Pioneers

While writing my last post, I came to a fork in the road. I chose to go down one path with the intention of coming back to the other path later in the post. That didn't happen. Here is the other path.

Devante SmithPelly, the Washington Capitals ice hockey player who was racially taunted by Chicago Blackhawks fans last week, follows a long line of professional athletes who have found themselves among a small handful of black players in their sport, and as a result. suffered indignities at the hands of fans and fellow players.

Much has been written about the abuses that Jackie Robinson endured after he became the first African American to play “organized" baseball since blacks were excluded from the game in the 1880s. His story and career, have become the stuff of legend. Less well known are the stories of the players who followed him into the majors, some of which I wrote about here. Even less known are the pioneers who became the first African American players in the other American professional sports leagues.

Kenny Washington

Like Major League Baseball, the National Football League originally featured black players until a "gentleman's agreement" was forged between owners to keep them out.  Kenny Washington, was a teammate of Jackie Robinson at UCLA on both that school's football and baseball teams. While there, Washington set several school rushing, passing, and defensive records (as players played both sides of the ball in those days), as well as being the first consensus All American from UCLA. He was considered by some to have been a superior baseball player to Robinson. So impressed by his abilities, George Halas, owner and head coach of the NFL Chicago Bears, tried to draft Washington after he graduated from UCLA in 1940, but was thwarted from doing so by the rest of the league. Washington languished in the semi-pro Pacific Coast Professional Football League from 1941 until 1945, playing most of his prime years in minor league football. When the Cleveland Rams moved to Los Angeles in 1946 and expressed interest in playing in the publicly owned LA Coliseum, overwhelming pressure from the municipality convinced the team to integrate, which they did, signing Washington on March 21 , 1946, exactly one year before Jackie Robinson became a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Jackie Robinson famously endured both verbal and physical abuse from fans and his fellow players and so did Washington. But as a football player, one can only imagine that the physical abuse from players had to be far more savage. Unlike Robinson, Washington's career in the big leagues was short lived. With five knee surgeries behind him and already past his prime when he entered the league, Washington played three seasons in the NFL, putting up impressive, but not Hall of Fame stats, which is why he isn't enshrined in the sport's shrine of immortals in Canton, Ohio. Still, Kenny Washington's contribution to the game of professional is unquestionable and he is deserving of much greater recognition. There is a movement underway to include him in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, but given his record on the field in the league, that seems unlikely. It would be interesting to poll current players in the NFL, a league now dominated by black athletes, to see how many of them know the name Kenny Washington. My guess is that few of them do.

There isn't a long history of segregation in the National Basketball Association only because the league wasn't founded until 1949. Unlike this country's three other major professional sports, baseball, football and hockey, (sorry soccer fans), the origin of the game of basketball can be traced to a particular moment and to a single inventor.

Time now for a brief interlude...

In 1891, PE teacher James Naismith of the Springfield, Mass. YMCA was given the task of creating a new activity to distract his bored and rowdy track and field athletes during the cold New England winter months. His boss, the head of that particular Y, had a few requirements for the activity: it had to keep the athletes in shape, it could not not take up too much space, and it especially had to be "fair for all players and not be too rough."

The new activity would be a goal-oriented game like football and hockey. To make it fair and not too rough, Naismith placed the goals, originally peach baskets, high up above the players' heads so they would be unguardable. There also was no running with the ball, it was advanced by passing it from player to player. Goals were scored by players successfully soft-tossing the ball (originally a soccer ball) into the appropriate basket without it coming out. Upon a successful score, the janitor present at the game, had to walk up to the basket then climb a ladder to fetch the ball. Following that, a "jump ball" at center court would resume the action, if you could call it that, Contrary to what you might have expected, no, the new game was not called "watching paint dry", but Basket Ball. You may think that the greatest innovation in the game of basketball was the jump shot or the slam dunk, but I give that award to the guy who decided it would be a good idea to cut a hole in the bottom of the baskets.

Here is an interesting site devoted to the evolution of basketball.

Anyway, Naismith's game was a big hit, first on the YMCA circuit, then at schools and universities, before finally turning professional . It was played by folks of all races, and evolved as most things did back in those days, in the parallel universes of segregation. But unlike baseball where white teams played black teams only in exhibition games, officially sanctioned games and even championships were held between white and black basketball teams.

One of those all black teams was the Harlem Globetrotters which began as a legitimate barnstorming team, not the circus act they would later become, and not as the team's name implies, from New York City, but from Chicago. In 1948 the Globetrotters took on the all white Minneapolis Lakers (today's LA Lakers), and the man many considered to be the game's first superstar, 6'10" George Mikan. The game took place here in Chicago at the old Chicago Stadium. The Lakers had their way with the Globetrotters in the first half, but the combination of double-teaming Mikan, and a consistent fast-break offense in the second half brought the Trotters back. The lead went back and forth in the second half and with the game tied at 59 with 90 seconds left in regulation time, Marques Haynes eluded the Laker defense all by himself, dribbling the ball until there were two seconds left on the clock. At that point he passed the ball to Elmer Robinson for a perfect 30 foot set shot to win the game at the buzzer.

While it was only an exhibition game, the Globetrotters beating a team that greatly out-sized them put to rest for good the notion that black basketball players were inferior to whites. It had the same impact to African Americans as Jesse Owens winning the gold medal at the 1936 Olympics, Joe Louis beating Max Schmeling in the first round of their second fight in 1938, and of course, Jackie Robinson joining the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Chuck Cooper

In 1949, the year after the Globetrotters' victory over the Lakers, the Basketball Association of America, the league the Lakers belonged to, merged with its rival, the National Basketball League, to form the National Basketball Association. The NBA would remain all white for exactly one year.

Settling on on the true Jackie Robinson of the NBA is a little complicated as there were actually three of them. From the 1950-51 season overview in NBA.com's encyclopedia, we learn this:

The season marked the first appearance of black players in the league. Chuck Cooper became the first black player to be drafted when he was chosen by Boston; Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton became the first to sign an NBA contract when he signed with New York, and Earl Lloyd became the first to play in an NBA regular-season game because the schedule had his Washington team opening one day before the others.

To further muddy the waters, one of the NBA's predecessors, the NBL, became integrated for a short time in the early forties during World War. II.* Unfortunately during a game, a fight broke out between black and white players, marking the end of that noble experiment.

Bringing up the rear as far as professional American sports leagues are concerned, the National Hockey League finally broke its color barrier with Frederickton, New Brunswick's own, Willie O'Ree, who broke in with the Boston Bruins to replace an injured player on January 18, 1958 for  a game in Montreal. 

There was little fanfare for O'Ree's debut. Eleven years earlier, Jackie Robinson was carefully groomed for the role he was about to be thrust into by his mentor Branch Rickey. Not O'Ree. His coach with the Bruins,  Mike Schmidt, while acknowledging the milestone, and assuring O'Ree that his teammates were all on board, told him in typical understated hockeyspeak, to put that all behind him and "just go out there and play hockey."

Willie O'Ree

O'Ree played only two games with the Bruins in 1958 before going back down to the minors. He was called back up two seasons later and played 43 games with the club. Like the other Jackie Robinsons of their respective sports, O'Ree received more than his share of racist taunts from the fans and the opposing players."Players would take cheap shots at me, just to see if I would retaliate..." O'Ree said, "...They thought I didn’t belong there. When I got the chance, I’d run right back at them."

Jackie Robinson was told by Branch Rickey that under no circumstances was he to retaliate when another player went after him, so as not to set back the cause of integration. For better or worse, fighting is an integral part of the game of hockey, at least as it is played in North America, and O'Ree was given the green light to not turn the other cheek. The worst cheap shot taken at O'Ree was right here in Chicago when my onetime hero Eric Nesterenko of the Black Hawks (as the name of the team was spelled at the time) verbally taunted O'Ree then speared him with his stick to the face, knocking out two teeth. O'Ree's stick then managed to find Nesterenko's head, setting off a bench clearing brawl. It took fifteen stitches to sew up Nesterenko's bloody head. Being hockey I have no doubt that after their penalties, both players barely missed a shift. O'Ree, a very popular player among his teammates, didn't need to fight all his battles. When opposing players would taunt or take a run at him, they had to answer to the enforcers on his team, namely Fern Flaman and Leo Labine.

While the rules of hockey allow retaliation against fellow players, the fans are another story.  O'Ree said the treatment by opposing fans was worse in the American NHL cities than in Montreal or Toronto. It seems the worst city of all, sad to say, was Chicago. "Why don't you go down south where you belong and pick some cotton" was probably one of the tamer remarks hurled in his direction. He was pelted with garbage while serving time in the penalty box but he never fought back. He said: "If I’m going to leave the league, it’s because I don’t have the skills or the ability to play anymore. I’m not going to leave it ’cause some guy makes a threat or tries to get me off my game by making racial remarks towards me."

After that 1960-61 season, (the season the Black Hawks won the Stanley Cup), O'Ree was traded to the Montreal Canadiens. As that team was stacked with talent, O'Ree unfortunately never played another game on NHL ice, but he did continue to play professional hockey in the minors, finally hanging up the skates for good in 1979 at the ripe age of 44.

Unlike Kenny Washington who died in 1971. Willie O'Ree lived to see the day when the contributions of pioneer black professional athletes were rediscovered and finally appreciated. In recent years, O'Ree, who is still very much with us, has received countless honors and awards including the Lester Patrick Award for outstanding service to hockey in the United States, and the Order of Canada, that nation's highest civilian award. Since 1998, Willie O'Ree has served as the director of Youth Development for the NHL/USA Hockey Diversity Task Force. As you can imagine from his job title, the goal of the organization is to promote the game of ice hockey to new audiences, especially in minority communities, and to encourage the participation of these groups in youth hockey. One might look at the numbers of black players in the NHL today (averaging out to about one player per team) as evidence that the Task Force is barely sputtering along. That is until you realize that after O'Ree's days were done in the NHL, no black player stepped on NHL ice for another thirteen years.

Hockey has indeed come a long way since the days of O'Ree's youth when, as a teenage baseball player,  he got to meet Jackie Robinson at Ebbets Field. When O'Ree mentioned that his true love was hockey, Robinson of all people responded: "I didn't know black kids played hockey."

The unfortunate taunting incident that took place in the United Center a little over a week ago, and the public's strong reaction against it, is a good indication that like hockey, society has come a long way since these pioneers broke into their respective leagues, but still has a long way to go.


* Integration was something Major League Baseball could and should have done during a time when there was a player shortage due to World War II. While the poobahs still deemed it unacceptable for blacks to play professional baseball, the majors fielded a child, sixteen year old Joe Nuxtall, and a one armed outfielder, Pete Gray during the war. That proved to be the final slap in the face for supporters of the integration of the Major Leagues which finally took place on April 15, 1947.