NHL’s first American-born black player endured all types of battles

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This article was published 28/02/2015 (4113 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Val James, the first African-American player to lace up and hit the ice in the NHL, didn’t have an easy road to the big show. But for all the obstacles and racism he faced, James’ story isn’t a bitter one. Rather, it’s a story of hard work and determination in the face of constant challenge.

Born in Florida to young parents, James moved to Long Island, N.Y., with his family when he was still quite young. In Long Island, Val’s father Henry eventually landed a job maintaining the Long Island Arena, home of the East Coast Hockey League’s Long Island Ducks. The senior James, a former high school football star, fell in love with hockey, though he never learned to skate himself. Instead, he got his son a pair of skates for his 13th birthday, and encouraged young Val to follow his dream all the way to the bigs.

Coming up during the late 1970s, an American dreaming of making the NHL had few role models to look up to; as an African-American player, James had nobody. At the time, only a couple of black Canadian players had ever played the game at its highest level. But James was undaunted, making the move at 16 to play hockey in Ontario and never looking back.

While James doesn’t recall any incidents of racism from teammates, he would constantly face it on the ice from both opposing players and from the stands.

“I was pretty good at keeping my emotions,” writes James, who would play the role of enforcer from junior through the minors and up to his few games with the Buffalo Sabres and Toronto Maple Leafs in the NHL.

“However, there were two things that could send me over the edge. If my opponent tagged me with a good punch, that would piss me off. Fortunately, that didn’t happen all too often. The second that could trigger a furious response was having an opponent curse me with racial slurs.”

According to James, few who made the mistake of doing so on the ice ever thought to do so a second time. Former teammates, coaches and officials throughout James’s career, from Scotty Bowman to John Brophy, all attest to the punishment James could inflict on opposing players.

But for all the use of his fists, by all accounts James was never a goon or a cheap-shot artist on the ice. Many of his regular sparring partners attest to his class and sportsmanship.

While James played the bulk of his career in the Eastern Hockey League and the American Hockey League, even scoring the goal that won the Rochester Americans the Calder Cup in 1983, it was in lacing up for the Sabres for seven games during the 1981-82 season that he made history as the first American-born black player to play in the NHL. During the 1986-87 season, he made history again as the first African-American player to wear a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey, though his stay on the Leafs’ bench was even more short-lived than his time with the Sabres, lasting only four games before returning to the AHL’s Newmarket Saints.

In today’s game, racism remains an all-too-present blight on the sport. Recall ignorant Bruins fans who took to Twitter following Joel Ward’s 2012 overtime goal in the playoffs, or last year’s first-round match-up against the team and P.K. Subban’s Montreal Canadiens, for just two examples.

But some of the behaviour James was forced to endure in opposing team’s rinks was disgusting. “In the Eastern Hockey League, racial harassment from the crowds was a regular part of my gig,” James recalls. “It didn’t matter which town we were in… All of these places had more than enough racists who figured that paying three or four bucks for a ticket entitled them to drop in after work and curse out the black guy.”

Despite all this, James looks back on his time without bitterness. His only regret was that, while he worked to improve his game and become a more well-rounded player, the coaches and management he worked with rarely saw fit to use him as much more than an enforcer.

Black Ice is an engaging read that sheds some important light on the subject of racism in hockey. James is an entertaining narrator, and his story is certainly one worth spending some time with.

Sheldon Birnie is a reporter for The Herald, and has an insatiable appetite for hockey stories.