Cecil Harris

An excerpt from Breaking the Ice

Trevor Daley is on that magical track that carries players to the National Hockey League. In the 2002-03 season, he was the nineteen-year-old team captain and star defenseman of the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds of the Ontario Hockey League. Excelling for the Greyhounds in the city known as "The Soo" puts Daley in select company. Hockey icon Wayne Gretzky starred for the junior-league team, as did probable Hall of Famers Ron Francis and Paul Coffey. Wherever Daley goes in The Soo -- a restaurant, a shop, a gas station -- he receives warm greetings from townsfolk, people who admire his talent as well as his poise and precocity. That Daley is a black hockey player, or more accurately, the brown-skinned offspring of an interracial union between a black Jamaican-Canadian man and a white Canadian woman, did not seem to color anyone’s perception of him. That is, until he truly got to know his coach.

John Vanbiesbrouck, himself a former Sault Ste. Marie Greyhound, assumed the duties of coach and general manager of the team in 2002 after a noteworthy twenty-year career as an NHL goaltender. Vanbiesbrouck was still learning the ropes as a hockey executive on March 7, 2003 when he uttered the word with which he hanged himself. While visiting the home of white Greyhound players Mike Amadeo and Jeff Doyle after a loss that night, Vanbiesbrouck referred to Daley on more than one occasion as a "nigger." Amadeo and Doyle were shocked, according to an associate of Daley’s agent, Hall of Famer Bobby Orr, and approached Daley the next day. "Trev, we’ve got to tell you something," the teammates said.

Daley, taught by his parents the credo of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that each person should be judged not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character, was stunned and deeply wounded by what he had heard. "Trevor asked me what he should do and I told him he should go home," Orr said. Daley returned to Toronto the next day, but not before meeting with OHL commissioner Dave Branch. "I saw a very hurt young man," Branch said, "who wants no part of this and didn’t ask for it."

Vanbiesbrouck coached the Greyhounds game on March 9. It would be his last. The next day, the former Greyhounds standout and NHL All-Star resigned in disgrace. He also announced plans to sell his 25 percent stake in the team. "I did use the N-word. That is the truth," he said. "I used it in the heat of the moment. I don’t know where it came from. It was wrong. I’m the first to admit it."

Vanbiesbrouck is hardly the first one to use the slur, and Daley is not likely to be the last black hockey player to be smeared by it. The slur is so regrettably common that it has its own euphemisms (e.g., the N-word). Willie O’Ree, the NHL’s first black player, said he was called "nigger" so often on the ice he thought it was his name. Black players who came before O’Ree, such as Herb Carnegie, often heard it too. Efforts have been made by the NHL, professional minor leagues and major-junior leagues such as the OHL to sensitize players to the psychological damage of racial slurs, particularly "nigger." The NHL made each of its thirty teams attend a racial diversity seminar, at which O’Ree spoke, during the 1999-2000 season. The OHL posts a harassment and abuse policy statement in the dressing room of each if its thirty teams. However, no league can regulate human behavior, or misbehavior. And too many hockey men, even a forty-year-old like Vanbiesbrouck, simply have not come to grips with their latent racism.

"John said he said it in the heat of the moment? That just means it was in his heart the whole time," said Boston Bruins winger Sandy McCarthy, who is black and Irish. "You don’t just say something like that about somebody unless you were already thinking it."

Said Carolina Hurricanes goaltender Kevin Weekes, a black who played with Vanbiesbrouck in the Florida Panthers organization in 1997-98: "It leads me to now wonder what he thought of me the whole time that I was in the [Florida] system. It makes you wonder. People ask, ‘Why don’t more minorities play hockey?’ Well, what are you going to play for? Are you going to play just to get substandard treatment or be treated foolishly or unfairly?"