDON O’REE, CM, ONB
Retired professional ice hockey player, known best for BREAKING DOWN THE COLOR BARRIER AND being the FIRST BLACK player in the National Hockey League. O’Ree played as a winger for the Boston Bruins.
O’Ree was born in 1935 and grew up in Fredericton, New Brunswick, a small city in the coal mining region just north and east of Maine. He started skating when he was three years old and began playing in a league at age five.
He was legally blind in his right eye due to a puck accident years earlier. This handicap he kept secret until she revealed it later in interviews. With his passion for the sport and drive he went straight through juniors and the minors, and reached the pinnacle of the hockey world NHL.
He became the first African-American to play in the NHL when he debuted for the Boston Bruins on Jan. 18, 1958, against the Montreal Canadiens. He played just two games with the Bruins that year, was sent down to the minors for the following two, and didn’t come back to the NHL until 1961 when he returned for a 43-game stint. Through it all, he was met with an endless stream of verbal abuse.
“Racist remarks were much worse in the U.S. cities than in Toronto and Montreal,” said O’Ree. “Fans would yell, Go back to the south’ and ‘How come you’re not picking cotton.’ Things like that. It didn’t bother me. I just wanted to be a hockey player, and if they couldn’t accept that fact, that was their problem, not mine.”
O’Ree scored a total of four goals and 10 assists in 1961. And that was that. While he continues to forge his legacy in his career.
HE CURRENTLY RESIDES IN CALIFORNIA.
O’Ree was inducted into the New Brunswick Sports Hall of Fame in 1984. In 1998, O’Ree was working at the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego, California when the National Hockey League approached him to be the director of youth development for its diversity task force. The NHL/USA Hockey Diversity Task Force is a non-profit program for minority youth that encourages them to learn and play hockey. As of the mid-2000s, O’Ree lives in Berkeley, California. O’Ree and Kevin Weekes appeared in the Everybody Hates Chris episode “Everybody Hates Gretzky” in 2008.
On the afternoon of January 19, 2008, the Bruins and NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly honored O’Ree at TD Garden in Boston to mark the 50th anniversary of his NHL debut. In addition, The Sports Museum of New England located in the TD Garden, established a special exhibit on O’Ree’s career, comprising many items on loan from his personal collection. Those in attendance included a busload of friends from O’Ree’s hometown of Fredericton. Two days earlier, the City of Fredericton honored him by naming a new sports complex on the North side after him.[Around the time of the 60th anniversary of O’Ree’s contribution to ice hockey in early 2008, he was once again honored by the Bruins and the NHL, with a new street hockey rink in Boston named in his honor, one of many accolades the Bruins and NHL legend are involved. On January 27, 2008, the NHL also honored O’Ree during the 56th National Hockey League All-Star Game in Atlanta, Georgia. On February 5, 2008, ESPN did a special on him in honor of Black History Month. On October 29, 2008, San Diego State University presented O’Ree with an Award for Outstanding Commitment to Diversity and Cross-Cultural Understanding.[29] In 2008, O’Ree was also inducted by the San Diego Hall of Champions into the Breitbard Hall of Fame honoring San Diego’s finest athletes both on and off the playing surface.
The same year, O’Ree received the Order of Canada, the highest civilian award for a Canadian citizen. He was honored as a pioneer of hockey and a dedicated youth mentor in Canada along with the U.S. On June 28, 2011, The Sports Museum at TD Garden in Boston honored O’Ree with the Hockey Legacy Award at the 10th Annual “The Tradition.” Other honourees that evening included Larry Bird, Mike Lowell, and Ty Law. The Buffalo Sabres hosted a Willie O’Ree skills weekend in March 2012. His jersey was retired by the San Diego Gulls on October 16, 2015.
As the 2016 Stanley Cup Finals were about to start, the San Jose Sharks’ Barbadian Canadian star right winger Joel Ward was preparing to play against the Pittsburgh Penguins and told ESPN that O’Ree was one of his inspirations to play pro hockey, and should have his player number 22 retired by the NHL league-wide, just as Jackie Robinson, the first player of color in Major League Baseball has been honored. Ward himself honored Robinson’s legacy through his last season in NHL play by wearing jersey number 42 in NHL play; Robinson’s own player number 42 has been retired league-wide in pro baseball.
On November 3, 2017, O’Ree was honored with a banner by the Springfield Thunderbirds during a pregame ceremony to commemorate his time with the Springfield Indians.
A more personal honor for O’Ree was arranged by John Grzelcyk, father of current Bruins defenseman Matt Grzelcyk. A long-time member of the Boston Garden and TD Garden “bull-gang” team of arena personnel that assists with “changeovers” for different events at each facility, the senior Grzelcyk had saved an original number 22 Bruins uniform jersey worn by O’Ree from the 1960–61 Boston Bruins season, when O’Ree last played in the NHL as a Bruin. Both Grzelcyks personally presented the jersey to O’Ree, to honor him for his time with the Bruins and the NHL.At about the same time as O’Ree received his vintage Bruins game-sweater, it became known that Madison Bowey, a then-Washington Capitals rookie of bi-racial ethnicity, had been taught by his Black Canadian father about O’Ree’s importance in NHL history, and selected 22 as his number with the Capitals to honor O’Ree’s achievement.
On June 26, 2018, it was announced that O’Ree would be inducted as a builder into the Hockey Hall of Fame later that year.
Almost ten months after receiving his original Bruins sweater from the Grzelcyks, on November 1, 2018, O’Ree attended the ceremonial dedication of a street hockey rink named in his honor in the Boston neighborhood of Allston, as part of the continuing legacy of O’Ree’s time with the Bruins.
By early May 2019, following O’Ree’s builder honor with the Hockey Hall of Fame the previous year, a bill in the 116th U.S. Congress is authorizing the award of the United States Congressional Gold Medal for O’Ree’s achievements “in recognition of his contributions and commitment to hockey, inclusion, and recreational opportunity.”
O’Ree was named to Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame on May 27, 2020, in the Builder category.The formal induction ceremony was postponed to October 3, 2021, due to concerns over COVID-19
On January 12, 2021, the Boston Bruins announced that they would retire O’Ree’s number 22 on February 18. However, the jersey retirement ceremony was moved to January 18, 2022, by the NHL.
In 2021, as a celebration of Black History Month, all NHL players wore a commemorative helmet decal honoring O’Ree from January 16 to February 28.
In 2022, US President Joe Biden signed the Willie O’Ree Congressional Gold Medal Act. The bill awarded O’Ree a Congressional Gold Medal, the U.S. Congress’s highest honor, for his contributions to “hockey, inclusion and recreational opportunity.” O’Ree is the first player in NHL history to receive the honor