Growing up in Ottawa and nearby Nepean, Fred Brathwaite didn’t think about being a person of colour playing competitive hockey.
“That’s kind of how it was,” Brathwaite said while visiting the Black Hockey History mobile museum at Lansdowne Park Monday. “I grew up in a white neighbourhood, went to a white school. It wasn’t — ‘there’s Fred the black guy’ — it was just Fred who plays hockey. I played soccer and all the other sports.
“I was lucky. I hear stories of others who had issues.”
Brathwaite, 47, played in the OHL for the Oshawa Generals and was the winning goaltender on a 1990 Memorial Cup team that included Eric Lindros. Just last week the Generals celebrated the 30th anniversary of that championship.
Brathwaite went on to play parts of nine seasons in the NHL as well as in the AHL and Europe. He didn’t experience much racism, he says, until he spent two seasons in Russia with Kazan Ak-Bar from 2004-06, where he heard abuse.
“Russia is a whole different ball game,” said Brathwaite, who’s helping former Senators Shean Donovan and Chris Phillips coach a under-18 team in Kanata this winter.
Willie O’Ree, the first black man to play in the NHL (Jan. 18, 1958) was a special guest at the mobile exhibit, which is venturing to schools, community arenas and to NHL rinks through February, celebrating O’Ree and his fellow trailblazers. The mobile museum will be at the Canadian Tire Centre Tuesday evening when the hometown Senators play host to the Anaheim Ducks.
Interestingly, O’Ree said on an Ottawa radio station that he thinks verbal abuse to players of colour, especially involving children, is worse today than when he was a child growing up in Fredericton.
“Kids don’t know how to handle it,” O’Ree said. “They come off the ice crying.”
O’Ree cautioned that while racism exists in all sports, hockey is more vulnerable than football and baseball because it has fewer players of colour. Kids will go play another sport if they don’t have a positive experience in hockey, O’Ree said.
As an ambassador for the sport, O’Ree advises children who are racially targeted to stand strong and believe in themselves.
“Stay focused,” he says. “Names will never hurt you unless you let them.
“If people can’t accept you for the individual that you are then that’s their problem. I know it’s hard, I’ve talked to a lot of boys and girls, 10, 11, 12, 13 who have had racial remarks and slurs directed at them, not just from players on the opposition but from players on their own team. I think it’s just a disgrace to have players on your own team make racial slurs.”
O’Ree was supportive of Akim Aliu recently sharing his story of being abused with racial taunts from coach Bill Peters a decade ago while playing for Peters’ AHL Rockford Ice Hogs. After Aliu went public, Peters lost his job as head coach of the Calgary Flames.
“I believe (Aliu) did the right thing,” O’Ree said. “He felt within his heart, within his mind this is what he should do and he went out and did it. I speak of racism and prejudice and bigotry and ignorance. It happens all the time, not just in sports but in general life. I’ve had racial slurs directed at me at a gas station or in a drug store. In a mall.”
O’Ree said he imagines a day when the game is so diversified it won’t be a big deal anymore to see black players on a team – because there will be so many.
“It should be like that today,” O’Ree said. “Those players of colour and black players, they’re there today because they have the skill and the ability to be there. They want to be just another player. And this is the way I think it should be.”
O’Ree is disappointed that racism still exists. In some respects, he says, the cause has taken one foot forward and two back since the 1960s when Dr. Martin Luther King was fighting for justice and equality.
“One thing I learned from Dr. King: Don’t judge a person by the colour of their skin but the content of their character,” O’Ree said. “There’s a lot of truth in that. I get up in the morning and I don’t see a black man or a brown man, just a man.”
By age 84, sharply dressed in a white shirt, purple tie, jacket and fedora, O’Ree had hoped for more dramatic change in race relations in sport and society, but is optimistic things will improve in time.
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In hockey, there are strides to be made not just in the makeup of rosters but in other on-ice and off-ice capacities.
“There’s room there for coaches, managers, linesmen, referees,” O’Ree says. “You just set your goal and work towards it.”
So determined was O’Ree to be a professional player, he persevered despite losing the vision in his right eye after getting hit by a puck while playing for the Kitchener Canucks of the Ontario Hockey Association. He was 20 at the time, and went on to be a prolific scorer in the old Western Hockey League.
“If you feel strongly . . . you can do anything you set your mind to do,” O’Ree says. “A doctor told me I’d never play hockey again. He didn’t know the goals and dreams I had. He was a fine physician but he couldn’t save the sight of my eye.
“When I got out of the hospital I was able to play, not only professional hockey, but I was able to play with the Boston Bruins for three years. Work hard, set goals for yourselves and don’t let anybody tell you you can’t attain your goal. It’s very important.”
As part of the Black History celebrations in Ottawa, there was a commemorative Coloured Hockey League of the Maritimes (CHLM) game at the CTC Monday night. The league operated from 1895 until the 1930s and is currently featured on a Canada Post stamp. The commemorative game included several ex-Senators, with O’Ree and current Senators winger Anthony Duclair serving as guest coaches.
Brathwaite, like a lot of ex-goalies, was looking forward to playing out during the exhibition game, instead of tending goal.
“Yeah, you get tired of getting pucks shot at you,” he said, laughing.
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