A Hockey Trailblazer Who Missed His Chance
His memory had dimmed, and glaucoma had robbed him of sight. At 92, Herb Carnegie was living in an assisted-care home in northern Toronto.
But Carnegie, who many say should have been the Jackie Robinson of the N.H.L., laughed with delight when he reminisced about his youthful hockey experiences.
“We learned to skate on the frozen ponds right outside the front door,” he said. “When I was 7, my sister Bernice said, ‘Hey, Herb, you can play!’ Getting a compliment like that, at that age? Boy, you got your wings.”
Carnegie died Friday in a Toronto hospital, his daughter Bernice Carnegie said.
Born on Nov. 8, 1919, the son of Jamaican parents who met and married in Canada, Carnegie was raised in a northern suburb of Toronto. They were the only black family in the neighborhood, Carnegie recalled, but hockey helped ease the racial divide.
He rose and fell with the fortunes of his beloved Maple Leafs. When he took to the ice, he pretended to be Gentleman Joe Primeau, the center on Toronto’s Kid Line. The voice of the radio announcer Foster Hewitt “rang through your brain,” Carnegie said, adding, “All you’re thinking about is hockey.”
Compact at 5 feet 8 inches and 160 pounds, he straightened his hair and wore a sliver of a mustache. He earned a reputation as a playmaking center, a dipsy-doodler of a stickhandler who liked to put the puck between a defender’s legs and go around him.
“While you’re looking down, I’m behind you,” he said.
When he and his older brother Ossie started their careers, no blacks played in the N.H.L. Conn Smythe, the Maple Leafs’ owner, watched Carnegie skate and, the story goes, said, “I’ll give $10,000 to anyone who can turn Herb Carnegie white.”
The Carnegie brothers heard racist slurs from the stands in the small towns of the Canadian mining leagues.
“You learned to play on,” Carnegie said last month in a telephone interview.
They graduated to the Quebec Provincial League, a notch or two below the N.H.L., and teamed with Manny McIntyre, a winger/enforcer from New Brunswick. The presence of three black players on the same line was a gate attraction and a headline writer’s dream. They became known as les Noirs, the Black Aces, the Dusky Speedsters.
When fans watched them, Carnegie said, “their reaction was, ‘There’s three of them?’ ”
They were more than a novelty act, with Carnegie winning multiple Most Valuable Player awards with the Sherbrooke Saints.
“When I was 13 or 14, I never missed a game when Sherbrooke was in town,” Jean Beliveau, the Hall of Fame forward, said. “I tried to duplicate what Herbie was doing at faceoffs and making passes onto the blade, not behind the wingman.”
In 1946, Kenny Washington and Woody Strode broke the N.F.L.’s color line with the Los Angeles Rams. The next year, after a season with the minor league Montreal Royals, Robinson made his major league debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
In August 1948, Rangers General Manager Frank Boucher invited Carnegie to the team’s training camp in Saranac Lake, N.Y.
“Bring your own skates,” Boucher wrote in a letter, adding, “if possible, have your skates sharpened so that you will not lose any time in getting on the ice.”
Carnegie said: “It was a very exciting time for me. I said, ‘This is my opportunity.’ ”
During the first week of camp, he said, the Rangers offered a contract with their minor league club in Tacoma, Wash. He turned it down. A day later, he received an offer to play for their team in St. Paul. He declined. Then came a third offer: to report to New Haven of the American Hockey League, just below the N.H.L.
Carnegie was 28, with a wife, three children and a fourth on the way. He could not afford to take a pay cut.
“It was hard for me to demean myself to take a pee-wee salary when I was worth a senior salary,” he said.
Carnegie believed that he had earned a spot on the Rangers.
“I was as good as the most talented player,” he said. “I was stopped by the color barrier.”
He never got another opportunity.
“I think Herbie made a mistake,” said the hockey historian Stan Fischler, who saw Carnegie play during his prime. “He should have gone to the minors like Jackie Robinson and proven how good he was.”
Cecil Harris, the author of “Breaking the Ice: The Black Experience in Professional Hockey,” wrote that Carnegie would be remembered as “the best black player never to reach the N.H.L.” Harris referred to him as “the Josh Gibson of hockey,” a reference to the star Negro leagues catcher who never got to play in the majors.
Three months after his tryout, Carnegie led his Sherbrooke squad to Madison Square Garden to play the Rovers, another Rangers farm team. He scored a goal in a 4-2 victory.
Any satisfaction was short-lived. The Black Aces split up, and Carnegie could only watch as teammates and opponents advanced to the N.H.L. He said he had bouts of rage.
Carnegie retired in the mid-1950s after a stint with the Quebec Aces of the Quebec Hockey League; Beliveau, now 80, was a teammate.
In 1958, the N.H.L. became the last of the four major professional sports leagues to integrate when Boston signed Willie O’Ree.
By then, Carnegie had started the Future Aces Hockey School, one of the first hockey academies in Canada. He devised the Future Aces Creed, a 12-point philosophy that empowers youths to become responsible, caring citizens.
Working with young players allowed him to confront, and soothe, the bitterness inside him. Carnegie stayed active, winning several senior golf tournaments, until his sight failed him. He was a successful financial planner and was married for more than 60 years. His wife, Audrey, died in 2003.
In addition to Bernice Carnegie, his survivors include two other daughters, Goldie and Rochelle, and a son, Dale.
Carnegie had one final unrealized dream: to be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, in his hometown. The 18-member selection committee denied Carnegie the honor in the player and builder categories.
“Without question,” Carnegie said, he should be in the Hall. A 2001 documentary, “Too Colourful for the League,” made his case, with testimony from Richard Lord, who broke collegiate hockey’s color barrier at Michigan State.
“Herbie deserves to be in the Hall of Fame,” Fischler said. “He was a pioneer. But he has to have a rabbi, a good one, with the selection committee, and no one has stepped up.”
So far, the only black players in the hall are Grant Fuhr and Angela James.
nytimes.com
But Carnegie, who many say should have been the Jackie Robinson of the N.H.L., laughed with delight when he reminisced about his youthful hockey experiences.
“We learned to skate on the frozen ponds right outside the front door,” he said. “When I was 7, my sister Bernice said, ‘Hey, Herb, you can play!’ Getting a compliment like that, at that age? Boy, you got your wings.”
Carnegie died Friday in a Toronto hospital, his daughter Bernice Carnegie said.
Born on Nov. 8, 1919, the son of Jamaican parents who met and married in Canada, Carnegie was raised in a northern suburb of Toronto. They were the only black family in the neighborhood, Carnegie recalled, but hockey helped ease the racial divide.
He rose and fell with the fortunes of his beloved Maple Leafs. When he took to the ice, he pretended to be Gentleman Joe Primeau, the center on Toronto’s Kid Line. The voice of the radio announcer Foster Hewitt “rang through your brain,” Carnegie said, adding, “All you’re thinking about is hockey.”
Compact at 5 feet 8 inches and 160 pounds, he straightened his hair and wore a sliver of a mustache. He earned a reputation as a playmaking center, a dipsy-doodler of a stickhandler who liked to put the puck between a defender’s legs and go around him.
“While you’re looking down, I’m behind you,” he said.
When he and his older brother Ossie started their careers, no blacks played in the N.H.L. Conn Smythe, the Maple Leafs’ owner, watched Carnegie skate and, the story goes, said, “I’ll give $10,000 to anyone who can turn Herb Carnegie white.”
The Carnegie brothers heard racist slurs from the stands in the small towns of the Canadian mining leagues.
“You learned to play on,” Carnegie said last month in a telephone interview.
They graduated to the Quebec Provincial League, a notch or two below the N.H.L., and teamed with Manny McIntyre, a winger/enforcer from New Brunswick. The presence of three black players on the same line was a gate attraction and a headline writer’s dream. They became known as les Noirs, the Black Aces, the Dusky Speedsters.
When fans watched them, Carnegie said, “their reaction was, ‘There’s three of them?’ ”
They were more than a novelty act, with Carnegie winning multiple Most Valuable Player awards with the Sherbrooke Saints.
“When I was 13 or 14, I never missed a game when Sherbrooke was in town,” Jean Beliveau, the Hall of Fame forward, said. “I tried to duplicate what Herbie was doing at faceoffs and making passes onto the blade, not behind the wingman.”
In 1946, Kenny Washington and Woody Strode broke the N.F.L.’s color line with the Los Angeles Rams. The next year, after a season with the minor league Montreal Royals, Robinson made his major league debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
In August 1948, Rangers General Manager Frank Boucher invited Carnegie to the team’s training camp in Saranac Lake, N.Y.
“Bring your own skates,” Boucher wrote in a letter, adding, “if possible, have your skates sharpened so that you will not lose any time in getting on the ice.”
Carnegie said: “It was a very exciting time for me. I said, ‘This is my opportunity.’ ”
During the first week of camp, he said, the Rangers offered a contract with their minor league club in Tacoma, Wash. He turned it down. A day later, he received an offer to play for their team in St. Paul. He declined. Then came a third offer: to report to New Haven of the American Hockey League, just below the N.H.L.
Carnegie was 28, with a wife, three children and a fourth on the way. He could not afford to take a pay cut.
“It was hard for me to demean myself to take a pee-wee salary when I was worth a senior salary,” he said.
Carnegie believed that he had earned a spot on the Rangers.
“I was as good as the most talented player,” he said. “I was stopped by the color barrier.”
He never got another opportunity.
“I think Herbie made a mistake,” said the hockey historian Stan Fischler, who saw Carnegie play during his prime. “He should have gone to the minors like Jackie Robinson and proven how good he was.”
Cecil Harris, the author of “Breaking the Ice: The Black Experience in Professional Hockey,” wrote that Carnegie would be remembered as “the best black player never to reach the N.H.L.” Harris referred to him as “the Josh Gibson of hockey,” a reference to the star Negro leagues catcher who never got to play in the majors.
Three months after his tryout, Carnegie led his Sherbrooke squad to Madison Square Garden to play the Rovers, another Rangers farm team. He scored a goal in a 4-2 victory.
Any satisfaction was short-lived. The Black Aces split up, and Carnegie could only watch as teammates and opponents advanced to the N.H.L. He said he had bouts of rage.
Carnegie retired in the mid-1950s after a stint with the Quebec Aces of the Quebec Hockey League; Beliveau, now 80, was a teammate.
In 1958, the N.H.L. became the last of the four major professional sports leagues to integrate when Boston signed Willie O’Ree.
By then, Carnegie had started the Future Aces Hockey School, one of the first hockey academies in Canada. He devised the Future Aces Creed, a 12-point philosophy that empowers youths to become responsible, caring citizens.
Working with young players allowed him to confront, and soothe, the bitterness inside him. Carnegie stayed active, winning several senior golf tournaments, until his sight failed him. He was a successful financial planner and was married for more than 60 years. His wife, Audrey, died in 2003.
In addition to Bernice Carnegie, his survivors include two other daughters, Goldie and Rochelle, and a son, Dale.
Carnegie had one final unrealized dream: to be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, in his hometown. The 18-member selection committee denied Carnegie the honor in the player and builder categories.
“Without question,” Carnegie said, he should be in the Hall. A 2001 documentary, “Too Colourful for the League,” made his case, with testimony from Richard Lord, who broke collegiate hockey’s color barrier at Michigan State.
“Herbie deserves to be in the Hall of Fame,” Fischler said. “He was a pioneer. But he has to have a rabbi, a good one, with the selection committee, and no one has stepped up.”
So far, the only black players in the hall are Grant Fuhr and Angela James.
nytimes.com